Jane McGruder-Watkins and Bernard J. Mohr, Appreciative Inquiry: Change at the Speed of Imagination. Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer, 2001.
Referenced in: Strategies for Church Renewal – Whole Systems, Large Group
LifeandLeadership.com Summary
This book discusses Appreciative Inquiry (AI), a Whole Systems approach to organizational renewal that has been useful in many churches. Like other sources on AI, the authors present the theory and cultural timeliness of AI. The chief value of this text, however, is in showing how AI helps organizations craft visions for the future by unleashing their positive core. It is a true consultant/practitioner guide to lead entire organizations in a process to “create shared images for a preferred future,” and find innovative ways to realize that preferred future. Consult the Resource Guide for additional works on AI and other Whole Systems approaches.
Fromt the Publisher
Appreciative Inquiry – a book in The Practicing Organization Development Series – is for leaders and organizational consultants who are ready to abandon the familiar tyranny of complex change programs. Recognizing that human systems are constructions of the human imagination and therefore capable of change at the speed of imagination, the Appreciative Inquiry (AI) process frees organizations from the restrictive orthodoxy of “deficit based change” and allows them the freedom to mobilize strategic change and focus on the visible and tacit strengths of an organization. AI is capable of engaging whole systems at amazing scales—easily engaging hundreds or sometimes thousands of people, often in a matter of weeks or days, to leverage the positive core of the organization.
Tap into the rich and inspiring “high point” accounts of personal or collective capacity and link this “positive core” to any change agenda. Once you have have determined what is really working, transformations never thought possible are rapidly and democratically mobilized.
About the Authors
JANE MAGRUDER WATKINS is a past chair of the board of the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science and a founding member of Appreciative Inquiry Consulting. In her thirty-five years in the field of organization development she has worked with a wide range of private, public, and government organizations, including Avon, GTE, Detroit Edison, SmithKline Beecham, ScottishPower, and more than 200 international organizations in nearly 50 countries.
BERNARD J. MOHR is president of The Synapse Group, Inc., and co-founder of Appreciative Inquiry Consulting as well as co-creator of Whole System Design (WSD), an approach integrating changes to culture, work processes and systems. His clients have included AT&T, British Airways, BP, Coca Cola USA, Exxon, L. L. Bean, the Internal Revenue Service and the Episcopal Church.
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