David Cooperrider

Instead of "problems to be solved," human systems are "mysteries to be appreciated." In a real way they are products of the miracle of human interaction and relatedness. The more we study "what gives life" versus "what’s wrong," the more we move in the direction or become what we study. Instead of studying low morale, for example, we should study human flourishing in the workplace "because human systems move in the direction of what they study." The simple act of observation in a human system changes the phenomenon itself. In another realm this concept has been called the Hawthorne effect. But in human systems, the result is even more powerful. Cooperrider called it "the exponential inquiry effect" to indicate how our first questions, like the early stage of a snowball, can grow into exponential tipping point movements. That's why he writes: "We live in worlds our questions create."

In a classic conversation between Cooperrider and Peter Drucker, they found something in common: a realization that strengths do more than perform, they transform. For Drucker, the development of an appreciative eye is, in essence, the first task of great leadership. "What is leadership all about?" he asked, "Leadership is about the creation of an alignment of strengths in ways that make a system’s weaknesses irrelevant." That is what appreciative inquiry does: it provides the theory and tools for (1) the elevation of systemic strengths; (2) the unification and configuration of systemic strengths; and (3) the magnification of systemic strengths outward into society, that is, the discovery and design of positive institutions that bring our highest human strengths, such as love and courage, into the world.

What is big idea of Appreciative Inquiry? It began with the observation that ever since Taylorism, managers, researchers and consultants have seen organizations not only in machine-like terms, but in deficit-based terms as "problems to be solved" or fixed. True to Abraham Maslow's observation that "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," those same managers and consultants became, over the years, quite good at finding, analyzing, and sometimes solving problems in organizations. So much so that organizations became problems personified—and hence a whole vocabulary of deficit-based change grew up centered on concepts like "gap analysis," "organizational diagnosis," "root causes of failure," "resistance," "unfreezing," "needs analysis," "threat analysis," and the need for high levels of dissatisfaction and urgent "burning platforms." Much like diagnostic medicine with its focus on illness, management had become locked in a problem-analytic view of the world, especially when it came to concepts and tools for managing change.

The David L. Cooperrider Center for Appreciative Inquiry, located in the Robert P. Stiller School of Business at Champlain College, is a comprehensive hub for connecting students to learn, apply, and amplify Appreciative Inquiry. The center was dedicated on November 8, 2014, and is the only academic center in the world focused entirely on Appreciative Inquiry. The center is run by former Cooperrider graduate student and now Academic Director of the center, Dr. Lindsey Godwin. The stated purpose of the Center is to educate leaders to be the best in the world at seeing the best for the world, in order to discover and design positive institutions – organizations and communities that elevate, magnify, and bring our highest human strengths to the practice of positive organizational development and change.

Then, in 2004, for his world inquiry with Ron Fry into Business as an Agent of World Benefit, the Aspen Institute gave him the “Faculty Pioneer Award for Impact” in the domain of sustainable development. That work, including his book with Jane Dutton on The Organization Dimensions of Global Change: No Limits to Cooperation, has given birth to two major institutions and endowments: The Fowler Center for Sustainable Value and the ongoing global forum series hosted by Case Western Reserve University in partnership with the United Nations Global Compact and Academy of Management titled “The Global Forum for Business as an Agent of World Benefit.”

In a New York Times best-selling book, Marcus Buckingham concluded that the theory of Appreciative Inquiry was one of the three most important academic catalysts for the strengths revolution in management. Beyond the seminal work of Cooperrider and Srivastva, the other two giant sources of the strengths revolution in management included Peter Drucker's Effective Executive and Martin Seligman's call for a Positive Psychology in 2000. Together, appreciative inquiry, Drucker's management theory, and positive psychology have created a society-wide positive-strengths movement "because it works."

All of this also affected the experiential learning field, including his most recent work focused on "Flourishing Organizations." In 2000, for his contribution to organizational learning and development, Cooperrider was given the "Distinguished Contribution Award to Workplace Performance and Learning" by the American Society for Training and Development.

Cooperrider has published numerous books and authored more than 60 articles and book chapters. His book with Diana Whitney Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change has been a best-seller with multiple printings. His original article on Appreciative Inquiry (with Suresh Srivastva) in 1987, which appeared in the series Research in Organizational Change and Development, Vol. 1, has become an important source for its field since publication.

Cooperrider is recognized as the founder, together with Suresh Srivastva, of the theory of Appreciative Inquiry. Cooperrider's original doctoral dissertation "Appreciative Inquiry Into Organizational Life" has been cited as “the first, and as yet, the best articulation of the theory and vision of appreciative inquiry.” It was completed and defended in 1985.

Early in the 1980s almost two decades before the positive psychology field was christened, Cooperrider began to question the deficit-based change field and the root metaphor that "human systems are problems to be solved." He observed that the pervasive problematizing perspective was constraining and limiting, just as industrial era machine metaphors were also limiting. Cooperrider and Srivastva, in their earliest work at the acclaimed the Cleveland Clinic, engaged in a radical reversal of the traditional problem-analytic approach. Influenced by the writings of Albert Schweitzer on "reverence for life," they determined that organizations are not institutional machines incessantly in need of repair and that deteriorate steadily and over time. Rather organizations are, fundamentally, living systems and centers of human relatedness, alive and embedded in amplifying networks of infinite strengths.

Cooperrider's impact on the fields of leadership, human development and management theory is significant. His work at Case Western Reserve University in the early 1980s on Appreciative Inquiry anticipated and helped bring about today's positive psychology movement, strengths-based leadership models, and positive organizational scholarship (POS). Kim S. Cameron, Robert Quinn and Jane Dutton called Appreciative Inquiry “a pillar.” Management scholar Robert Quinn, in a 2000 book Change the World declared that “Appreciative Inquiry is revolutionizing the field of organization development.”

Cooperrider grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, and later completed his undergraduate studies at Augustana College in 1976. He earned a Master's of Science at Sir George Williams University in 1983 and his Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University in 1985.

David Cooperrider (born July 14, 1954), is the Fairmount Minerals Chair and Professor of Social Entrepreneurship at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, and Faculty Director at the Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit at Case.