Systemic Practice and Action Research, Vol. 15, No.

6, December 2002 ( C 2002)

Business Action Research in PracticeA Strategic Conversation About Conducting Action Research in Business Organizations1
Rod Sarah,2,8 Tim Haslett,3 John Molineux,4 Jane Olsen,5 John Stephens,6 Susanne Tepe,6 and Beverly Walker2
Received June 10, 2002; accepted September 2, 2002 The objectiveof this paper is to provide practitioner researchers with insights into the initial ndings around the challenges of conducting business action research in practice in commercial settings on the basis of experiences of a PhD cohort at Monash University in the rst 18 months of candidature. In performing the role of a concluding paper, it sets out a generic framework for action research that the cohort has come to embrace. In doing so, it draws on emergent themes spread across the six diverse topics that are the subject of action research interventions of the cohort members. The paper then identies and analyses the common patterns that have emerged and offers observations and conclusions for those involved in practitioner research. KEY WORDS: action research; learning sets; action research cycles; organizational clockspeeds.

1. INTRODUCTION This paper describes the experiences of six PhD candidates in the rst 18 months of their candidaturehow they have used action research to date and the learnings as they move forward in their pursuit of improving organizational performance.
1 Personal

and group references for this paper are drawn from personal learning journals and minutes of PhD Cohort Meetings held between Nov 2000 and April 2002 and discourse and reective conversations held by cohort members during FebApril 2002. 2 Internal Consultant, Monyx Pty Ltd., 16 Miles St., Mulgrave 3170, Australia. 3 Department of Management, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. 4 Human Resources Consultant, Australian Public Service, Melbourne, Australia. 5 National Australia Bank, Melbourne, Australia. 6 Greyhound Racing, Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. 7 Consultant, Management Action Australia Pty Ltd., Melbourne, Australia. 8 To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: Rod.Sarah@monyx.com 535
1094-429X/02/1200-0535/0
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These candidates came together as a group (a cohort as they have named themselves) initially, as a result of their earlier experiences as postgraduate Masters students working in learning sets. They have stayed together and have built a sense of community around their work as research practitioners using concepts of systemic thinking and learning because of the benets the group derives as a community. The group meets once a month for 3 hours, and has been doing this regularly since the inception of the individual PhD research activities. These meetings occur consistently. In addition to providing support for each other, they also create a space and time for group reection and the creation of insight and new knowledge about their practice as research practitioners. This cohort is considered the critical element of an infrastructure that supports their PhD candidature process. These meetings are in addition to 1-hour monthly meetings with their Supervisor. It is the content emanating from this infrastructure as a space for reection that forms the basis of this paper in which we synthesize the reections from six different formal action research studies that are at different stages of PhD candidature. The rst aim of this concluding paper in this special edition is to document reections of the six PhD candidates who make up the action research cohort. The second aim is to offer specic learnings from these experiences. The next part of this paper outlines the rst challenge this cohort of new PhD candidates faced, namely the selection of a particular action research approach. The paper then reects on the process of gaining organizational access and continues with some observations regarding sustaining an action research intervention in a business organization. 2. A FRAMEWORK OF IDEAS, A METHODOLOGY, AND AN APPLICATION AREA Coinciding with PhD provisional candidature in late 2000 was the 5th World Congress on Action Learning, Action Research, and Process Management (ALARPM) conducted in Ballarat, Australia. This Congress provided a unique opportunity for some cohort members to participate and link with members of the national and international action research community. In exploring the approaches within the action research family, an initial core dilemma the cohort confronted was which family member approach to adopt? As a group, the cohort have come to adopt the Checkland FMA (Checkland and Scholes, 1990) model that underpins his soft systems methodology (SSM). One background reason is its link into systemic thinking and learning. As graduates of a Masters Degree in Organizational Systems program at Monash University during the late 1990s, albeit from different years of graduation, all cohort members

