Partners
Gathering Information
Making Sense
Reflecting-in-Action.
Attending to Curiosities
Whether we are engaged in formal/official research or clinical or everyday practice, we become interested in a topic or energized by an unrelenting dilemma, or we notice that we keep repeating the same question or understanding. In our clinical work, we pay close attention to the words and phrases our clients use when they present their troubles and the professional rules, traditions, and voices we adhere to; in reading research, we focus on the language and themes used in the literature and the words and phrases that appear in the calls for grant monies or in our professional discourses. We get curious about consistencies, inconsistencies, and we answer the question of what intrigues us, what we would like to understand better and why. These questions orient us to aspects of our world and invite action.
Speculating
As human beings, when faced with dilemmas or concerns, it is hard for us to leave the blanks open, the mysteries unsolved. We tend to fill in those blanks and imagine possible answers to those questions in order to have an understanding and move forward. We begin to synthesize from what we have come to know. This reveals the extent of what we know and the extent of what we do not know. In speculating, we can begin to get more specific and clear regarding what we are curious about and begin to reformulate key questions so that we might focus our work precisely and efficiently. It becomes a calculated hunch that can help us begin to engage with the topic of interest. It could be called a hypothesis, a guess, a working assumption, ‘starter dough’ – it is most simply, a place to start. It does not lock us into a position – we can reshape our speculations as we go along (and we most likely will).
Enlisting Partners
There is no need to pursue questions as a solo mission; we can usually find others who are similarly intrigued and who can provide support for one another. These may be clients, students, employees, or neighbors. There is much to be said for collecting other viewpoints on an issue that stimulate and extend our curiosity. Connecting with others who share a concern or question is a pivotal component. The initiative in which we invite/encourage inquirers to engage others transforms an individual idea or wish into a collective one. This reverses the trend to separate our questions and inquiries from others. Questions change when we join with others to examine issues that concern us.
When we face a clinical or teaching dilemma for example, we actively wonder if we are alone in this or if there are others in our agency/practice/circle of colleagues who experience this issue. Our experience has been that there are always others who share our interests or concerns. A developing curiosity is how our clients and students could join us in our curiosities about the dilemmas we experience in our efforts to try to help them. This is an example of how one of our six initiatives carries within it the seeds of another one of the initiatives (attending to curiosity). One of the surest ways we have found to expand our thinking is to engage others in our work (Bohm, 1996).
Gathering Information
Practitioners in the field, whether working with projects, people, or situations, are aided in decision-making by gathering information that has been already created, developed, and utilized. We can do this by conversing with others, reflecting on our own thoughts/experiences, noticing effects and patterns, and seeking variety/diversity.
We sometimes have very targeted questions, other times more general questions, and other times we may switch our questions once we are engaged in the process. We may connect with ‘insiders’ to the issues or we may solicit relative outsiders to gain some breadth or fresh views. New information often influences our question and we might revise it as we integrate the information we are gathering. You can see that we have already jumped ahead into the making sense part of the process, because it is hard for us not to think about new information and organize it as we take it in. This crisscrossing of these initiatives moves smoothly because they are all part of the process of engaging with our worlds – they are tools that are utilized as the situation or issue-at-hand indicates. They are chosen and utilized as the situation merits. Some issues may require more of the different components we have at our disposal (‘tools in the toolbox’).
Making Sense
We must admit, this is probably our favorite part – this is where the picture of what we are doing (or going to do) really starts to take visible shape. We have loads of information and usually new information continues to stream into our thinking. Now we need to do something with it to bring the informational pieces together into something that the individual bits cannot provide – something that will lead to and make action sensible and worthwhile. This is where we start to assemble the various ‘pieces’ to form a picture – a matter of ‘engaged unfolding’ (McNamee and Hosking, 2012, p. 45). From our social constructionist ways of understanding, the pieces we are bringing together are not revealing a picture that was always there – the sizes and shapes of the pieces work together to create a coherent picture that was not pre-ordained (Gergen, 2015). The various elements we have chosen to bring together can be assembled in a number of different ways, each embracing a sort of coherence of its own. We shape our understandings.
We like to challenge ourselves to step outside of the expected, the known, the usual, or our ‘comfort zone’ in order to gain some freshness or newness to our thinking. We ask ourselves the following questions of the information we have collected:
What are we coming to know that was not visible before?
How are our actions aligning with what is already known and accepted?
What possibilities arise from imagining alternative ideas to the status quo? What limitations do they present?
What surprising ideas have we been starting to notice?
What are some of our assumptions or understandings that are getting in the way of seeing things differently?
The questions above fit all manner of choices and decisions. Making sense of the information will be idiosyncratic to each decision-maker – the ‘facts’ may be organized in very different ways by different people.
Reflecting-in-Action
Reflecting-in-action means that we are deliberately trying out our new learnings. It could also mean sharing these ideas with others and then attending to their responses. We do best when we ask ourselves questions about what we see and experience. Those keep us on our toes, prevent us from becoming complacent and are more generative than making assertions and definitive statements.
What new questions can we develop that take into consideration possible influences that we cannot at this time see?
What new courses of action and joining with others are available to us now? What are new avenues to pursue that we did not see before (or were willing to overlook)?
Are there better questions to pose and pursue? What shape would those questions take?
Do we have new curiosities that have started to form? If so, what are they?
Initiatives
