Annotated bibliography of methods, techniques and concepts for living systems
Published online in 2011 by the Action Research Press
a wholly owned imprint of the Action Research Issues Association Incorporated,
2 Minona Street, Hawthorn,
Victoria3122Australia
LivingSystemsResearch.com
© Yoland Wadsworth and Action Research Press
1st Edition 2011
This is a companion volume to the book:
Wadsworth, Y. (2010) Building in Research and Evaluation: Human inquiry for living systems, Action Research Press, Hawthorn and Allen & Unwin, Sydney.
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Here I present some informal translations[1] of the kind of discourseused in the areas covered in this book that you might encounter if you had time to get to the literature.
All those tantalising books on stalls at conferences and online are so enticing at the time, but if we bring them home they seem too much like work, but if we take them to work they seem too much not like work?! So an annotated bibliography seemed a good thing to offer.
This section provides some thumbnail comments on a clutch of some of the major new methods, theories and terms that seemingly are emerging by the minute from the minds of constructivists, complex adaptive systems thinkers and critical and appreciative postmodernists worldwide. I’ve steered clear of those not so accessible or not in the public domain (often copyrighted and certified ones that require undergoing special training to use, or which are overly dense and esoteric), and focused on those that can fairly easily be followed up (especially online).
Questions to ask yourself about these might include:
- What ideas can I get from this?
- Is this going to suit me? (What do I need most at the moment?)
- What contribution could it make to building a ‘living system’ for me or our group, organisation or community?
- Can I expand the value of my or our work by using it?
Remember when we just had interviews or questionnaires, a theory was a good idea and an ‘autocatalytic set’ would have been something you fitted to your car?!
Now - as we say cheerfully in these often sorry days - enjoy!
Index
Note: This is an ongoing work in progress. It is not yet a comprehensive bibliography. It will be filled out over time. Additionally, new methods and techniques are being named as we speak! We will endeavour to fill in the gaps and keep adding to this over the years to come.
Action Learning (AL)
Action Science
Agora – local, linkage and steward
ANT – Actor Network Theory
Appreciative inquiry, Strengths-based
Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD)
Attractors, Strange attractors
Autocatalytic sets
Autoethnography
Autopoesis
Benchmarking
Butterfly effect
Capacity building, community building
Chaos theory
Charrette
Coaching
Co-intelligence
Communities of Practice
Complaints procedures
Complexity theory
Consultation/Public consultation
Consumer consultants, consumer advocates, community consultants
Co-operative inquiry
Critical reference group/Critical inquiry group/
Critical inquirers/Appreciative inquiry group/Appreciative inquirers
Cybernetic conversation, Sensitive interpersonal conversational exchange
Deliberative democracy, deliberative polling/Citizens juries
Design systems
Dialogue, multilogue, dialogic designs
Double (and single and triple) loop learning
Emergence, iterativity
Ethnography
Evidence-based
Facilitation
Forcefield analysis
Field theory
Fishbone causal diagram
Future Search (a.k.a. "search")
Gaia hypothesis
Holo–
Inquire/Inquiry
Irreversibility/‘wicked problems’
Learning organisations (LOs)/
Organisational development (OD)
Listening circles
Mapping, concept mapping, community mapping, mind mapping
Morphogenetic fields/Fields of morphic resonance
Most significant change (MSC) technique
Open space technology
Promising practice profile
Sociometric charts
Study Circles
World Café
Peer support or ‘supervision’ (individual and collective) or/and
Professional supervision
The entries
Action Learning (AL)
Reg Revans, the person who ‘fathered’ AL – noticed, a little like Etienne Wenger of ‘communities of practice’ fame, how fellow scientists shared their problems and received support and help from each other in the group. He became convinced that for an organisation to survive, its learning needed to match the rate of change in its external environment. His work at the NationalCoalBoardCollege – instead of just providing expert ‘programmed knowledge’ workedon real-world coalfield problems with those experiencing them. From first-hand observation down pits and later on hospital wards, he was able to show that pits in which managers paid close attention to their men were safer and more efficient than others (an average increase of 30% in output over those pits that did not participate), while patients in hospital recovered faster when doctors listened to nurses. By the time he became the first ever UK Professor of Industrial Administration (at ManchesterUniversity) in 1955 he had learned two powerful but simple truths.
