Tuesday, 7.38pm
Sheffield, U.K.
Words may show a man’s wit but actions his meaning. – Benjamin Franklin
As some of you know my research programme is a type of action research.
The way to do action research is to do something and then think about what you’ve done and think about what you could do better and then do something again.
In action research theory is about practice – which makes it suitable for answering the kind of questions that other research methods find hard to address.
It’s also criticised by some people as not scientific because it doesn’t follow the usual approach of hypothesis, experiment, results etc.
We don’t really listen to those people.
But they have a point – action research is not replicable; you can’t do the same thing the same way again to see if it will give you the same results.
The most you can do is be clear about how you did something – and make the process recoverable.
Now you have a choice about how to do this.
Do you talk about what you’ve done or do you try and show what you’re doing?
The difficulty with describing something that people aren’t familiar with is that it’s extremely hard to understand what you mean.
Imagine describing an elephant to someone that’s never seen one before.
This is not an uncommon problem. I studied electrical engineering and passed exams on relays without ever seeing one or even a picture in real life.
I didn’t learn anything from that experience.
So if you really want someone to learn something you need to show them the thing in action.
And it’s even more complicated if the thing you’re talking about is really something that gets you to the thing you’re really after.
For example, a technique to gather information more effectively is not about the process of information gathering but about the decision you want to make once you have the information.
Or, in the famous example, what you want is not a drill but a hole.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
Handcrafted insight 