Stories/Lived Experience
Authors: Bob Williams, Systems Thinking Practitioner, Trainer and Evaluator – Consultant. Joan O’Donnell, Systems Thinking Trainer and PhD Researcher at Maynooth University’s Assisting Living and Learning Institute, Research Funded through the Science Foundation of Ireland (SFI) Centre for Research Training in Advanced Networks for Sustainable Societies (ADVANCE CRT)
In this blog, we will discuss topics covered during ADVANCE CRT’s Summer School on Systems Thinking at Maynooth University in June 2022. See here for the first blog. It can be read as a discourse around designing research, and you are invited to consider how the questions posed offer an inflection point for your research.
Nobody would deny that research is a complex business. One of the most complex decisions is deciding the focus of your research among the vast range of possibilities that lie within its scope. This blog explores how understanding and addressing three different kinds of complexity can help with that tricky decision. Ontological complexity helps you address the reality you are dealing with; cognitive complexity helps you understand how different people make sense of that reality and praxis complexity helps you decide which parts of ontological and cognitive complexities ought to be inside and outside of your focus.
One of the most important decisions in any research project is deciding the boundary between focus and scope, and then having made that choice, working out what your scope entails. Depending on the respective stage of a project,, scope can either be largely ignored or, conversely, during other points in the research journey, it can threaten to overshadow the focus so much that the scope effectively becomes the focus. Although ignoring the scope might make your research more achievable, it risks the research being largely irrelevant because it is disconnected from its technical, social and political context. The potential dissonance between the focus and scope of your research can place such a huge burden on your project that, while it might be very relevant to the real world, it risks being unachievable. This tension between scope and focus is especially applicable to PhD researchers who often have to navigate the academic demand for narrow focus and funders’ and society’s demands for relevance, and thus for a potentially larger scope.
How do you decide where the boundary between the focus and the scope of your research should be? How can you identify the potential scope of your work and then take well-informed decisions about a focus that is both relevant and achievable?
The systems thinking field has long acknowledged this tension between focus and scope. How it addresses it can be illustrated by the diagram below (Diagram 1).
The above diagram displays a triangular graphic that shows how the three elements of a systemic inquiry – understanding inter-relationships, engaging with multiple perspectives and reflecting on boundary choices – are all mutually interconnected. Two of those elements essentially determine the scope of a particular piece of work and the third determines the focus. There is a boundary where the key choices and compromises between focus and scope lie.
Let’s unpick this diagram in detail.
The first task of a systemic inquiry is to identify the scope of the work – in particular the substantial network of inter-relationships – and the nature of those inter-relationships. This is sometimes called understanding the ontological complexity of a situation.. In other words, what is the reality you are dealing with?
However, different stakeholders in your research area will interpret that reality in different ways, based on their histories, cultures, world views, age, specialisation or experiences. As a researcher, you will ‘see’ this complex reality in different ways to your funder, while a person who is participating in or providing data for your research, even your supervisor, will see a different reality. In any given situation, there will be thousands of different perceptions of those realities. There will, therefore, be many different responses to the question ‘what is this research about?’, and many different assessments about whether your research is the right thing to do. Furthermore, those different realities will influence how people behave within and respond to your research. Thus, a systemic inquiry will also need to explore these multiple perspectives to completely understand the situation that is being researched. This is sometimes called cognitive complexity In other words, how do people interpret the same reality?
That combination of two complexities comprises the scope of a piece of research. It includes not only what is ‘out there’, but what people’s ideas are of what is ‘out there’. Taking all of that ‘scope’ into the ‘focus’ of your research is clearly impossible. In order to do the research, there has to be a process of deciding what to include and what to exclude from the scope, so that the focus of that work is practical while also being sufficiently relevant to be achievable and legitimate. In the systems thinking field, this is called boundary setting, and the reflection necessary to decide an appropriate boundary is called boundary critique.
There is, however, one more level of complexity. As suggested by the arrows in the diagram, each of the three elements affects the others. Prioritising a particular perspective not only will affect subsequent boundary choices, but will also affect those aspects of ‘reality’ that will be necessary to understand to do your research. A decision that there are certain aspects of reality that are unmeasurable or unobservable will affect the boundary choices of what resources (people, money, skills, knowledge, things) are necessary to do your research. And those decisions may, in turn, have an impact on which perspectives on the research are prioritised and which are marginalised. A label for this could be ‘praxis complexity’. In other words, the complexity of deciding what is feasible and desirable to do?
There are several implications for you as a researcher. For instance, it implies that your research design is not something that is done at the beginning but rather throughout the entire research program. Every time you discover more about reality, then all perspectives on that reality change, and that in turn poses questions about the nature of your current boundary choices. It also invites questions about how your research can claim that it is the right research to do. There are ethical questions of who ought to make that decision. You? Your supervisor? Your funder? Those positively, or negatively, affected by your research? Those who feel their perspectives have been marginalised may pose a risk to the feasibility, sustainability and legitimacy of your research.
These are difficult issues and the systems thinking field contains many approaches by which they can be addressed. Systems thinking can effectively assist the researcher in their navigation of the complexities between scope, focus and boundary setting. It can also enable them to confidently manage a very wide array of complex strategic questions upon which the success of a research project can depend. Future blogs will explore how the systems field addresses them.