Let’s U-It: On Mixing Theory-U in Conventional Research
Danielle Shani, Dana Selinger-Abutbul, Havtam Bara
Theory-U was developed out of a long tradition of action research, and has offered a new “Social Field Perspective” to action research itself (Pomeroy et al., JABSC, Vol. 1(1)). As Otto Scharmer said in a recent encounter with the Israeli GAIA community (September 2, 2021), “One of the root issues is our concept of Science. That we apply the principles of Science, which essentially boil down to letting the data talk to you, only to the exterior reality but not to our interior reality. Yet in the social world everything we experience is data.”
Our Intention
Otto’s insight about our lacking concept of Science raises the question: how can Theory-U contribute to conventional research itself in ways that improve our understanding of the world around us and our ability to generate change? In the second half of 2020, we prototyped mixing Theory-U tools and practices into a qualitative research on improving community relationships in 19 diverse communities in Israel, where both veteran Israelis and Israelis who immigrated from Ethiopia live. In this piece we share the value we found in this work, the challenges we encountered, and the questions that arose for future examination.
The research at the center of this exploration was conducted by the Israeli Association of Community Centers (IACC) — a semi-governmental entity. It investigated the relationships in local communities between residents of Ethiopian origin and residents of other origins. The goal was to gain knowledge that would help the IACC design interventions to improve relationships in diverse communities. At first, they designed and budgeted a standard qualitative research based on in-depth interviews. But then, the head of research at IACC (the second author of this piece) met Theory-U and came to the realization that in order to fully serve the intention of the research it might be wise to incorporate Theory-U insights into the research tools and methodology. And so this experiment was brought to life.
Dana Selinger-Abutbul, Head of Research at IACC: “This was a research on relationships. Relationships are a very elusive concept. They are invisible, to start with, and adding to the complexity is the intergroup dimension of the relationships. It was very clear to me that I need to go beyond the boundaries of my regular research language in order to bring something that will feel right, and be rich and authentic. That’s what attracted me to Theory-U.”
We saw a threefold contribution in mixing Theory-U into this research:
1. Knowledge ownership — the premise that everyone holds relevant knowledge, and that the knowledge belongs to everyone.
2. Researchers’ perspective — that in order to gather rich and unconventional insights, we should include the first- and second-person perspective of the researchers’ themselves and the research interaction, as well as other relevant types of knowledge — sensorial, relational, aesthetic and intuitive (see Pomeroy et al., JABSC, Vol. 1(1)).
3. Implementation — that practicing Theory-U tools for deep listening will lead to a deeper understanding and thus to a greater ability to develop interventions that are a good fit for the local needs.
The findings we share below focus on the second dimension, and offer also some initial indications for the third dimension. The implementation phase is currently underway, and thus we will be able to examine it more fully only in the future.
Training & Redesigning
How did we incorporate Theory-U into the research? This phase of the project included three elements: Training the research team, redesigning the research tools for collecting and processing the data, and accompanying the project’s leading team (by the first author of this piece).
The research team included 8 researchers and assistant researchers (three of them from Ethiopian origin) that worked in pairs in 4–5 cities each, and a leading team of three directors. We conducted three training sessions for the research team, introducing them to notion that “the success of the research depends on the interior condition of the researchers,” to paraphrase the famous Theory-U quote by Bill O’brien. The training sessions included dialogue walks of the research pairs; learning and practicing four modes of listening; introduction to sensing journeys which we added to the research tools; introduction and practice of redesigned interview protocols; and a collective sense-making practice of the first set of interviews. We also made sure the researchers are paying attention to the edges of the system. The main goal was to help the researchers operate from a deeper level of experience as they collected and processed the data.
The data collection took place for roughly 6 months, including almost 600 individual interviews in the 19 cities all together. To learn from this prototype, we held 10 in-depth interviews with the members of the research team at the end of the project. In what follows below we depict the contribution we identified in incorporating Theory-U in the research, and then turn to the challenges we encountered.
Awareness to the Researchers’ Internal Condition
The researchers reported being much more aware of the extent to which their own internal condition and mode of listening impacted the quality of the interview. “I reminded myself before the interviews who I want to be…it created a framework, how to access the interview, how to bring more presence… I made an effort to retreat, not to enter straight from the daily noise,” one of the researchers described. Many members of the research team said the difference between interviews where the Theory-U protocol was more closely followed and those where it was less, was clearly noticeable. As one of the research directors said: “it was evident who was careful in practicing the quiet preparation time before entering an interview — the outputs were better.”
