Are. So for this talk, I'm going to talk about something which is quite close to my my heart,
which is about process thinking, which is a way of thinking about the world that we're trying to understand.
And I've written quite a few things about about this topic, mainly methodological work.
And one of the one of the pieces that I've written is about thinking a process, thinking in four different ways of process thinking.
And so what I'm going to do is introduce them to you, discuss them a little bit.
And I'm also going to try. I don't know whether they will let me do this,
but I'm also going to try and relate this a little bit to Richard Norman's work because looking at his work,
I think he was many things Richard Norman.
I think he was a systemic thinker. But I think he was also a process thinker.
And so I would like to like to draw attention to some of that as I talk about this topic.
So, Richard Norman, there's a process think of first class.
And so here are a couple of quotes from books that that Rafael mentioned.
First of all, from his book Management for Growth, clearly he was dissatisfied with in his work with positive mystic approaches.
And so he says naturalistic theory is based on positive based methods can be used to plot regularities between observable and existing phenomena,
but they provide an inmate an inadequate tool for any attempt to penetrate the dynamic world of social change process.
Thinking is really thinking about changing and change.
And then we have to change in order to say the same as kind of a it's the first line that you read in his book on reframing business.
So what is process thinking so?
We defined process thinking in an article that I wrote with Clive Smallman, Harry Soukous and Andrew van der found in this article,
process thinking implies considering phenomena as in motion as unfolding over time and US becoming process.
Researchers seek to understand and explain the world in terms of interlinked events, activity, temporality and flow,
rather than in terms of variants and relationships amongst dependent and independent variables.
So the basic. Entity or or object that process research researchers look at our events and activities,
things that happen rather than variables, and so variables may into it into some of the research that we do.
But the real focus is on a temporally evolving phenomenon.
So the next question is why is this important?
OK, so well,
a first very obvious reason why this is important is the centrality of time to our experience of the world and to our understanding of it.
It's the only thing that we cannot escape, right?
It's important. And yet a lot of the research that we see done and written up in in journals actually doesn't pay much attention to it.
It's kind of left out. So we think that there's room for a perspective that really takes it seriously.
A second reason to think more about process is that it helps us understand not only changing,
which I spoke about, but also about all the activity that is necessary.
And Richard Norman said this in some way to stay in the same place that the activity that is required.
So that every year the Norman lecture takes place in this room, which is staying the same and those who organised that, thank you very much.
But you had to work hard for this, so work is required even for staying the same, and we should recognise that and think about it.
What is that activity that is enabling us to stay in the same place?
A third reason is that, you know, most of our research we think about, well, does an independent variable and there's a dependent variable.
There's an outcome and then it's over. Actually, the world isn't that way, and that there are there are ripples.
I think things get done and they have short term consequences, and they have longer term consequences, sometimes surprising ones.
And so if you just stop, you know, with the measure of performance at the end of the year and you say, well, we've got the outcome now.
But there are things that you did in order to obtain that performance that might have other subsequent consequences.
And so unless you're taking a process perspective, you would just ignore that.
A process perspective enables you to take that into account.
A fourth reason why this is important is because we need to understand not only what the best practises are.
So I had a discussion earlier with some friends from Norman Partners and we were
discussing Ikea's wonderful value constellation system that they had developed.
And that's wonderful. They developed this. We can examine it.
We can see how, how it performs. But my question is, how did they get that?
If you are another business that wants to do as IKEA did in a different sector, for example,
you could invent you could say, OK, well, we need to do this, this, this and this.
But the question I would ask you is, OK, well, fine, that's your objective.
But what are you going to do tomorrow morning and then next week and then next month?
So a lot of the research we do doesn't provide answers to that question.
It tells you what's better. Maybe it says that a is better than be.
If you're a bee, how do you become a.
It's not it's not by waving a monetary mom and saying, now we're be that there is a process.
Unfortunately, a lot of our work doesn't really address that.
So these are for reasons for doing that and the next looking at process, in fact.
And the next step, I'd like to introduce you to four different ways of thinking about process.
And in order to do this, I need to recognise an ex student of mine, Fernando Fakin,
who together with whom we wrote this chapter in the Sage Handbook of Qualitative Management Research Methods,
which introduces this these same four modes, which I have built on in order to do this presentation.
So this is the summary of my presentation. So if I don't make it to 50 50 minutes, here it is.
In fact to me, put it there. So first, one first way of of thinking about process is thinking about evolution over time.
