How
Generative Action Research
What Makes Our Methodology Generative
The four capabilities that define our generativity framework are
SELF—SUSTAINING: Balancing change and continuity in a way that supports the life-enhancing capacities present in the social field of the research.
SELF-IMPROVING: Intentionally and continuously enlivening individual and collective effectiveness by:
~ Setting the action/assessment/feedback/learning loops so that they provide a replenishing infrastructure.
~ Learning to generate new capabilities in response to emergent situations
SELF-EVOLVING: Listening for and using the research’s evolutionary purpose as its “North Star,” as well as growing into more inclusive stages of consciousness.
SELF-PROPAGATING: Embodying the core framework in a way that inspires others to awaken new possibilities in their lives, relationships, organizations, and movements
Read more about these capabilities here.
Prelude to the Future
“Our concern is not with the conquest of a future, at least not that ‘temporal’ future that is generally deemed to be the future. Rather it is a question of what is the future in us, that is, what is present to the same degree that all past in us is present… Our sole concern must be with making manifest the future which is immanent in ourselves.” — Jean Gebser
The choice of the word “HOW” following “Future” in the name of our research center is emblematic. It is an expression of our intent to be more than a think tank, to put our distinctive methodology of action research for discovering walkable pathways (to both the desired shift in organizations and the Big Shift) front and centre of our work.
The future that we are invested in is not the next year or decade; in fact, it’s not a moment in time at all. It is, in Gebser’s words, “the future which is immanent in ourselves.” What’s immanent in ourselves is the evolutionary impulse acting as our highest aspirations for individual and societal well-being and flourishing, our aspirations for a world free from unnecessary, man-made suffering, which are matched by our potential to manifest them.
The Potential for Self-Organization
Tapping into and realizing that potential, overcoming the internal and external structures hindering it, requires a collaborative effort and continual learning. In other words, action combined with reflection, is at the heart of Action Research (AR). AR is both an academic discipline and the daily (albeit implicit) practice of a multitude of change-oriented projects.
That potential is everywhere, where people interact and spontaneous order is emerging from the parts of an initially random set of relationships. That potential is present, for example, in the genesis of communities, organizations, regenerative movements, impact DAOs, and the vast social ecosystems for civilizational renewal.
Self-organization is an organic process. That’s how life is carrying itself forward. In the social realm, that process has many conditions hindering it and supporting it. Disarming the first and amplifying the latter are consequences of a well-designed AR project conducted with our methodology.
Variety of Action Research
There is a great variety of approaches to AR. The difference between them is more traceable in the academic literature than in the on-the-ground practice of their respective professionals. The approaches that inspired the development of the methodology used by Future HOW are:
- Participatory Action Research brings people together to reflect and act on their own social practices to make them more coherent, just, satisfying, and sustainable.
- Action Research for Transformation “calls upon the researchers to critically engage with the production of knowledge for sustainability through transformation.
- Critical Participatory Action Research “challenges the traditional and narrow perimeters in which research has been conducted and elevates the voices and perspectives of formerly marginalized groups.”
- While these brief self-descriptions can’t account for the full richness of these approaches, their differences are more in the nuances than in their substance.
What Is Generative Action Research?
We developed Generative Action Research (GAR) as a social technology of liberation. It’s a theory and practice of collaborative knowledge and capability development related to challenges in social ecosystems which hinder their development. Building on the previous modalities of Action Research, GAR transcends and includes many of their characteristics. Its primary distinguishing feature, what makes it “generative”, is its four generative capabilities growing on top of each other: self-sustaining, self-improving, self-evolving, and self-propagating. GAR is not only a methodology, it is also a social philosophy, summed up in the essay Towards an Enlivenment Theory of Change. GAR also has a distinctive, emancipatory ethos, grounded in the struggle for closing the gap between our present conditions and the fuller, individual and collective human potential. It will take an enlightened citizenry to realize that potential. An enlightened citizenry can only be a sovereign citizenry, not only in the political but also, in its developmental sense. The foundational value of GAR’s ethos is increasing sovereignty.
Principles
Transcontextual mutual learning
None of our research initiatives are fully independent of each other. Action research aimed at helping practitioners to address societal challenges cannot successfully do so by perpetuating the reductionist approaches that aggravated them.
GAR teams take into account as many contexts relevant to any problem situation as possible. They are composed of members coming from different disciplines. The framework for transcontextual mutual learning, encapsulated by the Greek word “symmathesy,” was introduced to us by Nora Bateson, who writes: “Transcontextual” refers to the ways in which multiple contexts come together to form complex systems. It allows for a concentration on the interdependency between contexts that give resilience to both living and non-living systems… Transcontextual description offers insights into where contextual overlap is reinforcing the status quo and where it is loose enough to initiate shifts.
