where should we go from (here)?

though the truth may be elusive
revealing itself in fragments and glimmers
its purpose is not to be held
but to be a guiding light
which illuminates the path
toward what is right
that you may go down
when it is time to go down
and up
when it is time to go up
and not go down merely because that’s where others go
or because they tell you so
or because you are afraid of what they’ll say
or because you can’t see any other way

to go where you ought to go
you must learn to read the flow
of the currents you are caught up in
and those that reside within

in the space
where the two of them interact
that is the place
from which you should act

the ground beneath my feet

the world is not what it was yesterday
nor what it will be tomorrow
the truth I argued for last year
seems out of place today
and the reason I behaved the way I did this morning
may no longer seem justified next week

the ground beneath my feet
I love to feel it shifting
it tells me that all is alive and flowing
it tells me without my even knowing
and should I mistake it for a problem
I might miss the doors it opened

to see the familiar in new ways,
is to create new universes in one’s mind.
doing it together
creates new realities in our universe.
and that is why it is said
“seek and ye shall find”

silence

It has been an empty few months… absolutely packed full of thoughts, emotions, experiences, conversations, interactions and meaning. But there has been nothing to post. How can so much be going on and yet the urge to communicate anything about it all be so reluctant to emerge? Why the silence? This is a question that has come up time and again for me during my relatively brief life (so far) in the blogosphere. Why the silence? Why are there those moments when there is nothing that can be communicated. And why do these moments tend to come in such sizeable chunks? It’s not as though I’ve been thinking or feeling the same things for the last few months… No! There have been multiple and often radically divergent states. But is there something that characterises them? Something that draws them together… other, of course than the silence itself. Is it something to do with the nature of this outlet? Is it a reluctance to put out there in the world critiques and criticisms that I fear could be harmful or painful (whether honest or not)… Is it doubt about the conclusions I am reaching or is it living so much with an absence of conclusions that I feel there is nothing I can just type out and say… or at least not anything that would make sense to anyone else… Because, like I said… a lot has been happening. Many things have ‘progressed’ though what this means and who’s yardstick gets used is not at all clear to me. Is it possible that as things ‘get better’ (what does that even mean?) – like as we slowly get deeper into engaging with the issues that matter – the feelings, emotions and reactions that accompany this transition get less and less positive? and not just other people but my own? is it the feeling of anxiety of digging into those sensitive areas that are all covered up which hurts? why did I feel so lost and purposeless when Seva Mandir finally decided to wholeheartedly jump on the NREGA bandwagon (now that’s an overstatement, I admit… but it’s at least relatively wholeheartedly!)… why did I feel so frustrated and disconnected when my attempts at using stories to expose people to some of the underlying social dynamics in Delwara were completely misunderstood… because these kinds of incidents and the countless other little stories like them get right at my sense of purpose, of who I am and why I am here… Which strongly suggests that that very sense of purpose is part of the problem… because I create in myself the reaction that I experience by setting myself up for it… by creating the expectations I create in the particular way that I do. By working towards the creation of situations based on logics that just aren’t harmonised with reality. So perhaps this just points me to the fact that I should be stepping back a moment, contemplating, breathing… rethinking how I am integrating what I am setting out to do into the ongoing flows and forces around me… which I may be succeeding in at times… but not so much at others… It’s almost an issue of style… a kind of pre-thought establishment of general approach to responding to what is going on around… that becomes part of the background against which thoughts and deliberations emerge into being as part of the ongoing unfolding interactional experinence of being and changing with others in an organiastional context. maybe this is a really good time to be heading back to IDS for some deeper reflection – alone and with others…

toward liberating patterns of interaction

One of my key areas of interest in understanding organisational learning and change in Seva Mandir is the intersection of power, ideology and identity in the patterns of communicative relating that take place amongst those working here. In particular, I am interested in the way that meaning, patterns of inclusion-exclusion, intentions and actions emerge through these dynamics and reproduce or transform the patterns of interaction that constitute the organisation. Without looking at what this means at the community level, this would be a hollow exercise. Thus my inquiry is concerned with the multi-directional way that patterns of interaction (i) within Seva Mandir, (ii) at the boundary between Seva Mandir and the community and (iii) within the community (or society, more generally) reproduce and transform each other in different ways.

In this process, I am particularly concerned with what gives form to the patterns of interaction and how this formation takes place. Following Stacey’s lead, I strongly believe that it is the very patterns of interaction which either reproduce or transform themselves over time. In particular, it is the interplay of particular ‘organising themes’ – including ideology – and their intersection with power, identity, etc. that characterise these patterns which lead to the reproduction and transformation of existing patterns.

