Essay 8 . April 26, 2026

When I started my MSOD program at Pepperdine, I didn't expect the turn it took around its midpoint. By then we'd spent months in the intellectual heart of organizational development — systems, change, culture. Then we were handed a book called Appreciative Living by Jacqueline Kelm.

The assignment was personal. We were asked to take situations from our own lives — things we'd been carrying a particular way for years — and practice looking at them through an appreciative lens. Not to rewrite what had happened. To see what else was true about it that we'd stopped noticing.

I came to that assignment with shame. There were personal decisions I'd made earlier in my life that had lasting consequences, and I'd been telling myself a single story about them for a long time. The story was that I had failed. That I should have known better. That whatever else I went on to do, those decisions were always going to be sitting there, evidence that I'd gotten it wrong.

What Appreciative Living asked me to do was not to forgive myself. It was simpler and harder than that. It asked me to look at what else was true — what I had learned, what I had built since, who I had become because of what those decisions taught me. Not to erase the failure. To stop letting it be the only thing in the frame.

That reframe didn't fix anything. It just gave me a different place to stand. And from that different place, I could see that I had actually been doing a version of this my whole life — instinctively choosing to look for what was working, what could be built from, what was quietly holding together underneath whatever was obviously broken. I had just never had language for it.

Appreciative Inquiry, at its core, is the discipline of asking what's already working and building from there — rather than starting with what's broken and organizing the work around fixing it. The formal practice gave me the language. But it also gave me permission. Permission to make that instinct a discipline. Permission to treat it as a legitimate leadership posture rather than something soft I needed to apologize for in a performance culture.

I've been practicing it ever since.

I walked into a regional manager role for a branch network that was a bottom performing region in the enterprise. I'd been brought in externally. The region had been underperforming for a while, and the conventional wisdom going in was that there was a lot broken that needed fixing.

What I found instead was an absence. There were no people routines. None. Managers weren't meeting with their employees regularly. There was no rhythm of development conversations, no cadence of feedback, no structure for anyone in the region to know their leader was paying attention to them as a person.

I could have started with a list of what was wrong. Turnover was high, engagement was low, the business results reflected both. The deficit view was readily available and would have felt productive.

I started somewhere else. I required every people manager in the region to begin meeting with their direct reports at least every other week. Not to evaluate. To learn about them and help develop them. The simplest possible intervention.

Then I waited. And about two months in, I started asking the most junior employees in the region what it had been like.

They were loving it. Some of them had never had a leader ask them about their development before. A few said it was the first time in their career that someone had treated their growth as a serious question.

So I did the thing the methodology calls for and the instinct demanded. I celebrated it. Not once, in a ceremony. Consistently, with the leaders who were doing it, in the small moments where it mattered. When a manager described a good conversation they'd had with an employee, I named what was working in it. When turnover started ticking down in a particular branch, I celebrated the leader publicly and asked them to share what they were doing.

Over the following year, turnover in the region dropped by eighty percent. Business performance improved alongside it.

That's the outcome I was most proud of in that role. Not the business number. The turnover number. Because what it actually measured was that we had built something where people were choosing to stay. And the way we had built it was by starting with what was possible between a leader and an employee, and celebrating it every time we saw it.

I've watched AI work and I've watched it fail, and the failures taught me something the successes didn't.

At one organization, I was supporting a team through significant structural change. A new external leader had come in, and her instinct — reasonable, common — was to list everything she saw that needed to be fixed. I recommended we try a different approach. We used AI to shift the conversation from what was broken to what was working and what could be built from there. It changed the tenor of the work immediately. People came to the table differently. The change effort ended up going further than anyone expected.

At another organization, I tried the same approach with a team that was coming out of a long period of what many would have called a toxic culture. They struggled to connect with the practice. They found it hard to trust that anything would actually get better. Ultimately they rejected it and chose a more traditional approach.

Two things happened. They experienced meaningful turnover. And the cultural change they'd hoped for was tepid at best — the kind of change where some things improve on paper and very little shifts in how people actually experience the place.

I thought about that team for a long time afterward. And what I came to understand was that Appreciative Inquiry asks something of the people in the room that not every room can give. It asks them to trust that naming what's working won't be used against them. It asks them to believe there's something worth building from. For a team coming out of prolonged damage, that ask is sometimes too big. The floor has been destroyed. You can't start the conversation on the second story.

That's not a failure of the method. It's a sequencing problem. Sometimes the work before the work is rebuilding enough trust that an appreciative question doesn't feel like a trick.

I've also seen myself miss the opportunity to use AI and default to let's fix the problems out of nothing more than habit. The deficit orientation is the water most of us swim in, and even with the training, even with the practice, I catch myself reaching for the familiar tool when the better one is right there. The deficit approach doesn't always fail. But when I look at the times I've used it out of habit rather than intention, the outcome is usually smaller than it could have been. Less energy in the team. Less buy-in. Less of the upside that's available when people feel the work is an invitation rather than a correction.

Appreciative Inquiry is still the tool I reach for first. Not because it's always the right one. Because it assumes something about people I want to keep assuming — that there's something here worth building from, if we're willing to look for it.

There's a line I come back to often, from Dave Canales, the Carolina Panthers head coach: What you celebrate is what you become.

It sounds simple. It isn't. Because the inverse is also true — what you fail to celebrate is also building something, just not what you intended. A team whose leader only names what's broken will eventually become a team that can only see what's broken in itself. A team whose leader celebrates what's working will start looking for more of it, in their work and in each other.

That's not a methodology choice. That's an orientation toward human beings. It says: I believe you are capable of more than the last thing you got wrong, and I'm going to aim my attention at what that more looks like.

Most leadership cultures don't reward that orientation. Performance reviews catalog gaps. Meetings diagnose failures. Post-mortems name what went wrong. The entire apparatus of management is tilted toward the deficit, and leaders didn't choose that orientation so much as inherit it. Which means choosing something else, consistently, over time, is genuinely countercultural.

It's also, I've come to believe, the most human thing a leader can do.

The leader who asks what's broken here and how do we fix it and the leader who asks what's working here and how do we build more of it are not using different methodologies. They are sending their people home with different sentences forming in their mouths.

One sends them home rehearsing what was wrong with them today. The other sends them home remembering something they did that someone noticed.

Over months and years, those sentences become the story each person is telling themselves about who they are at work. And the story each person is telling themselves eventually becomes the story they tell the people who love them, in the kitchen at the end of the day, when the leader is nowhere in the room.

That's what you're building. Whether you meant to or not.