And the question here is how does an entity change or evolve over time?
So entities like the identity of an organisation, how does it evolve over time?
The structure of an organisation? How does it evolve over time? And so you've got something which becomes different?
And we call this as having a substantive ontology, because there's a focus on this entity, which is an entity and which changes.
The second one processor's narrative is really thinking about the temporality, not necessarily in what you might call the real world,
but in terms of people's experience and how they express it, the stories they tell.
So people tell stories which have time within them. They say this happened and this happened.
Then this happened. This is the story. It may bear some relationship to what happened, but it could just be a story.
And so the second way of thinking about process, which is a kind of experiential technology,
is this notion of temporality being in the stories that people tell.
Oh, the third one, which we which is philosophically speaking, if there are philosophers in the room,
a process ontology, what people usually mean by that is the idea.
That process is all that is OK.
There are no things. Things are made up of processes.
So the notion here is how a phenomenon is reconstituted in and through activity.
And then finally, the last one takes and we're getting more and more professional as we're going through this,
the last one process as witness is the idea of not only is the thing that you're studying,
moving and process, but so are you as a researcher so that the researcher is moving along with the elements they're looking at?
So these are these for. And so my purpose in the rest of the talk is to illustrate them.
And hopefully Denise will help me to make sure that they we manage to at least talk a little bit about each of them.
And so in order to do this, I'm going to use some examples from my own research, sometimes from my own research, some from other.
But for each of them, I'm going to give a few little examples from my own research.
So let's start with the first one. So process this evolution.
And if you look at the literature in organisation studies, this is the version of process, which is most common.
And to be quite honest, most of my own work is based on this idea.
And the distinction that I see is particularly important between process and variance is very present in this picture,
where process studies are kind of represented by the picture on the right.
So if you take these two pictures, you could argue that both of them provide an explanation of strategic change.
On the left, you have a series of variables that predict the degree of strategic change.
That's the traditional way of thinking in most of our scientific disciplines.
The picture on the left, on the other hand, is another way of explaining a strategic change.
But it traces the path of that change over time through not through variables, but through advance activities and choices.
And so this is the version of process that I'm going to focus on when I use the term process as evolution.
I'm not necessarily referring to Darwinian evolution here.
I'm just referring to development over time.
So, OK, so how one would one go about studying this, so usually the kind of research design we use,
this is longitudinal or retrospective case studies of change.
This is a very demanding research methodology if you want to really use this approach to and do it well.
You actually need to be there following things over time. Data from multiple sources, mostly qualitative.
And then your your task as a researcher is to find patterns to detect patterns and temporal trajectories.
I'm a qualitative researcher. I do most of this qualitatively, but quantitative methods to the extent that they might be useful in process research,
this is here where they could be used. Well, we can look at things like agent based simulations as being potentially used,
and longitudinal quantitative models might be helpful for this kind of thing.
This is not what I do, but that's that's where they could come in.
So an interesting contribution to this kind of perspective comes from Andrew van der Veen and Marshall Scott Poole,
who developed for all kinds of ways of thinking about process as something evolving over time.
And so the first one is a kind of a theoretical mechanism is lifecycle.
So, you know, genetic processes, for example, human life follows are predictable, fairly predictable life cycle.
We know what happens next.
Generally, a second kind of process theory theory is the idea of agency where people decide that what they want to do and do it,
they learn from what they do and adjust what they do is a function of this learning.
So the team geology theoretical model is really about learning.
And agency, the third one that is Darwinian evolution here.
So the notion of there being variation occurring amongst species or it could be, for example,
if you're looking at organisations making a large number of ideas being produced in your
organisation and at some point you have to select which ones are going to survive.
So there's a kind of a survival of the fittest thing going on.
And those that are most adapted to the context will survive and continue.
So that's that kind of model. Finally, and this last one is my favourite, which is the dialectical model,
which is the notion that change is driven by the opposition of opposing forces.
And why is this so attractive to me? I think it's because I I study pluralistic organisations,
pluralistic organisations where there are always tensions where you cannot decide
something on your own because you're going to have to interact with others. And so a conflict contradiction, tension is kind of endemic.
So this is the kind of approach that very often I have used in my research.
Some people find this rather pessimistic. It sort of makes you seem that you can't do anything, but I don't think that that's quite true.
So, so here is a dialectical model of strategic change, which is which I will try and explain to you.
So change in organisations is constant, right?
It's just incremental. Things happen differently every day.
So the basic circles here is that part of it.
