'Look for what's right'

Bliss Browne had given up divinity school to work in an inner-city parish, but found so much resistance to her ministry that she moved to Chicago and chucked social service for corporate banking. She would later become one of the first female priests of the Episcopal Church and the very first to preach at Westminster Abbey in London.

But until she felt a change one morning in 1991, she had never done anything so extreme.

The moment came during a corporate strategy meeting at the Chicago bank where she had worked 16 years. "I just felt that my insides had been turned around," she recalls. "And I knew in that moment, for reasons I couldn't defend, that my own integrity depended on being God's friend

in this city.... It was simply a moment of knowing that was like swimming in a clear stream, where you don't know what's ahead but you know you can do no other."

After the meeting, she quit her job on the spot and began nearly a year of searching for direction. Although she knew nothing of it at the time, Ms. Browne was on her way to joining a collection of development efforts based on a thinking process called "appreciative inquiry."

Little known at the time, the movement has since notched success stories around the globe. It has transformed the mental atmosphere of American corporations, nonprofit groups, and poor rural villages. A core belief of the discipline: Instead of looking at what's wrong, people succeed most when they look for what's right.

"We have become so burdened in a deficit consciousness," says David Cooperrider, an organizational behaviorist at Case Western Reserve University and father of appreciative inquiry. "The root metaphor is that our world is a problem to be solved as opposed to the opposite metaphor ... that our world is home to infinite capacity." Appreciative inquiry taps infinite possibility.

If Browne seemed resolute the morning she quit her job, doubts began to creep in when she picked up her children from school that afternoon.

"They all got angry and shook their heads and talked to me like I was a child," Browne recalls. "The first comment was: 'Mom, if you want to be friends with the poor, that's fine.... But this decision isn't going to help the poor. There are going to be more poor, not less poor, because we're going to be poor.' "

Browne tried to reassure them with the story about teaching a man to fish rather than giving him a fish. "And they shook their heads and said: 'Mom, you are so naive. Do you know how many people have dedicated their life to changing the system? ... What makes you think you can make the difference?' The littlest one said to me: 'Mom, you are not Martin Luther King Jr.!' Here I am driving in the pouring rain, sobbing, listening to these children because they are such articulate voices of my own fear."

But there were enough positive signs to keep her going: a surprise call from the head of Bread for the World, a retreat that inspired her to think of her search as a pregnancy, and an unexpected severance package from the bank that lasted, interestingly, nine months. Even her husband provided an encouraging word at a key time.

So in 1992, she gathered 20 educators, corporate executives, organizers, and other community leaders to design a project she called Imagine Chicago. The idea: get youngsters from all over the city to interview high-level community leaders about their positive experiences improving their city. What Bliss was trying to do was getcivic leaders dreaming about the future of their city. And the best way to do that, she found, was by having those with most of a stake in the future(disadvantaged youth) interview them. The project inspired team members to tell Browne about appreciative inquiry. Browne, thrilled to find an academic who was exploring similar unorthodox ideas, contacted Cooperrider.

Cooperrider, too, had had a moment of clarity in Hiroshima, Japan, as he listened to stories of survivors of the atomic bomb. "It was almost like an atomic bomb went off inside of me," he remembers. "The feeling that came over me was the preciousness of life on this planet. The question that was being born in me was: What was there in human relations that would be as positive in our lives as the atomic bomb was negative?"

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