EPILOGUE

An Invitation to Practice
Appreciative Resilience

As we end this book, we wish we could sit down with you as a leader and listen to your stories of using appreciative inquiry to build resilience. We wish we could hear your stories of hope, your capabilities in times of despair, and your abiding gifts of forgiveness. We know that leading is a journey of the unknown, and as you journey, we hope we have left you with curiosity about your own resilience and how you might foster it even more. We can’t predict the kind of resilience you will need along your journey, but as we bring this commentary to an end, we have some invitations for you as a leader.

We invite you to hone the practice of appreciative resilience in your leadership and watch what might grow in yourself and others. The appreciative resilience model, with appreciative inquiry spinning around the experiences of hope, despair, and forgiveness, is designed as something you can touch into as a process or take on as a deep study in your own leadership and in working with others. It is useful as a thinking tool, as the basis for a workshop, and as a springboard to further exploration. Think of it as a dynamic orb whose component parts move into the foreground or into the background depending on the experience of leadership. All these components come together as a whole as they work in conjunction with each other. It is the power of appreciative inquiry that surrounds hope, despair, and forgiveness and creates the notion of appreciative resilience.

We invite you to build the resilience of others, to uplift them when despair visits, and to celebrate them in their journeys of hope and forgiveness. We have written many times in this book that leadership is not undertaken alone. It is built from working with others and from holding to the vocation of service. Organizations are stronger when their members work together and deeply foster each other’s resilience. We wish for you resilient teams that seek to find what is working even in the direst of circumstances, and we hope that the stories and ideas we have described here can help with that possibility.

We invite you to explore further and deepen your practice of appreciative inquiry in your leadership. The possibilities that appreciative inquiry holds for shifting perspective and for opening to generative directions are limitless. We hope you read and study and learn from all the scholars and practitioners writing and working with appreciative inquiry in all its forms. In this book, we have focused on the aspects of using AI processes, AI principles, being AI, and AI leadership. There is much more in the field of appreciative inquiry that can add to your understanding. As one leader stated about her deepening practice of appreciative inquiry: “Appreciative inquiry has moved my work in the field of violence against women from adversarial relationships pushing for change to partnerships that shine the light on success and strength.”

We invite you to practice hope, as it is key to living a resilient leadership life. We wish for you an ability to reside in hope in both the easy and the complex times of leadership. Hope and a hopeful view are generative forces that can change everything in their path. Hope and a hopeful view open the door to possibility, energy, and creativity. For both organizations and individuals, hope calls them to create and enter the future.

We invite you to know your capabilities when despair comes to visit. There are times when you abide in the darkness of despair, and there are times when it is merely a glancing blow easily shaken off. Despair is an individual journey that has no easy path out. It stays until it is over. Knowing and practicing your strengths and capabilities in those times can be part of sustaining resilience in times of despair.

We invite you to practice forgiveness. To open your leadership heart to forgiveness is the hardest of practices in appreciative resilience. Yet to forgive self, others, and circumstance opens a door that stands between the now and the possibilities of your leadership. Forgiveness is a letting go and a holding close; it abides in love and champions knowing; and it walks with a steely and willful force. To bring forgiveness into your leadership life is an act of will and determination. It is an act of resilience.

We invite you to be curious about your own resilience and the conditions which test that resilience. As one of the leaders we interviewed said, “Resilience is not something you ever achieve fully.” Resilience is a study and a practice. Curiosity has driven our exploration of appreciative resilience. We will continue in our insatiable drive to deepen our understanding of leadership resilience; to explore the ideas and possibilities that a deep understanding of appreciative inquiry brings as a building block for resilience; and to invite the stories of how hope, despair, and forgiveness reside in a leader’s life. We invite you to ask yourself what it is about resilience that you are deeply curious about.

There is such beauty in the kind of leadership that uplifts the good in the world, and to do that work requires a resilient self. We talked to many leaders in many walks of life to bring this book into being. We were profoundly inspired by their stories of using appreciative inquiry in their leadership and of their journeys through hope, despair, and forgiveness. None of these leaders had a formula for being resilient. Many of them have traveled very difficult paths in work and in life. All have an abiding will to practice forgiveness, summed up by one leader: “Forgiveness is an inside job. . . . When you’re practicing forgiveness, you’ll know it in your heart; you’ll know it in your soul.” And so we end this journey of building resilience with appreciative inquiry with one last invitation: lead with all your heart in the companionship of others, persist in the knowledge that you are on a journey of resilience, and know that in the hard times you do not lead alone.