Design for the Research & Documentation Component
Written April 2001; Updated September 2001
The Leadership for a Changing World program gives an annual award to twenty individuals and groups who are members of communities advancing agendas of social change and enacting different forms of leadership. To develop the Research & Documentation component of this program, we will invite the awardees (referred to as LCW participants in this document) to engage in a systematic process to make sense of their leadership, with the goal of generating new knowledge and insights about the theory and practice of leadership.
Working with individuals who have been publicly recognized as leaders, the project will focus on their experience of leadership within a given context. We will invite LCW participants to work with us as co-researchers to understand how leadership happens in these situated practices. Given our approach to the subject of study – leadership as a meaning-making process that is grounded in community – we will ask the LCW participants to help us explore the way they experience, in the here and now of their practice, the reality of leadership, what scholars call the phenomenological reality of leadership.
Language is the primary mediating institution for meaning-making. Texts and narratives help individuals make sense of their experience and to re-present these meanings to others. Within the framework of the research process, LCW participants will engage in individual and collective reflection and in conversations to bring to the R&D project their voice in the form of narratives and textual representations of their experience of leadership. The research team will consist of the LCW participants in each cohort and a small group of outside initiating researchers working as co-production partners. Every team member will participate as co-researcher in at least one research strategy within the two-year cycle of involvement in the program. We will ensure that reflections and narratives are grounded in participants’ experiences in the context of their actual social change work.
A multi-modal research design - Our design consists of three parallel streams of inquiry conceived to engage LCW participants and other members of their communities in the research process. These three streams are ethnographic inquiry, narrative inquiry and co-operative inquiry. The attached diagram illustrates the connections of these streams to the guiding research question, the expected products for each stream, the degree of participation of co-researchers in each stream, and how they fit together for each cohort of the program.
These streams are anchored in our commitment to develop appreciative and participatory approaches to research and our belief in the value of conversational encounters with LCW participants as the core activity of the research process. The multi-modal design offers opportunities to explore diverse ways of engaging in sense making and various forms of representing meanings about the experience of leadership. Each research stream gives primacy to different “voices” within the research team, and affords a unique angle from which co-researchers can reflect upon their experience.
The contribution of ethnographic inquiry – For LCW we will use a particular kind of ethnography that is both collaborative and community-based. This means that the individual ethnographer or team will facilitate and support an ethnographic inquiry process that is driven by the community members. The goals of the ethnography are to produce new knowledge about the ways in which communities engage in the work of leadership and to draw out lessons that are useful to the community involved in the study. This research stream offers a window to the experience of leadership from the inside out, over time and in context. It will generate narratives characterized by “thick descriptions” that will result in rich portraits of the relationships, practices and processes within which communities engage in the work of leadership.
Local ethnographers will conduct four ethnographic studies of LCW awardee communities. As with the other streams, awardees will be invited to be co-researchers in ethnography. Each ethnographer will conduct three months of fieldwork, spending a significant amount of time, with several periods of continuous presence, in the awardees community. The same protocols will be used in each community to allow for the integration of the ethnographic work with the other research streams.
In effect, the four ethnographies will serve as “pilot” studies. While three months is a short period for a full ethnography, doing four short pilot studies allows us to explore a wider range of context during the first research cycle. Our goal is to extend one study for a full year, and revisit this approach for the subsequent cohorts based on these first experiences.
The contribution of narrative inquiry – To co-construct leadership stories with awardees, we will offer multiple opportunities and methods for awardees to tell their stories and to reflect on the previous telling at each step. Our design includes both individual and collective storytelling opportunities, some of which will happen in awardees’ communities while others will take place at program-wide meetings or other events. Several activities will be implemented to engage awardees in co-producing narratives. The predominant voice in this research stream is that of participants, each of whom will develop a leadership story as the final product of the inquiry process. This however, is not the tale of a leader, but the story of how the participants and their community frame and understand leadership in the context of their commitment to tackle tough social problems. To broaden the scope we will invite each participant to help identify others in their community to be interviewed in a group setting, integrating new voices in the narratives.
The main approach consists of two rounds of in-depth interviews that will be the primary source for constructing leadership narratives over the program cycle. We will use a fluid and open interpretive interview technique to allow the story line to take any direction, as each participant’s experience of the work of leadership is captured (“tell me about your work”…”you’ve talked about X, tell me more about it”…). Taking advantage of the developmental potential of both individual and collective leadership conversations, the second round of interviews—toward the end of the cycle--will start with an invitation to reflect upon the narrative generated from the previous conversations. Our hope is that these iterative interviews will enhance participants’ skills as ‘reflective practitioners’ and enrich the narratives with new learning.
Complementary activities for the narrative stream include sessions at program-wide meetings, reflective conversations, journaling and awardee initiated projects. Program-wide activities might include writing, oral storytelling, and various forms of artistic expression like drawing, photography, or performance to facilitate both individual and collective storytelling. Reflective conversations are based on a special type of interfview -- “subject-object” interview —designed to help people reveal their meaning-making structures and the limits of them for particular situations, in this case, those where leadership happens in community. A limited number of participants will be invited to engage in these conversations. For self-initiated projects, awardees can either use a camera and a recorder to capture the story of leadership in their community on their own, or partner with an arts organization or group in their community to creatively tell their story. This may begin within their organization and perhaps ultimately be expanded to include a presentation to the community at large. For example, this could mean writing a short play or creating a local photography exhibit.
At the end of two years, we will have twenty stories that tell of the ways in which the awardees and their communities make sense of the experience with leadership, thus providing ample information about various dimensions of the work of leadership. These stories will each contain some written narrative and may draw on other media when appropriate. Throughout the two-year cycle, we will also generate thematic propositions on the work of leadership by looking for common themes and patterns across stories.
