Appreciative Inquiry

A philosophy of management consulting that seeks to drive change at an organization by focusing on the organization's strength. It was developed in the 1980s by two professors, David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva, working at Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, which sounds like a college based on a well-aged bourbon.

Outsiders may have trouble fully grasping the details of the program, as adherents tend to speak of the process in terms usually reserved for obscure religions. For instance, the Center For Appreciative Inquiry describes it as "a way of being and seeing" and "a worldview and a process for facilitating positive change in human systems." The same could be said of SoulCycle.

Meanwhile, davidcooperrider.com, a site promoting one of the movement's founders, details the AI-4-D-Cycle (which could also be the name for a pick-up technique), a "paradigm shift in the world of sustainable organizational development."

The basic philosophy is to focus what an organization is good at as a way of generating improvement, rather than keying in on the things that it does poorly. So if you ran a basketball team that was good at shooting three-pointers, but had trouble winning games, the appreciative inquiry approach would encourage you to maximize the value of those three-pointers, rather than suggesting that you start working on defense or free throws or some other aspect of the game that you are currently bad at. Basically: "you’ve got to ac-centuate the positive...eee-liminate the negative…"