APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY AS AN ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT TOOL by Charles F. Martinetz, PhD
Appreciative inquiry can get you much better results than seeking out and solving problems. That’s an interesting concept for me—and I image for most of you—because telephone companies are among the best problem solvers in the world. We trouble shoot everything. We concentrate enormous resources on correcting problems that have relatively minor impact on our overall service performance. When used continually and over a long period of time, this approach can lead to a negative culture. If you combine a negative culture with all the challenges we face today, it could be easy to convince ourselves that we have too many problems to overcome and to slip into a paralyzing sense of hopelessness. And yet if we flip the coin, we have so much to be excited about. We are in the most dynamic and the most influential business of our times. We ought to be excited, motivated, and energized. We can be if we turn ourselves around and start looking at our jobs and ourselves differently. If we kill negative selftalk and celebrate our successes. If we dissect what we do right and apply the lessons to what we do wrong, we can solve our problems and re-energize the organization at the same time. In the long run what is likely to be more useful? Demoralizing a successful workforce by concentrating on their failures or helping them over their last few hurdles by building a bridge with their successes? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating mindless happy talk. Appreciative Inquiry is a complex science designed to make things better. We can’t ignore problems, we just need to approach them from the other side. (Mohr & Watkins, 2001a, p. 7).
—Statement by Thomas H. White, President, GTE Telephone Operations

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imply stated, appreciative inquiry (AI) is both a process and a