This list represents key lessons learned from a recent Action Research (AR) inquiry into curriculum development at a military college. Hopefully, you will find some reasons here to engage in AR yourself.
1. The 4 ways of knowing: experiential, presentational, propositional, practical. I see these now more explicitly in lessons I am preparing and constructing in the college. I evaluate claims for knowledge on the basis of this framework. I look for opportunities to integrate all 4 in all lessons. I have introduced the idea into our faculty development program, since there is synergy with our stated educational philosophy.
2. Unproductive communication exercise: a useful set of techniques to formally and systematically reflect on problem areas. This is a tough area for me as a generally effective communicator, to spend time and effort and re-work what comes so easily for me. But we know in business for example you get great value by expanding your strengths not just addressing weaknesses. Has made me more conscious of my communication methods and frameworks.
3. The Leadership Development Profile: Torbert’s intriguing and useful model for engaging organizations in transformation on a grand scale through self-awareness and a calibrate sense of what’s possible and anticipating friction points. I haven’t been able to apply it yet but I can see how powerful it will be inside my college, because it provides an organizational scaffolding around work we are already doing with individual leader transformation.
4. Simultaneous 1st, 2d, and 3d person inquiry: I appreciated from the paired assignments, supplemented by the readings that there can be simultaneous learning loops in practice. My exposure to traditional change management techniques has been much more sequential and single task focused. There is a lot of momentum for change that can be generated when approached on multiple paths simultaneously.
5. Transparency in research in action: It has been very liberating to approach the AR project from an explicitly transparent perspective, with my needs, values and goals up front, and encourage the stakeholders (who are at first invited to be stakeholders) to do the same to find the maximum area of common interest to exploit. Transparency in education has been a new topic introduced by our Commandant and it matches up well with the values of AR: democracy, empowerment, and building capacity among others.
6. Systems Thinking: The Ray Ison article in the Handbook of Action Research is a treasure of clarity and conciseness, and comes along right when I need it to be able to engage our developers with generating the requirements for leaders cognitive skills, many of which are sensed to be from the field of systems thinking.
7. Variety of experience and perspective, linked by common framework: On 2d and 3d readings and after reflection I have come to value the sharing of different perspectives and experiences contained in the Handbook. There are many insights and techniques that I initially set aside as non-relevant to me, but after adopting a wider perspective and accepting that in the future I may very well be partnering with people for whom those insights and techniques may have major value, I have come to appreciate the broadening of my horizons.
8. Iterative Learning & Doing: This could also read Learning by Doing, and Doing the Learning, since they are happening simultaneously and incorporate both the action and research components of the discipline. In the act of writing this bullet, this additional meaning of Action Research crystallized, since I am now seeing that regardless of which “phase” of the project you are in, you never stop doing research and you never stop acting on your knowledge.
9. Potential for AR in Education: Covered at greater length in the preceding pages, but it is clear to me that since infrastructure is a necessary part of learning/change that lasts, that AR must be a part of the education system, or we will continually be producing the kinds of wicked messes that require AR to address in the future. Unless AR is somehow integrated into our “fire prevention” in the ways people learn to think and work and share together, then AR will be focusing on “fire fighting” after the initial damage has been done.
10. Practicality: for all the concern I initially had about the field of AR being soft and fuzzy, filled with the kind of breathless fervor I negatively associate with true believers, I m seeing more and more the practicality of the philosophy, the integrity of the commitment to values I support, and the practicality of its methods and purposes inside my own work and life environment. It resonates with other experiences I have had, positive and negative, in the change management, quality and systems movements and I now see it as a practical discipline for achieving important change that lasts.