When we come in and we say, OK, we're going to do a change.
The purpose of this change is to reconfigure the organisation in a certain way, which we hope is going to be better.
And projects in organisations might include restructuring, mergers, reconfigurations, etc. So but then we implemented.
And does the organisation just let itself be forced to implement?
No, this is where the dialectics happens.
So you insert this wonderful project into the organisation.
The project does have some kind of change that effects in the organisation, but at the same time, the project itself changes.
I'm sure you have all experienced that the thing that you thought you were going to implement doesn't look the same once it's implemented,
it just kind of gets transformed. Uh oh yes.
And yeah, even to Norman thought the same thing.
So this is another quote from Richard from Norman, who is actually talking about the dialectic nature of processes.
So consequences of this. So change projects change as they interact with their context.
Change often has to be implemented by navigating through the very power structures and cultures that made change seem necessary in the first place.
Makes sense. OK, so what happens to end intervention that dissipate, it usually dissipated.
They don't usually get more ambitious, but you get dissipated as they are implemented and this going to happen, though in different ways.
So one way this can happen is you can decide that, OK, I'm going to implement this and I will make you do it.
So this is the coercive approach where you say we are doing this.
And of course, in that circumstance, if you're in a pluralistic setting, you will get reaction resistance, which will force you to move back.
So that's one way that you can dilute. The second way is that you could really realising this you propose something, but then you negotiate.
You have to consult with the people who are going to have to implement it. And as you do that, the project changes.
And the third way with just a little bit cynical is to do nothing and then claim you've done it,
which I call symbolic implementation, which does happen and people do get people do declare victory here.
But then in all three cases, you see a dilution occurring, but you never actually implement exactly what you propose.
So this always happens. The the question is, though, I mean, this is this sounds like a pessimistic story, right?
But but maybe some of these one of these approaches is actually better than others.
It may be better to do one of these rather than the other.
And so I'm just going to show you this diagram comes from a study which actually done with someone from Norway in Gaston Sokka,
and this was in a nameless oil company in Norway, and she was looking for her thesis.
This thesis, actually, she was looking at how three different I've only got two here,
but three different divisions of the same company were implementing the same organisational change on different oil platforms.
And you have this, this is on the top.
This is the one division and on the bottom, this is one division, and what we did was sort of traced.
There's even a little bit of quantitative sort of stuff here.
You can sort of trace trends in various things here.
So what you see is in the in the top one very coercive implementation.
So they moved right away to implement this thing.
So this black line is how much of the change they were actually trying to do and the blue line is what the the top management thought about this.
So they were very pleased about that, they thought that this was wonderful, this this this division is really properly implementing the plan.
But the employees hated it. So the relational trajectory is about the quality of employee relations trust.
And so that went right down the tubes strikes all kinds of relations.
And in the end, those who had implemented it left.
And so what happens is you end up with a moderate amount of change actually occurring.
In the end, they lost all their credibility with the top management, and they didn't really get the trust with employees back.
The other trajectory is the reverse of that. Right from the beginning, the division was not very keen to implement this,
but they said if we're going to implement this, we're going to work with the employees from the beginning.
That was not popular at first. With top management.
But it was a good way to maintain the trust of employees, and so you see the different trajectory.
I mean, we argue that it could be discussed debateable, but we argued that they did just as much change.
But they were much better off at the end because they had sustained employee trust.
They had, you know, after a low kind of recouped the credibility of top management because they hadn't created the crisis.
This this group created across this group was able to do as much as the project as the first group, but without the without the mess.
So I mean, this is this is an example of the types of things that that this kind of research can lead to.
And although the story seems pessimistic at first, there are some interesting findings which, you know, gas dissipation will occur.
But there are better ways of doing it than others.
And so probably a good idea to work with the people who are affected by your change rather than to try to force it through.
Small lesson. OK, so how am I doing?
You fine, you've got 25 minutes, OK, grip. So, yeah, I'm going to.
Very quickly talk about this one. This is a kind of corollary of this, which is which I call the boomerang effect,
which is also that change not only has substantial consequences and what happens in the organisation, but it has political effect.
So. So if you do something like the first unit and in that study?
Your future in the organisation may be. Yeah.
I mean, it depends on which point at which point people make these decisions, but at the beginning of the track record,
actually you might be promoted at the end of the trajectory you might use, you might lose your job.
So the issue is that leading change can affect personally and lead does a capability of leading change in the future,
which which is another kind of consequence to considering this this viewpoint.
