Thursday, 6.41am
Sheffield, U.K.
It is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting – anonymous
I’m grappling with the concept of “theory” in Action Research.
I’m not alone, many students and researchers avoid Action Research because of the need to come up with theory – it’s not clear what theory actually is or how to come up with it.
We have to start somewhere when unpicking a concept, so let’s start at a beginning.
You think. We all think.
A thought could be as simple as “If I listen carefully and take notes, I’ll learn about the situation my client is facing”.
It’s easier in the physical sciences – if I drop this rock it will fall down rather than go up.
We then take action based on what we think.
And we observe what happens.
This step of thinking to action is repeated countlessly.
Imagine a therapists office. The theory behind therapy might be that you listen to your patient and help them work out how to improve their situation.
That’s one way of thinking.
If you watch the Netflix documentary “Stutz” and read some of the commentary online you’ll find some criticism that the celebrity therapist the show is about “tells” his clients what to do rather than following an established process.
He thinks differently.
He does so because of what he has learned as a result of helping his patients – from the action he has taken.
But how do we learn from action?
We need time to reflect. To wonder about what happened, to write down what we remember, to make lists, to sort them, to categorise the ideas in them.
We need to articulate what we’ve learned.
This can be painstaking work.
It’s easy to take action – to do something.
When you do something a lot you start to forget how it’s done, how you learned to do it, what’s actually taking place.
Slowing down and analysing what you did is much harder than it seems.
You need tools for that.
Once you start to see what has happened you can start to package your ideas into a framework.
This is the start of theory building.
I recently attended a conference where I was talking about my research to a colleague.
I used a lot of words to explain something I was doing.
He nodded and said, “Ah right, you mean…”
And then he said a word.
For example, I talked about how it took time to get good at using digital tools.
He said, “Ah right, you mean ability“.
That’s the next step, encapsulating a bunch of words and ideas in a single one, or a succinct phrase, and it gets you started with theorising.
You start to think about “truths” in this step.
I think that perhaps the difference between thinking and theory is that theory is thinking smartened up and put in a suit.
It’s a polished version of what you think, that’s ready to go out and meet the world and stand on it’s two feet.
It’s a grown up version of thinking.
It’s the rich flavour that’s left when you boil away all the excess liquid in a stock.
Of course, none of these descriptions really help with saying what a theory is – or how to write one.
We muddle our way towards creating theory by writing and having it reviewed and criticized and writing again.
Theories gain importance when they are used and found useful by others, especially when it comes to the social sciences and Action Research.
They are the way we make sense of our worlds.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
Handcrafted insight 