Given that this book was not intended to be primarily methodological, it is important to place the issues that it raises in the context of policy and politics. With this in mind I want to conclude succinctly with some implications for organisations and for public participation. In this chapter I highlight the importance of the following:

• • building emergence into organisational decision-making processes

• • generating a different sort of evidence

• • rethinking dissemination and roll-out

• • re-assessing investment risk (commissioning uncertainty)

• • replacing the principle of consistency with the idea of appropriate action

• • enabling sustainable interventions

• • re-conceptualising participation.

Building emergence into organisational decision-making Processes

One of the biggest challenges facing organisations is the failure of centralised planning. Among the reasons for planning failure are that plans are often out of date by the time they are finished; they limit options (because we frequently do not know what new possibilities are available until we have taken some steps down the road); they result in unintended consequences and so on (see the Introduction to this book and Chapter Two). Despite this, organisations continue to rely on planning because there appears to be no alternative, and because it provides a form of accountability against which activities can be assessed.

Embedding action research into the decision-making process offers an alternative but it requires us to focus on the direction of travel and core values rather than trying to anticipate all of the details of implementation. This can be seen as a process of strategic improvisation that enables strategic intervention in ways that can respond flexibly to real world change. It also means that the action research has to be viewed as much more than a method of generating ideas that are then placed into traditional decision-making arenas for agreement. Systemic action research has to be constructed as part of the management and leadership process. This means that we have to let go of the traditional distinctions between different organisational tasks and roles such as leadership, management, research, organisational development and evaluation. These categories need to be collapsed.

Systemic action research is essentially about learning in its many forms, and learning does not respect role and task boundaries. So a critical question for organisations now is how to locate inquiry-based learning and action at the heart of the decision-making process for the organisation.