On embodied collaborative developmental action inquiry

Jacqueline van Paasen and myself discussed our Embodied Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry to Become More Reflexive Research-Practitioners in Action paper with Tomas Boatwright of the AR+ Yes-And Podcast.

We want to begin by thanking Tomas for hosting us with such generosity and depth, and the Action Research Plus Foundation for creating the space in which this conversation could take place. Tomas's questions opened territory we had not anticipated, and his patience with our digressions allowed us to think aloud and explore the topics in depth. We are grateful, too, to the listeners and readers of this work who are part of how it continues to develop.

Tomas guided us through a roughly two-hour discussion of our jointly authored paper. We reflected on how a sustained co-inquiry practice (fourteen cycles of action and reflection over roughly three years with our doctoral cohort, followed by four further groups we each hosted in external contexts) deepened our capacity for reflexivity. We tried to be honest that we hold reflexivity not as a static declaration of positionality but as a continuous, embodied practice of noticing how personal history, culture, and bodily conditioning shape what becomes perceivable and sayable in the moment of inquiry.

The dialogue moved between methodological scaffolding (Torbert's four territories of experience, Heron's typology of participation, Schön on reflection-in-action) and candid disclosure of what broke when the practice met clients, corporate cultures, and participants without doctoral-level conceptual fluency. We tried throughout to treat our own missteps as data and to offer the work transparently for others to adapt critically.

We came away from the conversation more aware of our own missteps and more curious about the limits of our frameworks. If anything in our work proves useful to readers and listeners, we would be glad to hear how you have adapted it in your own context. Once again, our thanks to Tómas, to the AR+ team, and to everyone who has engaged with the paper. We continue to learn from the conversation.

You can listen to the episode here or using the player below:

Since it is a two hour long episode, we offer a summary of key themes we discussed below, as well as the raw transcript. Do note that transcript was machine generated and might contain inaccuracies.

Key themes we explored

1. Reflexivity as embodied, ongoing inquiry

We treat reflexivity as the cornerstone quality criterion of action research, and we insisted in the conversation that it must exceed the listing of identities common in published work. Drawing on Schön, Bruno framed it as reflection on reflection in action: where reflection notices the gap between intended and actual behaviour, reflexivity notices how we noticed that gap. Jacqueline pushed the definition further, arguing that the practice also exceeds Heron's critical subjectivity and intersubjectivity. The lived question we keep returning to is: how am I, right now, shaping what is sayable, perceivable, and possible in this inquiry? The practice is therefore an embodied noticing in real time. Sensing a tightening in the chest when conflict looms. Catching the urge to withdraw or to dominate. Observing the moment when one's voice has taken too much space. We hope to make the location of self a living inquiry rather than a paragraph in a methods section.

2. The craft and challenge of forming co-inquiry groups

In the paper we describe five inquiry groups, and the conversation gave us room to trace what each one taught us.

• Our first group (the doctoral four): heavy upfront investment paid off. We spent two to three sessions on a charter that included "ethics in practice", "ethically important moments", and "what do we want to experience". The cultural diversity of the group (four nationalities, none of us living in our country of origin) gave us ready material for noticing enculturated triggers. We deliberately worked toward what we call brave space rather than merely safe space: a space in which participants surface what feels ridiculous, raw, or out of place precisely because it is arising.
• Bruno's two dyads: same process, divergent outcomes. One worked. The other fell apart. On reflection, Bruno located the failure in having accepted a premature yes on political participation without further inquiry.
• Jacqueline's first PhD group (her "pilot"): she now reads this as a single cycle of inquiry rather than a clean failure. No individual onboarding conversations, unclear expectations, and participants who defaulted to talking about clients rather than themselves.
• Jacqueline's second group: individual conversations beforehand, daily between-session embodied practices, and a commitment to "speaking from" rather than "speaking about" experience. This became her PhD principal group.

The methodological lesson we keep encoding is Heron's distinction between epistemic participation (everyone has lived experience in the inquiry) and political participation (everyone can shape question, methods, scope). Our practical claim is that political participation cannot be granted or instructed, only invited through radical transparency of process. The familiar pattern where researchers identify a problem, locals join, and "when the researchers leave, research dies" is, for us, evidence of participation achieved only in appearance. We have come to believe that the facilitator must themselves become an invitation: their embodied comfort with emergence is what makes brave space materially available, beyond what any written charter can deliver.

3. Embodiment as the nexus of knowing and acting

For listeners less familiar with Torbert, we used the conversation to lay out the two practical scaffolds we work with.

Our principled departure from Torbert is to insist that the body is not a parallel territory but the underlying foundation on which all territories rest. Cognition depends on bodily engagement with the world, and meaning-making is therefore embodied throughout. Pre-reflective bodily patterns, sedimented through culture and early life, shape what we even allow ourselves to perceive. Bruno noted the irony, common in this literature, that there is a great deal of writing on embodiment that is itself disembodied. Bruno's own access route is roughly thirty years of martial arts; Jacqueline's is somatic and relational practice. We shared one illustration from inside our inquiry group: one of our co-inquirers, whose cultural shaping made conflict particularly charged, proposed that humour in the group might be masking unaddressed conflict. The observation was simultaneously a genuine insight and a lens shaped by his own embodied history. We treated such moments as the working material of inquiry rather than as noise.

4. Power dynamics and the danger of action research

Bruno opened this section bluntly by saying that action research is dangerous, precisely because when it succeeds at equalising power within the inquiry, it can leave participants aware of injustices they cannot yet act on, which is itself a form of harm researchers must reckon with. Jacqueline then offered what may have been the conversation's sharpest disagreement between us, challenging Bruno's "doing it right" framing and arguing that fully mutual inquiry is a myth, because the primary researcher always retains subtle power regardless of intent. She gave a personal example, naming Bruno's early dominance as a confident male voice, and Bruno's self-chosen developmental edge of "becoming more permeable" by deliberately speaking later in group sessions. Bruno added a counter-example of how unilateral self-disclosure used to demand reciprocity is not equalisation but coercion. Where we converge is on the operative task: surface power explicitly, attend to who is speaking and who is withholding, and weave that observation into the inquiry itself rather than pretend it has been resolved.

5. Practical and personal trajectories

The work has already shifted our professional practice. Jacqueline has moved from individual coaching toward hosting relational circles in corporate settings, where people are invited to speak to patterns rooted in shame or early conditioning. She has observed that releasing the effort of "managing" these hidden parts liberates energy and supports a more humane workplace. Bruno is integrating the findings into his doctoral thesis on innovation, treating the body as the nexus of practice, inquiry, and engagement with uncertainty. Innovation work, like action research, demands tolerance for the unknown, and attending to the body can unlock a more flexible, creative range of responses.

The closing advice we gave ourselves was brief and characteristic. Bruno: pause, take a break. Jacqueline: trust your own voice while holding it humbly, and keep widening the circle of co-inquirers, because the kind of insight we care about only emerges in relationship.