And you can see that. There are various kinds of outcomes to all of these processes, so I'm going to skip the next slide.
Thank you. And summarising this, really.
So the main thing, the main insights of the complexity and reality of the change processes.
Unintended consequences and how short term and long term effects are different.
It's time consuming and we are still talking about entities here.
So maybe there's another way to talk about it. OK, so let's move on to the second one processes of narrative.
This is about how people make sense through narrative accounts,
and so process here is constructed through the stories people tell not necessarily seem to be occurring objectively in the real world.
And here I'm going to. Come back to Richard Norman. Who I think actually with the development of the scenario method and his approach to consulting.
This comes from him from his book on reframing business,
and he's talking about one of the first things you need to do is to understand
the story of the past and how that is represented in the future and also to.
Think about the story of the future and how that is represented in the present,
and so he said the more and richer the experience we can dig out and bring into the future from the past,
the rich of the present and the more we can bring out of insightful and ritual rich scenarios from the future, the rich of the present.
So that actually he was a process thinker and maybe a narrative thinker as well.
So what is the methodology that one would use for this, so it could be interviewing where people tell their stories?
And so the process is you are looking out at the stories that they are telling.
You could also be written texts where you can actually see stories being told in these text using narrative and rhetorical analysis methods.
There's a famous paper by Barry M Arms about strategy as a narrative which really builds on this approach.
And I'm just going to give you a snippet from one of the studies,
and I actually presented this study in depth this afternoon where in a certain sense, we're doing this.
So this is a study of a large Canadian cooperative organisation,
and we looked at how the company actually uses the history of its founder and its communications.
And in order to do this, we had access to an 80 year archive.
The magazine sent to employees this organisation, and a really interesting story is how what they write,
these stories they tell about the founder construct continuity, so continuity in the past and the future.
And so this one we call conservative and vocation. And this is a CEO who is talking about a potential change.
People in his organisation are pressuring for change.
And he is saying, No, no, no. No, we're not changing because our founder told us that this is what we should do,
so be careful not to be pulled in a false direction and lose the spirit that the founder wants to
give to the less popular Mr Sharma never seems to say that the popular must be parish organisations,
which is what was being changed. Good. He repeated.
Everywhere this teaching, which is our strength and security. So here is a narrative which says in order to be continuous, we must not change.
That's obvious. Now it seems like an obviously. But then a bit later, we have this quote.
Which which actually enables them to keep the founder as the symbol of continuity, but to change at the same time.
And so here is a narrative which says it has been said of our phones two of and that he knew exactly what to keep,
what to change and as needed, what to innovate.
It has also been said of him that he knew how to remind his collaborators of the social duty of adaptation,
as well as the democratic demands of corporations.
So between the two quotations, you can see the similarity of continuity based on the story of the founder.
But the difference in terms of what that story enables you to do in the first case?
Nothing, actually. It's a static story.
And the second, in order to be like our founder, we need to change and innovate.
And so that story that is being told there actually has some power in terms of organisational change.
I'm going to stick that might looks very nice, but I think I don't have enough time if somebody asked me a question, we can go back to.
So, so what are the insights from this so we can see how history is reconstructed and how it can serve different purposes within organisations?
Or we can see also the power of narratives to actually construct realities.
So if we think about, you know, the scenario method which which is used by Norman partners or even just by generating a scenario.
And talking to people about how that scenario might happen.
You might actually be making it happen. To some degree.
OK. Because they had not thought of it. And so this is kind of a power to that.
That's sort of a performance of what we would call a performative effect of projecting into the future,
because then that becomes the reality that you are producing.
So, yeah, the other important thing to remember with this kind of approach is that narratives are always constructed to persuade.
So we need to be sceptical of some of the things we hear, especially on Twitter.
And also we rarely see the interactions of narratives, and we just see that the stories that individuals tell so.
So that has limits as well. So we'll move on to the next one, so a process of activity.
So the idea behind this is is how a phenomenon is reconstituted in and through activity and interaction.
So this notion that process is all that is.
So you have this picture of the waterfall. This is a quote from Nikolai Russia process is fundamental.
The river is not an object, but an ever changing flow. The sun is not a thing.
But a flaming fire. Everything in nature is a matter of process, of activity of change.
So this is a perspective where things that seem.
Stable are actually in constant motion, and there are a set of philosophies that believes that this is the way the world is constructed,
so when we are doing this in organisation studies, one of the ways we try and get our minds around this idea is adding energy onto the ends of words.