- Members of small workgroups – or what he called ‘sets’ - can learn very quickly from each other, and
- Members of small workgroups will tend to support each other in achieving insights and understanding necessary to achieve output targets
In facilitated ‘sets’ with co-workers (as ‘comrades in adversity’), people reflect on their experience, problematise various elements and then ‘learn by doing’ how to achieve change. Reg Revans expressed this in an algorithm: L = P + Q ---where:
L = Learning; P = Programmed Knowledge; and Q = Questioning Insights.
Typically an AL set might have six to eight managers from different professional or functional backgrounds but of roughly equal status. Meetings are held on a regular basis, perhaps a half-day once every three or four weeks for several months. Proceedings are confidential to the group. A different group member presents a ‘live’ practical situation or project each time. The other group members listen carefully and offer responses to help the person (who is deemed the ‘problem holder’) review the situation in such a way that new ideas, approaches and solutions begin to emerge. The process integrates inquiry into what is initially obscure or puzzling, with learning and action to resolve the problem. Participants benefit from the heterogeneity of the group, which acts as an antidote to the manager’s isolation. Ideally the group grows in both individual self-awareness and in itself as a self-managing collectivity.
References:
A consultancy using AL in a particular procedural format:
A paper covering some of the deeper elements of AL:
The Dutch AL Association website for a list of benefits to AL set members:
Simon Caulkin’s obituary for Reg Revans (1907-2003)
References:
Revans, RW. (1989). Action learning. London: Brond & Brigg
Revans, R.W. (1980). Action Learning: New Techniques for Management.London: Blond and Briggs Ltd.
Action Science
This is rapid action research at a micro scale which many call improvisation oraction science, a term widely attributed to Bill Torbert, the Boston College Emeritus Professor, and management academic practitioner. It draws on a repertoire of activity that still has to get ‘all the way round’ a full inquiry cycle in the same way as effort at a greater scale or slower speed, but which does so quickly and more ‘in the moment’.
There is a tension between acting and observing acting. We have seen how difficult it is to stop and think or fully register what we are thinking or feeling when we are busy doing. Busy action precludes – at that moment of acting – the business of noticing and reflecting on that action. Yet for some things, we need to be able to think in the moment. And a moment later may be too late. Certainly we can’t stop and run a focus group in the middle of a fast-moving contact sport! – Or use a questionnaire to get feedback at the scene of an accident from someone who has just been hit by a car. A really rapid form of observational, evaluative and improvised ‘conversational’ research is needed instead. Often people will say they ‘acted without thinking’ – yet input was received, registered, rapidly sorted, patterns interpreted and processed, then followed imperceptibly in time by a new action selected from a repertoire of possibilities, now utilised in a more or less novel wayin a split second, possibly followed by yet more split second reviews, analyses, conclusions and further experimental responses and actions.
Action science is an approach to organisational development also associated with Chris Argyris (with important help in the past from the late Donald Schon and others) in Boston at the MIT. Bill Torbert who studied with Chris Argyris was probably the first to use the term ‘action science’ in 1976, but he now calls his approach ‘action inquiry’ or ‘developmental action inquiry’, possibly framing it more closely in relation to his long-time collaborator Peter Reason’s ‘co-operative inquiry’. It has its roots in thinking such as that of John Dewey in education (1859-1952) and Kurt Lewin in psychology and human services (1890-1947) and is reflected also in the work of systems thinkers like Peter Senge (also from MIT). Related terms are action research or organizational learning.