Stacey’s take on organisational learning is also worth considering here. By moving away from a systems-based model, the idea of learning as taking place at different levels or even, for that matter, as involving some kind of vertical progression or growth is abandoned. Instead, learning is equated with changes in patterns of communicative interaction. Indeed, Stacey argues that we cannot learn without changing our patterns of communicative interaction, whether in the singular (mind) or plural (group) form. The advantage with this way of thinking about learning is that it takes us away from overly abstract notions of ‘deeper’ learning and invites us to focus instead on the nature and quality of the interactions in which we are routinely involved (including our interactions with ourselves, our own internal conversations) and to understand how we can bring about significant or meaningful changes in these very interactions. Learning then takes place as we engage directly in working through these very issues of how to interact together locally in novel ways that enable new and more liberating patterns to emerge at the global level.

What do I mean by liberating patterns of interaction? A question asked to me by my supervisor. ‘Liberating patterns of interaction’, to me, is connected with the kind of notion of freedom articulated by Hayward (2001) in De-Facing Power. Hayward, redefining power as ‘the network of social boundaries to action’, argues for a political and positive notion of freedom as the only meaningful way of thinking about freedom: the freedom to participate in shaping our institutions and the norms, beliefs and practices that constitute and sustain them. Thus, for me, patterns of communicative interaction are liberating when they enable people to question and transform the institutions, norms, beliefs and practices that constitute their reality. This necessarily entails questioning and transforming the local (here and now) patterns of communicative interaction in which they routinely participate as it is through these that practices, beliefs, norms and ultimately institutions emerge. In addition to this, in order to be liberating, these patterns should enable all people to engage in this process equally as it is precisely those who are least aware of power’s effects (which may well, ironically, be those who are generally understood as being more powerful) who are, in this particular view, the least free (i.e. able to question and transform their institutions) and, therefore, the most likely to reproduce unequal power relations through their interactions with those around them.

In all this, one critical element that makes changing these patterns so elusive is that of the unconscious, and in particular the social unconscious. The idea that people are not fully conscious of how they are interacting (and how their interactive processes are being shaped by power, ideology, identity, etc.) is well known but often overlooked. People’s interactions, then, are shaped by both their conscious and unconscious processes of internal conversation (mind). The conscious part is the part that they think about as they do what they are doing. The unconscious part, if you will, is why they end up doing what they end up doing. It is also the intended and unintended consequences of what they did that they didn’t consider, the unquestioned assumptions, beliefs, etc. on the basis of which their conscious thoughts were formed. The unconscious is typically considered as something restricted to individuals, a kind of well-spring out of which unique, individual urges emerge. However, there is an alternative perspective that argues that as much as there is an individual unconscious, there is also a social unconscious.

The social unconscious, it is argued, exists because mind itself emerges through social – that is to say interactional – processes of relating. To the extent that our own mind is formed through our conscious and unconscious interactions with those around us, then our own interactions are shaped by the ’social unconscious’: the particular set of unquestioned, taken for granted, unperceived aspects of our communicative interactions that exist for a particular group of individuals constituting the social. What is problematic is the way in which the social unconscious, by its very nature, remains broadly out of reach of regular thinking and conversational processes. It effectively constitutes an invisible force which structures our thinking and our interactions and creates the impression that these very thoughts, our very own processes of interaction are what they are and that’s that. Indeed, in causing the nature of our patterns of interaction to be taken for granted, the social unconscious is integral to our understanding of our own identity, our position in society, and therefore the complex pattern of power relations in which we are entangled (that produce or transform us and that we, in turn, reproduce or transform). This, in turn, shapes and is shaped by (reproduces or transforms) what we believe we can and can’t, should and shouldn’t do, regardless of the feelings of anxiety that may arise within us as a result of the interactional processes we are caught up in.

But what is all this in aid of? Are we simply trapped within the limits prescribed by a social unconscious that we must remain, forever, unaware of? I do not believe that this is the case. Rather, I believe that the social unconscious is something we can come to know, and indeed must if we take the idea of cultivating liberating patterns of interaction seriously. It requires that you and I take our participation in patterns of communicative interaction seriously by gradually exploring and questioning that which is taken for granted (the ‘mundane’ and the ‘normal’), by politicising it, by inquiring into and reflecting on it, by seeking to actually change it through intentional modifications in our own behaviour. And if all we get is a deeper understanding of the paradoxes that we face as we go about doing what we do, a deeper sensitivity to the ways that power and identity, patterns of inclusion and exclusion, shape the way meaning is created for those around us and therefore the way that they must feel, the intentions that they form and the way they end up participating in patterns of interaction with ourselves and others, won’t that make us more able to transform ’stuck’ patterns of interaction, enabling ourselves and those with whom we interact to change in the process, and thereby participate more effectively in the co-creation of more liberating patterns of interaction?

