Try This: Appreciative Inquiry
Have you ever noticed that when you go looking for problems, more problems tend to appear?
It’s like peeling back the layers of an onion and chopping it. It’s never-ending and your eyes water in the process.
The same goes for conducting community needs assessments. When designed to identify the pressing needs of a community, they often focus on deficits, which doesn’t do much for community morale. Continuous focus on the problem increases the likelihood of seeing the problem everywhere. This isn’t to say that communities should turn a blind eye to what’s happening, but there’s something to be said about raising awareness of this practice, as it can immobilize communities to create change.
A while back, I wrote a blog post on asset mapping as a tool for community organizing and engagement. One reason why asset mapping and similar strengths-based tools are growing in popularity is due to an increasingly mindset shift away from solely deficits-based to identifying community strengths. Whereas deficits-based practices are problem-focused, needs driven, and questions what’s missing, strengths-based practices are opportunity-focused, strengths driven, and identifies what is currently available that can be built upon.
Today, let’s look at another strengths- based practice, appreciative inquiry.
What’s appreciative inquiry?
Appreciative inquiry (AI) is strengths-based approach, developed by Dr. David Cooperrider in the 1980s. First used in organizational development and change, AI has helped institutions worldwide integrate the power of the strength-based approaches to multi-stakeholder innovation and collaborative design. It quickly gained ground in program evaluation following the 2006 release of Reframing Evaluation Through Appreciative Inquiry by Hallie Preskill and Tessie Catsambas.
AI focuses on identifying what is working well, analyzing why it is working well and then doing more of it. In other words, AI teaches us that an organization will grow in whichever direction that people in the organization focus their attention.
If this can be done in organizations, why not apply it to community change?