Module 4 – Case
APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY
Case Assignment
For this assignment, first carefully review the required
background materials. Make sure you remember the standard organizational
development approaches covered in Module 1. Then make sure you understand the
main principles of Appreciative Inquiry and how they compare to traditional
organizational development approaches (action research, problem solving). It is
also important to understand what is involved in each of the “4 Ds” –
Discovery, Dream, Design, and Destiny.
When you are finished reviewing the background materials, go
through each of the scenarios below and apply what you’ve read to these
scenarios. For each scenario, cite at least one of the required readings to
support your answer. You should cite at least three of the four required
readings in your paper. Your paper should be 4–5 pages in length:
A bank has recently been losing money. Many borrowers have
not been able to repay their loans. It is not clear why this has suddenly been
a problem. Management is not sure if this is due to poor motivation of their
loan officers who may not be doing careful credit checks on borrowers, or if it
is due to other factors. But regardless of the source of the problem, the bank
needs to fix this problem soon or otherwise they will go out of business. Time
is of the essence for the bank to fix this problem. Should this team use an
Appreciative Inquiry approach, or a more traditional Organizational Development
approach? Explain your reasoning with references to the required readings.
A team of television screenplay writers have been working
together for 10 years. For the first eight years their show had very high
ratings, but over the last two years the ratings have started to slip and the
network is thinking about canceling the show. The team used to get along with
each other very well and agreed most of the time. But now the team has been
fighting, blaming each other for the lower ratings, and having a lot of
difficulty reaching agreement on what kind of stories or plots the show should
have. Should this team use an Appreciative Inquiry approach, or a more
traditional Organizational Development approach? Explain your reasoning with references
to the required readings
A new start-up social networking company has recently
received a lot of money from investors. The top management team consists of
young but experienced employees who have worked at Facebook, Twitter, and
similar companies. They are all highly motivated and get along well with each
other. But in spite of their motivation, experience, and money from investors,
they all agree things are not working as well as they should. They have only
been working together for a few months but feel that something is missing in
how they work together. They believe their functioning as a team could be
improved but are not sure what exactly needs to be done. Should this team use
an Appreciative Inquiry approach or a more traditional organizational
development approach? Explain your reasoning with references to the required
readings.
An organization hires an Appreciative Inquiry consultant to
help the company get back on track and improve the performance of its product
design team. The consultant starts by asking members of the team how they would
like the team to perform and what their ideal vision of the team would be. The
consultant collects all of this input and puts together a vision of how the
team should perform and function. However, once this vision is presented to the
team they are unable to come up with a plan to implement it. They all agree it
would be great if they could achieve this vision, but they also are in
consensus that this vision presented by the consultant is highly unrealistic.
What do you think went wrong? What steps do you think the Appreciative Inquiry
consultant could have taken to make the consulting process go better? Refer to
the specific “4 Ds” of Appreciative Inquiry in your answer.
Assignment Expectations
Answer the assignment questions directly.
Stay focused on the precise assignment questions; don’t go
off on tangents or devote a lot of space to summarizing general background
materials.
Make sure to use reliable and credible sources as your
references. Articles published in established newspapers or business
journals/magazines are preferred. If you use articles from the Internet, make
sure they are from credible sources.
Reference your sources of information with both a
bibliography and in-text citations. See the Student Guide to Writing a
High-Quality Academic Paper, including pages 13 and 14 on in-text citations.
Another resource is the “Writing Style Guide,” which is found under My
Resources in the TLC portal.
