I have a number of somewhat disconnected comments on the latest postings.
1. "Arriving at the point where participants are able to provide a language
for working out a springboard for change." We have never found this to be a
clear cut point. The main reason for this is what I might call the 'tyranny
of the present', or perhaps the inertia of the way things are now. Or in
CHAT language - being so oppressed by the management of disturbance that
there is no time to reach for the contradictions. This applies to us as
well! There are three main ways of working with this:
(a) engaging with the excited individual and encouraging them to 'infect'
others. This requires enormous patience as the lead individual, and those
s/he 'infects', blow hot and cold depending on the pressure of day to day
imperatives. But in the end I'm afraid that my answer to Katherine's
questions about this is that you almost always need the champion to start
things off. In most organisations mass dissatisfaction with the status quo
is generally incohate. It may provide the power holders and culture bearers
with their own motivation to search for a springboard, but I don't see
things progressing very often without that;
(b) we do it for them. I hinted at this in my previous post. Of course there
are serious methodological and theoretical issues around this. But our
operational experience (which I now realise is considerable - as well as the
manufacturing firm I mentioned we have mounted DWR projects in a number of
private sector firms, amongst farmers in NZ, and in 22 schools - 3 clusters
and 6 stand alone)is that there is almost always a need for an ignition
phase, where different principles apply precisely because of the absence of
a springboard. When we try to stay 'pure' in the ignition phase, usually
nothing happens except pious claptrap - and that is even WITH an internal
person with both influence and motivation;
(c) we model it for them. An example of how we do this is that we ran a
series of 'fishbowl' meetings. That is, we ran our own internal meetings in
the middle of their workplaces and invited them to be an audience (watch,
but do not speak). This, of course, is explicitly theatre, and invlolved us
having to rehearse being able to do this with a minimum of modification of
our own behaviour because of the presence of an audience. We stole this idea
from the work done on fishbowl faculty meetings at the University of
Nebraska, which I had the good fortune to observe in a demonstration at a
conference in Buffalo a few years ago.
2. diane writes:
"if the contradiction emerges amongst the participants, infinite outcomes
can be possible. in my reading of research, discordant voices are most
often characterized by the research team as "exceptional" perspectives,
cast as "hostile" or "resistant" to the project?
rarely (ever?) is a single voice of contradiction granted validity...
seems to me. there are a multitude of processes for silencing that which
is disruptive to the larger flow of a process."
Our experience is that there are ALWAYS discordant voices and single voices
of contradiction. speaking only for ourselves I will claim that we ALWAYS
grant these voices validity. In fact in our work with schools we use a
process which precisely draws out the single voices and requires the whole
to engage with the single. We began to do this after considering the work of
Yrjo and others on the nature of expertise and the problem of cognitive
inertia.
By this I mean ‘a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are
deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ striving for
unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative
courses of action.’ (Janis, 1983). The symptoms of this are overestimation
of the groups’ own capacity, closed mindedness, and stereotyping of others.
We challenge schools with such questions as 'You have 1000
parents/caregivers. You have gathered data which shows that 5% of them feel
that their children are unfairly treated by the school discipline system. Do
you discount them because they are only 5%, or does it matter to you that 5%
of them feel this way? And is your answer to this question congruent with
your espoused goals?'
The contradiction that diane rightly draws our attention to is that the
discordant voice is often sceptical about the project itself - which the
researchers and the leaders in the host organisation are already committed
to. But if researchers behave as diane suggests my challenge to them would
be 'From whence cometh your deep motivation here? Use value or exchange
value? And whose use or exchange value - the host organisation or your own?'
Or to use diane's more direct language 'how much is any researcher willing
to give up in order to participate with an activity?'
Katherine then asks:
"if you have outlandish ideas about what the "problems" are in a setting,
and your
experience of contradiction and distress is not validated or valued by
others
in the group, what happens to you? Are you left behind as others "master the
future" and make plans? where do these discordant voices go in the
analysis?"
My answer to this is that if the space has been made for discordant voice to
be heard and given serious consideration by the wider group, and then it is
still not validated, then that voice must either accept that judgment or
find a more supportive environment. There has to be a point of closure for
the reasons diane outlines in her latest post.
There are issues for the researcher in this. We sometimes feel that the
discordant voice actually has it right (and this is even given the fact that
we only work in settings where we feel morally aligned to the embeedded
values of the organisatio). But we cannot endorse the endless recommittal of
the discordant case, even where we agree with it. But we can be explicit
about our own position. In fact we have on one occasion disengaged from a
consultancy client because the consideration of the dicordant voice, and our
own declaration of our response to it, surfaced the fact that the values of
the organisation that hired us were not what they had told us they were.
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
-----Original Message-----
From: Diane Hodges [mailto:dhodges@ceo.cudenver.edu]
Sent: Monday, 11 June 2001 03:09
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re(2): any more on chapter 5?
kathryn writes
>Anyway, this is related in a way to the springboard question--if you have
>outlandish ideas about what the "problems" are in a setting, and your
>experience of contradiction and distress is not validated or valued by
>others
>in the group, what happens to you? Are you left behind as others "master
>the
>future" and make plans? where do these discordant voices go in the
>analysis?
>Katherine Brown
it depends on who voices the contradiction, doesn't it? if one researcher
in a team perceives a problem that the rest of the team will not validate
or value,
then that researcher will, likely?, silence his/herself and abide by the
majority perspective, yes? or risk producing internal conflicts that will
contaminate a team's desire for shared meanings, collective goals, and so
on?
if the contradiction emerges amongst the participants, infinite outcomes
can be possible. in my reading of research, discordant voices are most
often characterized by the research team as "exceptional" perspectives,
cast as "hostile" or "resistant" to the project?
rarely (ever?) is a single voice of contradiction granted validity...
seems to me. there are a multitude of processes for silencing that which
is disruptive to the larger flow of a process.
ultimately, i think phil capper exemplified this - how much is any
researcher willing to give up in order to participate with an activity?
diane
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