We’ve just been having our dining room redecorated and recarpeted to make it into a better study/office and not a dining room. This means I have had to carry all the contents of our bookshelf upstairs (two weeks ago) and back down again (today).
Now bearing in mind, this household has two OU MBAs – gained through slightly different elective routes – plus my MSc STiP. I started to realise just how many books we have with ‘managing’ or ‘management’ in the title. Continue reading
There seems to be a bit of a thing going on this week about terms like measurement, targets, payment by results, outcomes. It has been going on a while in conversations I have had (both face to face and on-line) and a number of systems bloggers are writing about it but it all seems to be getting a bit busier this weekend…it seems to be coming to a head.
So to start with I’ll mention all the activity that has prompted me to turn to the keyboard to add to the conversation – or if not adding to it then at least summarising where my own thinking is going to. Continue reading
One of the threads of academic discourse I have accrued papers on as I have been doing the ‘literature reviewing’ work referred to in my last post is that of “collaborative governance” – a recurring theme in public administration theory and research. As my first in-road, I decided to read the most recent paper in my list – I figured that the new stuff will build on the shoulders of the old stuff so even if I don’t feel particularly inspired by the new stuff – at least I have a feeling of the names of the people who write about this stuff. So the top of the pile (that is speaking figuratively, coz it’s all electronic) was a paper published in January 2012 (a year ago) by Emerson et al – called “An integrative framework for collaborative governance”.
It took a while to get used to the language – lots of familiar words, being used with particular nuances. I read it, read it again and then started realising just how helpful it is to me in my work (yes, distracted from my journal article per se but nevertheless useful and interesting). Perhaps it is the ‘integrative’ nature – in that it pulls on a wide range of other writing. Perhaps it is the ‘framework’ side – hey, I love a theory, particularly one that comes with a diagrammatic conceptual model. But I feel I’ve come across a gem.
You’ll see I haven’t been blogging much recently. It’s not that I haven’t been doing any thinking or reading – just that none of it is coherent enough to rally together into a blog post. It’s a little weird not having the rigour of an academic course to say – read this, think about it, reflect it back in assignments – at least the academic courses gave me a route, a journey to follow, and a timetable. Sure I did little forays every now and again – up interesting cul de sacs and detours, but the main journey was charted for me and I could see what it was to make progress. Continue reading
I have now been chatting about my research to enough people to start getting requests for the ‘products’ – so here is a page of downloads that I’ll probably add to over time…
I have been thinking a lot about change recently. I have got this muddled mess in my head about it. But as I sat down to write this blog, I realised I have been here before…
30/10/10 – one of my first ever blogs – The nature of change
12/11/10 – not long after Changing practice
27/12/10 – Worldviews and theories of change
14/3/11 – Managing systemic change
I think my latest quest perhaps has more to do with ‘managing’ change, rather than change per se. I think it was in B822 Creativity, innovation and change that the following approaches to change were laid out: Continue reading
Can’t believe nearly a month has gone by since my last blog… but hey it is supposedly ‘summer’ and there has been the distraction of the olympics. But I thought I’d better return to my inquiry into helping..
There are a number of other chapters in Schein’s book after the one on humble inquiry, but they are more about applications of the ideas covered in all the blogs to date, rather than new information. Continue reading
Having made the case that it is most appropriate to start out as a helper in the role of process consultant (the what and the why), Schein goes into humble inquiry – as the ‘how’ of being a process consultant.
Humble inquiry helps to do three key things – firstly, equalise the relationship by making what the client knows become all important; secondly, shows that as the helper you are attentive and interested in the client’s situation; and finally, it helps get more information and remove some of the ambiguity and unknowns from the situation so that as the helper you have more of an idea of what to do next. Continue reading
Moving on to the fourth Chapter of Schein’s book on Helping. We now look at the choice that the helper can make about the kind of helping role to take on (which goes back to the background material on social theatre that was covered in Chapter 2). Continue reading
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