Transcript

[Tomas]: Hello, listeners.
[Tomas]: Welcome.
[Tomas]: This is Action Research Journal with the Yes, Ann podcast.
[Tomas]: And I am Tomas Boatwright.
[Tomas]: I'm going to host our conversation today with Jackie Van Passen and Bruno Besitz.
[Tomas]: Today, we're going to talk about
[Tomas]: We are going to discuss their article, Embodied Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry to become more reflective research practitioners in action.
[Tomas]: I'm really excited for this conversation today.
[Tomas]: Hello and welcome to the Action Research Yes And Podcast.
[Tomas]: This is a podcast for and by action researchers who are helping transform a world of social and ecological crisis.
[Tomas]: Here you meet the scholar practitioners who are responding to crisis by creating human-centred social transformations.
[Tomas]: We dig into specific practices and theories of action research, both to understand and to be inspired.
[Tomas]: All participative action researchers, wherever you are in your journey, may deepen your practice and understanding of this action-liberating approach to knowledge.
[Tomas]: We invite you to check out the additional blog and show notes at actionresearchplus.com.
[Tomas]: These podcasts are made possible by our team at the Action Research Plus Foundation.
[Tomas]: As we get started, I want to take a moment to read a short bio for our two guests today.
[Tomas]: Jackie is a doctoral candidate at Holt-Ashridge Executive Education.
[Tomas]: Her research adopts an embodied relational perspective on adult development, exploring how conditioning and deeply ingrained patterns shape practitioners' capacity to serve as instruments of growth,
[Tomas]: Jackie partners with global senior leaders to develop work environments and human systems that are fit for complexity and designed for flourishing.
[Tomas]: Bruno Pešec is a doctoral candidate at Holt Ashridge Executive Education.
[Tomas]: His research is focused on how people in large organizations innovate and create change for the better.
[Tomas]: He interweaves martial arts, cooperative inquiry, and creative analytical writing to generate embodied, participatory, and actionable insight.
[Tomas]: Bruno works as a trusted advisor to senior leaders, helping them drive profitable innovation at scale.
[Tomas]: Jackie and Bruno, thank you so much for joining us today.
[Jacqueline]: Thank you for having us.
[Tomas]: Yes, absolutely.
[Tomas]: So I just read a short bio for you, and I want to just ask, is there anything that you would like to add to the bio, given our context today, focusing on action research?
[Tomas]: Is there anything that I missed or that you would like to add?
[Jacqueline]: Maybe one thing in the context of our joint research, it might be relevant to mention that I was born in the Netherlands.
[Jacqueline]: I lived in the US for a few years, resided in Spain for 18 years, and I currently live in the UK.
[Jacqueline]: And I'm mentioning that because my experience living in a Latin country as a founder of an integrative health center,
[Jacqueline]: Also, as a partner in a boutique consulting firm, if there's anything I learned from immersing myself in another culture and very relevant for our research, we become really aware of these enculturated biases that reveal themselves in the interaction with others from a dramatically different culture.
[Jacqueline]: So I think that's interesting.
[Jacqueline]: Bruno can speak to that as well.
[Jacqueline]: And we'll suppose we'll come back to that when we speak about an inquiry group, but that has been a very important aspect.
[Tomas]: Absolutely.
[Tomas]: Yeah.
[Tomas]: What you're sharing with us is that sharing a little bit about your lens, right?
[Tomas]: And I imagine that lens, sorry if there's,
[Tomas]: That lens, you know, you're thinking about your lens particularly when you're working with different types of clients or leaders.
[Tomas]: And I would be curious, right, how you attune your lens for action research and particularly participatory action research.
[Tomas]: Bruno, is there anything that you would like to add?
[Tomas]: to that bio?
[Bruno]: Well, you did a wonderful introduction.
[Bruno]: So I think everything else will be discovered and explored over the next hour or so.
[Bruno]: So I'm really looking forward to it.
[Bruno]: I'm so happy to be here with you and Jackie.
[Tomas]: Thank you.
[Tomas]: All right.
[Tomas]: Well, let's get into it.
[Tomas]: The first question that I have for you.
[Tomas]: So we know that we're here for the Yes And podcast, Exploring Action Research.
[Tomas]: Both of you, Jackie and Bruno, are doctoral candidates currently.
[Tomas]: And
[Tomas]: So in your experience doing research and immersed in your doctoral programs, what does it mean to you to be an action researcher?
[Tomas]: And how are the experiences with this current project and in your education, how is that shaping your understanding of action research?
[Jacqueline]: Wonderful question.
[Jacqueline]: Let me start with, in general, I would say to be an action researcher means you focus on the interweaving of science and practice, doing research with others who have a stake in the issue at hand, you're exploring.
[Jacqueline]: You orient towards human flourishing rather than creating knowledge for its own sake.
[Jacqueline]: Let's put it that way.
[Jacqueline]: For me personally, it has evolved into continuous practice of attending to how I am with others, how I act with others, how that contributes or moves away from a more just and sustained and human forms of organizing and living.
[Jacqueline]: So it means the boundaries between
[Jacqueline]: being a practitioner, being a researcher and living my own life, the soften these boundaries becomes a continuous as Judy Marshall says, living life is inquiry, you cannot really leave that position as you step out of your research project.
[Jacqueline]: So being an action researcher is less about a role related to a project, a research product, and more a way of moving through the world to have responsibility, care and openness to being changed, I would say.
[Jacqueline]: Yeah.
[Jacqueline]: we can speak to that more in the relevant for our inquiry because this position is very important related to what we have been looking at the first time.
[Tomas]: Oh, go ahead, please, sorry.
[Jacqueline]: No, we'd love to hear Bruno first.
[Tomas]: Well, I just wanted to kind of zero in on the softening aspect that you mentioned between these dimensions of self, if you will, right?
[Tomas]: you know, as an action researcher, you're thinking about the problem and the solution.
[Tomas]: And I love your point about, you know, softening these maybe borders between like my position as a researcher, my everyday selves, right?
[Tomas]: And then other parts of myself.
[Tomas]: You soften it because you recognize that working with others might need to call in that part of yourself, you know, at home, because you have insight that might work with this new relation, with this other relationship.
[Tomas]: Yeah.
[Tomas]: I was just gardening before our interview.
[Tomas]: I like to kind of like round myself, if you will.
[Tomas]: And gardening teaches you a lot about patience and observation and different forms of communication, not necessarily verbal, but what your article talks about sense making.
[Tomas]: And I like to think that I bring those things into my professional life as an educator or as a researcher in my collaboration, particularly because I have figured out how to soften some of those boundaries, if you will.
[Tomas]: Bruno, I would love to hear how you're thinking about action research.
[Tomas]: Or what it means to be a researcher?
[Bruno]: I've been close to listening.
[Bruno]: I mean, obviously, I know, Jackie, we've been working together for years, but it's always fascinating, you know, listening and getting reacquainted again and again, you know, how people think about important concepts.
[Bruno]: my my work into action research has come from completely different directions so by training i'm an engineer and a standard is you know doing research on objects blowing stuff up hammering stuff you know tracking everything to figure out what works what what doesn't work and since that was the only way i knew how to do research i took that once i started working and i i approached people the same way
[Bruno]: You know, you're my little lab rats and I'm going to figure out, you know, what makes you work, what doesn't.
[Bruno]: And I relatively quickly understood, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
[Bruno]: This doesn't really make sense to me.
[Bruno]: Why am I researching something like I'm on the outside when I'm part of the change that is happening?
[Bruno]: And I kind of went looking for better ways to generate practical outcomes, to generate insight.
[Bruno]: And that is how I stumbled upon action research.
[Bruno]: So I know action research, you can have very broad definition, etc.
[Bruno]: But really, for me, what's the most important differentiator is that action research is research with people instead of on people.
[Bruno]: And that for me is super important because that resonated, because that's how I was approaching my work.
[Bruno]: That's how I was approaching my research activities, etc.
[Bruno]: And everything else is a bonus that focus on practical outcomes, on participatory action, on human flourishing.
[Bruno]: That's all wonderful.
[Bruno]: But to me, what really brings it together is that thing that we are at the same time concurrently researcher and participant.
[Bruno]: And that sounds so beautiful when I say it out now, but it's so difficult in practice that we already wrote three papers on it.
[Bruno]: So it's amazing and more difficult than it sounds.
[Tomas]: It can be messy.
[Tomas]: Exactly.
[Tomas]: And I appreciate your article because you both of you are approaching this, you know, action research, assessing what tools you have available and
[Tomas]: and how might you attune those tools, those mindsets, those skills to, not necessarily do better work, but to support the work, to support the work so that it can be as full as possible.
[Tomas]: And to also not overlook,
[Tomas]: you know, the researchers' impacts, you know, as you brought up, right?
[Tomas]: Like we're part of whatever change happens, you know, on the other end.
[Tomas]: And so to be sensitive to all of those dynamics that are sort of at play in the messiness and the beauty of action research.
[Jacqueline]: Maybe one interesting point because Bruno alluded to this
[Jacqueline]: it sounded like I came to action research as a fully informed being, but I came from the same position as Bruno.
[Jacqueline]: I had studied, I had a master in health care management and policy and health sciences.
[Jacqueline]: Okay, organizational coaching and leadership, but focusing on elite performance.
[Jacqueline]: So a very positivist,
[Jacqueline]: take on on the world there's a there's a world out there that can be studied independently of who we are and what we bring to the world and starting this doctorate really opened my perspective of how narrow of a
[Jacqueline]: worldview i was holding and so the perspective that i alluded on earlier that that was more of an action researcher in the last few years but definitely what not one i came in with it was very confusing in the beginning yeah we we evolve and and you allude to this in the article right um
[Tomas]: And I think, um, uh, again, that's what I appreciate about your work, like getting more comfortable with the evolution and that process.
[Tomas]: Um, and then also attributing a, uh, analytic eye to, to that, to the evolution.
[Tomas]: Um,
[Tomas]: And you, so let's start talking about your action research, specifically your recent publication.
[Tomas]: You actually lay out.
[Tomas]: So my question for you is clarify your intention in doing this work.
[Tomas]: And you actually lay out your intentions.
[Tomas]: You consistently keep on coming back.
[Tomas]: Like, this is what we sought out to do.
[Tomas]: And this, you know, you're sort of reckoning with an aspiration to be much more present in the research.
[Tomas]: much more aware of sort of like, you know, what processes are happening.
[Tomas]: But for our listeners, can you share a little bit more about your intentions with this piece?
[Jacqueline]: Bruno, you start.
[Bruno]: I'd be happy to.
[Bruno]: At its simplest, what triggered the research that we are sharing in this paper was a little bit selfish.
[Bruno]: As Jackie said, when we came, when we discovered action research and we started wrestling with this messy and sometimes challenging and confusing new paradigm, confusing way of generating insights,
[Bruno]: What's valid now?
[Bruno]: How can we trust what we learned?
[Bruno]: There were so many questions and there's this huge abundance of both epistemological approaches and also methods.
[Bruno]: And since this is, after all, action research plus yes and, when we talk about methods, there is methods with little m, for example, all different journaling narratives, etc.
