The Other AI
~1000 words. 4 minute read.
I hadn’t felt the impact of a modern-day influencer on myself until I discovered Scott Galloway about three years ago. A friend of mine recommended his book ‘The Four’, and it was total and complete Galloway immersion thereafter: His No Mercy No Malice blog, the Prof G Show and Pivot podcasts, his other books (‘Post Corona’, ‘The Algebra of Happiness’), and sprint after sprint with his online education startup Section – first as a sprinter, then as a Teaching Assistant. Okay so – check him out.
In the face of significant societal impact from recent Supreme Court decisions, the ongoing attack on America’s democratic institutions, and the possible slide into economic recession, Galloway wrote in his latest No Mercy No Malice post:
“There’s nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed with what’s right with America.”
An assertion to fall in love with, much more so than the often-repeated, emotionally charged but scientifically, statistically, and logically unfounded maxim of:
“America is the greatest country in the world.”
Before you take to social media to complain about the unpatriotic sentiment expressed in my post here, I ask you to withhold your reaction a tad longer. I can explain.
To do so, I need to enlist the help of David Cooperrider and his ‘Appreciative Inquiry’ model (ahh, there it is, the other ‘AI’). Cooperrider felt that the overuse of the ‘problem solving’ approach stood in the way of organizational improvement. He replaces this deficiency model that has organizations ask questions like “what’s the problem?”, “what is wrong?”, “what needs to be fixed”, with one that rests on one fundamental paradigm:
“Organizations (and societies) will evolve in the direction of the questions they most persistently and passionately ask.”
I will let Wikipedia or Cooperrider’s book do the heavy lifting on definitions and on unpacking the model for you. What I’d like to do is point out the many strengths of this supposition:
Appreciative Inquiry advocates that collective inquiry is the driver for change. Collective inquiry means all of us are asking the same question, like for example: “How can we ensure that our kids don’t get shot in school?” We will have different answers to that, but we should all persistently and passionately be asking this very question.
In a polarized society, collective inquiry sounds like a great way to get us talking to each other again.If paired with a focus on that which is positive, a strength, an advantage, this inquiry will free us from the ‘break-fix mindset’ and open the door to imagining what could be - a pre-requisite for the collective design of a future state that is compelling to all of us.
Because of (2), change becomes easier and does not require coercion or incentivation.
I have spent significant amounts of time researching change during my post-grad years in college and ever since. In my professional career, I have always defined my role to be that of change agent, irrespective of the Business Analyst, Business Architect, Product Manager, or Strategist label. ‘Breaking the code of change’ has been the search for the Holy Grail in organizational development and after 18 years of reading and writing on the matter, AI (Appreciate Inquiry) stands out to me as the model most universally applicable to effective and enduring organizational change.
In today’s environment especially, it has one particularly relevant strength that is missing from change frameworks that are not based on social constructionism: It argues that organizations are created, maintained, and changed by conversations, by the social forces connecting our daily enterprise. The prescribed organizational structure only threatens to limit people’s capacity for agreement (easily observable in inter-departmental conflicts. Shouldn’t we all be playing for the same team?).
If you read my last post, you will understand the following:
Appreciative Inquiry can mute High Conflict.
AI (Appreciative Inquiry) is the model at the heart of an organization that must have one of the toughest missions in the world, the United Religions Initiative (URI). Founded in 1996 as a global organization dedicated to promoting interfaith cooperation for peace and justice, URI is now a movement in 113 countries, thanks to AI (Appreciate Inquiry). AI (Appreciate Inquiry) has also been the operating manual of what is known as the United Nations Global Compact. And lastly, AI can very well be considered the philosophical underpinning of managerial approaches that are based on positive core analysis and on listening to and shaping the ‘organizational conversation’. We live it in every Town Hall and All-Hands meeting today, and it all goes back to AI. The other AI, Appreciative Inquiry.
Using AI (Appreciative Inquiry) we can refocus on what is right with America, and fix what is wrong with it. Not even fix, just improve, evolve, keep building.
I mean - if it works for interfaith cooperation…
