Building Resilience with Appreciative Inquiry: ALeadership Journey through Hope, Despair, and Forgiveness

Summary

Since the 1980s, Appreciative Inquiry has proven to be one of the most powerful and effective methods for organizational change. Now two top consultants show how leaders can adapt its principles to become more personally and professionally resilient. Appreciative Inquiry is a venerable and widely used organizational change method that emphasizes identifying what's working and building on those strengths. It is the focus on the best of what is and using that to generate the future that makes it so powerful. In answer to numerous requests from their clients, consultants and scholars McArthur-Blair and Cockell show how to apply the lessons of AI to build resilience in leaders. Every leader has moments of despair, that "dark night of the soul" where there seems to be no clear path forward. The authors' ALIVE process (Appreciate, Love and Inquire in order to Venture and Evolve) helps leaders forgive themselves for their own failures and those of others, focus on their strengths in times of despair, and amplify and grow those strengths so that they are better able to build hope in themselves and throughout their organizations. In times of rapid change like ours, building resilience is a vital leadership skill.