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DAVID COOPERRIDER
David Cooperrider ignited a movement for change around the world. The professor of organizational behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management developed appreciative inquiry, a management theory that had its formation during his doctoral studies at the school, from which he graduated in 1986. Appreciative inquiry, which focuses on an organization’s strengths, has generated more than 500 scholarly papers worldwide, as well as dozens of books. In the early 1990s, the United States Agency for International Development awarded Case $6.5 million to use appreciative inquiry in more than 200 countries. Last June, Prof. Cooperrider and Case doctoral students used AI methods during the United Nations Global Compact Summit in New York City. In September, more than 1,000 people were scheduled to gather in Miami for the Second International Appreciative Inquiry Conference. Prof. Cooperrider’s ideas about strength-based change are the core of Case’s new Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit, a university-wide initiative launched this summer.
As a young college student, I was not happy about what I was seeing in society. Increasingly, I didn’t want to grow up and be an adult where we were inheriting a global complex of problems, from issues of global warming to the disparity and grinding poverty of billions of people.
On a visit to Hiroshima, it was like an atomic bomb went off inside of me, and there was this paradoxical feeling—it wasn’t so much a feeling of dismay, but gratitude of the miracle of life on this planet that is now in our hands as human beings. At that moment, a question was born: What in the social sciences—I was studying social psychology at the time—will be invented and discovered that will be as powerful to human relationships and society in a positive sense as the atomic bomb has become in the negative and destructive sense?
At Case, I was assigned to be an assistant to a senior doctoral student. He was studying the forms of leadership at the Cleveland Clinic, where physicians are in every major leadership position. It was the place where the beginning of theory and vision for appreciative inquiry began to take root.
The power of positive emotions is necessary in sustaining long-term change.
If we define the world in mechanical terms, like a car engine that needs to be fixed, then the world is a problem to be solved. If we have a different metaphor of the world, as a miracle of human interaction and existence, then a simple shift like that begins to change your questions. Instead of asking what is wrong with this picture and world, you begin to ask questions of life: What gives life to this system?
We need to learn the art of the question.
I’ll bring doctoral students with me on our work in East Africa, Brazil, India. These experiences liberate and create a democratization of the mind, where we celebrate the diversity of people and cultures. That, to me, is what learning is about.
When [my son] Daniel was eleven, I brought him to Uganda. We went to forty-one of the fifty medical districts in the country. We spent time in villages with people, learning their way of life, values, capabilities, strengths, and vision for the country. I learned a lot in the medical arena on how to bring organizations together across boundaries, but my son learned about the lives and hopes of all the children he came into contact with. When he wrote a paper to get accepted at the University of Chicago, he talked about that experience as the most important and life changing event in his life.
Someday, working interactively in large groups of a hundred to a thousand people will feel natural.
I was honored to be invited by the Dalai Lama to have a dialogue with religious leaders—all different religions—using appreciate inquiry to guide the discussions. Working with the Dalai Lama, I have come away with the blending of the seriousness of life with an incredible sense of joy. Every once in a while during the meeting, he would burst out and shake with laughter like a child and ease the tensions in the room.
The fundamental task of the twenty-first century is to invent new forms of human cooperation and global interaction that allows us to deal with the most complex problems of our day. 
As told to Susan Griffith
Photograph by Barney Taxel
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