Core concepts in action science (as with related terms) include the idea of discrepant ‘mental models’ or theories of action. These are a bit like the master programs, or patterns, designs or propositions that people use to ‘design’ or image to carry out as action. They include values, theories, beliefs, concepts, rules, attitudes, routines, policies, practices, norms or skills that underlie action. Discrepancies are reflected in differences between intentions and actual results, thoughts and actions, theories and practices. A shift from using mental Model I to using mental Model II is seen as occurring when individuals in groups detect and correct the gaps between their descriptive claims and practical outcomes, or what they do and what they claim to. In action science, ‘single-loop learning’ and defensive reasoning processes make for ‘undiscussables’. Model II's main characteristic is double-loop learning, a productive reasoning process that when unstressed involves minimal interpersonal defensiveness. Action science tools that help make assumptions clear include the ‘ladder of inference’, and left-hand column (‘what I’m thinking/feeling’) and right-hand column (‘what is actually said’) tables. The overall goal of action science is to promote reflection-in-action or the ability to identify the dynamics of a situation, comment on them as they unfold in a conversation, and respond in a more self-aware, mindful and effective way. Living systems inquiry epistemology would see intuition and flexible perception as key components of action science skill.
Resources:
The Action Science Network
Organisation Studies course in the Carroll School of Management at Boston College
References:
Argyris, C., and Schon, D. A. (1974) Theory in practice: Increasing professional effectiveness. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Argyris, C., Putnam, R., & Smith, D. (1985) Action science: Concepts, methods, and skills for research and intervention.San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Argyris, Chris (1993) Knowledge for action: A guide to overcoming barriers to organizational change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Senge, P. 1990, The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organisation, Doubleday-Currency, New York
Senge, P. 1994, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Doubleday-Currency, New York
Agora – local, linkage and steward
Nice name – from the ancient Greek word for ‘place of assembly, marketplace’ (note the systems idea of space and place for dialogue across difference/distance. Agoras as an inquiry method also involve the same valuable ideas that lie behind an AL ‘set’ or an AR ‘inquiry group’ of bringing together the standard optimal 7-12 people in small groups, ‘stewarded’ (or facilitated/resourced) at the local level to work on designing desired futures. The method also connects to the ideas both of network and ‘scaling up’ (or transcending the current system level) in that local agoras link both through stewards exchanging ideas with other stewards from other local agoras (think constructivist version of a shop stewards conference :-), and also through local agoras linking among themselves in cyberspace conversation (and involving a website administrator). The agora movement explicitly identifies as systems-thinking and using participative dialogue, as well as drawing on traditions of open space and LOs. Source literature includes that of Bela Banathy the systems thinker, education and evolutionary science. It is at present primarily an intellectual method used in academic settings, with an analogue in Foresight planning.
Resources:
The New Agoras project discussions:
For a breathtaking insight into the way in which some of these concepts are being taken up in the world of computer technology design of a person-machine ‘ambient’ environment (truly another ‘take’ on the idea of literally ‘building it in’!) - see especially the Gossip Wall, the Community Wall, the InformAll and the SIAM-interface:
And for a creative visualisation of the ideas of systems thinking - from the world of Java software makers – go to the PowerPoint tutorial (e.g. slides 5, 18, 21, 29,36 [take-home point], 46, 49-50):
Using JavaSpace to Support Cooperative Agent Agoras
(Specially see the description of loss of systems stability - ‘as agents fail the whole system gracefully degrades’. [Could be the decline of Microsoft Empire, or me!] See the cute depictions of ‘objects in space’, and try and ignore that ‘agents’ in this case are machines, albeit operated by humans! Compare slide 15 with slide 63 - which indicates that hierarchical memes can invade or exist, even in networked open space!)
References:
Banathy, B.H. (1996).Designing Social Systems in a Changing World.New York: Plenum Publishing.
Banathy, B.H. (2000).Guided Evolution of Society: A Systems View.New York: Kluwer / Plenum.