What that does is it puts them in motion.
So instead of saying organisation, which kind of projects a thing, we talk about organising which projects an activity similar.
Similarly, we might take a concept and identity as a as a concept which are just interests me a lot.
But instead of talking about identity as a thing,
we might put the word work at the end of it and identity work is what people do to try and make something, have a certain identity.
So, so there's the the efforts that are put in place to protect the identity rather than the entity as a thing.
Richard Norman has, of course, been there also.
And this, I think, which should speak to some of the partners, what we usually think of as products or services are really frozen activities,
concrete manifestations of the relationships amongst actors and a value creating
system to emphasise the way all products and services are grounded in activity.
We refer to them offerings. So the notion that in fact.
Products such as stuff being made constantly by different people do different things, this is what.
It's not a fixed thing. It's ongoing activity.
So this has some interesting, different consequences, so if you really want to study process as activity, as a management researcher,
normally what you would tend to do is engage in naturally occurring observation of real time interactions, meeting observations,
email conversations,
ethnography and deep dive vignettes into into small activities where you can actually see the activity constituting or accomplishing that,
performing the thing which does not exist, but which is continually being constructed.
I'm going to. Skip the example, because I think it'd be more healthy to move forward.
And talk about an example from my own research, and this is again with my ex student Fernando Phakeng, and for his thesis,
he studied this peer to peer hardware organisation, which was trying to make it was a start-up and it was trying to make sensors.
Actually, that's what it was. Its business was. And they have this email list.
And he was receiving these emails, and people who are members of this organisation would continually exchange emails.
I was also on this list and it was so we just got these emails.
And in these emails, people would say things about identity, for example, they would say things.
We are an open organisation. And they would then, you know, they would have some ideological discourse,
but they would also have really concrete problems as well that they would try and discuss.
And so he treated these conversations as offensive identity work.
So we look at these e-mail conversations over four years, and we reveal it reveals strong identity tensions between being open, I mean,
one of the leaders of this organisation was convinced was convinced of the need to change the capitalist company and to really profit as an evil.
And so we need to be open, et cetera, et cetera, and being viable, which is they need the money in order to continue.
So in this email list, we saw all kinds of activities taking place, so first of all,
there would be people who would pronounce themselves about being open, et cetera, and other people would just ignore them.
Just not engaged. A second kind of second kind of activity would take place with these conversations with never led anywhere.
I mean, they just people talk past one another. Some people say we were open and the other one would say, Yeah,
but we still need to consider the people who are going to give us money and so they would talk and not resolve anything.
And the third one was they would make these temporary compromises.
So they would they would carry on without a fundamental agreement.
Typically, when one case is patenting, so they have to decide whether they would patent the project, the device that they were developing.
And so they didn't want to patent because that's the kind of commercial non open thing to do.
But on the other hand, how are we going to get investors to put money in this thing?
So they decided to do it temporarily. And, you know, next next year, when this is the last time we're going to do this right?
So so through this process of talking, talking, talking for four years.
They did identity work. But they had no identity.
Right. That everything was ambiguous, fluid.
And so this e-mail list came in all the time, I was the conference on collective leadership of all things.
How many times OK? And in the middle of this conference, the emails started coming in and I realised.
That this organisation was in the process of falling apart. And it was falling apart because at this point, they had to clarify its identity.
And a clarifying of it made it impossible for these people to work together at all.
And so it collapsed. They split up came two separate organisations.
So this is a this is a study where. Yeah, the identity is never there, it's just activity, but still, there was some interesting insight in this.
The what the work is doing is keeping this organisation going, even though it doesn't have an identity.
So this is an interesting I think some of the insights here is how you sustain stability as well as change
how you keep things going in spite of the fact that you're not changing some of the dilemmas with this,
the snippets of data that we sometimes use can be rather decontextualised.
So you don't necessarily, when you're doing this, know where all these people come from.
And so if you're doing the study, sometimes you lose that. And also when you're doing this, of course, the distinction between.
The activity and what the activity is producing.
It's very it becomes increasingly fluid, so so stuff is being done and things are being performed and accomplished.
But what is the. You can't can't imagine talking about independent and dependent variables being separate things.
These things are code constituting each other. So this brings us to the last one, which I call.
After John Shatter, this word is not mine. Who who discussed this idea process as witness.
So the idea here is how understandings of phenomena are looked forward with research subjects.
So not only of the research subjects in motion, but the research is in process alongside the research.