[Bruno]: And there's methods with big M,
[Bruno]: cooperative inquiry collaborative inquiry action inquiry you know name them so there's this huge breadth of things you could do and this is where we started okay we respect this we understand that this is important but what we want to zone in is that small little bit reflexivity because reflexivity is where we all
[Bruno]: We felt it was important for the quality of action research as a researching practice, but we struggled with being able to articulate, okay, but how do you do this reflexivity?
[Bruno]: How do we...
[Bruno]: embody this how do we implement this in our practice how do we make it a part part of us that's what kicked us off and this this little paper is is a part part of that how we wrestle with that over a period of what was it jackie three years and and then how we how we took that insight and
[Bruno]: used it in further inquiries because and I'll stop after a second.
[Bruno]: You asked us about action research.
[Bruno]: One of the beautiful things for me for action research is that is what is that?
[Bruno]: That is in 2001.
[Bruno]: First version of action research handbook is one of the most important elements is enduring consequence and enduring consequences demand enduring engagement.
[Bruno]: So this is not a research project of three weeks, but you engage consistently, persistently over a long period of time to learn more about yourself, about how you're impacted by the system, how you impact the system, and there are no shortcuts.
[Bruno]: So that was a little bit of a background.
[Bruno]: And I'll stop now here so, Jackie, you can fill in.
[Bruno]: But this, I think, is...
[Jacqueline]: important for understanding everything that came comes after yes absolutely bruno is speaking to more of our intentions when we started so maybe i can speak more to the intentions we have with publishing our work or the idea what's behind actually writing the article writing the paper and i think there are two pieces to this
[Jacqueline]: We feel that co-creating change with others, whether in the work context or research, we need to become more aware of how our early life experiences, cultural context, how does that inform our current experience?
[Jacqueline]: So through what we perceive, through how we make sense of things and how we act.
[Jacqueline]: If we don't do that, this goes beyond cognitively understanding these influences.
[Jacqueline]: And we come back to that when we speak about reflexivity.
[Jacqueline]: It's an embodied noticing, for example, the narrative we have when we experience certain sensations or the urge to withdraw or engage when there is a productive conflict going on in the group.
[Jacqueline]: inquire into how different relational context might trigger you and noticing these things requires an attunement to your own experience and attunement to to your own body so this is of course important both in individual context and in the collective how as a group and you spoke to that a little bit or you spoke to that a little bit before we started did a notion of power we won't go into that now but
[Jacqueline]: That is, how do we as a group, what are we not willing to see?
[Jacqueline]: Or what perspective is actually missing by how we constituted the group?
[Jacqueline]: Or what are we not allowing to emerge?
[Jacqueline]: So these questions.
[Jacqueline]: So another intention I think is bringing this work here specifically, developmental action inquiry, to other contexts and writing explicitly about the challenges we have
[Jacqueline]: we have these ideals when we are in action research as if what we do during our doctoral programs that's directly applicable in any context we feel it useful for.
[Jacqueline]: We want to be explicit what these challenges were and bridge these and come up with maybe suggestions of where to start if a group doesn't have the same level of trust or it doesn't have a post-conventional, you could say background.
[Jacqueline]: from which to start inquiry.
[Jacqueline]: So I think these two intentions were really important, bringing this to other contexts where it's incredibly important and recognizing that of the there and then of our lives is always present in the here and now when we are with other people.
[Tomas]: Beautifully said.
[Tomas]: Thank you so much for sharing
[Tomas]: a little bit about your intentions with this article and then the work at large.
[Tomas]: What I appreciate, and I think our listeners will appreciate this also, is that as action researchers, you are very keen to understand that many of these threads, the withholding
[Tomas]: of our ideas, the habits that we possess that are deeply ingrained, often implicit, the language that we immerse ourselves in, all of those, putting those things under a microscope, we find that they actually
[Tomas]: have an impact in the research, right?
[Tomas]: And so it's in our best interest to be intentional in having some space to discuss, explore, tease out those threads, because they might have a greater impact on what we end up discovering in the long run.
[Tomas]: And I think I appreciate you all kind of putting that front and center, right?
[Tomas]: There's no stone left unturned when it comes to action research because there are so many possibilities on where it can lead.
[Tomas]: Can you...
[Tomas]: Can you, for our listeners, can you share a little bit more about how you see your work
[Tomas]: sort of fitting in action research context.
[Tomas]: Describe the relevance of your work to others, to the listeners who are, you know, a wide variety of practitioners and researchers.
[Tomas]: Some, you know,
[Tomas]: starting out their career really just in the classroom and then on the other end of the spectrum have done many action research projects.
[Tomas]: So yeah, how are you thinking about the relevance of your work?
[Bruno]: May I offer a few words, Jackie, first?
[Jacqueline]: Please do.
[Bruno]: So continuing on what we just said.
[Bruno]: So anyone who is interested in action research will presumably go and take a little bit of a dive in the literature.
[Bruno]: And broadly, you have two types of literature.
[Bruno]: It's
[Bruno]: okay three if you can't count philosophical pieces but in general you will either be reading about breakthrough methods paradigms parts of them ontological underpinnings everything that's important and then there are other part which is a mix of hey this is something we did and this is how it worked or didn't work because of a b a b and c
[Bruno]: I would put our paper firmly in that second camp.
[Bruno]: And that is what we focused a lot on.
[Bruno]: Again, it was to scratch our own itch.
[Bruno]: I remember when we were taking a deep dive in all these methods, I was personally always hungry for, okay, I understand what you're telling me.
[Bruno]: This is fascinating.
[Bruno]: This is fascinating.
[Bruno]: But show me how did somebody do it?
[Bruno]: And why did it work?
[Bruno]: And why can I trust this outcome?
[Bruno]: For me, this question of validity has been huge and it remains huge in action research because action research is specific in a sense that it puts a big weight, onus, on the researcher to also explain why what are we sharing is trustworthy.
[Bruno]: in traditional positivist approach etc they are set upon and defined quality criteria and you just point to them and say checkbox check mark in action research no no no you have to argue this is the quality criteria why is that the quality criteria and how how we met it so in in this case uh you have a paper that shows
[Bruno]: to researcher practitioners how they used action inquiry, how they took inquiry practice from academic environment where everybody gets it to environment where only one person gets it, not because they're cognitively impaired or something, but because they just don't have experience with different research paradigm.
[Bruno]: So those nasty problems and my experience is that in academia, we have a little bit of aversion to nastiness.
[Bruno]: like even messiness that is presented is polished messiness it's not you know that that messiness where you have like you know you're all up like in a pigsty all muddy and whatnot but it's more like it's still beautiful messiness and that is kind of what we tried to show this is what we did like some of these things didn't really work and they were painful
[Bruno]: So maybe you managed to avoid them because we shared our naked experience.
[Bruno]: Hey, here are some things that did work and this is why we think they worked.
[Bruno]: use it critically, however you wish.
[Bruno]: And that is the type of paper we strived to write because we experienced transformation as we did at work.
[Bruno]: And as we know, action research is about small transformations and big, big transformations.
[Bruno]: Jackie, anything to add to that?
[Bruno]: Well, I know you have to add something.
[Jacqueline]: This piece, what you are highlighting here, let me start with that and then I'll speak to something else.
[Jacqueline]: I mean, we focus on reflexivity because reflexivity was, as Bruno said, it was in our own interest and, of course, a cornerstone of action research.
[Jacqueline]: The first thing we realized, it goes beyond, again, understanding where we are coming from and express that, articulate that simply in a paper.
[Jacqueline]: That is not reflexivity as we see it.
[Jacqueline]: So one example I want to give related to what Bruno said about the practices.
[Jacqueline]: We had the group journal, of course, a very durable exercise, sustained exercise during years.
[Jacqueline]: What we realized only over time by doing one kind of practice that was the person who was facilitating, which was a rotational practice.
[Jacqueline]: that that person would write about the outside world.
[Jacqueline]: In terms of Torbert, when you seek about the four territories of experience, one of the experiences is the outside world.
[Jacqueline]: So what we see
[Jacqueline]: what the results are of our actions.
[Jacqueline]: That it meant for the journal that the facilitator would simply say, this is what happened, this person spoke, this is what we saw, really literally what we could perceive.
[Jacqueline]: But the other three people would write about their personal experience from the other territories.
[Jacqueline]: What did I experience in my body?
[Jacqueline]: Where did I feel hesitancy?
[Jacqueline]: What were my thinking patterns?
[Jacqueline]: In what moment I did realize that I had an awareness of all three at the same time.
[Jacqueline]: We can speak a little bit more about the full practice of the four territories, but what I want to emphasize is only through the sustained practice of seeing more or less what we could say an objective description of something and then the differences between three people perceiving the same moment
[Jacqueline]: a moment in session in a very different way.
[Jacqueline]: We could learn from these differences and how we would attend to something and not to something else based on our shaping, based on our habits, based on certain expectations.
[Jacqueline]: But that was a way to make explicit these underlying dynamics.
[Jacqueline]: So it was one of that.
[Jacqueline]: And I think that is something that other practitioners, researchers, whether you're a researcher or a practitioner,
[Jacqueline]: That is key in any line of work we do with others.
[Jacqueline]: If we don't see that of ourselves, that shaping, then it will become very difficult.
[Jacqueline]: And I think one other piece that I hope we encourage others to do is this interweaving of first and second person inquiry, which is a huge challenge.
[Jacqueline]: We cannot start with a group who is not, you could say,
[Jacqueline]: accustomed to have dialogue, mutuality.
[Jacqueline]: We already spoke about power.
[Jacqueline]: If there's an hierarchical situation in a corporate context, people think they have dialogue, but they're not aware of power dynamics.
[Jacqueline]: If we start with an interweaving of first and second, and what we mean by that is simply speaking to inner experiences as they arise,
[Jacqueline]: speaking to what we see in the fields in the in between of the group arising and paying attention to content what are we actually speaking about working towards what is the purpose of what we're doing and doing that together is is a challenge but is one of the most rich you could say inquiries one could have to evolve for me for us as action researchers you can do
[Jacqueline]: Let me stop here if you have any other questions.
[Tomas]: Well, yes.
[Tomas]: What keeps on coming back to me is, you know, in this discussion about reflexivity, and I want to continue that conversation.
[Tomas]: I just want to kind of pull on this thread really for a moment.
[Tomas]: Transparency.
[Tomas]: There's a quality about transparency that you all
[Tomas]: really take seriously in your article, right?
[Tomas]: Like, you know, this is my process.
[Tomas]: This is the process that I'm bringing to this group or to how I'm, you know, seeing findings, et cetera.
