Spurred on by a good friend who visits this blog and tells me that she enjoys the posts on it,(thanks Anna), and by my obvious lack of recent activity, I have been motivated to pay it attention again.
For those who occasionally find their way here - for which many thanks, and do, please, leave a comment now and then - I am happy to share with you my strong belief that in Barack Obama we have a leader of massive potential (no startling insight from me there) with deep ethics, and with an approach to the role that offers leadership of an appreciative nature.
His inauguration speech talked of "reaffirming our enduring spirit...choose our better history...carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness". These phrases all speak to the Positive Core that Appreciative Inquiry (AI)asks us to inquire into and find as part of transforming our communities and organisations and indeed nations.
His talk of reaffirming the greatness of his nation through earning it, and his noting that those who earned it for the USA were frequently "men and women obscure in their labour who carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom" really talks to the Discovery of those people and attributes that make our communities and organisations as strong as they are, and hold the key to making them even stronger and more successful in the future.
The affirmation from him that ambitions (or Dreams perhaps?) are realised "...when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage" suggested to me that for all of us, change requires clear ambition to be present, and people freed to exercise those attributes in pursuit of that ambition. The very strong 'Destiny' that AI drives us to deliver on the Dreams we have.
Later on he spoke of how "the question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works...". Throughout he posited appreciative choices and also rejected false choices, such as those "between our safety and our ideals" citing those ideals as lighting the world and "not being given up for expedience's sake."
And so it went, realistic, not doom laden as some would have it, calling often to the Positive Core; rediscovering aspects of his country's greatness; relating more to fairness and justice than "greed and irresponsibility" and calling people to a "new era of responsibility". There was no 1933 Rooseveltian phrase of "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" kind, nor Kennedy's "ask not..." phrase, so perhaps we are to read that the time for soaring rhetoric has come and gone, for now, to be replaced by calls to appreciatively rediscover what works well and grow towards those things. I hope so.
His inauguration speech, critiqued by one writer as "virtuosic in its sincere, magisterial gloom", struck me as much richer than that, and AI has assisted me to appreciate its richness all the more I think.
