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Naming elephants and situating dragons : appreciating designerly ways of knowing across ecosystems

University of British Columbia

This intrinsic case study explores retrospective narratives with living stories of an organization’s team assigned a task requiring ecosystem leadership. Ecosystem leaders refer to centralized organizations recognized by the broader ecosystem membership as capable of addressing identified disruptions (Moore, 1996/2016). The identified disruption introduces a provincial curricular redesign of a grade 6 to 9 elective course using an inquiry-based approach to explore trades and technologies careers. The assigned task involves formulating and facilitating an organization-based resolution across the ecosystem. A resolution emerges as a result of applying Dewey’s (1910) experiential inquiry model to a problematic situation. The team adapts organization practices and integrates task-related workflows. They explore, discover, and examine the disruption as a problematic situation with other ecosystem members. The team makes sense of their individual and team experiences. Through ways of knowing, the team transfers and mobilizes new knowledge, skills, competencies, and social connections. Designerly ways of knowing illustrate the aggregation of the team’s explicit and implicit professional practices and workflows applied to model a new order across an adaptive, complex ecosystem (Cross, 1982). They accumulate extraneous factors during the formulation and confounding factors during the facilitation fostering workflow barriers. Metaphorically, naming elephants refers to how the team discovers implicit barriers from extraneous factors. Situating dragons refers to how the team identifies visible barriers from confounding factors. The research design uses a storytelling lens and an appreciative inquiry (AI) approach to gather data from the organization’s website, participant interviews, a 5D AI Cycle, and the researcher’s field notes. Synthesizing the data creates graphics illustrating the team’s journey. The findings inform the guiding question: how might a team working adjacent to a kindergarten to post-secondary education (K-20) system and with associated workplaces within an ecosystem retrospectively describe the impact on organizational learning (OL) as they generate appreciative professional stories, individually and collectively, of their daily practices and workflows after formulating and facilitating a resolution? The final chapter offers a step-back-to-step-forward process emerging from the study for researchers, teams, and organizations to consider before embarking on similar journeys.

Text

2019-04-26

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/69961

Interdisciplinary Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/