Action Research and
Systemic Practice
Embodied Inquiry
Dr Goff, ALARA
Systemic thinking and practice
 To practice systemically I need to see and experience systems by making distinctions:
 Each distinction is in some way related to any and all others
 Each is related in any and all ways to my act of perception in sensory, social and
conceptual terms - and the ground (values/agency) upon which I make such
distinctions - the ground being itself another distinction operating under the same
terms
 The patterns of relationship are not only webbed but an integrated mass - rising and
falling towards and away from the distinctions I make
 The state is fluidly mobilised/immobilised - at foundational and all other
levels/dimensions
 And we are all doing it (including plants and animals) consciously and
unconsciously
New living systems theory:
 …“sweeps in” both organ-ised system (as
structure) and organ-ising life (as process),
equilibrium and movement… structure and
agency - but now unified into
“doing/being”… (Wadsworth, 2008, p164).
Critical reflexivity
Everything is both being (what it seems to be)
and becoming (something else) at the same
time, and in more or less relation to everything
else that is both being and becoming, ad
infinitum, and at all possible scales: from the
momentary to the millennial, the “individual”
to the mass-social, from the proximal to the
distal” (Wadsworth, Ibid).
Action Research and Systems
theories
 Research is about creating new knowledge; Action
Research creates new knowledge from, within, and for
the benefit of what we do in the world.
 Systems theory is inalienable from Action Research
because it provides the marrow of knowledge
generation practices and the ethical quality of the
knowledge such practices hold in their enactment.
Recursive action
 New systems theory, or complex systemic
process theory, seeks to bring two
“moments” together: structure and
movement productive “organs” and change
processes into a more powerful critical
theory of “whole systems”, living systems
of life itself … (Wadsworth, ibid, p 164)
ALARA and systemic
management practices
 The Action Learning and Action Research
Association is generating itself through
management practices and structures that
foreground systemic approaches to our core
business.
 We are optimising the resonations between
individually and organisationally embodied
learning and research practices to address the
challenge of low resources to meet high
needs/visions.
5 steps
 Shift perception: ALARA is not an organisation but a living
organism
 Share a practice principle: “Collaborative Autonomy” is
working throughout practice, structure and policy
 Free the energy: output-defined roles generate strategy (the
Working Group) (eg: publications, website etc)
 Resource the energy: system-supporting roles generate policy
(Executive) (eg: communications, financials, leadership)
 Trust human integrity: our choice of principle is a natural fit
to our nature and capacities - enabling Distributed Leadership
to manifest
Distributed leadership
 Explicit values, multi-directional
information flows, and opportunities for
action, as opposed to technical-rational
control, become alternative means of
maintaining coherence in dispersed
networks of policy action (Weil,
Wildemeersch and Jansen, 2005: p227)