Almost half way through my written work, and the joys of action research.

Now back from the latest Roffey residential, and I can’t believe how fast the time has gone. We’ve now completed three written pieces (admittedly one is the Development Agreement which sets out what we’re going to do next, but still) out of the total of seven.

It was great to be back with the wider group, although it also made me realise with a bit of a shock that there are only two further residentials left before the end of the programme. One of the things I have been surprised about is that it has been relatively easy (so far anyway) to agree a programme of topics and areas for the residentials that has enough of interest and worth to everyone in the group.I am on the organising group for the next one, so I hope we do it justice, and that that continues to be the case.

As usual, a variety of different people came to share their thinking at the residential, with a variety of different comfort stretches. This time around topics we covered coaching, action research, the Gestalt approach, power and politics and graphic facilitation.

Of these, the thing that stuck with me the most was actually some of the learning around action research. I have to admit, I wasn’t necessarily expecting the research piece to be overly enlightening. Don’t get me wrong – I recognise the importance of well designed, well thought out research, and having a clear understanding of the pros, cons and limitation of whatever approach you choose, whether qualitative or quantitative.But I wouldn’t say that indepth consideration of research methodology exactly… sets my heart on fire.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find that the session was far more refreshing than that. The speaker shared their experiences of research, the message that this was about ‘important work’ and finding an inquiry that was really and genuinely important to us in terms of the impact we want to have in the world. They also shared their experience of a successful research project, which - as a consequence of the discussions on equality that were had within an organisation – led to a small but significant shift in culture in that the more junior women started talking to the senior women in the lunch queue. Not the most conventional measure of research success perhaps but despite that something they were really proud about; that felt it made the work worthwhile. Important work.

I had a bit of a revelation at this point, which seems embarrassingly obvious in retrospect. I think I had been rather assuming that the research piece I would do (and indeed all research in general) would be something that would measure the way things are and find out a bit more about how they work, but not actually impact them in any way. But actually of course, it’s all a bit more complicated than that.

On the one hand, that’s a slightly unsettling realisation: it would be nice if there was a ‘right and wrong’ answer to everyone and the trick was just to follow the instructions. On the other hand, it’s quite inspiring: the research work we will do might have a positive impact on the world it is exploring, while it is exploring it, and because of that, it seems more alive and relevant than it did before.