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were aware of this model prior to commencing their candidature. However, it was only toward the end of the rst 12 months that this model became the consistent framework that was referred to in cohort meetings when discussing our approach to action research. There are many descriptions of the FMA model (Checkland and Howell, 1998; Checkland and Scholes, 1990). A simple explanation of the FMA model is that in any research endeavour there exist a background framework of ideas (F) which as a theory inform our methodology (M), consisting of tools and methods, which are applied to some area of concern (A) in the form of practical application. West and Stanseld (2001) give a detailed explanation and justication of Checklands FMA as a means to position action research as an approach for managing IT projects. They also provide a thorough overview of the rigour and legitimacy of adopting Checklands FMA model. Our experience is that the FMA model can be applied to other areas of business application beyond IT projects. The FMA model has provided this action research cohort with a rigour on which to base our practice. It specically emphasizes the preeminence of the Framework of Ideas (F) as the basis for settling the domain of activity for our individual projects. Complimenting the FMA model, one cohort member integrated a specic reection template that has also been embraced by the larger group. Mezirow (1991, 1995) identied three forms of reection: content reection, process reection, and premise reection. It is suggested that these three levels of reection map with the three elements of the FMA model; when we reect on content, we are reecting on what happened in the action area (A); process reection maps to the choice of and how we applied our methodology (M); while premise reection suggests that we explore why we chose to do what we did in the way we did it as a reection of our framework of ideas (F). When taken together and integrated in an action research study consisting of cycles of action and reection, these three forms of reection form a meta cycle of inquiry (see Fig. 1). For the PhD candidate, Coghlan and Brannick (2001) make a key distinction: (i) f you are writing a dissertation, the meta cycle is the focus of your dissertation (p. 21). It is the elegance of this mapping that has increasingly been a factor in attracting the cohort members to embrace this ChecklandMezirow representation of action research. The settling on this FMA model as a framework came in late 2001 when cohort members embarked on preparing a set of papers for the 7th ANZSYS (Australian New Zealand Systems) Conference. In attempting to make sense of the degree of richness in each of the projects, and the challenge to abstract common learnings from each of the situations, the FMA model provided a way of organizing, what for many seemed at times, the unorganizable.

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Fig. 1. ChecklandMezirow representation of action research.

3. CANDIDATURE USING ACTION RESEARCH WITHIN A TRADITIONAL RESEARCH PARADIGM As the cohort reected back to the process of submitting for PhD candidature, the standard candidature application format was felt to be predicated on linear planning conceptsthat there were specic outcomes, milestones, objectives, etc. As candidates, this structure shaped and inuenced our initial mindset signicantlychannelling our thinking and conceptualizing of action research back toward the more traditional research paradigm. Initially, as we began our initial cycles of learning in our respective organizations, any development, questioning, or learning tended to be seen as a variation from the plan. Also the idea that as action researchers we did not have an objective against which to assess progress was antithetical to traditional research. This created a tension with an action research mindset of emergence where you start with a loose idea that allows for outcomes to unfold and reveal themselves through cycles of action and reection within a dynamic context. With this initial tension between the theories and approaches of action research and the traditional research paradigm, the action researcher has to be pragmatic and acknowledge the context that they are operating in. We will return to the issue of being pragmatic in action research later in the paper.

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4. CYCLING WITHIN A LINEAR VIEW OF THE WORLD The metaphor of the cycles of action research suggests that you are always in a process without a formal beginning or ending. However, this creates the potential for another initial dilemma for the new student. For a PhD researcher, candidature and a thesis must have a beginning and an endingalbeit an arbitrary beginning and an arbitrary end. Similarly, our organizations frequently viewed the research topic as a projectwith similar notions of beginnings and endings. The cohort reected that this is most likely the result of the mindset in the organization or a manifestation of the so-called natural cycles that exist in commercial organizations. We will also return to this issue of natural cycles and cycle timings later in the paper. In this initial period of our research however, we continued to struggle with the challenge of making sense of our limited understandings of our situations. Yet, we intuitively knew that an action researcher always starts in the middle of something, since an action researcher views the world as continuous. Where ever we start and however we conceptualize the beginning of our intervention, it is helpful to conceptualize our work in terms that the reective cycles help to readjust direction, and that this emergence is the natural outcome of taking action. However, despite this knowledge, the initial desire to get it right remained deeply embedded in the subtext of the cohort. One of the cohort members reected in a conversation in preparing this paper:
Over two cycles of intervention, neither of which worked well, I realised that rather than thinking about the interventions in terms of it didnt work, I began to focus on what did we potentially learn . . . what could be done better . . . what did work . . . (i)t was a shift from right and wrong thinking to learning.

