Product Description

How is it that some people seem to have great relationships and success in their lives while others do not? Why are some organizations successful at sustaining positive change while others make a great start but let it fade away? It rests on the dynamics of their relationships. Creating positive dynamics and sustained success requires continuous awareness and informed appreciative action. Dynamic Relationships: Unleashing the Power of Appreciative Inquiry in Daily Living invites us to step into the appreciative paradigm where the principles governing our actions and relationships offer a means for increased value and meaning in our lives and our communities of work and play. Dynamic Relationships offers us the opportunity to practice these principles through cycles of reflection and action in ways that empower us to become a force for creating and sustaining life-affirming relationships and success in daily living.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #424166 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-30
• Binding: Paperback
• 171 pages

Review
Easy to use and effective ways to create the relationships we want--strategies that can be immediately used by anyone. -- Bernard Mohr, President of Innovation Partners International, August 2005

Easy to use and effective ways to create the relationships we want--strategies that can be immediately used by anyone. --Bernard Mohr, President of Innovation Partners International, August 2005

Great Work! This is the first book to bring Appreciative Inquiry straight into our personal lives. . . and I'm grateful! -- David Cooperrider, Co-Creator of Appreciative Inquiry, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve Univeristy, August 2005

Great Work! This is the first book to bring Appreciative Inquiry straight into our personal lives. . . and I'm grateful! --David Cooperrider, Co-Creator of Appreciative Inquiry, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve Univeristy, August 2005

Practical and thoughtful, an exceptional contribution to the field. This book takes AI beyond the organization into your life. -- Marge Schiller, President of Positive Change Corps, September 2005

Practical and thoughtful, an exceptional contribution to the field. This book takes AI beyond the organization into your life. --Marge Schiller, President of Positive Change Corps, September 2005

About the Author
Cheri Torres and Jackie Stavros have been collaborating for several years presenting seminars that combine the powerful approaches of Appreciative Inquiry and Experiential Learning. It has been their great joy and opportunity to co-author this book. Cheri Torres, MBA, MA, and doctoral student in Collaborative Learning, is an educational consultant with MTC Associates, LLC. She has worked with hundreds of corporations, community organizations and schools to develop excellence through positive transformation. She co-designed and patented Mobile Team Challenge, an award winning, innovative, high performance portable low ropes course and has authored or co-authored numerous articles and books including The Appreciative Facilitator, Inspire Cooperation: Teaching Young People to Manage Conflict, and From Conflict to Collaboration. Jackie Stavros, EDM, possesses eighteen years of strategic planning and organizational change experience. She is an Associate Professor at Lawrence Technological University College of Management. She has done business in over a dozen countries in Asia, Europe, and North America. Jackie has authored several articles, “Strategic Inquiry with Appreciative Intent: Inspiration to SOAR!” and co-authored The First Appreciative Inquiry Handbook: For Leaders of Change. Jackie has spent the last 12 years incorporating Appreciative Inquiry (AI) methodologies into her teaching, training, and consulting work. She works with executives, managers, staff and line teams and an organization’s stakeholders to collaboratively and creatively help them get organized and focused for profitable growth. Through AI coaching, she helps organizations identify and articulate their values, vision and mission statements, create strategy, and build collaborative teams for inspired action.

Customer Reviews

Dynamic Relationships is a significant book on using AI in your own life!
Dynamic Relationships: Unleashing the Power of Appreciative Inquiry in Daily Living
By Jacqueline M. Stavros and Cheri B. Torres

Reviewed by Helene C. Sugarman

Appreciative Inquiry is deceptively simple. As you read, attend a workshop and learn about it, it seems just about anyone can do it easily. Think about how many years a skilled actor takes to develop his craft so he is believable and can make acting look effortless. Professionals using AI know that to help people and organizations develop and transform into their desired future requires deep understandings of this methodology. We can understand AI and be able to use AI for ourselves in our daily living after reading this book.

Dynamic Relationships is a significant book on using AI in your own life. Jackie and Cheri demonstrate that we do our work through our relationships with others. No one exists in a vacuum. It's this idea of working in relationship with others that gives AI (and its roots from social constructiveism) the power and knowledge of how to use this understanding for our own development. They added a 6th Principle: The Principle of Awareness which gives us the opportunity to reflect on our actions and behaviors. Thus, we gain a true understanding of just how we can use AI in our everyday lives including relating to our children and our spouses. They give us examples and exercises to think about at the end of each chapter so we can continue to reflect and learn.

They make using AI easy to understand. They walk us through the 6 principles (note that they have added one for use in your personal life) and the 4 stages (D's - Discovery, Dream, Design, Destiny) using such clear language and key experiences that we immediately `get' it. They have done a magnificent job of synthesizing the basics of AI so completely that they help us think about it on a very deep level.

Jackie and Cheri give us another tool to use in our learning about using Appreciative Inquiry with a very sharp eye for developing ourselves. This is a must read book for anyone who practices AI professionally and for all those folks in organizations who want to make a difference. Yes, even one person moving forward with conviction and power can make a difference. They show us how through Dynamic Relationships!

From their own words we can hear their call:

Dynamic Relationship is a call to change the way we live and work together. Iti is an invitation to develop a new set of beliefs for how you perceive and make sense of the world. It is also intended as a guide for a new way for all of us to make meaning together. Many corporations, communities, and families are doing just this as they flatten their structures. They are seeing themselves as dynamic systems and calling for leadership at every level because of the value of engaging the full potential of every person...

The shift is spreading to communities that are calling for their members to have a voice, to recognize their relationships are dynamic, and to take an active role in creating their community of choice.

Again, Dynamic Relationships is a significant book in the field of using Appreciative Inquiry for your own development. Read and learn for yourself.

Simple Concepts with Powerful Potential!
I enjoyed the simplicity of this book, but I also realize just how powerful this book really is. I work for the federal government and we want to share this material with our staff with the hopes of creating high performing teams. This book is just what we need to infuse appreciative life into our organization! Jackie and Cheri put the AI concepts in language that can be understood and applied in both personal or professional situations. This book provides the basis for powerful change.

Dynamic Relationships is a gem.
I began giving this book to friends and colleagues to introduce them to Appreciative Inquiry. I asked them to read at least Chapter 1 for an explanation of AI and Chapter 2 to learn the Principles. Invariably each one has told me how helpful this book is in his/her personal life. I knew they would continue to read the whole book and begin applying their insights in their every day relationships. The examples are powerful and people often quote them when telling me how much they appreciated receiving this book.