[Tomas]: Can you speak a little bit about, you know, the value of transparency in this work?
[Tomas]: And yeah, how are you thinking about it as a component to research, action research?
[Jacqueline]: Shall I start, Bruno?
[Jacqueline]: So I think we can frame this within the kind of space we want to create to have this kind of a conversation or what makes it even possible.
[Jacqueline]: It is not so much a safe space.
[Jacqueline]: I would say that's the minimal required piece.
[Jacqueline]: Are people who are vulnerable and speak to what's arising in them, are they criticized or ridiculed?
[Jacqueline]: Of course, that is a minimal requirement, but it's more of what we call a brave space.
[Jacqueline]: That's something we had in our notes of the group document we created.
[Jacqueline]: The brave space means is speaking to things that you even consider maybe
[Jacqueline]: ridiculous or extremely vulnerable or out of place simply because they rise in the present moment.
[Jacqueline]: But these are the mirroring opportunities that you give space to others to reflect on what they're seeing in you.
[Jacqueline]: It might sometimes be an embodied response to something.
[Jacqueline]: Oh, Bruno, when I said this, I saw you moving like this, or I saw you moving backwards.
[Jacqueline]: It seemed like you were withdrawing.
[Jacqueline]: What's that about?
[Jacqueline]: Simply pointing out that you're observing something, it can be something that the person themselves brings forward because they, I experienced some, yeah, some inner conflict or I noticed that I have the tendency to withdraw.
[Jacqueline]: And bringing that forward is not the only thing we speak about, but it's mixed in with what the purpose of the inquiry is.
[Jacqueline]: And so the transparent space and the openness and the sufficient slowing down sometimes to be able to perceive what's happening is critical here because the tendency as we are all, especially Bruno and I in corporate context, it is go, go, go.
[Jacqueline]: There's a conventional context where results are primary to slow down people, to notice actually what's going on in the in-between and the inner world of a person.
[Jacqueline]: if you don't do that, there's no inquiry.
[Jacqueline]: So the transparency goes with courage and slowing down for me.
[Jacqueline]: What about you, Bruno?
[Bruno]: I mean, this is this is wonderful.
[Bruno]: I will not I'll strive to avoid repeating your points, Jackie, and approach it from from a different direction.
[Bruno]: And that is
[Bruno]: In my opinion, transparency of research process is inseparable from quality of participation.
[Bruno]: And when, well, I'm a big fanboy of Heron.
[Bruno]: So I think about participation, you know, the way he describes it, epistemic participation, everybody in the inquiry must participate personally in the experience and political participation.
[Bruno]: Everybody in the inquiry must participate
[Bruno]: have a choice of influencing the question, the methods and everything related to research.
[Bruno]: And the
[Bruno]: Only way I and we have so far found is to make the process transparent.
[Bruno]: And if you read some of the well-known action research papers, they will often lament how participation was missed out because of this or that.
[Bruno]: Smart researchers, they came to the side, they identified problems and people were coming along, but when they left, research died.
[Bruno]: That's because participation was actually not achieved.
[Bruno]: And you cannot mandate participation.
[Bruno]: You cannot actually even give participation.
[Bruno]: That was, I think, one of the big takeaways in our paper, Jackie.
[Bruno]: Even when we would tell to people, let's be participatory.
[Bruno]: Tell us, shape the research, participate in experience.
[Bruno]: You cannot do that even as a host.
[Bruno]: The best we can do is make the process transparent and make the invitation as genuine and as honest as possible.
[Bruno]: Hey, here is the process.
[Bruno]: Here is how you can join along to shape the research politically.
[Bruno]: This is how to join in epistemically.
[Bruno]: And it's actually epistemic participation is much easier because people, you know, it's embodied.
[Bruno]: You come in.
[Bruno]: we are doing something together you're drawn into it and energetic but when you start going into that political then it's very easy to accept oh you're the researcher you tell us how we're going to do this i mean isn't that what you're doing come on just just tell us you know facilitate this process and it's so easy to say yes
[Bruno]: What I want to be clear is that our experience has not been that the opposite works, where you say, no, we stop here and we're gonna participate hard.
[Bruno]: So it's more like this, what Jackie mentioned earlier, this softness, this navigating the process, understanding, you know, this is where we are today.
[Bruno]: Okay, I accept, I'm now going to shape this, but I still want your feedback.
[Bruno]: And next week we continue.
[Bruno]: And this was one of the big learnings for us because when we set up our inquiry group within the doctoral context, everybody wanted to have full participation because we are researchers.
[Bruno]: But once we started taking it out to corporate, we started experiencing this.
[Bruno]: Yeah, I want to participate and learn something, but why are you asking about methods?
[Bruno]: Like, why are we talking about this?
[Bruno]: Even when you try to eliminate the language, it's not like we sit down to plan the research, but, you know, picking the right dialogue approach, the right frame, etc.
[Bruno]: It has been so tricky.
[Bruno]: But again, this is the hard learning that we are sharing.
[Bruno]: And this transparency is so cool that you mentioned that because I don't think we actually explained in our paper why are we so transparent, but that is why we are so transparent.
[Jacqueline]: Yeah.
[Tomas]: Please, Jackie.
[Jacqueline]: Yeah.
[Jacqueline]: Yeah, thank you.
[Jacqueline]: I feel inclined to respond again to what Bruno is saying.
[Jacqueline]: We go into a corporate context and people, even in countries, and I'm saying that because northern countries, in general, there's a flatter organization.
[Jacqueline]: It's more normal that people, and especially my native country in the Netherlands, we speak our minds.
[Jacqueline]: We speak truth to power without any hesitation.
[Jacqueline]: which is in Southern Europe not always very appreciated, as I also acknowledged and experienced.
[Jacqueline]: But there is an expectation that there is mutuality
[Jacqueline]: but still within the constraints of the organization.
[Jacqueline]: So what mutuality actually in practice means is something different because it's in the normal, you could say hierarchy of an organization as compared what we mean by mutuality and create space.
[Jacqueline]: There is a,
[Jacqueline]: an openness to really diverse perspectives, a curiosity towards exploring these, in which often in a corporate context that is not appreciated because there's no time, there is this pressure, there's another appreciation of reward, you could say.
[Jacqueline]: But another thing I wanted to say, in addition to what Bruno said, and that is
[Jacqueline]: we cannot ignore that we learned it is also the facilitator who needs to become an invitation for this kind of space we cannot um put this outside of ourselves and say hmm they didn't understand was i was i transparent enough no it goes beyond being transparent enough it is can i look at myself how comfortable am i with this emergent
[Jacqueline]: you could say, structure.
[Jacqueline]: It's kind of a liberating structure, as Torbett uses it.
[Jacqueline]: That's sufficient structure to have dialogue around, but there's not so much structure that the emergent can be used to go anywhere in the inquiry.
[Jacqueline]: And I found, and I write about that in the paper, is that in one of the first inquiry groups I had outside our PhD inquiry group,
[Jacqueline]: I approached this as, okay, this is my first research group.
[Jacqueline]: This better be good.
[Jacqueline]: I'm more or less clear what I'm supposed to be doing.
[Jacqueline]: Yes, there is the emergent and yes, there is some structure and I can hold that both mentally and cognitively.
[Jacqueline]: I saw that happening, but in practice,
[Jacqueline]: I invited people to speak about their clients because these were all practitioners.
[Jacqueline]: So practitioners in adult development, in vertical development, both as in somatic practitioners.
[Jacqueline]: But I invited them, what happens when we do this kind of embodied practices with our client?
[Jacqueline]: What do you see there?
[Jacqueline]: What do you see there?
[Jacqueline]: And I had not been specific about the kind of space I was aiming to create.
[Jacqueline]: And that meant a first person in choir.
[Jacqueline]: We first look at ourselves as practitioners.
[Jacqueline]: Where do I feel comfortable?
[Jacqueline]: Where is my, where am I willing to
[Jacqueline]: yeah to live on my growing edge as i do research and as i am with my clients so that was an important learning for me what does it mean even to become an invitation for this kind of spaces and it became so important this is one of the questions i have in my my doctoral research so it became a very very interesting question so the invitation piece together with transparency
[Jacqueline]: what it means, give them information.
[Jacqueline]: What is this kind of space?
[Jacqueline]: What are these kind of practices we engage in in this kind of space?
[Jacqueline]: But then your embodying of this kind of invitation is vital.
[Tomas]: I want to ask you more questions.
[Tomas]: That's me pulling on the thread.
[Tomas]: pulling on multiple threads.
[Tomas]: The viewers can't, or listeners can't see that.
[Tomas]: But I want to ask you more questions about the co-inquiry groups.
[Tomas]: Because can you tell us a little bit more about that process for forming them?
[Tomas]: Because you're, I think it's in the beginning of the article, you offer us insight, right?
[Tomas]: You're like, no, we want to improve these
[Tomas]: we want to get really clear about practices that open us up, that recognizes, that filters how we work with people and how we're thinking about the work.
[Tomas]: And I think you also mentioned this desire to have safe space.
[Tomas]: So let's talk a little, let's talk some more about those co-inquirer groups that you formed.
[Tomas]: Can you describe the process for forming these groups and maybe speak a little bit more about, so we've so far, I've talked a little bit about reflexivity and transparency and then now comes like this self-awareness or I think insight might be a better, cause it's not just about the individual.
[Tomas]: But you had an inclination that there was a need to explore a facet of the research.
[Tomas]: And you use the co-inquiry groups to explore that, you know, those processes.
[Tomas]: So, yeah.
[Tomas]: Can you tell us a little bit more about how you formed those groups?
[Tomas]: What went into forming those, the co-inquiry groups?
[Tomas]: Yeah.
[Jacqueline]: maybe Bruno could start with the process of our inquiry group during the doctorate and I can speak to a little bit more to the other groups I formed after that.
[Bruno]: Yeah.
[Bruno]: So for, um,
[Bruno]: for clarification, dear listener, in the paper, we are discussing actually several inquiry groups.
[Bruno]: And we start with the first that was by people from our doctoral cohort.
[Bruno]: And then we describe four more groups.
[Bruno]: each that Jack and I started outside of the doctoral cohort.
[Bruno]: So I'm now talking about this first one within the cohort.
[Bruno]: That was based on, as I said, our shared interest in becoming better at reflexivity because we struggled a little bit.
[Bruno]: So that is what brought us together.
[Bruno]: That's that political participation.
[Bruno]: We had the shared question.
[Bruno]: And as Jackie mentioned minutes ago, we were very set on doing it right.
[Bruno]: And for context, this were basically four professionals that all to some extent have coaching experience, contracting experience, development experience.
[Bruno]: So, you know, we went all guns blazing.
[Bruno]: We got a contract together.
[Bruno]: We will have, you know, meetings together.
[Bruno]: Like we really put in the work and it did pay off.
[Bruno]: So I think we spent two to three sessions just discussing, engaging in conversation, exploring with each other, you know, what are our boundaries?
[Bruno]: how do we want to participate in it?
[Bruno]: What are the limitations?
[Bruno]: What's in, what's out?
[Bruno]: And it did work in our favor because that is then what served us for the next two years as we repeatedly engaged in inquiry.
[Bruno]: This is also where we learned all these things that do work and don't work.
[Bruno]: And once we started taking it to other inquiries, it also helped us understand, oh, wow, what didn't work.