Consistent with this reection, the early pressures regarding starts and nishes is now accommodated much more comfortably as the cohort has matured. The formal adoption of the FMA framework, and specically the explicit need to revisit our frameworks (F), provides clarity for the action researcher in what is an otherwise messy area. Despite our history of having confronted some of these challenges previously as Masters students, making the shift and maintaining the shifts from starts and nishes to journeys was difcult. But organizations and universities need them. So the action researcher needs to make these accommodations on pragmatic grounds of sustainability and viability. The group support provided by a cohort using a FMA model helped with these accommodations. The mindsets we confronted, both inside and outside our organizations and the University, view the world as though the future is knowable, and therefore we can predict and plan with a degree of certainty. As already reported in this paper, we have concluded that our organizations positioned our research studies as projects, with associated goals, project plans, and milestones. However, in an action research study, where researchers and participants are aiming to discover and understand

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through taking action, the process, method, and content of each action cycle are essentially emergent since we are learning our way forward into the future. Thus, a challenge for business action research and the practitioner-researcher is also to reconcile the project mindset within an action research mindset. As the cohort reected on their experiences in preparation of their papers for the ANZSYS Conference, as well as a subsequent conference in February 2002, and this set of papers, the Checkland FMA model provided the template to accommodate the above dilemmas and issues. For our cohort, there is signicant utility in sharing a common image and language of the larger process of which we are a part. The above examples notwithstanding, when beginning what is a cyclic process of action research within a somewhat linear mindset and worldview, the action researcher must be pragmatic if their existence as an research practitioner is to be sustainable and durable over time. The next section of this paper continues exploring some of the pragmatic issues of conducting business action research. 5. TOP MANAGEMENT SUPPORT Since action research is in itself an emergent developmental form addressing practical issues (Reason and Bradbury, 2001), in the business setting it is also a model of organizational change and evolution. Mainstream organizational change models outline the need for senior management endorsement. The commitment therefore of senior management, whether a CEO or Senior Executive, is a key part of the process. Consistent with this model of organizational change is the PhD candidature process that requires a letter of support from the candidates employer. As action research, this letter of support also served as a letter of senior management endorsement for the study in the host organizations. This letter of support and the notion of sponsorship in itself creates a framework and methodological dilemma, namely the nature of volunterism in action research studies. When you have senior management support for organizational access, it gives the researcher and the research topic organizational legitimacy. All the six candidates had and continue to have very senior management support. However, this support and organizational endorsement by a senior manager has the potential to coerce participation for political and power-based reasons, rather than democratic volunteerism that has to exist within the participatory worldview that underpins all schools of action research. Put more bluntly, does the requirement for senior management support challenge and put at risk the validity of action research? For our cohort members, yes it does. And it is a dilemma because one member of the group is the CEO who never knows who is a volunteer. Two other cohort members have been specically chosen by the CEOs of their organizations to undertake action research studies and therefore have massive top management

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support. Yet, our experience is that given that action research is more or less outside the mainstream of management thinking, without senior support you and your research approach risk being marginalized. As we reected on this issue, we reconcile the need for top management support as a pragmatic choice of sustainability of ourselves as action researchers and as research practitioners. Yet action research as a method provides the opportunity to revisit and compromise around these problemsto accommodate them. Living with uncertainty and ambiguity is part of the process and our experience is that the action research reective process helps deal with this. In business settings, there exist power relationships and top management support must therefore be seen as a political and power-related process, as much as a simple access issue. In organizations, including highly politicized bureaucracies and large corporations, senior manager support for a research topic can also act a weather vein to the organizational climate, and specically the utility of an action research study as a means to effect meaningful change. Action research has the potential to generate knowledge about key processes, which senior people can see as a source of power. The reection of our cohort over the last 18 months is that the needs of the organization and the sponsor has to be attached to the power dynamics in the host organization. If we conceive our organizations as political institutions, then the need to recognize and manage these power relations is critical. And learnings from the action research cycles need to be fed into the power dynamics in these organizations since the survival of top managers as sponsors is critical to the ongoing sustainability of the action research study. Herein lies another paradox: the more senior the support, the greater the potential fall from grace. Tracking and managing top management support, and involvement of organizational sponsors, appears fundamental to the sustainability of the action research study. The next section shows how all our action research studies have confronted signicant sustainability challenges over the 18 months and how each has weathered the storms. 6. THE ACTION RESEARCH WINTERS In this part of the paper, we outline what we have referred to as the Winter of Action Research studies in our host organizationswhen something occurs in the contextual environment of our organizations and the action research study is left vulnerable to these environmental elements. To outline the shifts in the environments of our action research study topics, Candidate A was made redundant due to a change in Government policy 1 month after candidatureshe was however successful in gaining a new host organization in a short time period. This candidate is now conducting her PhD as a full-time student.

