How does Appreciative Inquiry deal with problems?
Imagine a church that has numerous factions with conflict between these groups. A consultant is engaged and told the chief complaint: “There is too much fighting going on between the groups in our church.” The simplest goal would be to reduce the fighting by engaging in conflict management. In traditional problem solving approaches the origins of the fights would be explored and some equitable solution striven toward. The danger is that in the exploration of the origins of the fights people feel blamed and become defensive which in turn leads to a deepening of the rifts and exacerbates rather than solves the problem. But even if the conflict management was successful, what would the end point be? How much fighting would be acceptable? From an appreciative perspective it is impossible to effectively work on a negative goal. The problem is not that there is too much conflict, the problem is that there is not enough cooperation. Rather than working on reducing the conflict we would be see