[Bruno]: I'll briefly say about two inquiry groups.
[Bruno]: And then, Jackie, you fill in with the two inquiry groups that you describe, EIG 1 and 2.
[Bruno]: In my case, after our joint experience with Action Inquiry Group, I wanted to set up two inquiry, I call them diets, because it was two persons.
[Bruno]: And I literally picked up the phone and called the person, hey, listen, I'm looking into this.
[Bruno]: Are you interested in inquiring with me?
[Bruno]: And then we took it from there.
[Bruno]: And what I'm sharing in the paper is that
[Bruno]: Initially, I thought that I'm doing the same process with both persons.
[Bruno]: With one person, it worked great.
[Bruno]: With another person, everything fell apart.
[Bruno]: And to me, at the moment, that was unclear.
[Bruno]: Why did that happen?
[Bruno]: So going back to our action inquiry group together, reflecting...
[Bruno]: being reflexive on the whole process, I was able to identify where did I actually stray.
[Bruno]: And it has a lot to do with what I mentioned earlier about ensuring political participation, accepting yes or accepting no prematurely and not doing anything.
[Bruno]: anything anything about it but that forming process for actioning per group was very intense but that helped us uh jackie learn what to reuse in the future future groups and i know jackie you had similar experience with your first and then second group so so i'll let you fill in on on that thank you bruno
[Jacqueline]: And one thing I would like to add, I think it was vital in the group charter we did with the cohort of the PhD.
[Jacqueline]: We also had a piece that was called ethics in practice was part of our group chapter, and then how we would respond to things happening in the group, and that it was more attending to what we called ethically important moments beyond simply rules beyond
[Jacqueline]: what we would articulate as ethical, because things arise in an emerging context.
[Jacqueline]: You cannot rely on rules.
[Jacqueline]: It's responding in the moment to what happens and what that means when we do.
[Jacqueline]: So we included that in
[Jacqueline]: in the in the group chapter and there was a piece what are we committing to what do we want to experience was another one that what do we find important to experience in a group like that so it made it more experiential as well made it more humane in many ways so I think a group chapter should not simple be
[Jacqueline]: This is the purpose.
[Jacqueline]: This is the aim of our inquiry.
[Jacqueline]: And how do we behave?
[Jacqueline]: That doesn't fit in this context.
[Jacqueline]: It's very important to go deeper with that.
[Jacqueline]: So that's the first thing I want to say.
[Jacqueline]: The groups that Bruno alluded to.
[Jacqueline]: So while we're still in this group, the reflexivity group,
[Jacqueline]: I started my PhD research group, the first one.
[Jacqueline]: I often call it a pilot and maybe I just call it a pilot because I failed in many respects and I want to see it as a pilot.
[Jacqueline]: But it's one cycle of inquiry.
[Jacqueline]: We can see it that way.
[Jacqueline]: So what I learned from our group
[Jacqueline]: we said it before, we had held four different nationalities.
[Jacqueline]: We were from different supervision groups in the PhD group, and also none of us lived in our country of origin.
[Jacqueline]: So with that immersion in different cultures, we had already more awareness about
[Jacqueline]: tensions that could come up, which were basically gateways into discovering more about ourselves.
[Jacqueline]: Oh, why is this irritating me?
[Jacqueline]: Oh, why do I want to do that with that person?
[Jacqueline]: And although I lived in Spain, for example, we had a gentleman from Argentina in our PhD group.
[Jacqueline]: And I noticed often certain things that would trigger me in Spain would also trigger me in him.
[Jacqueline]: So that was very interesting to notice.
[Jacqueline]: So from that perspective, I chose in my group, there were people from the US, the UK, Mexico, Russia, the Netherlands, that was me, and Canada in the first group.
[Jacqueline]: And I thought, okay, diverse group, this will work.
[Jacqueline]: We're going to inquire.
[Jacqueline]: And what I said before, I didn't really have individual conversations with each of these participants to hear their, I had it,
[Jacqueline]: via email with certain questions, so there was contact in different ways.
[Jacqueline]: But there was no clarity about what I expected that space to be, probably because I wasn't clear myself what I expected that space to be, a lack of experience of what does it mean, action inquiry, and to interweave first and second person?
[Jacqueline]: What does it even mean in practice?
[Jacqueline]: I know how it sounds, and I understand it cognitively.
[Jacqueline]: As I said, it turned out more as in there was reluctance to inquiring into errors or hesitancies or failures, if you want to call that.
[Jacqueline]: I would say more areas of improvement as practitioners in our areas, as coaches and consultants.
[Jacqueline]: And it was more about my client needs this or how can we with embodied practice serve a client who needs this and this and that.
[Jacqueline]: So learning from that and the group, it was a very interesting group.
[Jacqueline]: I learned a lot about myself and becoming the invitation to work with the tension between emergence and having a certain need for purposeful inquiry based on research.
[Jacqueline]: I learned to work with that tension more and more.
[Jacqueline]: So it was an important period for me to notice how I would
[Jacqueline]: lean into structure more and where I would limit participants, free dialogue because I felt we needed to go somewhere.
[Jacqueline]: So that was important learning.
[Jacqueline]: But what it did was with the second group, which became my main principal group for my PhD research and also lasted longer, I had conversations with each of them individually.
[Jacqueline]: I spoke about, I sent them information about the kind of research
[Jacqueline]: if they had questions, but importantly, what we do here is inquiring into ourselves and inquiring ourselves from an embodied experience and what that would mean, the kind of practices we might engage with, the practices that were not the kind of practice, but that we would do practices between sessions every day.
[Jacqueline]: So there will be group sessions, but there were embodied practices to engage with every day in which the group sessions then
[Jacqueline]: would engage with and speak about and learn from and then decide, okay, what do we see emerging and what do we engage with next?
[Jacqueline]: So there was more dedication to actual practice and not speaking about, but speaking from, so from experience and also actually engage in that during even the group sessions.
[Jacqueline]: So we had relational practices that we included in six of the group sessions.
[Jacqueline]: that were um focused on ongoing present moment awareness so someone would for example come with with attention they experienced that day could be a big thing could be a small thing and we inquire together into that so how do you experience that in your body
[Jacqueline]: noticing that i'm experiencing that based on what you're saying what comes up for me is that so it was a whole person inquiry not only embodied but in a whole person there were thoughts there were sensations they were expressed um tendencies of holding somebody or to dim somebody down or anything that would come up so
[Jacqueline]: That communication of what was required, if they would and could be committed to doing such an inquiry, because it's intense, it requires courage, but it requires a lot of time.
[Jacqueline]: So I got a group that was fully dedicated and did these practices.
[Jacqueline]: And it was an incredible experience for me.
[Jacqueline]: And based even on that group is the last thing I will say about that.
[Jacqueline]: I chose in the end to have a relational view on adult development, on vertical development.
[Jacqueline]: And I mean by relational view that I look at the in-between, so the real interweaving of first and second, and not relational in the action research sense, because every action research is by definition relational, but beyond that.
[Tomas]: And those practices that you mentioned are, as you say in the article, practices that attend to the releasing and softening of pathways that allow for more flexibility, creativity, and range.
[Tomas]: And the flexibility, creativity, and range is, would you say that's the in-between that you were just talking about?
[Jacqueline]: I meant with the in between what we saw happening in the field, for example, one person would speak that in the eyes of many people had in terms of vertical development, there is this subtle hierarchy that people who are very articulated have a very complex mind and know how to articulate that there was a subtle power leaning in towards that person.
[Jacqueline]: So seeing that in the field and speaking to that, I'm noticing that we have the tendency, what comes up for you or how is that for you?
[Jacqueline]: And so that's what I mean with the in-between.
[Jacqueline]: What you're speaking to is the results basically that we saw.
[Jacqueline]: The more range was people became more responsive to what actually would emerge instead of a more default pattern of this is how I think about things.
[Jacqueline]: And this is what we should do in moments of conflict.
[Jacqueline]: Or this is what we should do to include people more.
[Jacqueline]: It became a fully present moment attending with more of our attention available because there was nothing to defend.
[Jacqueline]: There was nothing to hold on to.
[Jacqueline]: It became looser, that necessity, if that makes sense.
[Tomas]: Right.
[Tomas]: Yeah.
[Tomas]: No, it makes it make great sense.
[Tomas]: Thank you for sharing.
[Tomas]: I want to come back to.
[Tomas]: To think talking a little bit about.
[Tomas]: collaborative developmental action inquiry.
[Tomas]: But before we get there, maybe it might kind of cross over into this conversation.
[Tomas]: I want to just take one more stop at reflexivity and give you another opportunity to continue to define it.
[Tomas]: And something that I'm
[Tomas]: In this recent exchange that's coming up for me is thinking about in the article, you offer a part of the definition of reflexivity is locating the self in the inquiries.
[Tomas]: And I think that that is
[Tomas]: really fascinating.
[Tomas]: And so can we take just another moment to continue to define reflexivity and how you all are thinking about it?
[Tomas]: And in light of these co-inquiry groups, because I imagine
[Tomas]: you know, as you're describing forming them and having, you know, trial runs, or if you want to call them that, pilots, right, it's continuing to help you define that component of the research.
[Bruno]: May I start, Jacob?
[Bruno]: Perfect.
[Bruno]: Reflexivity as we came to experience because it kicked us off is again one of those terms in action research that has multiple interpretation, multiple possible positions regarding to it.
[Bruno]: In our experience, reflexivity is quite broad.
[Bruno]: as a term and there are opportunities to position yourself relative to it in a different way.
[Bruno]: What resonated with me and well with Jackie because that's what we included in there is that element of finding self.
[Bruno]: in the research.
[Bruno]: It is similar to how reflexivity is explained the ability to recognize yourself both as a participant and researcher.
[Bruno]: Sean phrases it a little bit different, like reflexivity is reflection on reflection in action.
[Bruno]: So it has that a bit of a recursive
[Bruno]: definition, but the way I have reckoned with it at least is when we think about the fundamental action research cycles from Levin, so there's planning action, there's acting, there's reflecting.
[Bruno]: and and that reflection in that action research cycle is about the discrepancy between the plan and the action so you were hoping for something to happen and you were hoping to act in a certain way but this is how you acted and this is what happened think about the discrepancy that is being reflective reflexivity is thinking about how you thought about these differences
[Bruno]: So that is...
[Bruno]: I mean, when Jackie and I, we discussed this many, many times, and I don't think we found a much simpler way to express this idea.
[Bruno]: It may sound a little bit silly, but really, when you think of it, it's reflecting about reflective processes.
[Bruno]: And then there are different facets to it.
[Bruno]: Are you able to reflect in action?
[Bruno]: Are you able to reflect on action?
[Bruno]: And there are many...
[Bruno]: many discussions about how reflecting in the moment is extremely difficult.
[Bruno]: This is also in action inquiry, the four territories.
[Bruno]: Is it even possible to be in the four territory of experience because it's precognition and all these elements.