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Candidate B was made redundant 1 year after candidature because of a organizational downsizing and reprioritizing that saw the research activity cancelled. He was successful in gaining alternate employment to specically continue action research within the new organization and bring forward prior learnings and a new skill set to the new organization. Candidate Cs project was the subject of an organizational review, which saw the candidate with a new (and more senior) role in her organization, however, with the top manager who was her sponsor no longer in the organization. In emerging from the organizational winter, however, her ongoing role in the organization and the status of the role as an action researcher is enhanced. Candidate D was promoted to a new organization 6 months into candidature. The candidates experience and skills as a research practitioner were a factor in him being promoted. This also created the opportunity to expand the domain of the action research across two organizational settings. Candidate E continues in his host organization; however, the status of the research is continually under question, following funding cuts and restructures. This research work is analogous to a cork in the oceanit bounces up and down and changes direction according to the prevailing organizational winds and currents. Candidate F also experienced a redundancy. However, she continues as a consultant and has integrated action research into her consultancy work with clients. In preparing this paper, we reected somewhat jokingly about the dangers of undertaking action research, and whether action researchers are an endangered species because of the challenges of nding a niche in environments that can change rapidly and affect the sustainability of the action research study in the organization. However, the existence of the cohort as a place to seek solace and understanding has been a core factor in our ability to survive these organizational winters, manifest in the fact that all our action research studies continue some 18 months later. So the reective process has revealed a pull to a linear and static approach to change management that combines with the political dimensions of conducting research in business organizations. Yet, this was felt by the group to be an inadequate explanation. The next part of the paper compliments the important role that the cohort provides in doing work in organizational environments, with a discussion on natural cycles in organizations. 7. ACTION RESEARCH THAT PACES ORGANIZATIONAL CYCLES When we reviewed our original proposals, all were strategic in nature and linked to the strategic agendas of the host organizations. Yet, all confronted significant shifts in the agendas of these organizations. The question then became what

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do we need to do as practitioner-researchers in a consulting or employee role to ensure our survival should organizational winter descend on our action research? In the natural world, species evolve at various rates. Those that are successful adapt to meet new challenges or they die. If the same genetic imperative operates in business, what is the business equivalent of biological evolutions? Fine (1998) suggests there are natural organizational clockspeeds. He equates these as the business equivalent to biological life cycles. Some examples of business organizational clockspeeds include organizational restructuring and technological innovation, while the organizational clockspeed of government organizations is related to the electoral cycles and political imperatives related to that electoral cycle. Funding cycles in all organizations are another impact on clockspeeds. In reecting on the need to pace the strategic adaptation of our organizations with our action research studies, the cohort suggests that the cycles of learning must match if not outspeed the natural clockspeeds of our host organizations. For a business action research study to be sustainable, the need to be relevant to the organizational agenda, while necessary, is not sufcient. Our experience in our organizations to date suggests that the cycles of learning that form an action research study must attempt to pace and contribute new knowledge in a timely manner that coincides with the decision-making cycles within the host organizations. In offering a counterintuitive insight, our research to date suggests that it may be more important to nish a cycle of action research that coincides with the organizational clockspeed even if some element of quality is compromised in the short term. To be doing good work but be operating in a long cycle that is out of step with the natural clockspeed of the host organization increases the risk of confronting an organizational winter. 8. ACTION RESEARCH AS A WAY OF BEING We have already discussed the importance of the cohort in the process of undertaking business action research. Frequently the cohort members refer to this cohort as a community of interest. Communities of interest or practice share a common purpose (Senge and Scharmer, 2001) and a commitment to something beyond the selfto a meta sense or purpose. For example, a review of the monthly cohort meetings and monthly meetings with PhD Supervisor reveal a consistent pattern of regular attendance. Yet when reviewing the last 18 months meetings and engaging in strategic conversation with cohort members for papers in this series, the groups commitment to individual monthly meetings and group meetings reveal an extremely high sense of commitment to what we all, as PhD candidates and Supervisor, are attempting to do. The cohort members often ask one somewhat simple questionWhat do these sessions provide? In preparing this paper by reviewing journal notes and

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minutes, the process revealed some consistent themes that are expressed in the following compilation of several cohort members comments:
Our sessions together are invaluable. When we are in our organizations, doing our action research, we have to be guarded and cautious. Being truly vulnerable and honest is too dangerous to the ongoing viability of your research. Its not always appropriate to say I dont know and to show or share your ignorance, concerns or assumptions openly . . . yet this is what we should be doing if we are being truly reective. It is not always possible to nd a colleague in our organizational settings to share your deeper reections with. The monthly meeting allow us to hear directly from each other and this process reduces the sense of loneliness and isolation. We become as one. We are not however exclusive . . . when we have invited guests, they are welcomedwe give freely to them and each other and in this process we increase our knowledge and understanding. In this process we all grow wiser, and more likely and willing to contributeas we are served by the meetings, we are also more likely to serve . . .