Being more open was another theme that came up: “In previous research I recall having something I was trying to prove and I wanted the data to work out for me. In this case, I wasn’t eager for it to work out, I wanted to listen and see what emerges.” The deliberate attempt to suspend judgment, stop downloading, and strive for empathetic listening, is well captured by the following story: “I interviewed a 23-year-old Ethiopian captain in the Israel Defense Forces. I asked her what she plans to do in her life. She said she wants to move on to civilian life, but is afraid of the world out there… she fears she won’t be accepted because she is Ethiopian. Here is a young woman who had lots of interaction with white population and succeeded in everything she did so far — what is she afraid of??? I noticed the immediate voice inside of me thinking she is mindlessly repeating some familiar slogans. But I didn’t fall into this trap. I made a conscious effort to understand her perspective, to ask questions that will help me walk in her shoes, until I felt I was really able to see her fear.”
Accessing Deeper Levels of Knowing
The first finding was the researchers’ report of being more aware of their internal condition. The second major finding was that the research team reported accessing deeper levels of knowing by shifting from viewing the research from a third person perspective (“they”) to including also the first- and second-person perspective (“I” and “we”), and by viewing other types of knowledge as relevant and legitimate tools in the research. “The first insight for me was that when we talk about Ethiopians we always talk about ‘them’ ignoring the fact that this is a relationship. We can’t just talk about them, we must talk about the process that we — all of us — as an Israeli society are going through. At the beginning, our guiding questions were phrased such that the focus was on the Ethiopians, and then we changed the emphasis to the relationship between the communities and within the neighborhoods.”
This understanding impacted the perception of the interview itself: “Before, I perceived interviews as more of a one-way thing, with an arrow pointing from the interviewer to the interviewee. The U approach made me realize that there is also an arrow pointing at me, that there are two sides to this interaction.”
Encouraging the researchers to be present with their whole being affected both the atmosphere of the interview and their ability to access deeper layers of the experience:
“The more powerful interviews where those where I brought in my personal world. That was the turning point that created intimacy and lowered the levels of concern.”
“When it worked, I really felt a difference. It was as if I am able to hear the distress beyond the words, or at times, the hope beyond the words.”
“With this approach, the research becomes part of you. You experience it with your entire body… And it is precisely then, that you can bring the objectivity of what people feel. When it becomes part of you, you can genuinely bring their truth.” This could sound paradoxical, so we asked the researcher, Havtam Bara, to clarify: “When a mother is emotionally involved in her child’s life she understands things without words… only because the child is part of her, she really knows.”
Gaining New Insights
Perhaps the most evident contribution of Theory-U to this research was in inspiring the researchers to access other types of knowledge — intuitive, sensorial, and aesthetic — and to use that knowledge to gain new insights. Reflecting at the end of each interview, the researchers were asked several questions, among them, “What image comes to mind right now?”, and, “If the system we are researching was a living organism, what would it say? What would it want to become?”
Working with images generated a path to new layers of understanding that weren’t captured otherwise: “Sometimes you understand something, but not through words. Words come at a later stage. Images are a more intuitive phase… and that is why they helped me later to figure out what it was that I grasped,” said one researcher. Another shared a similar experience: “Through the image I realized what I experienced in the interview… All kinds of images came up in the reflection, and I had no clue where they came from. It reached something else within me. For instance, after an interview with the director of a community center, the image of a ‘bear hug’ came up. It made me realize what I actually experienced in the interview, what he said beyond the words. This director was embracing the Ethiopians in the neighborhood too tightly without listening to them. Through the Ethiopians, he gained access to budgets and resources. Often the Ethiopians are not asked what they need, what they want. It’s quite a superficial hug. I started noticing it in other places too. The ‘bear hug’ became a theme in the research.”
Treating the system as a living organism was another powerful trigger: “The question of what the system would say gave lots of information in just a few words. ‘I am tired,’ ‘I need some air,’ ‘I am drowning, I need to keep my head above the water.’ It was very powerful. It made a lot of sense.”
