In 1980, a young graduate student at Case Western Reserve University's management school was hard at work on his dissertation. He had selected the Cleveland Clinic, one of the world's largest and most respected medical centers, as a place to study the questions on his mind.
As a graduate student, he became thoroughly familiar with the best thinking then current in his field. Under the spell of the late 20th-century critical mindset, the academic study of organizations (as well as popular notions about management) was entirely focused on problems and deficits, pathology and dysfunction.
So the student set out to discover (more accurately, to diagnose) what might be ailing the Cleveland Clinic. He found something entirely different. And what he discovered has shaken many long-entrenched beliefs about organizations, and even about people.
Instead of finding a sick organization at the Cleveland Clinic, his questions led him to sources of life and energy: cooperation, innovation, egalitarian governance. That didn't fit into the deficit models he'd learned in graduate school.
So he proposed an entirely different study: an investigation into the factors that contributed to the clinic functioning at its best, the forces that gave it life. It was the first large-scale inquiry based on such a model.
The student was David Cooperrider, who we'll meet again in a few pages. His experience at the Cleveland Clinic was the first step in developing a promising new way of advancing people and organizations: appreciative inquiry.
The term may well be new to you. And if you're at all like me, you may be cringing at the thought of yet one more management buzzword. It's a good bit more than that. I've become convinced that appreciative inquiry offers tremendous potential to promote the growth and vitality of human systems, especially those devoted to the common good.
We've already seen the value of inquiry, asking questions because we want to learn something new. This kind of inquiry revives the sense of wonder that opens up new options. Thanks to David, I have come to value my presence as an everlasting beginner far more highly than any expertise I might offer. As the Zen master Shunryo Suzuki-Roshi put it, "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."
What about appreciation? In an age of criticism and even cynicism, that may sound a bit "soft." But in fact appreciation is an unexpectedly powerful act.
When we appreciate something or someone, we often mean we're grateful. That's fine, as a start. We can also mean we're recognizing and liking the qualities of something, treasuring it, valuing it, seeking to understand it fully, as when we appreciate art.
It gets better. When we pause to appreciate something (or someone), the object of our regard can actually increase in value, as a house or business might appreciate. Recall how our belief in an individual exerts an influence vastly greater than we usually recognize. We saw this in the Pygmalion effect--the higher achievement that often follows from being held in high regard--and in what happened for the student at Cambridge when she felt someone had believed in her.
On a much larger scale, remember Frederick Polak's conclusion that a bright image of the future is vital to the destiny of a civilization. As we'll soon see, appreciation is the most effective way to generate such images, and the confidence to bring them to fruition.