The cohort process supports how and what we have become. The process of writing conference papers and revisiting the framework of ideas in the Checkland FMA model requires a deep appreciation of who we are as practitioner-researchers and what we are doing. A way of being as action research practitioners is hypothesized to make sense of what the cohort has all experienced as action research Winters. Primarily, over time action research has become a way of operating in the world for all members of the cohort. As this way of being in the world has evolved, it has shaped our personal identity and how we dene ourselves and what we do. Similarly, this identity is reected in the action research. All cohort members have faced workplace changes that interrupted or threatened to challenge preexisting career paths. All cohort members have faced the dilemma of balancing ongoing employment choices with continuing their action research. When small step adaptation has not been possible, then all PhD cohort members have chosen to pursue their role as a PhD candidate/action researcher above a narrow workplace professional role. For example, candidate D in applying for a promotion in a new organization submitted his action research as a part of the employment process, with the threat that should he be successful, he was going to be doing this sort of work in the new organization. If they did not want this to occur, then do not select him. Candidate C has received a promotion within an organizational downsizing. Reection and learning are a core part of the new organizational practice that forms a core element of her ongoing action research. Candidate B accepted voluntary redundancy when the research topic was cancelled and faced with doing another role in his organization. He chose to leave to pursue an action research way of being, and was successful in obtaining a subsequent employment assignment predicated on continuing action research studies. The experience of this group suggests there are potential implications for both the researcher and the organization hosting the business action research study as

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the action research study unfolds. An unintended consequence for organizations is that they may need to increasingly accommodate action research as the way individuals increasingly describe how they approach their work assignments in organizational settings. For this group of practitioner-researchers while no member has yet to produce a business card with the title action researcher, action research is increasingly the way they do things around here. 9. CONCLUSION Our experience is that the cohort has been critical to our success. We have met every month for not only the 18 months since provisional candidature but for up to 12 months prior to that. This is a monthly meeting as a group for 3 hours and is separate from our 1-hour meeting with our primary supervisor. There is a tremendous commitment to the group and to the process of action research that reects our increasing personal and professional identity as action researchers. Practitioner-researcher is our way of being within a cohort of critical friends which provide a shared safe space for learning (Nonaka and Konno, 1998; Schrage, 2000). By identifying ourselves as professional action researchers, we are increasingly independent of our topics. As our topics come and go in the ebb and ow of organizational life, our key question has become what can we take forward with us? While we are all still some way from PhD submission, we have already begun to consider a potential role as future action research supervisors and practitioners. We see a future role to support the next cohorts that we would hope may follow in our footstepswhether in business settings, university settings, and hopefully across both. In a business practitioner-researcher role, it is critical to acknowledge the political and practical dimensions of business organizations and the cycles that affect them, and how that affects our research and ourselves since we are nested within the organization and its cycles. Our cohort has found that it is more important to nish a cycle of research on time in accordance with the organization cycles, than to nish according to a complete or pure model of research. The world of business and government moves on and does not wait for action research or a PhD thesis to catch up. The action researcher must adapt before the inevitable organizational winters become organizational ice ages for the maladapted action researcher and his or her study. REFERENCES
Checkland, P., and Howell, S. (1998). Information, Systems, and Information Systems, Wiley, Chichester, NY. Checkland, P. B., and Scholes, J. (1990). Soft Systems Methodology in Action, Wiley, Chichester, NY.

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Coghlan, D., and Brannick, T. (2001). Doing Action Research in Your Own Organization, Sage, London. Fine, C. (1998). Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage, Perseus Books, London. Mezirow, J. (1991). Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. Mezirow, J. (1995). Transformation theory of adult learning. In Welton, M. (ed.), In Defence of the Lifeworld. Critical Perspectives on Adult Learning, SUNY, pp. 3970. Nonaka, I., and Konno, N. (1998). The concept of Ba: Building a foundation for knowledge creation, Calif. Manage. Rev. 40(3), 4054. Reason, P., and Bradbury, H. (eds.) (2001). Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice, Sage, London. Schrage, M. (2000). Serious Play, HBS Press, Boston, MA. Senge, P., and Scharmer, O. (2001). Community action research. In Bradbury, H., and Reason, P. (eds.), Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice, Sage, Lodon, pp. 238249. West, D., and Stanseld, M. H. (2001). Structuring action research and reection in information systems action research studies using Checklands FMA Model. Syst. Pract. Action Res. 14(3), 251281.