[Bruno]: But the spaces that Jackie has been describing as brave spaces, inquiry groups, etc.,
[Bruno]: When we succeed, and this may not have anything to do with our capability, but there is a little bit of serendipity, a little bit of luck.
[Bruno]: When the right moment happens and we are able to act and reflect in that same moment, this is when the breakthrough in the inquiry happens.
[Bruno]: We cannot...
[Bruno]: manufacture it, but we can create the environment that would be supportive of such moment.
[Bruno]: And this is also where I think like people like you, Thomas, you know, the educators, people who create spaces, they have a high impact on the ability of others to reach this breakthrough.
[Bruno]: If you think about doctoral program, it's one big frame, one big environment to nurture
[Bruno]: such space.
[Bruno]: When we create co-inquiry groups, or not create, that sounds maybe mechanistic.
[Bruno]: When we host co-inquiry groups, what we are really hoping is for creating an opportunity for something like this to transpire.
[Bruno]: Now you digressed a little bit.
[Bruno]: I apologize.
[Bruno]: Jackie, please fill in on our position if I missed on anything.
[Jacqueline]: I think you said a lot.
[Jacqueline]: I will add to it, hopefully, from a slightly different angle.
[Jacqueline]: The reflexivity first, as Bruno said, it's a quality criteria in action to start with.
[Jacqueline]: And that's the location of self, as we said, acknowledged and brought into the inquiry, made explicit.
[Jacqueline]: This goes beyond which I have noticed in certain articles, beyond the list of self identities or positionality.
[Jacqueline]: It really requires exploring these attachments, the questioning, taken for granted ways of being and knowing, noticing how language
[Jacqueline]: and your presence, for example, shapes what becomes sayable, perceivable, actually possible in the entire space.
[Jacqueline]: staying open to the vulnerabilities of what that space might create and attend to that so what bruno already said reflexivity is beyond the noticing and saying okay i am a woman from the netherlands i live there and there my perspectives are this my education is that so i realize that in groups of this and this and that
[Jacqueline]: I might assume this and that.
[Jacqueline]: No, it goes beyond that.
[Jacqueline]: It's the continuous noticing of how you are shaping the environment.
[Jacqueline]: And I would say is one of the crucial aspects of action research.
[Jacqueline]: I think Heron says it, he terms it critical subjectivity and critical intersubjectivity in the group.
[Jacqueline]: But even I find Heron not really
[Jacqueline]: speaking to this extended form that Bru and I want to encourage people to engage with.
[Jacqueline]: Yeah.
[Tomas]: Thank you.
[Tomas]: Thank you for sharing that.
[Tomas]: I imagine listeners are really going to appreciate this conversation
[Tomas]: because you are so transparent and thoughtful in how you're approaching the research.
[Tomas]: And I'm really excited that we get to offer this to the researcher practitioner community.
[Tomas]: I have a couple more questions for you.
[Tomas]: You all have been brilliant.
[Tomas]: So I hope that you...
[Tomas]: are still with me.
[Tomas]: I wanna, as I said in the last question, I wanna now kind of talk a little bit, have you speak to collaborative developmental action inquiry.
[Tomas]: Can you say a little bit about why you chose CDAI as the research approach
[Tomas]: And then in that, can you speak a little bit about that need for safe space and how embodied condition patterns are related to the implementation of CDAI?
[Jacqueline]: I will invite Bruno again to start and I will add.
[Bruno]: This goes back to what brought us together within the doctoral frame.
[Bruno]: So the four of us that came to form action inquiry group, we had a shared interest in both reflexivity and action inquiry as we read about it.
[Bruno]: Everybody had a little bit different interest.
[Bruno]: Jackie, I apologize if I misrepresent yours, but you will correct it soon enough.
[Bruno]: So some came from the developmental perspective.
[Bruno]: They were familiar with that and they were interested in, okay, there is this body of work that is relevant and offers within-action research frame a way to investigate it.
[Bruno]: I came from a very, I might say, mundane position.
[Bruno]: I read about four territories of experience and four ways of speech, and I was like, okay, I understand this.
[Bruno]: This resonates with me.
[Bruno]: I read about action logics, and I was like, I'm not interested in this at all.
[Bruno]: So for me, I was attracted.
[Bruno]: And again, this might be my engineering background shining through because four territories of experience, they offered me at least a way to understand, oh, these different observations, there is a way to differentiate them.
[Bruno]: Because in four territories of experience, Torbert and the crew, because there were many contributors, they're really talking about there is a way to observe the world and self
[Bruno]: as you're inquiring.
[Bruno]: And of course, as we discussed for the past hour, that is so important.
[Bruno]: What I've been attracted to in Action Inquiry is it really gives you this
[Bruno]: Well, I will call them tools because when we talk about at this lower level of complexity, they're really tools because it doesn't tell you how to do it.
[Bruno]: It's more like, hey, this is what to pay attention to and what to observe.
[Bruno]: Go do it however.
[Bruno]: And then the same with four parts of speech.
[Bruno]: As we went deeper into this, Jackie, myself, and two other co-inquirers, then we were expanding.
[Bruno]: What are we playing with?
[Bruno]: What are we experimenting with from this action inquiry space?
[Bruno]: And it was a little bit...
[Bruno]: It's a funny side comment.
[Bruno]: When we started, it was action inquiry.
[Bruno]: And then over time, it became collaborative, developmental action inquiry.
[Bruno]: And it's tongue-breaking, like... Could I...
[Bruno]: But action inquiry, beautiful, beautiful.
[Bruno]: Jackie, please take over.
[Jacqueline]: Maybe you can explain to some people who are not familiar with that, the four parts of speech, just the labels so people have an idea and also the four territories.
[Bruno]: Yeah, yeah.
[Bruno]: So like we had the four territories.
[Bruno]: Basically, first territory is what has been observed, what's literally happening.
[Bruno]: And that was what Jackie described in our group journaling, where the facilitator literally wrote what has happened.
[Bruno]: And then second territory, what did I do?
[Bruno]: Like, what did I literally do?
[Bruno]: Third territory, what was I thinking about?
[Bruno]: What were the images in my head?
[Bruno]: What was the sensing?
[Bruno]: And fourth territory, the most elusive one, what was my intention?
[Bruno]: before even a thought formed what was i intending to do what was i hoping to achieve what did my body say these are the four territories and then the the four parts of speech and i might present them out of order uh there's framing
[Bruno]: framing the situation, explaining, giving background, giving context.
[Bruno]: There is illustrating, storytelling, painting with words, painting with speech, explaining the situation.
[Bruno]: There is advocating or advocacy.
[Bruno]: You are arguing for,
[Bruno]: specific action for specific question you're not questioning and then there's inquiring which is the opposite of advocating you're now inviting questions you're trying to understand you're trying to clarify what's important is that these four parts of speech are not linear like one precedes the other advocacy always bad inquiring always good
[Bruno]: no it's actually there are these four parts of speech and you should match them to the situation at hand like we discussed earlier if i'm trying to host if we are trying to host inquiry session we should not be advocating we should be inquiring if i'm trying to explain why are we here today i should be framing and then i should be illustrating to bring everybody on board and then we should move into
[Bruno]: inquiry frame of speech so it is again one of those simple and practical things to think about small small things to engage during dialogue because in essence speaking dialogue is one of the most fundamental forms of taking action
[Bruno]: Like we've been speaking for the past, what, 60, 70, 70 minutes, and that is actually acting.
[Bruno]: And if somebody listens and does even one little thing, they are continuing that action.
[Bruno]: If you're taking that to the parlance of action research, we are actually engaging in third territory of action research, right?
[Bruno]: Our words go beyond us and they enact action in all over the world.
[Bruno]: I'm going to stop here before it turns too poetic.
[Jacqueline]: Thank you, Bruno.
[Jacqueline]: And four parts of speech is something I apply regularly in corporate contacts.
[Jacqueline]: So people who are very adept in advocating for their point of view learn that they first have to frame that there also should be an illustration or an example.
[Jacqueline]: And of course, that there should be inquiry to get people on board.
[Jacqueline]: It's a very pragmatic model for people to understand in all kinds of backgrounds and contexts.
[Jacqueline]: One thing I want to say about the four territories of experience and
[Jacqueline]: in broader sense about developmental action inquiry.
[Jacqueline]: Where the growth, the developmental piece of the action inquiry comes into play is the observation how you hold these territory, how you engage with this territory, where are dissonances, where is their incongruence.
[Jacqueline]: If I have, for example, my inner experience as I speak with Bruno,
[Jacqueline]: is not aligned with what I expressed to Bruno I'm thinking about, which is not aligned in the end with the results I get in my collaboration with Bruno.
[Jacqueline]: There's something to inquire into.
[Jacqueline]: What is it?
[Jacqueline]: What is it that I'm not expressing that would align my four authorities of experience, which makes for a clearer intention and a clearer expression of self?
[Jacqueline]: And that is a developmental, you could say, move, which can be a lifelong inquiry.
[Jacqueline]: As Bill Torbert said, it's not something to be mastered.
[Jacqueline]: It's something to engage in your entire life, to see how these territories of experience, maybe you spend more time in one than the other.
[Jacqueline]: Maybe you're totally focused on the outside world and the results you see, and you don't attend to your inner sensations.
[Jacqueline]: Maybe, and of course, as a third territory, what Torbett included as the action logics.
[Jacqueline]: So the vertical development, the archetypes.
[Jacqueline]: Let's not speak about that now, but that's the way of thinking.
[Jacqueline]: It's your frame of reference.
[Jacqueline]: How do I see the world?
[Jacqueline]: What do I find important?
[Jacqueline]: What do I focus on?
[Jacqueline]: What is my perspective?
[Jacqueline]: And of course, the third one, which Torbett,
[Jacqueline]: the fourth one, referred to as triple loop learning, the ability to hold all these three.
[Jacqueline]: That is aligned with what Bruno and I, hopefully, are continually encouraged to engage with.
[Jacqueline]: That's reflexivity in action.
[Jacqueline]: The noticing in the moment of, oh, this is my inner experience.
[Jacqueline]: I'm noticing what is happening outside of me in the group.
[Jacqueline]: Oh, this is, I see now that my perspective that I could bring in is,
[Jacqueline]: impacted by this perspective?
[Jacqueline]: What if I choose that perspective?
[Jacqueline]: This is all happening at the same time.
[Jacqueline]: As you can imagine, attending to all these areas usually requires paying more attention to one that is not so practiced.
[Jacqueline]: And often that's one's embodied experience is one of them.
[Jacqueline]: Where Bruno and I, I don't want to say divert, but want to build on Bill Torbert's frame,
[Jacqueline]: We don't see the second territory of experience, your inner experience of sensation, whatever's going on inside of you.
[Jacqueline]: For us, that's not a separate territory.
[Jacqueline]: Our embodied, you could say, being is underlying all other frameworks.
[Jacqueline]: So our meaning making depends on our bodily engagement with the world.
[Jacqueline]: And that is the frame at least that we're taking.
[Jacqueline]: So cognition is dependent on that bodily engagement with the world as it is the foundation of cognition.
[Jacqueline]: And I think both, at least in my dissertation, I write about that and I think Bruno as well.
[Jacqueline]: So we wanna build on Taurus model as in there is,
[Jacqueline]: a wider, deeper role for our whole self, our embodied being as the underlying foundation to pay attention to within all these territories of experience.
[Jacqueline]: Let me stop there.
[Tomas]: And that paying attention is
