Inquiring into the mystery of life's unfolding

ONE DAY WORKSHOP FOR CHANGE PRACTITIONERS

ON RADICALLY DIFFERENT WAYS OF KNOWING

25.4.2025, HELSINKI

Jouke Kruijer and Jeanine Jansen both recently finalized unique PhD research in the action research tradition. Action Research involves a sensitive, reflexive way of inquiring within organizational change (Reason & Bradbury, 2008; Marshall & Reason, 2007).

Through their PhD journeys, they have developed a very personal processual and relational orientation to their practices by looking into the dynamics and interactions within ourselves and our surroundings (Shotter, 2008). They will offer a one-day workshop in which they offer an experiential translation of their groundbreaking research.

Both their contributions are concerned with ways to resist the seduction of western ways of knowing. These traditional ways of knowing tend to colonize our living experience by ‘analysis’ (cut into parts) and reduce the richness of the world in generalized modes of representations (often based on the thinking of white men living in another era and different context).

More about their inquiries.

Jeanine challenges the status quo and adds vitality and relevance to the way we theorize and develop practices within group dynamics. In her research she explores the relational and processual nature of groups in creative, polyphonic and sensuous ways. A source for that embodied creativity springs from her broad notion of musicality developed through her childhood and singing in choirs. The originality of Jeanine’s work also lies in the emergent, intuitive process of creating a group dynamics orientation ‘from within’, filled with confusion and surprise.

She offers a practice-oriented approach to change which includes difference, ambiguity and uniqueness. Her workshop will be an experiment dealing with change practitioner’s dilemmas of how to deal with unique group processes without reducing the reality with classic models and simple representations (like ‘forming’, ‘storming’, ‘norming’); how to handle a position of expertise while also holding the wisdom of the group; how to include embodiment and other sources of creativity in contexts where this might be unknown or different (like some academic settings).

Jouke positions his research in the present crisis of knowing. He explores artful ways of working in organisational change practices and the tension between how art is used and what art is about. Having worked as an artist in the organisational change sector, he develops a claim that working with art in organisations is about opening up territories of experience that participants would otherwise find difficult to talk about—desire, death, domination.

His research—rather than presenting us with a way of knowing—directs us to the mystery of our becoming and grounds us in the unrepeatable, unique experience of the living processes such conversations emerge from. His workshop will be an experiment with practitioner’s dilemmas around how to keep the change process alive while answering to participants’ needs to know what’s going on; how to make the process personal and develop one’s unique signature moves, while working within constrains of clients’ expectations and participants’ familiar frames of reference.

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