Consideration of using practitioner research as a vehicle for organisational change

1. Practitioner Research as
Organisational Change
Phil Wood, March 2020, BGU

2. • How do organisations change?
• What can practitioners contribute?
• How might we develop practitioner-led change?
Some initial questions

3. an organized group of people with a particular
purpose, such as a business or government
department.
Organisation
• But how do they operate?
• How do they bring change?
When looking down, managers only see shitheads
When looking up the rest only see arseholes

4. Hierarchical Organisations
• Importance of structures
• Decision-making at the top of the organisation – cascading
• Tend towards uniformity and efficiency
• Accountability, performativity, performance management
• Tendency for central planning
• Change seen as a linear, staged process
Guiding principles:
• Reductionism
• Structures
• Uniformity
• Performance
management
• Metrics

5. Complex Organisations
‘A complexity approach
acknowledges that all levels of
focus, whether this is the
individual, class, school,
national or international
associations, reveal humans
and human endeavour as
complex, and that focussing
on one level will not reduce
the multi-dimensionality, non-
linearity, interconnectedness,
or unpredictability
encountered.’ (Kuhn, 2008:
174)
Cilliers (1998) characterises complex adaptive systems as
having:
1. a large number of elements with many interactions;
2. interactions which are non-linear, i.e. large-scale causes
can have small-scale impacts and vice versa;
3. interactions which lead to feedback loops, both negative
and positive;
4. an ‘open’ system, having interactions with elements in
external environments beyond the immediate system;
5. elements which interact with their environment making the
identification of boundaries difficult;
6. a system which is far from equilibrium and therefore needs
a constant energy flow for it to operate;
7. the importance of history, past processes playing a role in
forming the present, often unpredictably;
8. each element only acting on local information rather than
information from the whole system.

6. Based on Iveroth and Hallencreutz, 2016
Alternative Models of Change

7. Barriers to Change
• Established paradigms which can lead to restricted and persistent world-views,
even in the face of evidence
• Educational contexts are inherently complex and therefore ambiguous. Makes
planned change very difficult to sustain
• Centralisation and ‘distance effect’ in departments
• Lack of time
• Barriers often multiple
it is important to heed Gibb’s warning that where the development of strategy and policy is too
centralised then ‘departments may . . . neither understand nor believe in what is decided
centrally’. (Newton, 2003: 438)

8. Avoiding Zombie Innovation
Another potential problem which can occur during a
change process where teachers become the
implementers
but are not involved in the creation of the innovation is that
solutions may be viewed as remote and divorced from the
contexts and complexity of practice. Newton (2003)
suggests
that where solutions appear to be too simplistic,
teachers can give the illusion of change without real
engagement in the process. This can lead to innovations
which exist in strategic plans, which are shown to be
successful in evaluations, and which are recorded in set-
piece
observations but which are absent in day-to-day
practice. I characterize this as a form of ‘zombie
innovation’,
where a change process carries on lifeless, sometimes
for years, in the twilight of official documents, plans and
quality assurance reports, but never lives in the
normalized

9. So What…?
• Need to see practitioners as a core resource for expertise and scholarship
The use of professional capital
Professional Capital = Human Capital + Social Capital + Decisional Capital
(Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012, 88)
• HC – development of knowledge and skills in teaching
• SC – interaction and social relationships – working in groups
• DC – discretionary judgement (a major characteristic of professionals)
• Scholarship and research can play a major role in building both professional capital
and organisational change

10. Locating practitioners as agents of change
Traditionally (Schon, 1983)
Swampy lowlands of the
practitioner – operating in
complexity and mess
Sunny uplands of the academic
– rarefied experimentation
Swampy lowlands of the
practitioner – operating in
complexity and mess
Translated into educational organisations
Sunny uplands of the leadership
team– operating through metrics and
complexity reduction

11. Alternative Model
Issues for
organisational
change
Leaders
ResearchersPractitioners

12. Practitioners as Researchers
• Context driven
• Issues of interest/importance/relevance
• Work with more experienced researchers to create good designs
• Intention is to improve the environment in which lecturers and students operate
• A range of possible approaches
• Action research
• Case studies
• Quantitative research
• Literature reviews
• ……

13. From Practitioner to Organisation
• Leaders need to foster research and scholarly activity
• Recognise the expertise of practitioners and the insights they might develop
• Engage with the insights gained from practitioner research
• See organisational change as emergent for much of the time
• Build knowledge networks
• Requires time, space, trust and investment

14. Normalisation Process Theory
Wood, 2017

15. Final Reflections
• Change is constant – we need to work with it
• Practitioner research can bring change at a very local level – but how to scale up to the
organisation
• Slower pace of change with fewer foci, emergent with involvement of practitioners
• Shift in leadership styles (Streatfield, 2001) – the paradox of control. Leaders are in
control and not in control at the same time
• Worry less about structures and more about processes
• Extend evidence base – complexity rather than reductionism. Metrics are useful, but
insufficient