Appreciative Culture

One can discern growing interest in moving beyond discreet inquiries to exploring sustainable appreciative culture. Two characteristics of most inquiries suggest some parameters for appreciative organizations: they make inclusiveness a priority, and every participant is treated with special care.

AI is frequently called a "whole system" approach because it seeks to engage as many players as possible. A good practitioner working with a congregation regarding strategic planning will probably suggest that young and old, members and friends, near and far be included if possible. What about the custodian, your banker, a local neighborhood leader, and a few representatives of the AA group that uses the fellowship hall?

To be sure, small leadership groups initiate the planning and decision makers need early engagement. But they will be asked: Who will participate? Can we enlarge the circle? Who is being left out? This is not simply an egalitarian commitment; in practical terms, every participant left out represents important gifts lost to the community.

A second appreciative characteristic, folded implicitly into both the principles and processes, is this: Treat every participant as an important player with gifts to contribute and leadership potential, a stakeholder whose feelings, engagement, commitment, and contribution can be significant. How we see each other and are open to each other’s contributions has everything to do with eventual outcomes. The appreciative interviews and small report-back groups give everyone a sense of speaking freely and being heard seriously when an inquiry is launched. Three hours into the event this usually causes a corporate buzz, an excitement and sense of solidarity, even among people who are shy or in the habit of disagreeing with each other.

Personalized treatment for everyone in the community is the groundwork for appreciative culture. This fosters a generative, creative environment that nurtures deep personal relationships and seriously identifies people’s gifts and commitments. It is also self-organizing: within the boundaries of the community, its purposes and agreements, people are encouraged to gravitate to issues and work groups they find compelling and collaborate with others in that arena.

Appreciative leaders are excellent listeners and inviters. They encourage people to seek their heart’s desire as they get involved, a significant shift from traditional routes to leadership responsibility. The implications of this new approach to "assigning" tasks does not become clear until, in reporting back highlights of appreciative interviews, a community’s excitement about who it is at its best starts to bubble.

This self-organizing tendency represents another connection to the dynamics of living systems Wheatley describes. Self-organization can feel strange and threatening to anyone who grew up with mechanistic models like organizational charts (where the church is a pastor, a council, some committees, a choir or two, a congregation, and a Sunday school).

Thinking beyond expected roles, challenged to identify what in our midst is most important yesterday, today, and tomorrow, trusting that the system needs freedom and openness more than my guidance or old models, and then encouraging people to follow their hearts in achieving a dynamic new vision . . . this is frightening territory at first, unsettling our habits and assumptions. But living in the vibrancy and enthusiasm of an environment where everyone’s gifts and engagement really matter quickly becomes its own reward. Nothing valuable need be lost.

Emerging issues about appreciative culture range from enlivening our personal lives to being sustainable appreciative organizations over the long term. Diana Whitney, besides working with corporate behemoths, leads a workshop in appreciative living and focuses the discussion around four questions:

• Who are you at your best, when you are most alive, engaged, and committed?
• What is your positive core, the life-giving center from which your best thinking and contributions emerge?
• What are your most courageous dreams?
• What are your greatest possibilities for serving the world?

The clarity and power of these simple questions indicate Whitney’s mastery of the art of writing questions and provide an extraordinary blueprint for church dialogue groups, young or old.

The first book about appreciative leadership was published in late 2001. Appreciative Leaders: In the Eye of the Beholder was edited by Marjorie Schiller, Bea Mah Holland, and Deanna Riley. In a thoroughly collaborative venture, 110 AI professionals and practitioners were invited to interview individuals they would characterize as "appreciative leaders." Eventually 28 accepted the challenge and did interviews; 15 stories were selected for the book.

From this research Schiller and her colleagues developed an appreciative leadership model with characteristics categorized three ways. In terms of values, genuine, credible, and respectful best describe these leaders. Characteristics the leaders associated with worldview were envision, inspire, and holistic. In terms of practices, an appreciative leader challenges, encourages, enables, coaches, inquires, and dialogues, a list reminiscent of Wheatley’s leadership metaphors. The editors go on to identify five themes shared by the leaders profiled. Though none of those profiled are religious leaders, the first theme they share is that appreciative leaders are "belief-based with an explicit spiritual orientation and practice."¹⁹

Five years earlier, discussing postmodern principles and practices, Diana Whitney had written, "Notions of leadership shift dramatically from the leader as authority or one responsible for vision, action, and organization, to leader who fosters public conversations among multiple stakeholders. Leadership becomes a process of ensuring relational meaning making, of ensuring that multiple, diverse voices are heard, of creating and holding space for stories to be shared and meaning to be made among globally disparate and diverse people."²⁰

These pastoral overtones of AI fit with conversations on the Internet about its spiritual dimensions. As we’ve seen, ontological, cosmological truth claims are not raised by the discipline itself. But utilizing AI’s tools, paying attention to the positive core, and taking advantage of the poetic principle delivers many of us straight into the heart of our religious faith and spiritual practice. In sum, for folk who take their congregations as seriously as their families, AI represents a revitalizing approach to community.

19. Marjorie Schiller, Bea Mah Holland, Deanna Riley, eds., Appreciative Leaders: In the Eye of the Beholder (Chagrin Falls, OH: Taos Institute, 2001), 162.
20. Diana Whitney, "Postmodern Principles and Practices for Large Scale Organization Change and Global Cooperation," Appreciative Inquiry: Rethinking Human Organization toward a Positive Theory of Change (Champaign, IL: Stipes Publishing, 2000), 238.