The contribution of co-operative inquiry – We will invite LCW participants to join one or two inquiry groups of eight to ten members each that will focus on an inquiry topic that grows out of our guiding question. About eight meetings over the course of the cohort cycle will produce the iterative “action-reflection-action” sequence typical of the co-operative inquiry tradition. In this tradition group members collect “data” from their practice and their community to generate practitioner-based knowledge in the inquiry meetings. While a few of these will take place during program-wide events, most of these meetings will take place in a neutral location that is agreed upon by the goup as a whole. The rationale for a neutral and consistent location is that it will help inquirers form a learning community within which they can establish a routine of productive reflection, away from work interruptions.
There is no predominant voice in the product of this stream, as all group participants, including members of the core research team, co-produce knowledge together, and document the learning process and the collective answers to the explored leadership questions.
In addition, we hope to schedule time at the program-wide meetings for inquirers to present their findings to the other awardees and to engage them in helping to push our/their thinking ahead. In this way, the boundaries of the co-operative inquiry groups will be somewhat fluid, as other awardees and community members are invited to contribute at important moments throughout the inquiry process. To an extent, the participants in the inquiry groups are doing this research in the name of the entire group, and reporting back allows them to get feedback from the group.
Implementing the design: co-researcher involvement, research products and knowledge integration - Every participant will not be engaged in all three of the research streams, but they will all be part of at least one. By carefully selecting with awardees the locations for ethnographic fieldwork, we hope that at least one or two LCW participants in each cohort will agree to participate in the three strategies, thus allowing comparisons across streams of inquiry.
The attached diagram illustrates the degree of participant engagement in each stream. Narrative inquiry will engage all twenty participants in the cohort, producing a total of sixty leadership stories over the life of the program. Co-operative inquiry will engage some of the same participants on a voluntary basis, yielding rich narratives in the form of six inquiry groups over the three cohorts. Ethnographic work will take place in four communities from the first cohort, with two to four groups participating from subsequent cohorts, depending on the experiences of the first ethnographies.
Each inquiry stream represents a self-contained strategy of qualitative inquiry, and each offers a different angle to access participants’ experience of leadership. However, even though the integration of knowledge across streams will occur toward the end of each cohort’s cycle, positive inter-dependencies can benefit the research process. For example, the first leadership conversations of the narrative inquiry stream can help participants think about research questions to pursue during the co-operative inquiry groups.
Full integration of the knowledge generated will take place at the end of each cohort cycle. During the final program-wide meeting of each cohort we will organize structured activities to invite LCW participants to make sense of the research products and to reflect collectively on how it all relates to their personal experience. During these activities the cohort will generate additional representations of the integrated research results in creative and varied ways. We will also invite participants to think about strategies to take back the insights into their communities. To capture the multiplicity of voices engaged in the research process, and given the different audiences we want to reach, we hope that the overall products of our research will include narratives that use different cultural texts and presentational formats (prose and poetry, visual images, performance activities, forums, etc).
Overtime, we will consider ways to make sure that the documented learnings get out to the appropriate audiences, including the LCW participants’ communities, general practitioners, and the scholarly community. The products of our R&D work will be formatted to become part of the LCW web page. All of the products will also feed into the LCW program-wide communication strategy.
Quality of the research and other design considerations – The constructionist lenses and inquiry strategies we have chosen demand that we approach the research with alternative assumptions about the nature of social reality, how we can understand it, and how we can judge the goodness of the knowledge we generate. For example, we expect to draw lessons for the theory and practice of social change leadership in general. But we do not consider the 60 communities or the awardees who represent them as a traditional sample. Instead, engaging with the 60 awardees in co-research, we expect to explore many instances that capture dimensions of the work of leadership as experienced by awardees and other members of their community.
We are committed to pursuing the standards of goodness of inquiry that fit in the traditions of interpretive and action research. Within this context, we feel confident that the products of our research will offer profound insights about the nature of leadership. Following these traditions, we also understand that this knowledge will always be partial, historically and culturally situated and that our documentation can never tell “the whole story”. This is not a limitation of our design but a reality of all social science research, and the core assumption of qualitative research.
In considering ways to ensure the trustworthiness of our inquiry we also acknowledge the connection between our research choices and the value system that frames our project. A list of explicit design features that mirror the values embraced by the LCW program includes: engaging LCW participants as co-researchers, incorporating multiple voices in the research and documentation, encouraging collaboration among members of different communities of practice, acknowledging the standpoint of co-researchers and their practice as significant sources of new knowledge, and zeroing-in on the experience of communities traditionally ignored within the mainstream leadership literature. These choices reflect the value we give to reflective practice, inclusiveness, participation, and respect to individuals and communities.
We believe the insights of our research will be valid if they are as relevant and useful to LCW participants and general practitioners as they are to leadership scholars and theorists. This imposes two design demands. First, we must make an effort to ensure that the research “act” and its products will be owned and used first and foremost by the communities within which they were generated. Second, we must organize the research activities to ensure sound, trustworthy and credible findings yielding propositions that can be then connected to existing theories of leadership. Features of our design, such as commitment to participatory values and the triangulation of methods, address both requirements.
A final word on contributions. The goal of the R&D component of the LCW program is to generate new knowledge to help change the conversation about leadership in this country. Yet the strength of the proposed design has ripple effects that yield additional contributions. Two of these are worth mentioning. One is demonstrating the power of an innovative approach to leadership development based on the democratization of research as a tool for individual growth and for community capacity building. The other is challenging the scholarly community to consider the potential benefits of producing more creative and still credible, social science based, empirical research on leadership. We are committed to pursuing both.
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Copyright © 2001 Advocacy Institute