Hi Judy,
First a general answer to your questions. When we visited San Diego (me) and
Helsinki (my colleague, Roberta) last November we came to understand that we
were - as Mike observed to us - using CHAT/LBE as a design principle. We
like to think of ourselves as a research institution, but the reality of the
niche we have found for ourselves in is that we are theory-driven and
reflective practitioners. In the end the people we work with may be
interested in our theories, but the test for them is 'did it make a
difference?'
Our starting point is that after 20 years of organisational RESEARCH (in the
case of our longest worker in the field colleague, who is Roberta) we
finally 'discovered' CHAT and DWR, and found that it provided a meaningful
body of work which was very well aligned with what we were struggling
towards in our isolation. Where that leaves us as contributors to CHAT, or
whether we are just camp followers, Yrjo and Mike (who know us well) are
best equipped to comment about.
Now for your specific questions:
"To what extent do you follow the methods of LBE?"
As closely as we possibly can. When, for whatever reason, we find tht we
can't, we try to improvise with actions which are resposive to the real
field situation we are in, but are not part of the existing cannon of LBE
method. We then try to document what we did and ask the questions 'Is this a
deviation from LBE methods? Or does it advance them? Either way, why did it
happen and why was it necessary?'
If you don't 'arrive at' the Big Contradiction directly, do you get to One
or several contradictions or what?
The Big Contradiction? No - because so far we have not dismantled the
capitalist system, or had our sites/clients express a wish to dismantle it
as a consequence of working with us. But if we close in the unit of
analysis, yes I think the systems we work with always arrive at it in the
sense that the process makes it visible and expresses it. But having arrived
at it, what happens then is very variable. I recall Yrjo at the Aarhus
ISCRAT saying something like 'in change Labs a recurring problem is the
strong resistance and deadlock that emerges when workers must tackle head on
problems in their workplace.' That pretty well captures it.
The Helsinki vocabularly talks of primary to quaternary contradictions. We
usually surface them all. But then a lot of emotion comes out. So we get
through the Drive > Needs > Emotions visibilisation pretty well and pretty
consistently. But we're much more patchy on Emotions > Actions > Will. At
least in the short term. I have one example of a school where I was ejected
after an afternoon of shouting and tears. Three years later I was invited
back and told "we thought you had destroyed us that day, but now we know
that you sowed the seed that saved us."
Do you perform the sorts of analyses YE outlined in ch. 5?
Pretty much exactly. But not so meticulously and comprehensively when it is
a consultancy context. Pragmatics and expediency always win out over
methodological robustness.
Are the emergent methods of 'action research' part of what you do?
Absolutely.
Is the springboard metaphor an adequate/inadequate descriptor for a
distinct phase of your work?
An adequate - indeed excellent - metaphor. Note that springboards bounce up
and down disconcertingly, and it involves some skill in figuring out exactly
when to jump of it in order to achieve the maximum effect.
What counts as success for you? How often (if ever) do your clients / you
arrive at LBE?
The hardest for last, eh! You ask, what counts as success FOR YOU? That
isn't the same thing as what counts as success for THEM. We haven't figured
out yet to what extent we are all part of a single system with shared
objects and shared contradictions, and to what extent we are interlocking
systems with our own different objects and contradictions, and other sets of
contradictions which operate across our boundaries. Above I talked about a
school where I left weak at the knees with a sense of failure, and
subsequently wrote it up as a failure. Years later it turned out to be not
only a success, but the success that made our reputation. This reputation is
based on not backing off, even when it gets very hard.
By contrast our major manufacturing client's faith in us was based on a
sequence where a disturbance occurred, we spent 20 minutes in which the two
teams involved surfaced the underlying contradiction, the new model was
designed in a further hour, it was trialled the next day, reviewed the day
after that, and incorporated into routine practice the day after that. The
changes involved a fundamental cultural shift for the people involved (they
had to start providing each other with information which they had hitherto
regarded as their own secret property). It transformed their on time
delivery rate from 55% average in the year before this to 95% in the nine
months since. It probably rescued their biggest ever order, and so probably
saved 100 jobs. But right now we begin to see reversion to old behaviour.
So is this a short term success and long term failure? Don't know yet. Why
is it happening given the demonstrated utility of the change? Don't know
yet.
How long is a failure a failure? A success a success? It would count as
success FOR US if we could begin to answer such questions.
As for the how often (if ever) question, the answer is equally conditional.
We think we can point to some organisations we have worked with and say
'those people now have LBE embedded in their practice'. If you came to NZ I
could take you to places where we have worked and there is not the slightest
indication that it is happening. Sometimes the practice erodes as personnel
changes because it is actually counter cultural in NZ culture (in my view).
But equally I can see some organisations we have never worked with which
have transformed themselves because somebody who has worked with us has gone
into them in a leadership role.
Overall I think that we have made enough differences in enough places to
keep us enthusiastic.
Phillip Capper
WEB Research
PO Box 2855
(Level 9, 142 Featherston Street)
Wellington
New Zealand
Ph: (64) 4 499 8140
Fx: (64) 4 499 8395
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