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The use of dialogues within and across organizations is on the rise. This increase is a tacit acknowledgement of the relational foundations from which new meaning is created and social innovations emerge. However, coming together for a dialogue doesn’t assure constructive conversation or transformative engagement. Dialogue participants, even when they are asked to “suspend assumptions,” are generally still embedded in the mental models and familiar frameworks that distance them from one another and prevent real generativity and novelty.

This paper proposes Appreciative Inquiry as an approach particularly conducive to creating public dialogues that are generative and transformative. It suggests that a community is best served by inquiry into strengths, assets and past successes. It further proposes that this mode of inquiry tends to produce positive emotional states, which expand the resources and pro-social inclinations of those in the dialogue. It offers five conditions that support generative and transformative public dialogue and explains how Appreciative Inquiry creates these conditions.

In this chapter we are exploring Appreciative Inquiry within organizations through the dialogic process in its relational aspect. The present discussion is composed of four parts: An exploration of the myriad meanings of dialogue and a description of a useful orienting platform, dialogue as “discursive coordination.” We then turn to the pivotal function of dialogue in the organizing process and the development of a vocabulary of discursive action with practical consequences for effective organizing. We next turn to the problematic potentials of dialogue. A contrast between generative and degenerative dialogue enables us to explore how certain forms of coordination ultimately lead to organizational growth or demise. Among our conclusions we propose that dialogue originates in public, is a form of joint-action, is embodied and contextually embedded, as well as historically and culturally situated. Dialogue may serve both positive and negative ends. Described are four aspects of dialogue – an emphasis on affirmation, productive difference, coherence, and temporal integration. Appreciative inquiry adds an enormously important element to the transformative potentials of dialogue. Other transformative practices and potentials are also described.

The experience of individuals has a huge potential for management education and development. Specific approaches are required to transform experience into learning. The purpose of this paper is to create a framework of dialogic approach, as a method of experience-based learning, which can be used for transforming the experience into learning.

This paper uses analytical abstraction and conceptual integration to develop the framework of dialogic approach. Evidence from prior research studies is used as the theoretical background to support the framework.

Dialogue is important for unravelling the experience and creating learning. Dialogic approach as a tool for experience-based learning is developed by combining reflective, appreciative and generative dialogues in a theoretically consistent sequence.

The proposed framework is operationalised as a three-phase process for delivering the dialogic approach and can be used by educators.

The framework of dialogic approach is unique as it combines different types of dialogues. The framework is independent of context and can be applied globally for management education and development, which is a novel contribution.

This chapter is motivated by the author’s desire to show that appreciative inquiry (AI) has developed over the course of its history by responding to client needs, gradually enlarging the scope of its capabilities, tracing the evolution of AI from a strengths-based approach into a catalyst for flourishing and wholeness. The purpose is to share how AI has inspired the business community to embrace generative language and increase awareness of the larger system in which it operates. The chapter reviews a series of cases – including Rava Packaging (to incorporate sustainability), Nutrimental Foods (a whole system intervention), Telefonica (to increase employee commitment), and the São Paulo State Federation of Industries (to support Millennium Development Goals) – in which the author and others facilitated. The interventions involved positive dialogue and appreciative interviewing. Through its capacity for generativity, AI has created greater commitment to and engagement within organizations, stronger collaboration among multiple stakeholders that benefits business and society, and deeper and lasting commitment to profound transformation in service of flourishing. The chapter contributes to a better understanding of how, at each stage in its evolution, AI has supported business by helping to expand its positive narrative and helping organizations become agents for world benefit.

This chapter reviews literature in support of a model that predicts the effects of Appreciative Inquiry on physical health in the workplace. Studies that demonstrate the physiological correlates associated with the experience of appreciation are examined. A model of emotion is proposed that shows how the heart, in concert with the brain, nervous, and hormonal systems, are fundamental components of a dynamic network from which emotional experience emerges. The authors demonstrate how favorable affective experiences and appreciative processes go hand in hand – and suggest the need for further empirical investigations in the field of positive organizational change practices.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context. 10; 10; 10; 10;

Management education might be most effective when an experienced-based approach to learning is adopted. Firm can achieve desired outcomes by encouraging participants to engage in different types of dialogue in order to interpret experiences that can subsequently help generate new knowledge and inspire greater creativity.

The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

The aim of this paper is to report on findings related to the use of a large group intervention method known as The World Café.

The intervention method and its philosophical genesis are described along with lessons learned from observation, personal use, and interviews with café participants.

While The World Café approach has the potential to make significant contributions to large group knowledge exchange and collective meaning making, it has suffered from being used by inexperienced facilitators and for reasons not well suited to the method. Participants, as a result, have failed to achieve the results expected and in some cases formed negative opinions of a lasting nature about the method and its proponents.

The limitations of this paper and its generalizability are framed within the nature of a case study, which is neither a representation of the whole nor a controlled experiment. Every effort has been made to fairly represent all perspectives as they were presented.

The World Café and its many imitations has been employed at numerous conferences, retreats, and gatherings during the last decade. Thousands of individuals around the world have been exposed to this method and many within the LO community have been exposed to it without understanding both its benefits and perils. Organizational leaders and practitioners can better analyze the value of this approach when measured against the learning goals of an event.

The paper makes an objective presentation of experiences with the method and shares lessons learned from the participant and practitioner perspective.

Appreciative inquiry is an approach to action research that intends to create knowledge for social innovation. Such knowledge has the generative capacity to interrupt habitual practice and to create an inspiring sense of possibility that energizes novel action. How can appreciative inquiry live up to this promise? The premise of this chapter is that we need to better understand the generative qualities of inquiry in the appreciative/inquiry equation. What is the nature of inquiry that has generativity at its core? The chapter describes five distinct, yet interrelated approaches that enhance the generative process of inquiry. They depict generativity as a dynamic interplay of open-endedness and connectedness. How can the five dimensions of generativity advance appreciative inquiry as a scholarship of transformation? The last section of the chapter gives some suggestions for such possible enrichment. We need audacious forms of scholarship for the creation of a more just and sustainable global society. Appreciative inquiry as a generative process is well positioned to take on that role.

This chapter discusses how the special qualities of poetic language can inform new principles for organizational design. Appreciative inquiry makes extensive use of poetic language – of stories, metaphors, and imagery – to facilitate the discovery of high-point experiences and the articulation of desired future states. It is commonly believed that through this narrative mode of knowing, appreciative dialogue awakens the imaginative and relational possibilities for successful transformation of organizational systems. In a critique of current practice, the chapter suggests that the unleashed generative capacity for change is not fully utilized because of appreciative inquiry's reliance on logico-scientific discourse during its design conversations. This return to modernist managerial practice is unfortunate, if we accept the need for alternative ways of knowing and talking in our efforts to create more just and sustainable forms of organizing. In an attempt to renew existing thinking, the chapter explores the question of what becomes possible when we embrace the poetics, rather than the pragmatics, of organizational design. It describes four qualities of poetic language – imaginative, ambiguous, touching, and holistic – which may inspire the design of organizations that are both more daring and caring in character.