Transforming Challenges into Opportunities through Collective Evolution
Introduction to Generative Action Research (GAR)
What if research wasn’t just about understanding the world but reshaping it?
GAR is a branch of action research that blends research and action, helping people, communities, and organizations develop new capabilities while solving real-world challenges not limited to localized issues of the immediate context. We developed Generative Action Research as a social technology of liberation. It’s a theory and practice of collaborative knowledge and capability development of people, groups, organizations, and social systems.
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 but 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 to close the gap between our present conditions and the fuller, individual and collective human potential.
People frequently ask how GAR relates to the better-known branch, the Participatory Action Research (PAR). GAR and PAR share a commitment to action-oriented research that engages participants in solving their challenges. Both GAR and PAR share a commitment to action-oriented approaches that engage participants in solving real-world challenges. However, they differ significantly in several aspects. Here is a summary table of how they compare:
Aspect | Generative Action Research | Participatory Action Research |
|---|---|---|
Foci | Development of individuals, groups, and systems; transcontextual learning; solutions scalable across diverse contexts | Empower communities, address local issues, democratize knowledge production, achieving tangible outcomes |
Aim | Catalyzing profound social transformation | Challenging power structures in the existing system |
Participant Role | Co-creators with multi-stakeholder inclusion | Community members as decision-makers |
Outcomes | Long-term scalability, self-sustaining, self-improving, self-evolving, and self-propagating systemic innovation | Context-bound, reflected in participants’ lived experiences, prioritizes immediate empowerment over long-term scalability |
Philosophy | Regenerative and systemic thinking, metamodernism, developmental psychology, integral theory, emergence | Critical theory and social justice, liberation theory, feminist epistemology, post-colonial thought, social constructionism |
Technology | Central, partners for participants, e.g., AI, Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence blending human wisdom and algorithmic insights | Peripheral, tools for participants, e.g., surveys, interviews, tallying questionnaire responses |
Core Principles
Praxis
The praxis principle refers to the dynamic and integrative relationship between theory and practice, emphasizing the interplay between thought and action to create transformative outcomes. Praxis transcends a simple division between theoretical understanding and practical application, instead highlighting their mutual dependence on meaningful and reflective action.
Theory provides the conceptual frameworks, principles, and critical insights that inform and shape action. It helps practitioners understand the broader context, anticipate potential outcomes, and navigate complexities. Practice provides grounding for theory. It tests, challenges, and refines theoretical assumptions in real-world scenarios. Through engagement and application, practice generates new insights that feed back into theory, making it more robust and relevant.
The praxis principle aligns with the ethos of Future HOW, where a blending of intellectual rigor and practical wisdom is required to address complex, fluid, and emergent challenges of significant scale.
Symmathesy
Symmathesy is a Greek word composed of the prefix “sym,” which means “together,” and “mathesis” which means “learning.” Nora Bateson coined the term and developed the corresponding theory of transcontextual mutual learning, which became a defining principle of our methodology.
None of our research initiatives are entirely independent of each other. GAR teams consider as many contexts relevant to any problem situation as possible. Nora Bateson 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.”
Multiple Yields
Most forms of action research generate win-win results, where the research participants 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 large system change.
Multiple yields also characterize GAR’s “learning expedition” design method. (See in the “Methodological Pluralism” section). This term refers to the Expedition’s learning, research, and development outcomes.
Typical learning outcomes are breakthroughs in individual and collective capabilities, including the meta-capabilities of collaborative learning, meaning-making, shared-attention, and distributed cognition. Research outcomes are found in new contributions to advancing the evolution of knowledge in the Expedition’s chosen domain. Development outcomes may include tangible knowledge products, e.g., new educational materials, handbooks, websites, or the validation and coding of practices worth replicating.
Methodological Pluralism
GAR, the overall methodology framework of the Future HOW research center, serves as a basis for the harmonized combination of various approaches.
They include, for example:
- Learning Expedition and its three aspects (metaphor, model, and myth) developed by George Pór
Our methodological pluralism also calls for applying multiple epistemological lenses to honor different ways of knowing, including Indigenous Research Methodologies and the 8 Zones of the Integral theory.
Those elements of our approach will form a living and evolving mix that we draw on as appropriate to the different contexts and instances of the research. They form an ecosystem of practices from which we compose and apply the constellation of the best fit to the research hypotheses, objectives, and the working conditions of the stakeholder groups.
Metamodern Sensibility
We asked ChatGPT, a non-human member of our team, who is well-tuned to both GAR and metamodernism:
How can metamodern sensibilities inform the principles of Generative Action Research?
Below are its answers.
Metamodern sensibilities, characterized by oscillation between modern and postmodern perspectives, sincerity, playfulness, and an embrace of paradox, can significantly enrich the principles of Generative Action Research (GAR). Here’s how:
Embracing Complexity and Paradox
- Metamodern Insight: Metamodernism thrives in the space between contradictory ideas, allowing for sincerity and skepticism, hope and critique.
- GAR Application: GAR can adopt a metamodern stance by welcoming complex and contradictory stakeholder perspectives without seeking to resolve them prematurely. This creates a fertile ground for generative innovation, where paradox drives deeper inquiry and creative problem-solving.
Oscillation Between Frameworks
- Metamodern Insight: The oscillation between modern (progress-oriented) and postmodern (critical, deconstructive) approaches helps navigate polarities.
