The search engine for the World Inquiry is Appreciative Inquiry (AI), a philosophy and approach to change created by David Cooperrider and his colleagues at the Weatherhead School of Management. AI is a strength-based narrative inquiry process that searches for those things that "gives life" to organizations, communities, and larger human systems when they are most alive, effective, and healthy in their ecology of relationships. It is founded on the assumption that inquiry into, and conversation about strengths, successes, values, hopes and dreams triggers life-affirming change, and that human systems move in the direction of what we most persistently, actively and authentically ask questions about. Three things make Appreciative Inquiry uniquely suited to an initiative of this nature and scope:
AI uncovers grounded stories of possibility that are anchored in direct experience.
AI works at a scale of wholeness, engaging hundreds - even thousands - of people throughout a system in the process of transformation.
AI is a conversation based form of change. It can transform the nature of public discourse, providing us with a vocabulary of relationship that lifts up positive possibilities for the future.
For more about Appreciative Inquiry, visit the AI Commons.
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