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DAVID COOPERRIDER: Extended Interview
I have to admit: As a young college student [at Augustana College], for two or three years, 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.
I almost wanted to drop out. Fortunately, one of my favorite professors encouraged me apply for a Lilly Foundation grant to study the relationship between language, thought, and action. For a semester, I was able to go to Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. It was a turning point for me.
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? It was an important question that woke me up and gave me a sense of direction, meaning, and purpose to my schooling.
I started looking at Case in 1978. I had finished my master’s [at George Williams College] and was working at the American Hospital Associations and felt it was time to get my Ph.D. The Ph.D. program in organizational behavior was by far, in my view, the best program in the country. I was thrilled when my future dissertation chairman, Suresh Srivastva, called and invited me to work on the doctorate.
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. As I was helping to analyze the data around leadership, I really got excited about the organization and the major innovations in organizational governance, in democratic process, and collective decision making I saw there.
I was also asked to play a role as a traditional organizational development consultant to help diagnose the problems and improve the management and organizational effectiveness. But as I got into the diagnosis of some of the organization’s problems, I recognized how deeply ingrained the problem-focused view of change had become in our field.
Something didn’t feel right, because this place was an extraordinary place of innovation in management and leadership; I thought maybe that is all I should study. Forget all the problems and difficulties: My job is to develop a theory of everything that gives life to the system when it is most alive. My job is to begin to explain the social and organizational innovations that happened there, and to use that material to help envision and build a theory for the future.
That was really an important step. My mentor Suresh Srivastva encouraged me to let go of the problem-based view that had become so typical in our field, which asks, “What’s the problem? What are the causes of the problem?”
He said, “Dave, go with your excitement.” My excitement was around the question of what is it that gives life to this system when it is most alive—when people are most engaged, when there is maximum creative, innovative response to the patient.
I began to study everything—the true, the good, the better, the possible in that system—and selectively lift out new images of what was possible. Such as, what would happen if we magnified these strengths a hundred times? What would happen if we combined and concentrated the strengths, innovations, and all the factors that gave life and effectiveness to the system? What would happen if we stretched those?
I began to develop a theory—an anticipatory theory, a future-oriented theory of what was possible. The turning point, in which appreciative inquiry began to become a paradigm shift for our field, is when we fed back the initial report to the Clinic’s board of governors. There was an incredible stir. People got very energized by the map of the positive core of all the past, present, and future capacities we saw at the Cleveland Clinic. And they were intrigued by the systematic analysis of all the root causes—not of failure, but of success. What were the root causes of success—wherever there was success, wherever there was strength?
We were asked at the time if I could develop a process for all 8,000 people on the Clinic staff. We coined the term “appreciative inquiry” to describe what we were doing. It was very exciting.
What emerged in my Ph.D. dissertation was a theoretical articulation of appreciative inquiry, specifically looking at how our human inquiry transforms the world—that human systems move in the direction of what we as human beings most persistently and actively ask questions about.
So we began to challenge the view: Should we, as organizational consultants and development people, really do one more survey on low morale? Maybe it might be more effective to choose a different topic.
The topic isn’t low morale but instead extraordinary engagement and ownership and commitment. What we found as we studied high commitment factors were moments of maximum creative innovation; the human system, in this case, the Clinic began to move in those directions more powerfully.
Appreciative inquiry originally was meant to be a way to do research—grounded, theory-building research—but what we found is that it really was an intervention.
All inquiry is change. It creates change in awareness. It creates change in our language. It creates change in the priorities that people begin to lay forward. And so appreciative inquiry has emerged as a powerful organizational development approach that is based on what we call a strength-based theory of change.
The seeds of change are implicit in the very first questions. The questions we ask will determine what we find. What we discover then sets the stage for how we as human beings talk to one another, plan, and create new visions.
We need to learn the art of the question.
I recently had a discussion with Peter Drucker in California. He has written more on management thought than anyone in human history. He is about ninety-four years old now. It was an incredible discussion. He wanted to hear about our work on appreciative inquiry. At the end of the discussion, I said, “What is the essence of leadership and change?” He said, “Dave, it is easy and ageless in its essence. The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths in a way that makes the system’s weaknesses irrelevant.”