Digging relational sociology

Since the last post, and before it too, I have been quite intensively burrowing through some material on process sociology, relational sociology and critical realism. Through this I came to discover the links between Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu. I toyed with idea of figurations and fields, came across the idea of institutional entrepreneurs and generally have been finding the experience rather enjoyable indeed. One of the great finds was Mustafa Emirbayer’s (1997) Manifesto for a Relational Sociology. Relational sociology is all about shifting from a concern with ‘things’ to a concern with ‘processes’. As I read through the article, Stacey’s work on complex responsive processes kept popping into mind.

Anyway, Emirbayer, building on the work of Dewey and others, elaborates three distinct forms of action: self-action; inter-action; and trans-action. Self-actional theories are based on the idea that actors act through some sort of internal propulsion which is somehow inerrent or intrinsic to their being. Such actors could be individuals, groups, organisations or societies as a whole and they are treated as non-problematic given entities. Inter-actional theories tend to focus on the interactions that take place between actors, often by examining the interactions between variables that describe these actors. However, such theories fail to actually examing the ways in which the actors themselves are interacting and potentially changing in this very process. Both self-actional inter-actional theories are based on a substantialist logic and miss the complex dynamics that are captured in trans-actional theories. Trans-actional theories (the basis for a relational sociology) engage primarily with the relational processes between units or terms and see the dynamics these entail as continuously reproducing, dissolving or transforming the very same units and terms and their relations with respect to each other over time.

This somehow leads me on to this little extract – which is a timely contribution to my last post:

“transactional thinking contests the intrinsically reified nature of all categories [with state, civil society, market being examples of such categories, my addition]: it shows how they “totalize” identities that are in fact often multidimensional and contradictory; prescribe modes of thought and action against which alternatives can only be labelled “deviant”; naturalize rigid distinctions that suppress possibilities for creative (self-) transformation; and, most generally, accept rather than contest the historically variable relational matrices that serve to constitute invidious distinctions and categorizations in the first place (Somers and Gibson, 1994, pp.55-57).” — Emirbayer (1997)

So I suppose that somehow, having conversations about this transactional or relational perspective may be an important part of the work I do here. It will be interesting to see how this happens… As will understanding what it really means to work within a critical realist framework as a self-proclaimed ‘institutional entrepreneur’ – someone who uses “the causal powers of pre-existing structures to create new institutions or challenge existing ones.” At the same time, I am still trying to get my head around exactly what ‘reality’ is and what we are or are not talking about when we talk of ’structure’ and how this connects to the idea of ‘institutional logics’.

Market, State & Civil Society: a flawed distinction?

For some time I have been pondering the distinction that is routinely made between state, market and civil society. I have increasingly been drawn to the conclusion that while this is a convenient and seemingly self-evident distinction it is also, at some more critical level, a flawed – or perhaps better, a misleading – distinction.

The basic unit of states, markets and civil society is people. People interacting in different ways, for different purposes, based on their respective values, beliefs, assumptions, worldviews, priorities, etc. Within this broader social figuration, power dynamics play a central role in determining what gains legitimacy over time and how new order emerges.

One of my major concerns is with the reification of state, market and civil society. If we were to adopt an understanding of each of these as particular delimitations of social processes that have been arbitrarily – or at least narrowly – construed as systems or else as system components, then we gain access to a very different perspective on each of these. These different spheres of activity, distinguishable by their perceived and ascribed functions, are not in and of themselves actors but are, rather patterns of interaction. By this I mean to say, that there is no agency that can be ascribed to the ‘whole’ even though it may be possible to describe phenomena as if this were the case.

In moving beyond such ’systemic’ and reified understandings of society, we perhaps are able to dissolve some of the constructs that limit our own understanding of what social change is and how it happens… more to come on this in future posts…

emerging opportunities

The road to Delwara...

It’s been almost a month and a half since I returned to Seva Mandir. I have been writing my experiences and reflections almost fanatically – dedicating substantial chunks of my time every day to this endeavour. When I’m not writing, I’m either reading, engaging in conversations or else observing and trying to pay attention to what is going on, what is being said and what isn’t.

