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78 Appreciative Leadership

Showing the connection between strengths and business results

helps people understand how they fit into the big picture. Knowing
that their strengths and abilities are integral to success inspires people
to give their best and to work with others in ways that also bring out
their best. By aligning people’s strengths with each other and with the
purpose and goals of your organization or community, you create a
powerful energy for excellence.

Root Cause of Success:

Illuminating the Positive Core

Every person, team, and organization has a unique pattern of strengths,
capabilities, and potential waiting to be discovered, liberated, and used
in positively powerful ways. In the practice of Appreciative Inquiry,
we call this the positive core. It is a description of the specifi c causes
of success. It is a profile of the person, the team, or the organization’s

strengths when it is performing at its best; this profile is the result of a
root-cause-of-success analysis.
Root-cause analysis is a classic tool used in the total quality
movement to facilitate a rigorous analysis of failures. We have
found it to be equally powerful for conducting a rigorous analy-
sis of successes—for creating an inventory of strengths embedded
in a project, a team, or an organization when it is at its best. As
Figure 4-2 shows, a “fishbone,” or “Ishikawa,” diagram is a great way

to illustrate and illuminate the positive core of a team, group, or orga-
nization based on their root-cause-of-success analysis. Figure 4-2
is an example of one group’s current capacities and strengths for
positive change.
Not only does a root-cause-of-success analysis give you informa-
tion about your team and your organization at its best; it also shines

the light on daily acts of excellence that all too often go unrecognized.
It gives credit to high performers and sets the expectation that every-
one else should follow their lead. By illuminating the best of people,