Action Research and Systemic Practice

1. Action Research and Systemic Practice Embodied Inquiry Dr Goff, ALARA

2. Systemic thinking and practice • To practice systemically I need to see and experience systems by making distinctions: • Each distinction is in some way related to any and all others • Each is related in any and all ways to my act of perception in sensory, social and conceptual terms - and the ground (values/agency) upon which I make such distinctions - the ground being itself another distinction operating under the same terms • The patterns of relationship are not only webbed but an integrated mass - rising and falling towards and away from the distinctions I make • The state is fluidly mobilised/immobilised - at foundational and all other levels/dimensions • And we are all doing it (including plants and animals) consciously and unconsciously

3. New living systems theory: • …“sweeps in” both organ-ised system (as structure) and organ-ising life (as process), equilibrium and movement… structure and agency - but now unified into “doing/being”… (Wadsworth, 2008, p164).

4. Critical reflexivity Everything is both being (what it seems to be) and becoming (something else) at the same time, and in more or less relation to everything else that is both being and becoming, ad infinitum, and at all possible scales: from the momentary to the millennial, the “individual” to the mass-social, from the proximal to the distal” (Wadsworth, Ibid).

5. Action Research and Systems theories • Research is about creating new knowledge; Action Research creates new knowledge from, within, and for the benefit of what we do in the world. • Systems theory is inalienable from Action Research because it provides the marrow of knowledge generation practices and the ethical quality of the knowledge such practices hold in their enactment.

6. Recursive action • New systems theory, or complex systemic process theory, seeks to bring two “moments” together: structure and movement productive “organs” and change processes into a more powerful critical theory of “whole systems”, living systems of life itself … (Wadsworth, ibid, p 164)

7. ALARA and systemic management practices • The Action Learning and Action Research Association is generating itself through management practices and structures that foreground systemic approaches to our core business. • We are optimising the resonations between individually and organisationally embodied learning and research practices to address the challenge of low resources to meet high needs/visions.

8. 5 steps • Shift perception: ALARA is not an organisation but a living organism • Share a practice principle: “Collaborative Autonomy” is working throughout practice, structure and policy • Free the energy: output-defined roles generate strategy (the Working Group) (eg: publications, website etc) • Resource the energy: system-supporting roles generate policy (Executive) (eg: communications, financials, leadership) • Trust human integrity: our choice of principle is a natural fit to our nature and capacities - enabling Distributed Leadership to manifest

9. Distributed leadership • Explicit values, multi-directional information flows, and opportunities for action, as opposed to technical-rational control, become alternative means of maintaining coherence in dispersed networks of policy action (Weil, Wildemeersch and Jansen, 2005: p227)