I get a blizzard of emails every day, most of which go into my Spam folder or Delete folder before I even see them. I have no idea how many more are caught and deleted by my mail server before they even get to me. But of those that actually get to my Inbox, I often observe the creative ways in which people from all over the world try to find the keys to our individual volition … a hundred seventy one billion per day according to Michael Specter [1] . They use everything from news events, freebees, sexual aids, easy money, companionship, and good health, all playing on hopes, fears and inadequacies in an almost limitless list of attempts to trigger something that matters to us.

For spammers, push is cheap. They can push out millions of emails and make a profit with only a few responses per million. But the levers of pull belong to each of us. We choose which emails to click open based on what matters to us.

Spam reminds us that push is an incredibly inefficient way to try to foster inspired thought. We have all been in meetings in which people tell, sell, lobby, persuade and in other ways compete over the merits of their ideas. But no amount of charisma, control, force, intimidation, dictatorship or, of course, spamming will succeed in creating inspired thought. Control and force create an underground of the very contrarian ideas that could, if surfaced, expand the boundaries of thought.

We cannot push social networks, quality relationships, effective conversations, engagement processes and individual habits on others. These elements, which must be in place in order to create inspired thought, are always a product of a pull partnership. If we don’t both want it, it isn’t going to happen. That is a hard lesson to learn in personal relationships but it applies in organizations as well. In fact, it applies to virtually anything that matters to us.

Inspired thinking is always a product of something that matters to both of us.

This is why appreciative inquiry is so effective. If we join another person in appreciating their best instincts or ideas and it rings true for them, we set in motion all five of the basic dynamics that determine the margin of difference. Our focus pulls the people (our social networks), the qualities of relationships (our social capital), the language through which we interact, our engagement processes (thanks Rob) and individual processes. Appreciation enables people to enlarge the boundaries of the way they understand their strengths and translate that quality into day-to-day reality.

Appreciation is Steve Sunderland listening to people trying to reach across the chasms of racial alienation in Cincinnati. It is Harry Bury being present and being kidnapped during the rage that accompanied the closing of Israeli settlements. It is June Wolcott listening to those who want less proscribed environmental processes and Ken Rutchey who searches for ways to enable scientists to reach across organizational boundaries to create inspired thinking for the protection of the Everglades

For Tom, it is watching for and transparently appreciating those moments when his fellow executives reach for common ground instead of competing over the validity of their ideas. For John, who knows that the very survival of the company he is guiding depends on the margin of difference, it is reaching into each of the people he has installed as executives and flicking the switches of mutual appreciation for the contributions of the others.

We can’t push our way into the margin of difference. We are all effective “spaminators”. But we can pull. And every time we do pull, we also potentially pull information that is outside the boundaries of our current thought. Nested within what we pulled is a surprise … often in the form of disconfirmation of something in our current thought form … if (and this is a very big “IF”) we can recognize it. And what we do with that surprise determines the margin of difference.

Inspired thought always results in a new system of thought … a new understanding. It always results in a new form. It accompanies something that matters to us, but it is usually unexpected.

As always, I invite your observation and stories, about ways in which you have experienced the way appreciation has pulled you or others into inspired thought.

[1] Michael Specter, Damn Spam, The Losing Battle in the Junk Mail War, The New Yorker, August 6, 2007, P36.