6.2 Positive Psychology, Resilience and Appreciative Inquiry

APMG Change Management Foundation Exam

Track your progress as you read

Finished sections get a check mark.

1 Chapter 1: The v3 Foundation Exam and the Organisational Context

1.1 Exam Structure, the Five Syllabus Areas and the Certification Path 1.2 Scene Setting: External and Internal Factors Shaping Change 1.3 Change Management, Benefits and Dis-benefits

2 Chapter 2: Understanding the Change Context

2.1 Kelman's Three Levels of Adoption 2.2 VUCA and the Cynefin Framework 2.3 Planned Change versus Emergent Change 2.4 Systems Thinking in Change 2.5 Organisational Culture and Its Three Levels

3 Chapter 3: Diagnosing and Structuring the Change Approach

3.1 Lewin's Force Field Analysis 3.2 Co-Design 3.3 The ADKAR Model 3.4 Evolving the n-Step Process and Kotter's Eight Accelerators

4 Chapter 4: Delivery Strategy, Agile Practices and the Change Strategy

4.1 Delivery Strategy: Big Bang, Phased, Voluntary and Iterative 4.2 Agile Practices and Agile Change Practices 4.3 The Continuous Change Management Cycle 4.4 The Change Strategy

5 Chapter 5: People and Change — Individual Difference and Response

5.1 Differences in People and Personality Preferences 5.2 Neuroscience and Change: SCARF, Mindset and Insight 5.3 The Change Curve 5.4 Bridges' Transition Model

6 Chapter 6: Motivation, Resilience and Learning

6.1 Rewards, Punishment and Pink's Three Motivators 6.2 Positive Psychology, Resilience and Appreciative Inquiry 6.3 The Beckhard-Harris Change Formula and Schein's Two Anxieties 6.4 Competence, Learning and the Learning Dip 6.5 Learning Preferences: Kolb, Honey and Mumford

7 Chapter 7: Key Roles in Change Leadership

7.1 Key Roles in the Change Process 7.2 The Role of the Change Sponsor 7.3 The Change Agent's Role and Personal Influence 7.4 The Role of Local Leadership in Change

8 Chapter 8: Psychological Safety, Leadership and Culture

8.1 Psychological Climate and Psychological Safety 8.2 Carolyn Taylor: How Leadership Shapes Culture 8.3 Leadership Styles and Organisational Climate

9 Chapter 9: Teams and Change

9.1 Team Structures and Change Agent Networks 9.2 Tuckman's Stages of Team Development 9.3 Lencioni: Assessing and Growing Team Effectiveness 9.4 Harvesting the Value of Team Diversity

10 Chapter 10: Stakeholder Identification, Analysis and Engagement

10.1 Stakeholder Definition and Identification 10.2 Stakeholder Analysis, Segmentation and Empathy Mapping 10.3 Stakeholder Mapping and Sources of Power 10.4 Barriers to Engagement 10.5 Planning Stakeholder Engagement

11 Chapter 11: Communication Theory, Messaging and Emotional Connection

11.1 Communication Theory and the Communication Process 11.2 Barriers to Communication and Cognitive Biases 11.3 Messaging: Setting Context and the Tell, Sell, Include Approach 11.4 Appealing to Hearts and Minds

12 Chapter 12: Communication Channels and Planning

12.1 Ways of Communicating and VARK Language Style Preferences 12.2 Communication Channels: One-Way, Two-Way, Lean and Rich 12.3 Communications Planning

13 Chapter 13: Assessing Change Impact and Severity

13.1 Change Management as Risk Management and the Two-Step Assessment 13.2 Step 1: Categorising Impacts and Identifying Impact Areas 13.3 Step 1 Continued: Gap Analysis, Impact Profiles and Monitoring 13.4 Step 2: Change Impact Severity

14 Chapter 14: Resistance to Change

14.1 Causes of Resistance and Oreg's Four Neural Factors 14.2 Common Reasons for Resistance and How to Deal With Them 14.3 Building a Strategy to Manage Resistance

15 Chapter 15: Change Analytics and Exam Readiness

15.1 Measurement Types and the Change Delivery Scorecard 15.2 Building a Change Analytics Strategy 15.3 Exam Technique and Final Revision

