Conversational Inquiry as an Approach to Organization Development
Patricia Shaw, Associate Director, Complexity and Management Centre, University of Hertfordshire Business School, UK.
Journal of Innovative Management, vol. 11, no. 2, 2005/2006, pp. 34-37
Extract form the article:
Organizational Continuity and Change
We are in the midst of a sea change in our understanding of how organizational continuity and change arise. We have concentrated on trying to design and implement future states, explaining, in hindsight, what actually comes about as the successful realization of our prior intentions. However as the complex interdependencies of our world become increasingly apparent, the illusory nature of our traditional understandig of control - of being able to trace simple chains of cause and effect, of re-engineering the form of our organizational activities - is proving illusory. So we are now shifting towards understanding how outcomes emerge from the local self-organizing interaction of multiple intentions in webs of power relations, where there is no single source of change.
This is leading us to explain continuity and change as arising through intensive processes of joint inquiry amongst diverse participants. The focus is shifting from the design of outcomes to the design of, and participation in, inquiry processes. This is not inquiry understood as investigation into a static set of facts to find simple causal connections. Rather, this is inquiry as an active on-going process of re-creating our situation. Inquiry means making fresh sense between us of how we get to be here and how we can move on, thus remaking the potentialities of the situations we are continuously constructing together. We are coming to recognize that complex change arises thorugh the movement of inquiry itself rather than as a result of it.
The article is to be read in: Journal of Innovative Management, vol. 11, no. 2, 2005/2006, pp. 34-37
