Research Alive: Exploring Generative Moments in Doing. Qualitative Research. Arne Carlsen and Jane E. Dutton (Eds.) Copenhagen Business School Press, ...
Research Alive: Exploring Generative Moments in Doing Qualitative Research
Arne Carlsen and Jane E. Dutton (Eds.)
Copenhagen Business School Press, Advances in Organization Studies Series
MANUSCRIPT IN PREPARATION: PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE OR OTHERWISE USE WITHOUT AUTHORS
Making Waves: Moments When Ideas Are Set Free Elena Antonacopoulou As a native of the island of Aphrodite, Cyprus, I have always felt a natural affinity with water; be it close to a rushing river, a mirror-like lake or by the sea and its expanding horizon. Drop-by-drop water is the source of life but it is also an unpredictable force that can and does kill. I have often thought of the ideas from my research as drops of water in a vast sea of knowledge. This image has cultivated in me, as a qualitative researcher, a deep sense of humility and respect for ideas and their life giving qualities. It is the power of ideas to seduce, amuse, delight, energize, disturb, move and puzzle us that may also hold the key that urges us to experiment, ponder and discover through the fragile connections of thought and action that they expose. In short, ideas may be drops of water that have the potential to make waves - to make a difference - in the rippling effects they can cause. Of all the ideas that have accompanied my search and re-search pursuits professionally and personally over the years, I could never have imagined that a question I posed during a research feedback meeting could have generated such rippling effects. It was the typical setting when a group of researchers straddling three universities interacted with a group of executives from one of the organizations involved in a collaborative research project, sharing insights from the emerging research findings. The discussion was flowing smoothly and issues were being debated, however, the dialog during the meeting was increasingly disjointed and different parallel conversations were emerging.
I remember observing the dynamics of the dialog during the meeting and being unusually quiet. I was participating in the discussion and yet I was also outside of it. I think that this was an important space to be in, temporarily at least, for I feel that this is what prompted me to notice a detail that I could easily have missed. One of the executives was reflecting on a long-standing organizational challenge - that their projects were complex and did not always generate the intended outcomes, mostly because they were disjoined. In this organization project management practices were an aggregation of tasks and activities which were rarely synthesized unless they were presented to clients. In essence what was presented as a seemless process was infact highly disjoined. Confronted with this description I simply asked: ‘Do you mean complex or complicated?’
In posing the question I was as much motivated by hearing more about the perceived project complexity, and ways of ‘managing’ it, as I was by an urge to continue to ponder and experiment, not just with the meanings of words like ‘complexity’ and ‘complicatedness’, but with the ways in which these are experienced in everyday practice and manifested in all aspects of life. I posed the question and what followed was silence, which signaled more than I could absorb at the time. The body language of the executives communicated some uneasiness and
distinctly more so than that of the executive whom I targeted by posing the question to. He did not rush to respond, but took time to analyze why I was making the distinction and why it might be important. Almost as if I were able to read his thought process, I was able to see he was more interested in exploring the distinction, which allowed me to embrace his interpretation. He explained, sounding surprised and yet, as if he were stating the obvious, that in his practice aggregating activities was not the same as connecting them. All of a sudden, projects were appreciated as being complicated for the tendency to manage them as an aggregation of tasks.
Timing the question at this juncture during the meeting was spontaneous and yet proved to be most timely in that it sparked a whole host of activities that could not have been anticipated. For example, the dialog with the executive on this very topic has been maintained for the last three years. He requested me to provide some readings from my work on this topic and he has taken the time to explore how the ideas can be used in his practice. He has been writing short essays that seek to articulate his practice, exercising critique in the approach adopted so far in ‘managing’ project complexity. He has been kind and responsive to my requests for feedback about ideas I am working on and he has gladly taken the time to attend and contribute to events that I have been organizing in relation to this and other themes. The latest adventure in our collaboration has been a session he was instrumental in organizing where he gathered some of his friends in order to take part in what we now refer to as an ‘intellectual workout session’ where I and five executives with multiple backgrounds and experiences met to discuss complexity and complicatedness in relation to leadership and decision-making. I am already looking forward to whatever our dialog on complexity and complicatedness might prompt us to do in the future. It is amazing how one question, at that particular moment in our collaboration, could have caused so many special moments of energy during the process of learning together. If I could freeze time in order to capture these moments I would have loved to have been able to do so. It is those rare moments wherein the power of ideas lies; when they vibrate energy that transcends time and space as their rippling effects generate possibilities for action that could not have been preempted ex-ante. This I have discovered is partly what makes ideas timeless. The intimate connection between idea generation and use becomes an important foundation for collaborative learning which can enrich, sustain and allow the ideas to continue to grow without controlling their destiny. What really matters, to me at least, three years after that meeting, is that the question I posed and the words ‘complexity’ and ‘complicatedness’ have come to mean so much more today and who knows what they might mean tomorrow?
So, for me ideas are what I love in every research journey and my love of ideas and the passion to set them free, by sharing them with others (within and beyond the academic community), is also the reason why making waves has given a meaningful purpose to my scholarly pursuits.
