How Has Appreciative Inquiry Lived Up To its Promises and What Will its Future Look Like?

I propose that AI has lived up to its promises by making a focus on strengths a common part of change processes, making social constructionist thinking more widely embraced by managers, accelerating the use of large group engagement, and making people’s emotional state at work a legitimate managerial concern. What has not happened is much change in how organizations are studied by researchers, nor much attention to what gives life to organizations. I propose that AI is not used more widely because emergent change processes violate the strongly held narrative of leaders as visionaries.