Most of my reading has been drawn from the general pool of materials associated with Stacey’s complex responsive processes. In particular, articles by Chris Mowles and others who have pursued their DMan from Hertfordshire’s Centre for Complexity and Management. Some of this has proved incredibly rich. In particular, I have been reading Chen’s (2007) work examining the momentary, subjective experiences of change itself and the ways that such moments emerge through communicative interaction between individuals or even between an individual and a text. Central to this experience of change is paradox – the simultaneous co-existence of two apparently opposing traits (e.g. knowing-not-knowing; powerful-powerless). However, working with paradox does not imply something to be resolved and therefore transcended, but rather as something to be held, engaged with mentally, bodily, and socially in the process of creating new meaning together and bringing about change. Doing so means paying attention to one’s own state of entanglement with paradox – emotionally, bodily, and in terms of thought processes, with particular attention focused on the experience of anxiety. Furthermore, it means looking out for ‘gaps’ that emerge in processes of communicative interaction, where gaps are understood, essentially, as people’s inability to engage with paradox and therefore find themselves re-producing the same patterns of interaction that have existed to date – the very ones in which change is being sought.

I have found myself particularly intrigued by the idea that engaging with texts constitutes conversation – an idea made more meaningful through Mead’s notion that mind is, in effect, a private conversation composed of the same patterns of communicative interaction as conversation with other persons. Thus, as I read, various responses are triggered in my mind which essentially enables something of a conversation to emerge between myself and the text. The text then becomes a part of the ongoing conversation that is my mind. At times I must take myself away from the text in order to continue the conversation I was having with myself on my own terms – since the text continues on regardless of my thoughts – it is not dynamic in the way that my own mind is. Yet still I feel drawn to read on, usually after pausing for a while to write down the proceedings of the conversation that the text has evoked within me.

The subject matter for all these conversations is my life and work here at Seva Mandir; the complex patterns of interactions in which I engage on a daily basis as I try to make-sense and help to enable learning and change to emerge. This includes conversations with organisational staff and citizens occupying a diverse range of positions from Seva Mandir’s General Secretary through to citizens. The foci of these processes of communicative interaction have included: Delwara (and its incredibly complex dynamics); the uptake of action research processes within Seva Mandir; the need to focus on and examine the quality and patterning of relations between staff at different levels in the organisation; the promotion of participatory monitoring and evaluation methods. Regular – almost obsessive – writing, combined with my sense-making conversations have provided the bed-rock of my emerging understanding of what is going on around me. Some achievements that I can report so far that are somehow connected to my own involvement include:

• bettering of relations between two staff critical to the Delwara programme – namely, easing the tension that had emerged between the two senior-most staff within the programme. A range of differences had surfaced over time and rather than getting discussed openly, they had been avoided. The result was that this had started festering and actually becoming harmful to the project. The relationships has been substantially improved and there is now a greater willingness to engage with some of the controversial issues that were being avoided earlier. At the same time, this kind of change will no doubt, be slow and difficult and the initial positive responses
• broadening the scope of ‘what gets talked about’ in the Delwara programme – in particular trying to shift the conversation from what I considered to be a superficial recounting of events to one that delves into the complex power dynamics that shape the way conversations take place. This has also helped to secure a recognition of the need to focus more intently, explicitly and openly on the way that power dynamics are playing out within the programme. In addition to this, the very approach and ideology underlying the programme can now be surfaced, deconstructed and debated. An essential part of this process will be that of identifying and developing the appropriate language for communicating this.
• activation of a citizen-staff member of Delwara’s citizen’s forum in overcoming power relations – in this case with respect to the local community mobiliser notifying the more ‘powerful’ communities that if they do not contribute the monthly cleaning fee, then their cleaning services will be suspended. This subject appeared to somehow get avoided during the meetings.

While this is all well and good, it doesn’t really do justice to what I have been doing. Many of my conversations are not of the kind that will yield instant results. Rather, they are exploratory, probing conversations that seek to gradually uncover the complex, multi-layered and political nature of the patterns of interaction that are Seva Mandir. I then work to bring these patterns that I observe to light and to encourage reflection on and inquiry into these patterns as part of the conversation that I engage in. Thus, as I move around the organisation, having conversations, gathering stories and inviting further inquiry and exploration I am able to construct complex narratives that are at once descriptive and transformative through the process of their co-construction and the conversations that they make possible. By continuously reflecting on my own interpretation of these stories, I am able to pick apart my own possible biases and explore options for addressing them.