And so John Sato is one of the inspirations for this.
He has this article in organisation studies, understanding processes from within an argument within us thinking.
Another source of inspiration of inspiration is Karl Wyck,
who in 1999 wrote this article in the Journal of Management Enquiry, and I just read you the quote.
And he's arguing here for the importance of studying things forward rather than backward.
And he's arguing that we, as academic researchers, speak for myself here, always study things that are deep and gone.
But in fact, there's. There is value in thinking forward, so unsettled,
emergent contingent looking forward contrasts sharply with our backward oriented theoretical propositions that depict that living as settled,
causally connected and coherent after the fact.
The compact causal structures that epitomise our theories are artefacts of retrospect rather than narratives of prospect.
So I think there's something fundamentally interesting about that comment.
I think that academics tend to be trapped by this because we need to publish these articles and journals.
And so it's hard to do that with perspective thinking, but it didn't worry Richard Norman.
And so what are some of the ways to study this so dialogic action research was something that was recommended by shorter,
real time auto ethnography could be some way way to do this and clinical process interventions of the type that Richard Norman was engaged.
And I think our ways of doing this. And and so in order to do this, you're engaging in collective sense,
making with the people you're working with and kind of iteratively working with them.
So this is a question that Norman asks in his book Managing for Growth, where he's talking really about this methodology.
And I hope I'm not taking his name in vain here, but I think that his perspective was that he wanted to contribute to practise,
but at the same time, he wanted to do this in a rigorous, rigorously academic way.
And his question was how can the language used by the researcher be linked to the language used by the actors in the studied system?
And how can these two languages be made to enrich one another in a combination process of research and change?
And I think that this is with witness thinking that he was considering at this time.
And honestly, I haven't really done this myself. So, I mean, there are very few articles which are published in our top journals about this,
but there is a one here which I recommend to everybody who's interested in it.
By Lottie Lucia and Marianne Lewis, who have a paper here on organisational change and managerial sense making working through Paradox.
And it's it's a very interesting story of how the researchers.
So Lottie Lucia was a consultant. Marianne Lewis was an academic, and so the two of them got together,
and you can see how the authors worked with the organisation members at go on ongoing issues.
And they come up with some theorising around paradox and the paradox lens of organisations in the study.
So this is a really good example. We're fine. Yeah, so and I mean, the other example is certainly riches, Norman's overall perspective and heritage,
where he really developed prospective theories based on decades of clinical research
oriented towards helping companies reframe business and reconfigure their ecosystems.
So I think that he was a witness thinker as well as a process thank.
And just, well, I haven't really done this, but here is a place where we almost did.
And so in two thousand and one with some colleagues, I published a paper on leadership and strategic change and it was about mergers,
actually, and this has been a long longitudinal study.
I think we've been studying this for eight years and we really need to publish something at this point.
And so this is what we wrote at the end of it. We do not know how the mergers will turn out in the end.
But this summary can best conveys how we see them now. This is far as we have come in our research journey.
Hopefully, as we keep on following events, we will learn more. Indeed, if Wike was right about the value of real time research,
the record we have set down here and now should one day enable us to increase
our understanding when we go back to compare it with what actually happened.
And so that's another way of doing prospective research, which is, you know, you're doing a study.
What you should do is write down what you think's going to happen on a piece of paper,
put it in a safe deposit box and open it one year later and see how completely you got it completely wrong.
Or maybe not. But if you really did understand the situation, then you shouldn't.
There should be something left after that. If we're doing good work.
So, yes, it so I mean, worthless and can can contribute to performing the processes that it that it studies,
and it's but the difficulty for us academics, it's not so difficult for consultants, perhaps as.
Yeah. Two things it's hard to publish with this because process is getting increasingly hard to pin down in academic research.
And in the end, retrospect nevertheless takes over.
So when we started emerges, even if it's one year later, you're always looking back.
You can't look forward. You're always describing what happened and not what will happen.
So I'm coming to the end here, which is good.
So there's more than one way to operationalise the notion of process thinking in research and practise.
And each of the four conceptions has quite different assumptions.
It requires different types of data and modes of analysis, and as we move through them, it gets more and more complicated, right?
It gets harder and harder to get your mind around, perhaps, and it's more and more difficult to study, according to traditional research methods.
And so I'm just going to finish with a couple of questions.
So can the different approaches be bridged and combined?
How do they work together and which ones are ultimately most useful and for whom?
I'm just going to leave that open. And then we go.