Maybe change is all about strengths. While, for years, in management we have talked about strengths as an indicator of optimal human system functioning, what we haven’t talked about is that strengths do more than perform—they transform. They are the materials out of which we create, ignite, and sustain long-term positive change.
So it raises many questions that the field needed to deal with. Why would strength connected to strength create change? Why would hope connected to another’s hope create change? Why would inspiration connected to another’s inspiration create change?
After the first papers articulating the theory of AI, I had to go deeper into the logic. We pulled together materials for different disciplines—medicine, sociology, sports psychology, education in the classroom—and we started to find a common thread around the power of the positive. Positive images of the future create positive action in the present. The power of positive language and how our words actually create worlds. The power of positive emotions is necessary in sustaining long-term change.
We pulled together and drew in research from different fields. Very exciting was the research of Barbara Frederickson. She recently won the prize for the top researcher in the field of psychology; in some ways, it was because she turned the field of social psychology upside down. Psychology, like the other social sciences, has been a science of deficits—human pathology, human problematics. For example, there are thousands of studies on depression and fear and anger: the negative emotions.
There are almost none on the positive emotions. What good are the positive emotions like hope, inspiration, joy, solidarity, camaraderie? She began to study the positive emotions. She found the more we cultivate those emotions, things begin to happen: The first is that we have incredibly more access to our innate intelligence. Our IQ scores go up when we feel hope, inspiration, joy, and solidarity with others. We have more access to our human capacity when we touch those strengths of those positive emotions.
Secondly, she found there are always lingering effects of the negative patterns and events in our lives. The anger we hold over from early family relationships and so on; that gets trapped in neuron patterns and in heart disease or in heart impacts. She is finding the more we cultivate the strengths of hope, inspiration, and joy, it serves to reverse those damaging effects from the earlier parts of our lives. That’s powerful, because it begins to turn the field of change upside down: that’s strength connects to strength makes change.
At first blush, that may not sound too important. But see how ingrained the negative models are in all the helping fields: in medicine, the medical model, the disease model; in psychology, the pathology model; in organization and management thought, the problem-solving model; in community development, the problem-based development-based or -needs model.
What we have seen in all the different disciplines is a strong focus on human deficiency—great analytical tools for discovering and analyzing the problems. What we don’t have is a powerful theory of positive change, where the concentration of strengths and where the magnification of strength propels and sustains new levels of change.
So the first part of AI is a focus on strength-based change, and what that has allowed us to do is to get really innovative in the ways in which we approach organizational and community change. It has allowed us to experiment with whole system methods of change. For example, because of the positive approach of appreciative inquiry, we aren’t limited to conducting strategy planning in groups of six to eight people, which most companies do. There is a senior team at the top that develops a strategic plan, and then they do a communication rollout to the rest of the organization.
We began to say, if it is all about strengths, then we need the whole system in the room. If we are working with a trucking company, why wouldn’t we have the truck drivers, dock workers, and customer service people in the same room creating the strategic plan? That has been exciting for me: to use appreciative inquiry to bring between 500 and 2,000 people together. All the internal and external stakeholders.
What we have evolved now is a process of strength-based planning called the Appreciative Inquiry Summit method. What was once the inner-circle strategy for a few people is now an inner-circle strategy open to the whole system, and it creates an incredible energy for change. It strengthens relations across bureaucratic boundaries and taps into the collective intelligence from every level—in this case from the truck driver to the senior leader. Someday, working interactively in large groups of a hundred to a thousand people will feel natural. Today, it is not, in our bureaucratically fragmented and separated ways of working.
The appreciative inquiry method that emerged from our early theorizing has spread throughout the world in its use and application. As a result, we have been called into some of the most exciting projects that I think anyone can imagine. In 1990, for example, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) had heard about our work with AI.