While all this is ongoing, I find myself experiencing anxiety. Time appears to be passing by and I do not yet feel that I have managed to set up the kinds of conversational processes that I feel I ought to be setting up. While I am furiously going about having conversations with those around me, I do not feel that I have even come close to achieving the level of reflection that is required to really enable those involved to gain deeper insights into the ways that they themselves are co-re-creating the situations that frustrate them. Furthermore, I have not yet managed to engage myself at the zone level in the way that I feel is required to enable me to gather stories and deepen my understanding of the particular qualities of the patterns of communicative interaction at these levels. Getting an experiential grounding at this level, I believe, is going to be integral for developing any meaningful transformative processes within the organisation.

As I gradually move into the zone level, I will continue with my conversations, inviting those around me into inquiry, encouraging the uptake of action research processes and reflecting on the continuously unfolding patterns of interaction, power relating around me and the ways in which ideology and identity shape and are shaped by all this… Let’s see where this takes us.

since I’ve been back

It’s now officially more than a week since I’ve been back at Seva Mandir and things are quickly entering what could be called ‘full swing’. I’ve been taking out a lot of time for reflection and reflective writing and I’ve also been very busy having conversations with those around me. A few days after arriving I came across the work of Chris Mowles who has been using Stacey’s work on complex responsive processes (Stacey 2000) in international development contexts. Chris also has a blog (Reflexivepractice) that is certainly worth checking out for those interested in such issues. Since then, we’ve exchanged a few mails exploring these ideas and this has proved quite thought-provoking. I suppose I am quite struck by the fact that we live in an age where such connection is possible and that someone I have never met is so ready to take the time and effort to communicate with me. So thank you Chris!

Back to the nitty-gritty of my life and work over here… All is going well. Through the various conversations I have had so far with staff from across the organisation, I have been busy trying to communicate the nature of my inquiry. I have identified multiple opportunities for collaboration though I am still not clear on how to procede with any of them. For the most part I can see opportunities for taking up approaches broadly modelled on Participatory Action Research (see the Annex to my learning plan for a brief description) within the organisation. However, as I continue exploring, conversing and reflecting, I find myself increasingly drawn to using insights drawn from the theory of complex responsive processes to frame my work and research.

During a conversation with the CE, I was advised to focus my efforts on the zone level. This is Seva Mandir’s front-line responsible for field level implementation – and, therefore, arguably for making social change happen. Clearly then, their capacity is key. I must admit that the idea of engaging at the zone level is one that I have found tempting for a long time – precisely for this reason. While I continue to be excited by the idea of working at this level, I feel more aware than ever that the very idea of capacity needs to be considered very carefully. Indeed, as I wrote in a recent mail that I

believe that the ‘problem at the zone level’ is not simply a problem of the zone at all. It is, rather, a problem embedded in the way that the interplay of power relations, ideology (including what is considered legitimate and what isn’t), conversational themes (e.g. performance, reporting, etc.), identity (e.g. within the organsiation) and its associated patterns (perceived or real) of exclusion and inclusion create dysfunctional patterns of interaction across the organisation. If this is really the case, then it is to the nature of these patterns and the role we each play in either perpetuating or transforming them that efforts need to be directed if substantial change is to be realised.

After quite a lot of practice I think I am starting to think – and see the world – in terms of complex responsive processes. While this has enabled me to see a range of limitations in many other, more systems-based approaches, I can’t quite bring myself to reject such approaches fully. Furthermore, I find that the whole domain of participatory action research holds a great deal of potential when used as a vehicle for learning about how to bring about change. The complex responsive processes approach, however, seems to be particularly useful as a way of understanding the interpersonal dynamics that are going on all the time. These dynamics intersect (through all manner of communicative interactions – not just conversations) with the kind of systems-based thinking that, although not generally made explicit, underlies the way that work is conceptualised, articulated, assigned and judged… apparently quite often with confoundingly counterproductive consequences!

