24 Understanding Conversational Approaches to Change The belief in the power of appreciation to achieve change stands in contrast to the belief in the power of criticism to produce change. Growing behaviour and producing change through appreciation doesn't involve threat or coercion or humiliation or fear or any of the other negative emotions associated with achieving behaviour change through criticism. This tends to mean that the behaviour change produced is freely given, rather than a product of reluctant compliance. It is this recognition of the vastly under- utilized power of appreciation that is at the heart of Appreciative Inquiry. In practical terms this means that, when considering an organizational assignment from an appreciative perspective, one of the first challenges is to identify `What is the behaviour that we want to grow?' and not `What is the behaviour that we want to stop?' Belief in the power of inquiry You will remember that we talked in Chapter 1 of the prevalent belief that action is linearly sequenced. This is the idea that we first do one thing, then another. It also suggests that we need to do things in a linear sequence. One way this is expressed in organizational life is through a belief in the necessity