USAID was looking for a management school to tailor make a program for all the NGOs—nongovernmental organizations—that they were providing funding to. USAID wanted a management school to design a program to strengthen the capacity of all the NGOs—nongovernmental organizations—that they were providing funding to. They decided to go with us, first at $3 million and then $3.5 million, to bring the AI approach to hundreds of organizations in over 200 countries.
In the next six years, we advanced our knowledge and began to see the AI process grow in strength, sophistication, and application. So it has been amazing to see the developments. During that time, there have also been over 400 articles written on appreciative inquiry, and dozens of books. What is happening now is just an explosion of experimenting and learning. We continue to get called into amazing situations.
When I came to Case, I entered an amazing institution alive with commitment to knowledge and a brilliant, inspiring faculty. Early on, I was inspired by Fred Robbins in the medical school. [The late Dr. Robbins was dean emeritus of the medical school and University Professor emeritus.] He was a friend of our organizational behavior department’s. Fred received the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1954 for his work on polio. He realized that major international health efforts—for example, the global eradication of small pox—depended upon human cooperation and new forms of management.
What inspired me about people like Fred was their vision of Case as a regional, national, and worldwide resource. He invited me, for example, to join a team of young doctoral students to go to Uganda. We connected with his team in international health that was in Kampala to fight the spread of HIV and AIDS. I worked on the organizational dimensions. There were over three hundred NGOs around the world that were struggling to connect and cooperate. We wrote papers on new collaborative alliances with hundreds of organizations connecting and bringing their strengths together. It was people like Fred Robbins who lifted my vision of what our work could be about.
I made a decision very early on to work across sectors—that is, with NGO sector, the nonprofit sector, the intergovernmental sector, and the business sector. I decided that the strength of AI depended on being developed across sectors.
We continue to bring our students into the world in a real way: live learning laboratories where the educational atmosphere is so powerful. For example, 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 Case received the multimillion-dollar grant that would take me around the world, it was kind of frightening. My wife, Nancy, and I had a discussion of how this would change our family life forever. We made a decision: On every major trip, to the extent that we could, Daniel, who is now a freshman at the University of Chicago; Matthew, a senior at Chagrin Falls High School; Hanna, a junior there; or Nancy would go with me. And so when we returned home, there could be a real learning process for the family that would expand and develop a kind of global citizenship concept and our appreciation of people and cultures around the world. One of the real joys has been seeing their expansion of consciousness as global citizens.
When Daniel was eleven, for example, 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.
The same thing happened when I brought Matt to India and Hannah to Brazil. I am so proud of their desire to be global citizens and to learn. My own learning soars when I travel with them.
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? When is this living system of human society and organization most alive?
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. It has been extraordinary to see what can happen when you create the right setting for human beings to connect to the deepest and best in each other’s world views, beliefs, values, and capabilities. 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.
At this time in history, we as human beings are being called to move beyond our radical preoccupation with the self to a radical reorientation to the “other.”
Suresh Srivastva has helped me bring the learning process alive in a way that no one else could. I have learned from him about the adventure of ideas, and it is through ideas that we shape and reshape who we are and who we can become.
It has been a privilege to be a professor and to have the opportunity to continuously push the boundaries that we know—and yet do it in a way that connects with the most complex issues of our day.
Business as an Agent of World Benefit is an idea that the time has come to use appreciative inquiry to search for new models of business in relationship to society—new innovative models of leadership, global citizenship, and corporate responsibility to look at how business can bring its strengths to bear upon many global issues that we face as a human family, and how business can be a force for ecological restoration.
Management is becoming a matter of world affairs. Our work is based on the assumption now that the future of human society and the natural world are intimately linked to the future world economy and business organizations. The twenty-first century is when the dynamism of business is aligned with the global agenda for constructive change.
For me, it feels like we are just beginning: We are only about five percent into it right now in terms of what we will ultimately know about the whole dynamic process of strength-based change and appreciative approaches to knowledge.
We need to realize that today is a day of partnerships and finding ways to connect across sectors. No organization or nation alone can solve the difficult and complex issues that are facing humans beings. I think 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
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