[Tomas]: is intentional it's an as you describe in the article it's an active role that you're taking right not being passive to whatever is kind of happening also inside in mind or in body um but but
[Tomas]: But seeking to explore, inquire, understand maybe.
[Tomas]: And I think you also write it includes sense making.
[Jacqueline]: Yes.
[Jacqueline]: How we make sense.
[Jacqueline]: I give you a simple example.
[Jacqueline]: Let me see how I can illustrate this.
[Jacqueline]: If I grow up in an environment in which
[Jacqueline]: unexpected anger is related to conflict at home or with significant others.
[Jacqueline]: When I have only the slightest sensation or idea that conflict will arise in the group field, what I perceive, how I make meaning of what I see and how I respond is underlying all these aspects.
[Jacqueline]: So my thinking is not primarily.
[Jacqueline]: My automatic response to something that before, that's a pre-reflective response, before I even can make sense of it, is determining my response to that.
[Jacqueline]: So there are kind of procedural fields of possibility that are opened by our shaping.
[Jacqueline]: Shaping not only by parents, by institutions, by culture.
[Jacqueline]: I'll give you one other example that happened in our group, very short.
[Jacqueline]: one of the four in our group um was curious about we had a great sense of humor in our group so we would laugh about certain things that things would come up and it would be very light and then we would be very serious and engaged and he would say he would say um
[Jacqueline]: I think there's underlying conflict under humor.
[Jacqueline]: I think humor might be our cover for not wanting to engage with conflict.
[Jacqueline]: That's bold.
[Jacqueline]: Yeah, that's fantastic.
[Jacqueline]: That's beautiful.
[Jacqueline]: And when I spoke with him later, and I have his agreement to speak about this, there is in his culture, conflict is...
[Jacqueline]: problematic in not only in his family of origin, but also in the wider culture, it's more problematic.
[Jacqueline]: And his focus of attention was conflict as a research subject.
[Jacqueline]: So at the moment that he sees things simply happening in our group, we have a lens that
[Jacqueline]: perceives things related to conflict as interesting because that's what we hold in mind.
[Jacqueline]: And then from the culture, there's an extra layer that might say, okay, this might be happening in our group because I am used to environments in which that happens.
[Jacqueline]: It's a very simple example, but there are layers that influence what we see and how we make meaning of it.
[Jacqueline]: And that is what I mean by the underlying layer of the embodied person
[Jacqueline]: in our entire experience of the world.
[Jacqueline]: And that's why we see so important in research, both and in corporate context, because when we are making that more explicit, it becomes more transparent.
[Jacqueline]: Usually it softens, it doesn't go away because it has been
[Jacqueline]: you could say in times that were very plastic, of course, it has sedimented literally in our bodies.
[Jacqueline]: And these are action tendencies that are very strong.
[Jacqueline]: It softens, but we can intervene.
[Jacqueline]: When I notice there's something going on and I feel triggered and I lean in, I feel myself leaning in and I think, uh-oh.
[Jacqueline]: And then I take a breath and I sit with what's really going on inside of me.
[Jacqueline]: So there is an intervening of that.
[Jacqueline]: I think sufficient illustration for now.
[Tomas]: I so appreciate those examples.
[Tomas]: And I want to ask you a little bit more about tension and tension.
[Tomas]: Yeah, how are you all thinking about that dynamic, the dynamic of tension conflict in collaborative action research?
[Tomas]: So in addition to cultivating a greater sense of self-awareness, you might even say mindfulness.
[Tomas]: and the capacity to hold tension, can you say more about how you see your research approach addressing dimensions of social location and power?
[Tomas]: So social location being sort of like, right, how if we're thinking about the world as a matrix of like access or opportunity, power, privilege,
[Tomas]: uh dispossession right all of those things um you know how how are you how is um yeah how is your research approach you know addressing um those realities that often become you know embodied and sort of embedded in or um in our in our lens and how we see the world
[Bruno]: May I speak up?
[Bruno]: Please, Bruno.
[Bruno]: Okay.
[Bruno]: So, action research is dangerous.
[Bruno]: Action research is very dangerous.
[Bruno]: Because action research ultimately, when done right, it's actually a power equalizer.
[Bruno]: Like if we engage in something and we engage successfully in neutrality, participation on ethical level, on human flourishing level, that means that everybody in inquiry became an equal in terms of power.
[Bruno]: in terms of not necessarily economic or social power in the broader context, but in terms of that specific inquiry, we became real equals.
[Bruno]: When inquiry is done right, that means that we have learned something, that we have gained insight that we haven't had before.
[Bruno]: And that can be dangerous because sometimes, and I'm not being ironic or sarcastic, ignorance is sometimes better for health, for psychological reasons.
[Bruno]: So engaging in action research, and remember, action research is usually for big topics, big impact, sensitive topics, becoming aware of injustice, becoming aware of inequality, something that you might have been blind to yesterday, but now is painfully aware of,
[Bruno]: and you don't know what to do about it, or even worse, you actually don't have what it takes to impact the system, can be harmful.
[Bruno]: And I'm sharing this reflection not because there is now a bold or beautiful solution or answer coming, but more something that we have to be aware of as researchers, because we talk a lot about ethics.
[Bruno]: And ethics includes harm.
[Bruno]: And harm isn't just people physically get hurt, but people getting hurt psychologically, statusly, sociologically, economically.
[Bruno]: All of that is a possibility that we have to be
[Bruno]: aware of.
[Bruno]: In our case, we were aware, especially in the first group that we set up, we were more or less flat on the power dimension.
[Bruno]: We came to the doctor that we have chose, that we have paid for ourselves.
[Bruno]: Most of us had independent practice.
[Bruno]: So there was a sort of
[Bruno]: Equality already built into the system.
[Bruno]: But the more we went out of it, setting up additional inquiries with people that we have been less familiar with, this range of power discrepancy became bigger and bigger and bigger.
[Bruno]: And sometimes it's difficult also exploring those questions because, as Jackie mentioned earlier,
[Bruno]: Europe is not geographically huge, but it's extremely diverse in terms of expectations, cultures, languages, behavior, socioeconomic trends.
[Bruno]: I mean, three hours of flight will take you to the other side of Europe, to Scandinavia, which is extremely rich and behaves completely different than Southern Europe, where people are used to sun, relaxed life, but at the same time, economics are horrible.
[Bruno]: So, you know, within the same landmass, you have huge array of completely different socioeconomic statuses, approaches to power, approaches to hierarchy.
[Bruno]: The only thing that both Jackie and I have found and experienced is that this has to be taken as part of the inquiry process.
[Bruno]: It is a part of building that mutuality, of building that participation and
[Bruno]: What we believe is very important and this might be actually helpful advice is do not demand it.
[Bruno]: You cannot demand that people strip naked in front of you and share everything so you can become equal because you think, you have specific standard of what equal means, but first you have to learn what does equal mean to the other side.
[Bruno]: One of the worst things I have witnessed, and I'm saying this, I have witnessed, this is not something that happened in what either Jackie or I or together we have been doing is when a person decides to share everything,
[Bruno]: in order to become equal and then demands everybody else to do the same because they did it.
[Bruno]: That's not equality.
[Bruno]: That's not equalizing power.
[Bruno]: That's the opposite.
[Bruno]: You're exercising your power.
[Bruno]: You're brutalizing your co-inquirers because you decided that this is now the level that everybody should be at and therefore oblige, come along.
[Bruno]: So it is very sensitive, it is difficult to navigate, and that has to be done with utmost care.
[Bruno]: And even if you do it wrong in a sense, it's better if you do it in the participatory manner.
[Bruno]: If we reach this point together, mutually, because then we can heal the rift, but if it was forced, if it was hammered into,
[Jacqueline]: and inquiry is gone you you you you have sailed too far too far off well there's i think there's so much to say here you we can dedicate it more than an hour only to this subject um first i'm going to challenge bruno a bit your
[Jacqueline]: statement of inquiry doing right or doing wrong i think in action research is not really existing i would nuance that i would say it's a myth that we can actually be fully mutual i think the primary researcher always holds a subtle power for how much we make that explicit invite people's voices
[Jacqueline]: invite perspective and bring their whole selves into the inquiry.
[Jacqueline]: It is, I think it's a myth.
[Jacqueline]: Beginning action researchers, as I am, still feel I am, I think it's good to relax into that so you can actually pay attention to make these things explicit instead of
[Jacqueline]: being focused on doing it right and assuming that it actually is mutual inquiry i think that's a very important point to start with there are always subtle power differences i would say in our group bruno you are very confident you have a strong voice you're male um in the beginning i would say there was a subtle um
[Jacqueline]: I wouldn't call it power, but there was more voice of you until you yourself, which was beautiful.
[Jacqueline]: You said, I am going to become... Maybe you can explain it yourself.
[Jacqueline]: Do you remember your developmental action?
[Jacqueline]: What you did with that?
[Jacqueline]: The permeable... Maybe you can explain it yourself because it's best heard from the person themselves.
[Jacqueline]: And then I will explain how that relates to, for me, to the power conversation.
[Jacqueline]: I can tell the two in my words, but then correct me if I do it incorrectly.
[Jacqueline]: So we all had a growth edge in our group.
[Jacqueline]: So we said, well, what is one thing that we're looking at ourselves that we would like others to give feedback on when we see that happening in real time?
[Jacqueline]: And Bruno came forward with,
[Jacqueline]: becoming more permeable in the sense that he, as a confident person and obviously smart and skilled in many ways, he felt himself that he sometimes had this quite strong border.
[Jacqueline]: This is right.
[Jacqueline]: This is wrong.
[Jacqueline]: This is my opinion.
[Jacqueline]: And he wants to become more permeable.
[Jacqueline]: to influences from the outside.
[Jacqueline]: And one of the things that he did that for me was noticeable, he didn't say that, by the way, in our inquiry group, instead of speaking first, always in our cohorts or with some kind of practices, he would at least almost towards the end, speak towards the end, give his contribution to the end.
[Jacqueline]: That was a huge difference in the
[Jacqueline]: I don't know, the subtle interaction and emergence within the group.
[Jacqueline]: I find that a beautiful example of Bruno, what he did, for example.
[Jacqueline]: So for me, yeah, there was subtle power, even in our smaller group of four.
[Jacqueline]: We invited two women to be in the group as well, that we would have six.
[Jacqueline]: In the end, we ended up with me and then three males.
[Jacqueline]: So I felt, yeah, there was a gender informed dynamic in the beginning, but
[Jacqueline]: exercised by me as much as exercised by the others so i inquired into when am i not focusing on certain contributions while the space might be good to do so why do i hold back for example why don't i speak about that so for me that became a part of the inquiry it wasn't a huge power difference but it's good i think for everybody to acknowledge there's always some influence
[Jacqueline]: Speaking to power, I would say less subtle, but interesting.
[Jacqueline]: One of my inquiry groups, I said it before, we would engage in vertical development inquiries from our own point of view.
[Jacqueline]: So the role of the body in adult development.
[Jacqueline]: And we did some assessments, but not assessments like vertical assessments.
[Jacqueline]: We did some assessments that had to do with embodied awareness.
