Book Publications:

Healing Conversations Now 
Joan Chadbourne, Tony Silbert

Healing Conversations Now: Enhance Relationships with Elders and Dying Loved Ones

We might be drawn to initiate Healing Conversations for a variety of reasons: Tony recognized the time was now if he was going to know his mom as a whole person before she died of small-cell lung cancer. Crisis compelled Joan to have more meaningful and powerfully intimate conversations with each of her parents before they died. Those interactions moved her to begin years of on-going conversations with her elder aunts. They continue today.

As we reflected on these life-changing interactions, we realized: no matter what compels us to enter into Healing Conversations, the outcome is the same. Relationships are enhanced. Those who engage in Healing Conversations experience a more satisfying connection and a greater sense of loving and being loved.

In this book you’ll find stories to inspire you to initiate Healing Conversations with your elders and dying loved ones. Questions and conversation starters are also provided, to help you know what to say and do. The handbook section will guide you, step-by-step, as you engage in these new conversations. They will open your heart, give you a better understanding of loved ones, ensure that you have the conversations you need and want to have. You will find peace and have no regrets and so will your loved ones.

Order your copy at the Taos Institute!

Positive Family Dynamics: An Encyclopedia of Positive Questions to Bring Out the Best in Families
Dawn Dole, Ada Jo Mann, Jen Hetzel Silbert, and Diana Whitney.

Positive Family Dynamics is a resource for parents and family members who want to bring out the best in their families. It is an Encyclopedia of Positive Questions for anyone who wants to nurture respect, love, and care within their family. The book's imaginative questions, stories, and exercises create a simple yet powerful method for helping families discover hidden reserves of strength and inspired opportunities for better living. They also provide powerful tools for helping all families become increasingly more appreciative, collaborative and effective in creating and shaping the futures they desire for themselves and their communities. This book contains 56 appreciative questions designed to increase learning, listening and positive dynamics within your family. Positive Family Dynamics is recommended for all family members -- grandparents, parents, children, and beyond. 

Order your copy at the Taos Institute!

Journal Publications:

Journal Archives:

Strength-Based Organizations (Appreciative Inquiry Practitioner, November 2008 Issue)

Click here to purchase the complete issue.

Introduction: Strength-Based Organizations: The Challenge for Appreciative Inquiry 2.0? (pages 1- 4)
Bernard J Mohr, Catherine McKenna, Sallie Lee and Joanne Daykin

In 1987 David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva published Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life, the first time that the term Appreciative Inquiry appeared in a professional publication. Now, just slightly more than a generation later and in the context of unprecedented economic, social and ecological complexity, we ask ourselves, ‘What’s next?’: what is the new frontier of Appreciative Inquiry?

Click here to read the complete article.

The 3-Circles of the Strengths Revolution 
(pages 8-11)
Foreword to AI Practitioner’s Special Issue on Strength-Based Organizations
David L. Cooperrider

To appreciate the magnitude of strength revolution is to appreciate possibilities such as these: Imagine what would happen to you if you had the ability to consistently see, and connect with, every strength – every one of the capacities – inherent in the world around you; or to see every positive potential in your son or daughter; or, like Michelangelo, the intellectual ability to sense the towering, historic figure of David ‘already existing’ in the huge slab of marble – even before the reality.

Click here to read the complete article.

Stories from the Strength-Based Organization Frontier

CertainTeed’s Moundsville Plant Start-up… a Strength-Based Journey to Becoming a High-Commitment/High-Engagement Manufacturing Organization (pages 27-32)
Bob Laliberte, Bernard Mohr and Bob Belanger

CertainTeed Gypsum West Virginia, Inc. was conceived to be a ‘high commitment, high engagement’ organization, utilizing the strengths of all members to operate a world-class manufacturing environment. Structured as a self-directed work force, employees function in a strength-based team environment in all aspects of the operation. This is the story of their organizational journey, beginning in 2007, which has already produced significant business results.

Click here to read the complete article.

In Conversation with Jenifer Fox
(pages 41-42)
Jenifer Fox and Ada Jo Mann

Jenifer Fox, author of Your Child’s Strengths, whose work is prominently referenced in Marcus Buckingham’s DVD GO Put Your Strengths To Work, describes her path to a strength-based school as president of that school. She shares her own definitions of a ‘strength-based organization’ and how it gets expressed in everyday practices.

Click here to read the complete article. 

Tracing the Journey of an Extraordinary Strength-Based Organization: Neighborhood Centers, Inc. (pages 48-51)
Jen Hetzel Silbert and Tony Silbert

Neighborhood Centers Inc. is a non-profit human services agency serving the greater Houston, Texas area. The agency has seen many changes in the past century, both in the communities it serves and in how it serves them. This article examines its journey to becoming an SBO – how it began and where it’s headed, the role of leadership and the philosophies and approaches that continue to seed its extraordinary growth.

Click here to read the complete article.

Click here to purchase the complete issue.

Years of asking my elder aunts for life stories and listening to their responses has created something I call a ‘listening field'. It is a web of connections, intentions and appreciation that supports and enlivens. In the listening web my aunts told vibrant, fresh stories that prompted them to reflect and reframe their lives while enhancing my personal history. It allowed for their appreciative life review and for me to resolve issues. This article tells the story of creating a listening field.

Click here to purchase an electronic copy of this article. 

GETTING STARTED: Secrets to Initiating and Contracting for Successful Large Inquiries
Bernard J Mohr and Stephen P. Fitzgerald, Co-Editors

In this May 2006 issue of the AI Practitioner, Mohr and Fitzgerald share six "best practice" cases of large-scale appreciative inquiries plus interviews with four of the field's leading practitioners.

But much more than great stories, this issue digs deeper - seeking to illuminate the here-to-fore unpublished ideas, activities, skills, and thought processes associated with Initiating and Contracting for Successful Large Inquiries.

Typically i.e. the typically hidden-from-view "tilling of the relational soil," or "coming alongside" - all of the "who does what, with whom, and how during this mysterious period of contact development, relationship building, mutual education, offer crafting, exploratory dialogues at various levels, preliminary proposal writing, site visits, etc."

Although you'll find many practical ideas and tips to help you successfully launch large inquiries, Mohr and Fitzgerald invite you to join them as they go behind the scenes to reveal rich stories of beginnings that may surprise you!

Click here to obtain a free download of this article or to purchase the whole issue. 

Creative Definition as an Antidote for Skepticism: Building Up Guyana's Positive Change Wave
Jen Hetzel Silbert

In the issue's finale Jen Hetzel-Silbert's article brilliantly portrays the challenge of sponsors' initial skepticism that their nation, known for historically violent racial clashes, could embrace a strength-based, participatory approach to peace-building and community/nation development. Her story of turning deeply rooted concerns of inter-ethnic violence into an affirmative topic that expanded an original scope of work into unforeseen opportunities is breathtaking.

Click here to purchase an electronic copy of this article.