World Appreciative Inquiry Conference

We’re setting off for our third World AI conference – in South Africa.  In 2009 we went to Kathmandu in Nepal, and in 2012 we were in Ghent, Belgium.

The title for this year’s event is Building Flourishing Societies Together: Elevating, Aligning and Reflecting our Best to Create a Prosperous World for All and the theme is strengths – how to focus on them and grow them, and how to support strength based organisations and communities. You can read more about the conference here…

We’re looking forward to sharing conversation with our friends, colleagues and international partners in the AI world. Some of the well known presenters will include David Cooperrider, Barbara Frederickson, Ken Gergen, Diane Whitney, Ron Fry, Lindsay Godwin and Anastasia Bukashe.

You may also have seen our blog last month about our sponsorship of the May edition of AI Practitioner, and we’re looking forward to meeting some of the article authors in Johannesburg. We have a special price on our materials for subscribers to AI and for conference attendees.

Appreciating People will be presenting a paper on our work using Appreciative Inquiry and Positive Psychology in homeless hostels and supported living. The talk is based on the paper published in Housing Care and Support journal: Organisational development, Appreciative Inquiry and the development of Psychologically Informed Environments (PIEs). Part I: a positive psychology approach. You can read the abstract here for more information…

We’re also visiting Cape Town the week before the conference, and are looking forward to doing some training with some inspiring consultants at Cebano.

We’ll also report back once we get home from South Africa, with updates and ideas from the conference.

If you want to go somewhere fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go with others” – African proverb