Triple yield
Traditional action research is generating win-win results, where the researched practitioners discover new ways to meet their challenges, and the field of knowledge involved gains new insights, patterns, and theorems. GAR goes beyond that and generates a triple yield, where the third win stems from the research’s contribution to the evolution of new social life forms.
Methodological pluralism
One of the ways in which GAR’s spaciousness manifests is its methodological pluralism. It means that GAR, as the overall methodology framework of the Future HOW research center, serves as a basis for the harmonized combination of a variety of approaches that support our work.
Depending on the context and needs of specific projects, they can include the fractal-like cycles of Presencing, the 7 quality choice points of Action Research for Transformation, Dialogue Interviews, Appreciative inquiry, or “trekking” on a virtual Learning Expedition, just to name a few.
Those elements of our approach form a living and evolving matrix that we derive from as best fit to the research hypotheses, objectives and the working conditions of the stakeholder groups. Our methodological pluralism also calls for applying multiple epistemological lenses for honoring our different ways of knowing, including indigenous wisdom.
Praxis
We define “praxis” as the dynamic interdependence of theory and practice. In our context, it refers to the integration of learning from action, and action enriched by learning, in an iterative, enduring spiral of the GAR cycles. In that sense, the praxis principle expands GAR into something more than a research methodology, a tool that can be used for mobilizing and maturing the collective intelligence of the community of co-researchers. To accomplish the latter, GAR is providing a mutually supporting learning process that involves both the researchers and the practitioners.
At Future HOW, we are dedicated to the praxis of discovering and supporting the deep trends that drive the current movements for evolutionary transformation, or as Paolo Freire used the term “praxis:” “reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed.”
Process characteristics
Participative
In GAR projects, practitioners are becoming co-researchers. As key stakeholders of the research project, they are actively involved in advising the process, assessing its evolving purpose and design, and shaping its outcomes.
If and when GAR involves a large number of stakeholder groups, those functions can be exercised by the Stakeholder Council formed by their representatives. This layer in the projects’ advice and governance processes can be substituted by exercising them on the blockchain.
One cannot design an interactive and self-evolving pattern library of successful practices without a co-creative relationship with the people carrying them out. Without being authentically participative, in no way could GAR processes be generative.
Cyclic
In most forms of Action Research, action and understanding go through stages of deliberate and spiraling intervention and reflection. Typically, this involves a 4-stage process of reflecting, planning, acting, and observing.
In the case of Generative Action Research, the first 4-stage cycle gives rise to subsequent cycles, each of which tends to be larger than the previous, in terms of its scope, the depth of challenges and opportunities addressed, the community(ies) of participants, and the value flows that link them.
It is these expanding cycles that make GAR particularly well suited to serve as an amplifier of innovation work in and on the social, business, technology, or knowledge architecture of value-creation ecosystems in both traditional organizations and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).
Emergent
The design of GAR projects is not detailed in advance, to allow the new cycles of the research to respond to relevant knowledge, new challenges, and opportunities emerging from the previous ones. Thus, when specific outcomes are not anticipated in advance, the processes remain flexible, with as much room for surprising breakthroughs as possible. Their emergent nature creates the conditions for GAR projects to be truly generative.
By definition, emergence cannot be designed but the conditions facilitating it can. These conditions must create the spaciousness for configuring GAR not as a finite but an infinite game. Such spaciousness and flexibility may cause discomfort to some problem owners and other stakeholders of the research if they are used to a more linear and predictable approach. Attention and care need to be dedicated to alleviating such discomfort if it’s present.
Trifocal lens
When we engage in a research project, we look at it through the lens of 1st-person inquiry, using the observation and description of the researchers’ felt sense of who they are in relation to the subject of the research. That may include self-inquiry into What factors motivate us for undertaking this research? What are the different contexts of our life relevant to it? What is our personal experience related to the focus of the research, if any, etc?
We integrate 2nd-person inquiry when conduct generative conversation, group interviews, inquiring together into issues of mutual interest, and other interpersonal activities that allow us to glean new insights from each other mental models.
Last, but not least, we leverage 3rd-person inquiry (data gathering, literature review, web searching related contexts and issues, etc.) – to parse relevant knowledge of a wider community, be it a community of practice or an epistemic community of relevant disciplines.
The foci of the trifocal lens are mutually supportive and, in the actual work, build on and blend with each other. the understanding gained from each lens is enriching what we are learning from looking through the two other lenses.
The History of GAR
Our founder, George Pór, the developer of GAR, introduced this framework, first in his International Executive Seminars, hosted by INSEAD and the London School of Economics, in 2003, followed by several professional conferences, including in his in keynote at the 2013 annual conference of the International Society for Systems Sciences.A newer introduction to GAR and the distinction “generativity” can be found in the 2017 special issue of Spanda Journal on Collective Enlightenment.