6.2 Positive Psychology, Resilience and Appreciative Inquiry

Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI

Personal resilience is both a character trait and a skill, and individuals can increase it by learning appropriate skills

Resilience skills include insight, relaxation, using experience, positivity, building meaning and countering negativity

Appreciative Inquiry focuses on positive identification of what is currently working well and how it can be built on

The Appreciative Inquiry 4-D cycle is discovery, dream, design and destiny

Appreciative Inquiry develops the positives that already exist rather than focusing on fixing something currently broken

Last updated: September 2026

Positive psychology addresses the link between motivation and a positive mindset. CM3 covers two elements: personal resilience and Appreciative Inquiry.

Personal resilience is a skill, not just a trait

The framing is important. Personal resilience is both a character trait and a skill , and crucially, individuals can develop and increase their resilience by learning appropriate skills .

That second clause changes what a change manager can do. If resilience were purely a trait, the only option would be to select for it. Because it is partly a skill, resilience can be built during a change — which matters, because change is precisely when people need it.

The six resilience skills

• Skill What it involves
• Insight Learning to notice where in the body you are holding the stress you feel
• Relaxation Using mindfulness, meditation or other techniques
• Using experience Recalling and valuing past occasions when you have overcome difficult times
• Positivity Learning to use daily tools like a simple gratitude journal or listing accomplishments
• Building meaning Finding and engaging in activities you find meaningful
• Countering negativity Learning techniques for handling negative thoughts and fears that occur

Using experience deserves particular attention in a change context. Reminding people of a previous difficult change they came through is one of the cheapest and most effective resilience interventions available — it converts an abstract fear into a concrete precedent. It also connects to the history of change context factor from the opposite direction: where the history is genuinely good, use it.

Building meaning connects directly to Pink's purpose. Both point at the same finding: people cope with more difficulty when the difficulty is in service of something they value.

Appreciative Inquiry

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) focuses on a positive identification of what is currently working well . It explores how this can be built on and strengthened to move the organisation to a desired future state.

CM3 gives the reasoning explicitly: focusing on the positive helps increase motivation to change , because all aspects of the change are spoken about in positive terms and because the change is seen as a logical journey . AI develops the positives that already exist rather than focusing on fixing something that is currently broken .

This is the key contrast to hold onto. A conventional change diagnosis identifies problems and proposes fixes, which implicitly tells everyone involved that what they have been doing is deficient. AI starts from what works and asks how to have more of it. The emotional difference for the people involved is substantial.

The 4-D cycle

AI asks structured questions around four areas:

• Stage What it does
• Discovery Looking at what currently works well in the organisation — and valuing it
• Dream Exploring how these successes can be built on and expanded — an exercise in imagination
• Design Creating a plan to implement the dream — an opportunity to create something new
• Destiny Moving the organisation towards the dream — engaging and developing people to deliver

All four begin with D, which makes the cycle easy to recall but also easy to scramble. The order runs from finding what works, to imagining more of it, to planning it, to delivering it.

Note that AI's discovery stage is not the same as the continuous change cycle's discovery stage, although they are compatible. AI's discovery specifically seeks what is working well; the continuous cycle's discovery gathers insight of all kinds.

Using AI in a change initiative

Three practical applications:

As a diagnostic alternative. Where a conventional readiness assessment would ask "what are the barriers?", an AI-framed version asks "where in the organisation is something like this already working, and what makes it work there?" The answers are usually more actionable, because they identify real internal practice rather than theoretical fixes.

As an engagement format. AI workshops tend to generate more participation than problem-focused ones, particularly from groups who feel blamed for the current state.

As a communication frame. Describing a change as building on a genuine existing strength is both more motivating and, where true, more credible than a burning-platform narrative. Where it is not true, do not fake it — the honesty point from the change curve applies.

The balance with survival anxiety

Appreciative Inquiry sits in productive tension with Schein's argument that organisations need to amplify survival anxiety to change at an acceptable pace. The two are not contradictory: Schein's model also requires psychological safety to keep learning anxiety low, and AI is one way of providing it. A change narrative that combines an honest account of why the current position is unsustainable with a genuine appreciation of what the organisation already does well is stronger than either half alone.