[Jacqueline]: But still people, by the way, you could say in a vertical developmental profiling sense, there were two people at one extreme and some people at what we call earlier stages of development.
[Jacqueline]: And I would notice that there was a lot of listening to what we would call more unitive
[Jacqueline]: perspective so profiled at unity level there was such an articulation and such a world that many of the others could barely grasp at times but felt attracted to by the the richness of the articulation that he took up quite some space until he said hello i'm taking up all the space what are we doing here and i brought that into the group what else do we see here that might be
[Jacqueline]: influencing how we inquire or what voices we are hearing.
[Jacqueline]: So yeah,
[Jacqueline]: There is this subtle power, but there can also be power not necessarily because of race, but there can also be power of the way we are shaped, for example, the narratives by which we are shaped, and that holds certain voices back.
[Jacqueline]: I want to expand it.
[Jacqueline]: And of course, in power, it is very important to look at marginalized groups or race or identities, but it's in all kinds of forms and shapes.
[Jacqueline]: If we want to research in depth, we have to acknowledge all of them.
[Jacqueline]: Simply noticing when voices are absent, simply noticing when we see embodied responses of maybe withdrawal or unfolding or,
[Jacqueline]: making that explicit there are all kinds of ways of making the subtle things more um yeah more bring that into the circle and make that part of the inquiry because usually that becomes an inquiry of the person who notices that or an inquiry of the person who might be subtly in a in a different position that makes sense makes
[Tomas]: A lot of sense, perfect sense.
[Tomas]: You all have shared such brilliant insights with us in this conversation.
[Tomas]: And I'm so appreciative of your time and your thoughtfulness.
[Tomas]: I have a couple more questions for you as we start to wrap up.
[Tomas]: So thinking about, and Bruna, did I cut you off?
[Tomas]: Did you want to add anything else to that?
[Tomas]: Okay, thank you.
[Tomas]: So as we wrap up, I want us to start thinking, you know, kind of thinking more forward, thinking about where your work leads next.
[Tomas]: So I'm going to kind of bundle these next two questions.
[Tomas]: What do you see to be the impact of this research so far?
[Tomas]: And where do you see this work leading next?
[Jacqueline]: I alluded to that before in the sense that our inquiry, the one that Bruno and I did with the two others, already informed a more relational approach in my current research that has been very important.
[Jacqueline]: The way I hold reflexivity in practice has been
[Jacqueline]: um enormously influential in how i hold these spaces and outside of research i have seen how powerful instead of group coaching i engage now more circles of people um as i am inviting people to relate to each other in different ways as attending to the present moment and attending to the purpose of whatever they are
[Jacqueline]: focusing on and i see what a relief people have to speak to their patterns to certain tendencies to which often are based on or have a connection with shame or a connection with um aspects of earlier life that they felt that needed to be hidden or
[Jacqueline]: somehow put us out outside of work to become more humane in the workplace and make that a normal conversation um that is outside of research but has been very powerful and i i plan to do more of these circles as i see how that impacts people and
[Jacqueline]: basically get available and energy available because what I said before, there is no managing of oppressions.
[Jacqueline]: There is no managing of something that needs to be, um, need to stay out of work basically.
[Jacqueline]: So yeah, let me start with that.
[Jacqueline]: Maybe something else comes up for me as Bruno continues.
[Bruno]: Okay.
[Bruno]: So I'm a little bit distracted because the weather is bad at my part of the world and it's getting crazy on the window.
[Bruno]: So I apologize if I doze off for a second.
[Bruno]: Jackie mentioned some of the important things, so I will not repeat that too much.
[Bruno]: When we set out to share this, as we said, it was with the hope of other researchers and practitioners finding something to help them in their own inquiries, to reach beyond us.
[Bruno]: We know it can be painful to learn things the hard way.
[Bruno]: So we hope others can save a little bit of pain by using what little insight we have shared.
[Bruno]: In terms of my takeaways, it's similar to Jackie.
[Bruno]: I was able to leverage this for further inquiries and activities I have engaged with others.
[Jacqueline]: What we have shared is this embodied element.
[Bruno]: And that's why it's also the first word of our paper.
[Bruno]: In my case, the embodiment comes through martial arts.
[Bruno]: I've been doing martial arts ever since I was a little kid.
[Bruno]: I have over 30 years of experience with martial arts.
[Bruno]: And I realized, I mean, I always knew it, but I realized only after engaging through action research, how much does that impact the way you are?
[Bruno]: the way you appear, the way you convene, the way you inquire.
[Bruno]: And my professional practice is focused on innovation.
[Bruno]: Innovation is about dealing with uncertainty, with unknown, with the messy.
[Bruno]: And that may sound familiar because action research is also about all these things.
[Bruno]: And what is joint is that our bodies, in a sense, are vessels of everything.
[Bruno]: We interpret, make sense through our bodies.
[Bruno]: We enact ourselves through our bodies.
[Bruno]: They're really the nexus of everything.
[Bruno]: And this is what Jackie mentioned earlier, where we diverge a little bit from Torbert and action inquiries.
[Bruno]: We really focus on that body as a nexus.
[Bruno]: And that is kind of what I've been focused in my doctoral thesis.
[Bruno]: And what's next is, you know, bringing all that together, body as a nexus of this, as a practice, as the inquiry, as dealing with the uncertain.
[Bruno]: how that happens, how that transpires in many different ways, shapes and forms, because everybody has a body, but everybody reacts a little bit differently.
[Bruno]: I see Jackie laughs, but is it not true?
[Bruno]: Everybody, at least so far, I mean, we haven't found the sentient rock, so so far it's just...
[Bruno]: just us with bodies.
[Bruno]: And it's a completely different way to think because the actual unit of analysis changes.
[Bruno]: Because once you start to seriously consider the body, the embodied knowing, embodied expression, you enter a territory that should be obvious, but it's so difficult.
[Bruno]: Like all this phenomena that we have been describing today, I want to say it's easy to act, but it's so difficult to reflect and be reflexive about why.
[Bruno]: you acted in a certain way so all the examples that jackie was offering they they are coming they're stemming through long and deliberate and sometimes challenging reflections and reflexivities to be able to to articulate such such positions and
[Bruno]: What is a little bit ironic is that there's a lot of writing on embodiment, importance of embodiment, and it's all disembodied.
[Bruno]: But I will not go there because we are already two hours in.
[Jacqueline]: Yeah.
[Jacqueline]: Yeah.
[Jacqueline]: I can add something to that, which sounds a little bit as an ending.
[Jacqueline]: I'm not sure if the ending should be the ending already, but I'll do it.
[Jacqueline]: And Bruno inspired me to that by speaking to the body.
[Jacqueline]: I think our modern and postmodern even instincts is to lead with the intellect still.
[Jacqueline]: And we assume that we can resolve the meta crisis or the poly crisis or whatever you want to call it with becoming more complex, complex of mind.
[Jacqueline]: But how I see it, and I think we see it, it's we avoid looking at gazing into the painful and disorienting, if you want to call it, deeper truths about ourselves as humanity.
[Jacqueline]: And that hold the key to delineation and division that we experience in the world.
[Jacqueline]: And I think we can only resolve
[Jacqueline]: these human challenges together if we start looking at how we are shaped in life and how we individually and collectively hold these truths.
[Jacqueline]: And one of the problems we have in our world is that the vision to the so-called between the brain and the body, or sometimes called the mind.
[Jacqueline]: I don't agree with that definition of the mind.
[Jacqueline]: Let's call it the brain and the body.
[Jacqueline]: There is no, there are expressions of the same whole
[Jacqueline]: unity that the human is in our perspective so if we start actually paying attention to our full and embodied self and the sense of a separate self that doesn't exist in our view then we can start healing more of the world and this is a good way our research is a way of inviting people let's start looking at the
[Jacqueline]: parts that makes us feel make us feel uncomfortable it's not easy it's hard to look at these parts but let's do it for the sake of our world that's our invitation i do have one last question for you you and um it's really uh
[Tomas]: Just to put a fine point on it, what advice do you have for your future self doing your next action research?
[Tomas]: And what else would you like to say to feel complete with this conversation today?
[Bruno]: This is the reflexive silence.
[Jacqueline]: That's good.
[Bruno]: It's a pity, dear listener, you have only sound and not the video as well, so you can enjoy our reflective faces, body postures, the embodied reaction to the deep inquiry.
[Jacqueline]: Yes.
[Bruno]: Okay.
[Bruno]: If I may, I'll be brief.
[Bruno]: And then, Jackie, you follow up as you wish.
[Bruno]: First, Thomas, I think this has been an amazing conversation.
[Bruno]: So the questions were very, very deep.
[Bruno]: And I hope we didn't drone on too much.
[Bruno]: I really feel that we have covered all the important questions.
[Bruno]: So I feel quite complete.
[Bruno]: I don't feel like we missed out on anything critical.
[Bruno]: And by that, I do not mean that we explain everything perfectly.
[Bruno]: all the important topics all the messiness of the process came to life as did our insights and that was our hope to share like here is this process here is how we made sense of it and this is what we learned and at the moment i cannot remember who said it but it was something along the lines of
[Bruno]: That most personal is most generalizable.
[Bruno]: And that is what we attempted to do.
[Bruno]: This is what was personal to us.
[Bruno]: We offer it without expectations.
[Bruno]: It's up to you.
[Bruno]: In terms of advice for myself, and this is advice for myself, so it's specific to me.
[Bruno]: And Jackie alluded to it a little bit.
[Bruno]: For me, advice keeps being pause.
[Bruno]: Take a break.
[Jacqueline]: three so I advise it to myself because I will need that advice in the future so pause Bruno I love that I can only echo Bruno in the sense that we covered a lot no doubt we could have another hour and deepen some other things but
[Jacqueline]: I would invite people if they have any questions that probably it will be clear where to find us and just, I would say, reach out and we'll speak a bit more.
[Jacqueline]: So that related to the fullness of this conversation.
[Jacqueline]: So thank you, Thomas, for guiding us into this space in which this has become possible.
[Jacqueline]: I feel some resistance towards the question, what advice do I have for my future self?
[Jacqueline]: Maybe I'm used to answering questions, what advice would you have for your younger self?
[Jacqueline]: Maybe that's the resistance.
[Jacqueline]: What would help me if I take the question as Bruno has interpreted it, as in what is important for my own research?
[Jacqueline]: moving forward is i would say trusting my own voice with the most humble position i'm capable of at the same time and involve as many people as i can
[Jacqueline]: share my reflections because in relationship is really where we co-create knowledge and where we come to insights that by ourselves are not possible i'm sure there's a lot more advice that i could give myself but i keep it i have a lot to learn but i keep it here thank you thomas
[Tomas]: Jackie, Bruno, I just want to thank you very, very much for your openness, for the generosity that you extended to us today with your time and your insights.
[Tomas]: Such a brilliant conversation that I know I'm going to be reflecting on throughout the day today.
[Tomas]: And moving forward, and I know our listeners are going to benefit greatly from what you shared with us today.
[Tomas]: So thank you so much.
[Tomas]: It was a pleasure chatting with you and hope that we can stay connected and continue this conversation again.
[Jacqueline]: Absolutely.
[Jacqueline]: Thank you, Tomas.
[Bruno]: Thank you.
[Bruno]: It's been a pleasure.
[Bruno]: Thank you for having us.
[Bruno]: Thank you.