The focus on what we want and what’s working and why is a challenge to culturally normative beliefs that ‘the only way to make things better is to focus on what we don’t want and what’s not working and why.’ For people who don’t have experience otherwise, the appreciative model is totally not realistic.
The good news is that the transition to an appreciative approach isn’t about trying to believe something different. It’s only possible when we see for ourselves. We do not become more appreciative by simply taking on someone else’s beliefs, no matter how compelling.”
There is something to the practice of appreciating that which is not positive as well, for what it offers us. For example, a client I was working with recently decided to use a “What would you most like to change…?” question in her appreciative inquiry in her community. When we worked through the implications of that question we looked at an appreciative conversation on how it was that the community DID change. This was to create a container in which calls for change drew on the best ways this community knew about how to change. So it involved looking back at a variety of ways the community had coped in the past in order to draw on the potential resources for future change.