- GAR Application: Practitioners of GAR can oscillate between structured, evidence-based methodologies (modernist) and interpretive, narrative-based approaches (postmodern). This allows for rigor and openness, balancing quantitative metrics with qualitative depth.
Playfulness and Experimentation
- Metamodern Insight: A playful yet earnest approach to serious challenges enables exploration without fear of failure.
- GAR Application: Encouraging experimental cycles within action research fosters innovation and adaptability. Playfulness helps participants imagine regenerative futures while remaining grounded in actionable realities.
Interconnectedness and Relational Thinking
- Metamodern Insight: The relational perspective of metamodernism recognizes the interconnectedness of systems, people, and environments.
GAR Application: GAR can prioritize relational approaches by embedding community and ecosystem voices in research design. This ensures solutions are co-created and systemically integrated, aligning with regenerative goals.
Sincerity in Engagement
Metamodern Insight: The “new sincerity” of metamodernism seeks earnest connection, even when irony and complexity are acknowledged.
GAR Application: Sincere engagement with participants fosters trust and authentic collaboration. GAR can frame sincerity as a guiding principle in navigating power dynamics and fostering meaningful dialogue
Future Orientation with Grounded Optimism
Metamodern Insight: A hopeful yet critically aware view of the future underpins metamodern sensibilities.
GAR Application: Generative Action Research can draw from this to maintain a focus on creating regenerative futures. Practitioners can embrace grounded optimism, combining visionary thinking with practical steps.
Holarchic Thinking
Metamodern Insight: Metamodernism acknowledges that individual, collective, and systemic levels are nested and interdependent.
GAR Application: GAR can apply holarchic thinking to design multi-level interventions. These can address personal transformation, organizational change, and broader systemic impacts simultaneously.
Aesthetic and Experiential Dimensions
Metamodern Insight: Metamodernism values the aesthetic, emotional, and experiential aspects of human engagement.
GAR Application: Incorporating storytelling, art, and experiential practices into GAR methodologies enriches participant engagement and aligns with metamodern priorities.
By integrating these metamodern sensibilities, Generative Action Research can become more adaptive, empathetic, and effective in addressing the complexities of contemporary challenges, particularly in the pursuit of regenerative futures.
Examples
The Interconnectedness and Relational Thinking characteristic of metamodernism inspires us to embed the voices of futurist communities and ecosystems in our research design, as illustrated by two design workshops we held, in the Summer of 2023, in collaboration with the RADAR community of 400+futurists and cultural innovators.
Our Future Orientation with Grounded Optimism is reflected in the pragmatic idealist approach of our flagship research, a Metamodern Response to the AI Dilemma. There, we embrace a grounded optimism about AI’s potential to enable humans to flourish and maintain a critically aware view of the devastating risks it can trigger in the hands of private and institutional bad actors.
Holarchic Thinking is a foundational principle that guides the nested and interdependent structure of our research agenda‘s four holonic layers. Similarly, our R&D prototypes (e.g. the Three Mountains discovery game) are designed to act on multiple levels, to facilitate personal transformation, collective self-realization, and broader systemic impacts simultaneously.
Process Characteristics
Trifocal Lens
GAR practitioners start their engagement in a research project with a deep-dive self-reflection on who they are in relation to it and how it is relevant in their life’s context(s). In that 1st-person inquiry, we use our felt-sense intuition and an honest assessment of our motivations.
We conduct a 2nd-person inquiry when in generative conversations, online forums, and other interpersonal activities, we glean new insights from each other’s mental models.
Last, 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 inquiries through these three lenses are mutually supportive, built on, and blended. The understanding gained from each lens enriches what we learn from looking through the two other lenses.
Participative
In GAR projects, participants are becoming co-researchers. As stakeholders of the research project, they actively advise the process, assess its evolving purpose and design, and shape its outcomes. If and when GAR involves many stakeholder groups, those functions can be exercised by the Stakeholder Council formed by their representatives.
We want to build an interactive and self-evolving pattern library of successful research practices. That will be possible only in a co-creative relationship between the participants and the researchers. That’s also a condition for the pattern library to help identify and spread practices worth replicating.
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.
These expanding cycles make GAR particularly well suited to amplify innovation in social, business, technology, and ecosystems.
Emergent
The design of GAR projects is not detailed in advance to allow the new research cycles to respond to relevant knowledge, new challenges, and opportunities emerging from the previous ones. Thus, when all outcomes are not pre-planned, the processes remain flexible, with room for surprising breakthroughs. Their emergent nature makes the GAR projects genuinely 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 as an infinite game. Such spaciousness and flexibility may cause discomfort to some problem owners and other research stakeholders if they are used to a more linear and predictable approach. We need to dedicate attention and care to alleviating such discomfort if it’s present.
Synergy with Action Research for Transformation
Methodological collaboration: how GAR and Action Research for Transformation (ART) can complement and enhance each other.
How GAR enhances ART
GAR’s self-evolving and self-improving qualities enrich ART’s focus on systemic transformation by introducing iterative, feedback-driven cycles for adaptation and innovation.
GAR’s emphasis on Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence (CHI) adds a technological dimension to ART, enabling the integration of AI as a partner in transformative efforts.
How ART enhances GAR
ART’s commitment to participatory approaches deepens GAR’s ability to engage diverse stakeholders in co-creating solutions.
ART’s focus on systemic transformation provides GAR with broader frameworks for embedding generative practices in large-scale societal change.