ANT – Actor Network Theory
A simple idea capable of being taken to breathtaking levels of complexity, actor network theory is an approach to understanding how knowledge develops and is adopted and sustained and changed. It had its origins in the sociology of science and history and philosophy of ideas, and received theoretical input from Bruno Latour (subsequently distanced himself from the idea) and Michel Callon in France in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The key idea is that any action taken is simultaneously the result of many different bodies of knowledge that are ‘real-ised’ in the taken-for-granted assumptions, practices, resources and material structural realities that underpin that action. The interdependence of the social and technical factors invokes both an idea like Lewin’s field theory and also some of Thomas Kuhn’s ideas about scientific revolution moving between moments of ‘normal science’ and puzzles reaching critical mass to overthrow a general worldview and replacing it with another. ANT focuses somewhat on the taken-for-granted phase in which a network of interactions stabilises a system of knowing, even while any individual actor is not fixed. Thus it ‘decentres’ from e.g. ‘the scientist’ to seeing how the scientists, science and scientific technology are all mutually co-constructing. ‘Actors’ in this sense may be people, test tubes or written papers – elements called ‘socio-technical’. The development of the ‘actor network’ and the knowledge it bears or expresses, proceeds by sharing of ‘the problem’, mutual enrolment/linkages, and cross-referencing until a point of ‘irreversibility’ is reached whereby the ‘network’ carries itself irrespective of particular bearers. However this is not the same as structural-functional determinism, or a way to deal with the old structure/agency debate, given the (‘inscribed’) patterns of use may not ‘succeed’ because the actual use deviates. Patterns may be weakly or strongly ‘inscribed’, e.g. in a large complex society word-of-mouth forms of transmission may be relatively weak while ‘engraved in stone’, in Work Manuals or legislation may be strong.
Latour more recently defined it not as a theory of the social so much as about how we know through ‘the spaces and the fluids’ and the circulating waves and particles. In this way it is both post-modern and systemic, anti-engineering and dissolving also the idea of a hierarchy of levels into a network of ‘the local’ – even for the hitherto ‘central’. It remains however depersonalising and seemingly rather dissociated from human embodiment, although with connections with a form of living systems theory.
Resources:
See practitioners’ varying definitions on Martin Ryder’s homepage:
Reference:
Bruno Latour (1997) ‘On Recalling ANT’, published by the Department of Sociology Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YN at
Appreciative inquiry, Strengths-based
What it says is what it is. Appreciative inquiry (AI) as initially created by David Cooperrider and associates, was a response to the deadly depressive questions that were characterising much of social science and which he saw were – far from being unbiased and neutral – actually creating a world which the social scientists would not have dreamed of ‘owning’: one of disadvantage, lack, ignorance, weakness and absence. AI uses a simple cyclic fourfold approach that asks appreciative questions in four steps around an action research cycle – the characteristic ‘4D approach’:
Discovering - Appreciating. Identifying the best of what is – ask: What gives life?
Dreaming -Envisioning. Picturing desired futures – ask: What might be?
Designing -Co-constructing. Strategising to enact – ask: What should be the ideal?
Delivering -Sustaining. Delivering destiny – ask: How to learn, adjust, and improvise?
This formulation is one of a number of framings of the AR cycle but starting in the ‘research’ moment of the ‘action – research’ cycle, or in ‘Observe’ in the Plan – Act – Observe – Reflect formulation; or at Level 1 questions of Fran Peavey’s strategic questions sequence, as does a living systems epistemology.
There is a critique of it ignoring the negative (understandable given its most common applications were where people had been overwhelmed by the negative and needed the energy of the positive). My own way of seeing this is to relate it to the popularly recommended "sandwich approach"...
1. appreciative inquiry – 2. negative evaluation – 3. what next positive vision
i.e. old success--plus new fear--plus new desirein that order
In my view the fear and observation of the negative discrepancy needs not to be ignored, denied or suppressed in order that there be ‘accurate propulsion’, but the celebratory/old success and new desire also need to be there for accurate attraction to shape the positive new idea. In this way there can be less need for behaviourist sticks or carrots that lack the bigger picture of context and seem more about rather mindlessly and non passionately replicate putting one plodding foot in front of the other – ratherthan enabling running enthusiastically towards a goal oraway from a threatening tiger poised to pounce!