Delwara, the gem that it is, has already provided me with a valuable opportunity to try and explore the usefulness of the CRP way of understanding – and hopefully transforming – organisational life. There will be more to follow on how this went very soon. In the meanwhile, I hope to spend some time in the coming days making field visits and spending as much time as possible with zone staff, chatting with them and examinging the ways that they participate in the patterns of communicative interaction that they are a part of. I also plan to pay special attention to the way that the day-to-day lived realities of the field staff intersect with systems-based models – in terms of both confluences (where there is synergy) and collisions (where there is tension, anxiety and frustration). It will be particularly interesting to observe the way that power dynamics play out amongst different groups of staff and the different ways that people resist, comply and, more generally, participate in reproducing or transforming the patterns of communicative interaction that they co-create. And, of course, at the end of the day, we’ll be wanting to look at just how all this translates into more positive change on the ground… won’t we?

getting back on track

After my more than 3 months in England, replete with my first term at IDS and some quality time with my family, I’m now back at Seva Mandir, Udaipur.

Without losing time I’ve pretty much dived into work, trying to make sense of what I might be able to do now that I’m back. So far this has included talking informally to a number of programme heads, sitting in on a programme meeting, chatting to friends and co-workers, and making a field visit to Delwara (where I was formerly posted). This has already proved interesting and has yielded a wealth of potential entry points for my involvement in processes of collective learning and change. I will be writing more on this soon.

I’ve also submitted my two papers that were due and they are available here.

The first paper (5000 words) is on capacity development. It begins by exploring the concepts of capacity and capacity development through contemporary theoretical debates and then presents a case study based on my own experience in Seva Mandir. It then concludes with some key insights into the practice of capacity development based on this:
1) Understanding and Enhancing Capacity Development: Insights from Theory and Practice

The second paper (2500 words) provides a broad outline of the inquiry that I will be conducting during my time at Seva Mandir. It includes a justification for the inquiry and outlines the particular approach that I am taking – including methods and techniques and the process I will follow for initiating my inquiry in Seva Mandir. The Annex provides a summary of some of the key participatory inquiry/action research methodologies that I intend to use as part of my inquiry.
1) Learning Process and Plan: An Inquiry into the Facilitation of Organisational and Social Learning and Change
2) Learning Process and Plan: Annex

More to follow soon on how my work here is unfolding… it’s getting more exciting by the day!

such a big difference?

As I slowly prepare myself for the work I will be doing upon my return to Seva Mandir, I have been doing my best to get whatever I can out of google books. As elaborated in my Analtical Paper and also alluded to in an earlier post, I am finding myself deeply interested in the work, on the one hand, of Ralph Stacey (and others who subscribe to the theory of complex responsive processes), on the other, of John Heron and Peter Reason (whose work focuses on participative inquiry, including cooperative inquiry). The similarities between the work of these two parties keeps on striking me as greater than the difference on so many levels. Nonetheless, Stacey’s band seem to repeatedly highlight that their approach, which has also been termed ‘emerging participative exploration’ (Christensen in Stacey et al. eds, 2005, pp.99-105), is distinct from action research and also distinct from cooperative inquiry.

At the moment, I’m not entirely convinced that Stacey’s band have done a good enough job of clarifying the distinctions – particularly given that action research and cooperative inquiry are continuously evolving fields through which new forms and approaches are continuously emerging. For example, it appears that one of the distinctions made by Christensen (ibid) is to do with the insider-outside divide – i.e. that action research (including cooperative inquiry) locates researchers as outside of the system they are supposed to be researching and involves them in making diagnoses on the basis of which changes to the system can be made. However, from my (admittedly) limited reading of the cooperative inquiry literature, this is not the sense that I have taken from it at all!

Perhaps what emerges most strongly as the biggest difference between the two schools of thought is that ‘emerging participative exploration’:

• does not require/involve setting up special cooperative inquiry processes that are distinct from the general ongoing conversational life of the organisation.
• integrates reflection and action rather than treating them as distinct elements to be cycled through.
• places a particular emphasis on identity, power relations, repetitive patterns of relating, anxiety, inclusion-exclusion, and transformation of patterns of conversation.

But what does this mean for me? For some time now I have come to construct myself as a ‘collaborative explorer-activist working for intersubjective improvement in the quality of life on planet earth‘. How do I decide whether I should frame my work in the Stacey camp or whether I should frame it in the Heron and Reason camp? Perhaps this is a silly question and I should frame it in neither camp but rather dance about picking the little pearls of wisdom, the insightful conceptual, theoretical and practical lenses that shine new light on the situations that I will find myself facing. I must say that I am particularly taken by the idea of seeing all my interactions – in both formal and informal spaces – as holding the potential for me to both understand the patterns that I am producing and help others understand the patterns that they are producing… and then using this as a means of disrupting dysfunctional patterns; of acting into being new and emancipatory patterns of interbeing.