Keith Kinsella - How can I improve my practice as an external facilitator to support the tacit learning of managers in large organisations, and create a systemic and relational epistemology of development practice.

This thesis will explore ways of enhancing managers' capability and performance through improving how they learn from and exploit their own tacit knowledge and local experience. It will represent a sustained inquiry into the dialectic of how I and others shape and are shaped by my practice, and the co-creation of a systemic and relationship epistemology of development practice. Through constructing a narrative of my own learning as I interact with managers in learning sets, this thesis will show how through my practice I attempt to realise a more systemic/relational expression of my embodied self.

This action research inquiry will relate to and engage critically with ideas coming from the systemic and social constructionist traditions, Foucault's work on self and power relations, the new insights of complexity theory, and the developments of Polanyi's original work on tacit knowledge. It will also explore the role of humour in dramatising and illuminating the dilemmas that managers deal with in working creatively and with integrity in large bureaucratic organisations.

It will involve the creation of a living theory of effective learning facilitation as I see to understand, improve, evaluate, and explain my support of the development process of knowing-in-action and knowing-for-action in the context of managing in large bureaucracies. In doing so it will explore the creation of an integrated 'learning architecture' for supporting managers' learning from their everyday informal work experiences and valuing and exploiting their embodied and tacit knowledge.

26 November 2005

Keith has re-registered for his M.Phil/Ph.D. programme and his you can view his latest writings on leadership here.