Phillip, Thanks for all the info about your work, which to some extent is
standing in for LBE-in-practice. I'm sure it is also its own 'thing',
though, so I wonder if you could help me to understand where the overlap;
where divergence. These are some questions that came to mind; answer
whatever -- I hope you can answer, at least sort of, in one screen-worth of
text.
To what extent do you follow the methods of LBE?
If you don't 'arrive at' the Big Contradiction directly, do you get to One
or several contradictions or what?
Do you perform the sorts of analyses YE outlined in ch. 5?
Are the emergent methods of 'action research' part of what you do?
Is the springboard metaphor an adequate/inadequate descriptor for a
distinct phase of your work?
What counts as success for you? How often (if ever) do your clients / you
arrive at LBE?
t 09:57 AM 6/11/01 +1200, you wrote
>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
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 01 2001 - 01:01:24 PDT