A process that creates itself
A process that creates itself
A few weeks ago I wrote about the idea to integrate strategic learning and evaluation in Fondation Botnar's philanthropic work through a systemic inquiry approach. I have been very inspired by Cathy Sharp's work on using an action inquiry approach to evaluation, which I mentioned in this post.
Why do we need a systemic inquiry approach?
Chris Mowles, in his book Complexity - A Key Idea for Business and Society (Mowles 2021:103), asks:
If we are interdependent, if communication is imperfect, if our relationships with each other are in ‘structured flux’ as Elias would term it and if the future is unknowable, what kinds of ways of knowing, of knowledge, are useful to us in our pursuit of trying to take the next step together?
In the same book, but earlier, Mowles gives one possible answer to these questions by referencing Charles Sanders Peirce (Mowles 2021:82-83):
Charles Sanders Peirce (1984), the first pragmatist, argued that knowledge arises in communities of inquiry, groups of scientists or researchers who share an interest in common, who carry out their research, then debate and leaven their inquiry by contesting each other’s methods and findings.
I take it that knowledge does not only arise when scientists or researchers get together, but that that is also true for any other group of people with a shared interest, whose interaction is marked by employing some kind of rigorous, systematic process of knowledge creation and sense-making. I would see such groups as a communities of inquiry in Peirce's sense.
In the chapter on knowledge, Mowles also describes that when people get together to engage around a social issue, there is never a recipe, never a general truth they can draw out of the drawer and simply implement. There general statements coming from both the social sciences and lived experience are always contingent on the context - the same recipe hardly ever works twice. This means that it cannot be the goal of a systemic inquiry to produce any generalisable truth or recipe. Indeed, the American philosopher Richard Rorty contends that (quoted in Sharp 2018):
We cannot regard truth as a goal of inquiry. The purpose of inquiry is to achieve agreement among human beings about what to do, to bring consensus on the end to be achieved and the means to be used to achieve those ends. Inquiry that does not achieve coordination of behaviour is not inquiry but simply wordplay.
So, in other words, systemic inquiries are about engaging in complex, unpredictable contexts, bringing groups of people together who have a shared intent, not to generate evidence of truth, but to generate evidence or knowledge that allows them to achieve agreement about what to do about a situation. This is also reminiscent of Dave Snowden's definition of sense-making: making sense of the world in order to act in it. And this then becomes an on-going, iterative cycle of action and learning, up to a point where the common interest disappears or some other changes in circumstances dissolve the group of people.
How do we approach establishing the systemic inquiries at Fondation Botnar?
In order to establish these systemic inquiries into our themes and find out how to convene the corresponding communities of inquiry, my original idea was to first run a co-design process together with those people who will afterwards engage in the systemic inquiries. During that process, those who will later engage with the process will design the process and then, in a next phase, apply it. But in a way, this seems odd to me now - first running a collaborative process to develop a collaborative process. Could we not approach the design of the systemic inquiry as a systemic inquiry in itself? The question we would inquire into would be something like: how can we at Fondation Botnar together with our partners run a systemic inquiry into our themes? In a sense this would generate a process that creates itself and I would venture that the boundary at which we move from a situation in which we primarily design the process to a situation where we engage in the thematic inquiry will be fuzzy. Experiential learning would be at the heart of the approach - learning by doing. While we learn about the theme we would also learn about the process of learning about the theme.
This is only idea, how exactly we are going to do that is still a question-mark in my mind. But luckily, I am working with a number of brilliant people who will help me figure this out - which again is a sort of inquiry into how to guide people in an inquiry. Inquiries all the way down one could say. So, I guess the simplest way will be just to start somewhere and inquire our way forward.
References:
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Mowles, Chris. 2021. Complexity: A Key Idea for Business and Society. Routledge.
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Sharp, Cathy. 2018. “Collective Leadership: Where Nothing Is Clear and Everything Keeps Changing Exploring New Territories for Evaluation.” Collective Leadership Scotland.http://tinyurl.com/y6vll2hp.
The Paper Museum
Living life as inquiry. This is the title of a 1999 article by British scholar Judi Marshall (Marshall 1999). This is how she describes the idea (p. 156f):
By living life as inquiry I mean a range of beliefs, strategies and ways of behaving which encourage me to treat little as fixed, finished, clear-cut. Rather I have an image of living continually in process, adjusting, seeing what emerges, bringing things into question. This involves, for example, attempting to open to continual question what I know, feel, do and want, and finding ways to engage actively in this questioning and process its stages. It involves seeking to monitor how what I do relates to what I espouse, and to review this explicitly, possibly in collaboration with others, if there seems to be a mismatch. It involves seeking to maintain curiosity, through inner and outer arcs of attention, about what is happening and what part I am playing in creating and sustaining patterns of action, interaction and non-action. (Drawing on systemic analysis I might then, for example, explore what is motivating how I keep things the same or how to expand my behavioural and goal flexibility.) It also involves seeking to pay attention to the ‘stories’ I tell about myself and the world and recognising that these are all constructions, influenced by my purposes and perspectives and by social discourses which shape meanings and values.
Why have I added this to my Paper Museum? The phrase and also content of the article resonated a lot with me. I think I'm also living my live as inquiry to a large extent, even though I can't say I'm doing it in a very systematic or rigorous way - I'm not taking copious notes, not even writing a journal, even though I think that would be very beneficial to the inquiry that is my life. I have never been able to establish that habit unfortunately. Secondly, I think we can also learn from Marshall's personal exploration of inquiry for the systemic inquiries that we are planning to establish at Botnar.
Reference: Marshall, Judi. 1999. “Living Life as Inquiry.” Systemic Practice and Action Research 12 (2): 155–71. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022421929640.
Photo
A foggy path ahead. Photo by jen ramona on Unsplash