Building Resilience with Appreciative Inquiry: A Leadership Journey through Hope, Despair, and Forgiveness

As a leader, you have work that is complex, full of ups and downs. Your ability to be resilient–to pick yourself up after setbacks and keep on going no matter the challenges–is critical not only to successful leadership but also to fostering teams, generating collaboration, and igniting your organization. In this breakthrough book, veteran consultants Joan McArthur-Blair and Jeanie Cockell show that Appreciative Inquiry can be an invaluable tool to build that resilience.

Appreciative Inquiry is a time-tested, highly effective, and widely used change method that emphasizes identifying what’s working well in a system and building on those strengths. Originating in the 1980s, it’s been responsible for dramatic results in every conceivable type of organization.

Using the authors’ Appreciative Resilience model, leaders can use AI to increase their ability to weather the storms they’ll inevitably face and come out stronger. A profoundly practical guide, this book features first-person accounts from leaders in all kinds of settings and situations describing how they’ve used AI concepts to increase their resilience, as well as a detailed description of the exercises and practices the authors use in their Appreciative Resilience Workshop.

McArthur-Blair and Cockell believe that the core of resilience is the interplay among despair, hope, and forgiveness. Every leader experiences despair in those moments when there is no clear path forward. Maintaining hope that a better future is possible enables leaders to keep going. And forgiveness, of one’s own shortcomings and those of others, helps leaders move from despair to hope. AI’s focus on the best of what is and using that to generate the future makes it a particularly powerful aid and ally on this journey.