How do I understand professional practice and practice development?

Posted on 19 July 2023 by Helen Wilding

I feel as if I have 101 blog titles going around in my head at the moment. It’s getting hard to know which one to focus on. But I guess starting somewhere is better than not starting at all.

This blog is actually based on part of my PhD thesis (Wilding, 2021, chapter 3). The key points are the same but I focus a little more on my story of grappling with ideas that I did to reach the explanation and claims I made there. It illustrates how my traditions of systems understandings supported the development of a set of ideas about practice and its development. Hopefully, those familiar with systems thinking ideas and tools will recognise the bricolage of ideas that I draw on – I don’t want to explain or reference them all in detail as this blog would never get written. Continue reading →

Introducing situations cleanly

Posted on 26 January 2023 by Helen Wilding

In Systems Thinking in Practice, we tend to refer to the ‘object’ of our inquiries as ‘situations’. There are variations on this term such as problematic situations, situations of interest or situations of concern which I have discussed in previous posts such as the ones in this search result.

In everyday situations, we tend to introduce situations with quite a long explanation. We often talk about how we think the situation came about, what the impact is and so on. We may even force a certain framing on the situation through phrases like “by saying x I mean y angle, not really z”. The difficulty I experience when people do this is it can be hard to really understand the focal point of their concern because they are bringing in lots of different angles. I also think that the person themself may not actually have got to the point where they have actually distilled the focal point of their concern. When this way of introducing situations is done, it also mixes up the introduction with the start of an analysis or understanding of the situation – an understanding that may have come about without using systems concepts and approaches as epistemic devices. Continue reading →

What is ‘STiP research’?

Posted on 3 December 2021 by Helen Wilding

Recently I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between systems thinking in practice and research. This isn’t a new stream of thought, I have been mulling it over for a long time and in some ways lots of posts I have done circle around this very issue.

It’s a dilemma that started when I did my capstone module for MSc Systems Thinking in Practice because I needed to do a piece of research that was relevant to my discipline. In one way or another I have continued to grapple with this throughout my PhD – although I wasn’t doing a PhD in Systems Thinking in Practice, I did want to ensure that what I did was authentic to me as a systems thinking practitioner (a PhD with systems thining in practice). Recently though, I think that this inquiry has gained more prominence. Now that I support MSc students on their capstone modules, I need to be able to advise students whether the research they are designing is appropriate or not. Continue reading →

The tail end of the ‘getting a PhD’ process

Posted on 7 August 2021 by Helen Wilding

This week, I received notification that I have been awarded a PhD – the first piece of official correspondence I have received to Dr Helen Wilding. On the one hand this is very exciting, but it also feels a little bit of an anti-climax. As I was updating various online profiles today with start date of 2013 and end date of 2021, I realised that for a good part of the last 15 months or so I have been ‘waiting’ for my PhD, rather than ‘working’ on it.

Continue reading →

The discipline of Systems

Posted on 23 May 2021 by Helen Wilding

This blog is prompted by a conversation I was in the other day with other Open University Applied Systems Thinking in Practice colleagues.

The conversation triggered three related but not yet integrated streams of thought – just want to get them down so I can crystalise them enough to reflect on them. Continue reading →

On the practice of literature review

Posted on 30 April 2020 by Helen Wilding

In the last few days, I have been in an email exchange with some other PhD students about literature review. The conversation made me realise how much my understandings of what this is have changed over the course of my PhD journey as I have drawn on both my tradition of systems thinking and literature about literature review.

Continue reading →

Food shopping in an uncertain world

Posted on 18 March 2020 by Helen Wilding

Like many people, I have been shocked at the problems created by panic buying of food supplies. But I’ll also confess I have perhaps followed it more than others because my brother (Prof Richard Wilding) is a supply chain specialist and is being interviewed and quoted on the problems.

Whilst there are the really extreme cases that we see of people buying up (sometimes with a view to sell on) huge volumes of in-demand products, I suspect that everyone is putting a little bit more in their shopping baskets. All these small changes do add up – they add up to empty shelves and less supplies for those who can only shop weekly due to finances and/or ability to carry or store large volumes of food.

So what should I do? Should I adapt my food shopping for an uncertain world, and if so what is reasonable and ethical?

I’ve realised that I can’t adapt unless I examine what I do now – how do I go about managing the larder (including fridge and freezer)? Or, what do I do when I do what I do? Continue reading →

Evidence in support of a claim

Posted on 5 March 2020 by Helen Wilding

Toulmin (cited in Hart,1998; Wright, 2012) developed a model of an argument that I find really helpful in thinking about what is important when I am trying to argue a point or convince someone about something. (if this is new to you I’d highly recommend the youtube video in the reference list – Wright, 2012).

Whilst there are lots of different elements in the model, the key idea is that if you are to make a claim, then you should provide appropriate evidence to support that claim. The other day, I was in a conversation which made me realise that ‘appropriate evidence’ can be quite a contested term – it means different things to different practice communities. Continue reading →

Just Practicing

sharing my journey through landscapes of practice

How do I understand professional practice and practice development?

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Introducing situations cleanly

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What is ‘STiP research’?

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The tail end of the ‘getting a PhD’ process

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The discipline of Systems

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On the practice of literature review

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Food shopping in an uncertain world

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Evidence in support of a claim

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