Practising change together – where nothing is clear, and everything keeps changing

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the thinking and practice of ‘action inquiry’ an embedded learning practice that can help navigate complexity when practising change together. The paper uses examples from social contexts where there are concerns about community wellbeing and health care. These are drawn from collaborative or collective leadership development programmes within public services that seek to bring new attention to the qualities of how people think, converse and interact, as part of their collective professional practice. This treats social action as a relational and dialogical practice, something that we do together as professionals by engaging in reflective inquiry and action. The paper suggests that action inquiry offers a prospect of rekindling the links between ‘action learning’ and collaborative leadership by developing a co-mission and a mutual commitment to a new type of learning partnership. Action inquiry can be wrapped around and enmeshed within initiatives and programmes that work with complexity, anywhere where effective social action will depend on the quality of relationships that can be developed. This research was funded by two separate Scottish Government commissions, where the author was a learning partner. The paper also draws on the further reflections of some of the practitioners most centrally involved.

KEYWORDS:

• Action inquiry
• action learning
• leadership
• complexity

Acknowledgements

Collective Leadership for Scotland is led by a small collaborative team responsible for the ongoing delivery, growth and development of the programme. Collaborative Leadership in Practice has a small delivery team drawing on staff from NHS Education for Scotland, Scottish Social Services Council and the Royal College of GPs in Scotland. Inevitably over several years, the people centrally involved are numerous and some of the key partners have changed. In seeking to distil and summarise some of the valuable learning, I wish to particularly acknowledge the vital contributions of Julie Higgins, Dot Mclaughlin, Sharon Millar, Kiera Oliver, Roy Lawrence, Karen Lawson, Susan Nevill and Janet Whitley. I would also like to thank the members of my own action learning set. I am extremely grateful for the reviewers’ comments that have been of considerable help in concluding this paper. As author, I am responsible for the interpretations made in this paper and any errors or omissions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Cathy Sharp is the Director of Research for Real, based in Edinburgh. As a leading practitioner of action research in Scotland, she aspires to change the ways that practitioners think about research and researchers think about practice. Cathy is actively engaged in the cultural challenges of public service reform in Scotland across health, social care and community development.

ORCID

Cathy Sharp http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2753-3099

Additional information

Funding

The work on which this paper is based was funded by the Scottish Government.