Paul Hocking - Improving my practice - an inquiry into my professional practice with a view to improving its positive, large-scale effect in health services in Wales. What evidence can I bring that shows that I have some positive and wide-ranging influence on health services.

In carrying out this research, I would like to understand the nature of my current practice, and the degree of its 'effectiveness'.

Then, given this, I would like to consider ways that I could improve my practice, and to test out these new ways in daily experience. In the process, I would like to capture evidence of the approaches which are more 'effective', and so, via iterative action and reflection, to improve the quality of my practice.

This prompts the question, 'what do I mean by improving my practice?' What does 'doing my work better' mean? As I am in the field of strategic organisational development in the health service, doing my work better would involve greater effectiveness in what I do (I am achieving what I am paid to do) and greater efficiency in what I do (I am optimizing the human and other resources at my disposal) - all for the good of the users (patients) and the providers of health services, for whom I work.

But it also prompts me to ask 'what right do I have to influence others?' And does not someone who takes such a view show that he believes he is outside the system, rather than one tiny element in the midst of the complex responsive processes of our relationship experience (Stacy 2000)? Stacey's thinking makes me question whether I can every have an idealized 'vision' towards which I am working, and certainly calls into question any guarantee that I will ever get there?

And yet I have observed, both in my own life and in the lives of others, a sense of 'vision' which motivates, and actually does result in significant 'vision achievement', even though admittedly not fully as expected, and with many unintended consequences, both good and bad.

So I begin my inquiry.