Appreciative Inquiry

One of the things inculcated to me as a child by my parents is the importance of planning with almost everything in my life. It comes as no surprise that planning is almost second nature to me by now. This habit is extremely helpful to executing appreciative inquiry and what it wants to achieve. At its core, appreciative inquiry is finding out how to build on established ideas and best practices to achieve the world we want to have. Part of being able to plan well is identifying what strategies can be implemented–which includes indicating what are the best practices available and how we can utilize them. 

Applying this method, I interviewed Lawrence Lopez, one of my classmates for my class in Sustainability Management. I asked him questions to know what he currently considers as a business innovation and what is the ideal world he wants to live in 10 years from now. What stuck to me during our interview was how he wants our costs of living to be actually that–livable, some 10 years from now. He is currently working as a moderator for GMGN Labs, a fully virtual marketing agency with a stronghold in emerging technologies, specifically for the cryptocurrency venture for the football team Manchester United. 

The business startup in itself is already a business innovation of its own, especially with the digital world having a permanent place in our life now. According to Lawrence, he believes that this current venture would actually be helpful in the long run in achieving livable wages and costs of living, considering that our world is slowly accepting the accelerated growth of technologies such as but not limited to cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence, and non-fungible tokens.

With this interview being my first experience in appreciative inquiry, I learned that it can be a new strategy to utilize in planning. As an Applied Corporate Management student, planning has been ingrained to us early on, and this can be one of the starting points to initiating change. Most people are dead set on introducing something new, and failing to realize that sometimes, it’s good enough to work on the current ones we already have and just continuously improve them as time goes by.

#AppreciativeInquiry #ACMSUST

Sophia Isabel S. Cauilan

Posted January 30, 2024