One of the research directors, Inbar Harush Giti, summarizes the benefit she experienced in incorporating Theory-U in the research tools: “It really enriched the research. It also generated resistance; — at the beginning on my end, later among others in the team… The U offers a novel approach to research that isn’t aligned with the conventional approaches we learned at university…. But fairly quickly I realized that there is something in it that creates totally new areas of knowledge… The U gave me legitimacy to access my own thoughts, experiences, memories, emotions, and make a story. I then shared the story back with the people on the ground and saw if it resonated. And it did. They really identified with these stories and thanked me for helping them make sense…I think it generates a different type of validity. Perhaps it’s even more accurate. It’s certainly more relevant.”
Time, Time, Time, and a Few Other Challenges
The biggest challenge the researchers’ reported was the shortage of time. There seemed to be a built-in tension between the need to deliver roughly 600 interviews (30 in each city), and the space and time required to hold stakeholder interviews in the U spirit. This came up in many interviews and is well summarized by one of the researchers: “The U methodology invites you to pause, stay with, make yourself available — in your mind, but also with your time. Otherwise it runs the risk of being hollow. And making that time was a challenge. That was frustrating.”
Effectively, the redesigned U protocols added 30–40 minutes to each interview for quite preparation time before each interview and reflection at the end. As one could expect, they weren’t followed systematically by all the researchers all of the time. Many of them were also torn between the expectation to hold an open conversation in the U spirit, and the need to collect practical data that the research required, especially in interviews with local officials, thus struggling to handle the time allocated to each interview wisely. Time came up in another respect: “The emotional involvement is deep and intense. So you don’t need more time just in a technical way. You also need more time to process all the feelings that come up.”
Naturally, some researchers were captured by this new methodology more than others. For the latter, the invitation to reflect at the end of each interview felt like another burden, or even as a source of anxiety. “This path invites you to meet yourself, and that’s threatening. It’s like a journey to find your internal truth…Not all of us are prepared to take that journey at every moment in time. It’s much easier to distance yourself and research something that is external to you. Because the U requires openness, it essentially requires vulnerability,” one of the researchers said. “The approach felt too ‘spiritual’ to me and I am very rational, so it was difficult to connect,” another researcher said candidly, and added: “standard research has worked perfectly well for me all the years, so why change it?”
A further source of frustration was that some were eager to know from the beginning what the format of the final research will look like and work towards that. Yet applying Theory-U meant the leading team was more open to see what emerges, and thus less inclined to set things in stone. Managing the tension between the process and the outcome was a continuous challenge for the leading team as well: “I was given a million NIS (New Israeli Shekels) with a clear organizational expectation that I’ll deliver a product that would advance meaningful interventions. I can’t just say that I am committed to the process and trust that everything will be OK. Employing Theory-U helped me to be more dedicated to the process and willing to give up some control. But the tension was there, and I’m not sure it’s solvable.”
An Open Invitation
We embarked on this journey sensing that Theory-U has a great deal to contribute to conventional research, in ways that improve our understanding of the world around us and our ability to generate change. Our interviews with the team of researchers at the IACC, who conducted the research on community relations in 19 diverse communities in Israel, confirmed our expectation that there is indeed a great potential. Researchers reported an increased awareness to their own internal condition, accessing deeper levels of knowledge, and gaining new insights by using Theory-U tools. Yet the tension between the two approaches was present, as we described above. How could we best combine Theory-U and conventional research? The knowledge on how to do standard research exists. The knowledge on how to do action research using Theory-U also exists, due to the immense work of Prof. Otto Scharmer, the Presencing Institute, and the global U community. However, we are still lacking a framework for working in the uncharted territory in between the two.
On a more practical level, we were also left with a series of questions pertaining to the extent and nature of the training and ongoing guidance required to fully realize the potential of employing Theory-U in standard research. How can we offer researchers who are not heavily immersed in Theory-U more support that will help them sustain an open mind, open heart, and open will throughout the process? How can we best offer a container for the researchers to reflect on the intense personal experience entailed in such a project?
And finally, how could we make the use of sensorial, relational, and intuitive knowledge more visible in a research “product”? What are some possible new manifestations of research that give room for such types of knowledge?
Our hope is that this story will help stimulate a wider discussion on the relationship between Theory-U and conservative research methodologies. We invite everyone who has interest in this conversation to reach out to us.
Who We Are
Dana Selinger-Abutbul is the head of Research and Evaluation at the Israeli Association of Community Centers (IACC), and the Principal Investigator in this research;
Havtam Bara is one of the researchers in the research team;
Danielle Shani is the co-founder of BeDo, an Israeli non-for-profit that worked with IACC to incorporate the U approach in this research.
All the quotes were translated freely from the Hebrew.
