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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2022
What this book is about
This book is about achieving holistic change in complex social and organisational settings.This is sometimes called ‘whole system change’. A holistic approach to intervention is crucial because complex issues cannot be adequately comprehended in isolation from the wider system of which they are a part. Things that happen within one arena affect, and are affected by, things that happen in other arenas, in ways which are often not easy to see. It is not enough just to see things holistically. Effective whole system change has to be underpinned by processes of in-depth inquiry, multi-stakeholder analysis, experimental action and experiential learning, enacted across a wide terrain. Systemic action research offers a learning architecture for this sort of change process.
Systemic action research is a process through which communities and organisations can adapt and respond purposefully to their constantly changing environments. It supports participative solutions to entrenched problems, and enables us to work with uncertainty:
It is through systemic thinking that we know of the unknowable. It is with action research that we learn and may act meaningfully within the unknowable. (Flood, 2001, p 142)
As we face more and more that is unknown and not capable of being understood or controlled, we must approach learning and change as relational and improvisational processes. This inevitably means building cultures that support new forms of collaborative inquiry and action research. (Weil, 1997)
Systemic action research opens up the possibility of strategy development that can meaningfully engage with the complexities of the real world. In this respect it is a challenge to the rolling out of ‘best practice’, to ‘strategic planning’, and to the models of linear causation that dominate our organisational and political landscape. These consistently fail because they are based on an assumption that intervention outcomes are relatively straightforward to predict, if only we could get enough of the right sort of evidence:
… once we can predict, we can engineer the world and make it work in the way that we want it to.… The trouble is that much, and probably most, of the world doesn't work in this way. Most systems do not work in a simple linear fashion…. (Byrne, 1998, p 19)
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