Author Archives: Helen Wilding

On helping – traps as a helping relationship forms

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Aha my motivation to carry on reading and blogging about Schein’s book has been given a helpful(!) boost by a friend who commented in an email that she was enjoying reading it ‘by proxy’…thanks for the help..

Moving on from the general understanding of relationships in everyday life in terms of reciprocity, deference and demeanour.  The third chapter of Schein’s book on Helping starts to focus on the helping relationship with a particular emphasis on how that relationship ‘starts out’.  At the point where someone asks for help or offers it a number of social inequities and role ambiguities some to the fore.  It is a tense moment full of pitfalls and traps for both the potential helper and the potential client – but we only really notice it when it all goes wrong. Continue reading →

On helping – reciprocity, deference and demeanour

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So after ‘Getting started‘, I have now read Chapter Two of Schein’s book on Helping.  Chapter Two is a bit of a scene setter about the cross-cultural principles underpinning social life and relationships in general – rather than about helping per se.  Schein emphasises that it is important to understand this “essence of relationships” so that the special-ness of a helping relationship can then be understood.

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On helping – getting started

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Last summer when I came across the work of Schein on research, I found a book that he had written called “Helping: how to offer, give and receive help“.  I bought the book in early November, just as T847 started so it has sat there largely unread.  I’ve started it a couple of times and then faltered – distracted with ‘real’ studying.  And then I tried again when the course finished.  It’s not the book – I realised that I am really bad at really taking things in and following an argument if I don’t turn to my notepad to take notes and my blog to summarise key points – I don’t think about what I am learning.  I can’t just read books – I have to interact with them if I am going to get anything from the process.

So I am starting again – a short burst of temporary purposeful activity to inquire into the notion of helping.  I figured writing a series of blogs as I go along may help with the momentum – and the learning process.

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Using systems thinking as a public policy actor: personal reflections

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Right, so for the event on 22 June (more information in the blog I published earlier today), Ray Ison asked me to do a talk on my experiences on systems thinking in the public sector.  The brief was to talk about a) experiences b) constraints to more use; and, c) opportunities for the future. Continue reading →

Harnessing systems thinking in public policy process

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Yesterday, I got to meet a number of systems thinkers in the flesh – hooray.  It was at a joint event arranged by Prof Eileen Munro of the LSE and Prof Ray Ison at the OU…partly to mark 40 years of systems teaching at the OU.

There were about 30/35 people there – mostly handpicked through systems and public sector networks.  Eileen and Ray had designed it as a systemic inquiry using conversational mapping in small table groups.  Every so often there was some front of the room ‘input’ reflections from people who had been involved in the use of systems thinking in public sector in different ways…the programme information is here (SYSTEMS+40Program) which provides info on each of these speakers…..including me – but more of that later.

It is easy to get enthused in a room like that – the energy levels were amazing – and the mark of any good meeting is that people didn’t quickly dash off at the end, people were chatting, connecting and so on for a good 40 minutes afterwards – and then for a few of us longer in a pub.

Just a few thoughts that struck me as the day went on and I reflected on the way home on the train (admittedly with a glass of wine inside me)… Continue reading →

T847 as a part of my learning trajectory

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Pre-amble – I have had this blog written for a while but kept it to a limited audience whilst I thought about it more and waited for my result.  I now have my result – a very welcome Distinction – but even with that great news, looking back at it all my thoughts about the experience remain.  So here they are….

 

At the end of TU812, I said that I was going on to ‘do’ T847 as part of my ongoing trajectory as a systems practitioner.  It’s ‘done’ now, the project is in so I have found myself thinking about whether or not the experience helped me develop my systems thinking in practice.

The question is – how did my T847 experience contribute as a ‘subsystem’ of a learning system intended to develop my mastery in systems thinking in practice? 

I am thinking about it in terms of Ison’s design turn – the module was designed as a system to… (that is what the module aims covered) but I am now looking at it in terms of how it was enacted and experienced…Of course, I can only reflect on that from the perspective of my own experience. Continue reading →

A trail of crumbs… ‘doing’ research

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Since last November, I have carried out endless searches for articles that resonate with my desire to practice research in a manner consistent with developing my systems practice.  Whether it about being a systemic research practitioner or a research-oriented systems practictioner, I don’t think it really matters.  My main driver was that T847 was part of my ‘trajectory’ of developing my systems practice – and I wanted that to be about the practice/praxis of my research, not just the content/topic.

Every so often, I found a ‘gem’ – the needle in the haystack that helped distill things.  Sometimes this was the product of my own labours, other times a gift from Arwen, another student carrying out similiar inquiries to myself.  It may be that I was not a ‘good’ searcher, but it seems those hits were quite few and far between.

So I thought I would pull together all the ‘gems’ in one place so that I can remind myself what it was about them.  This post may also offer others on a similiar journey to me, to reduce their own searching hours by offering a platform to start from. Continue reading →

So ‘absent competence’ or ‘constrained capability’?

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After all those weeks of writing very academically about my research topic, I’m finding it hard to explain it all ‘in lay terms’ – removing all the public health speak; Systems speak; and, research speak.  I want to write a briefing note to share the findings – not least with the participants – but short of copying and pasting the relevant bits into a new document I am stuck as to how to make it readable, understandable and engaging.  How do I ‘sell’ the ideas that I have developed – I think they are really helpful ideas, but they are only helpful if you realise the problem that they help with exists in the first place!

So I thought I would try and do it bloggy style here to break the academic mode of writing – in the hope that I can subsequently write something that fits in the middle. Continue reading →