From the logic of Feeling in Organizations, discipline, and communication, methods are resources for routing out conflicts in an organisation's logic and helping develop new logics. The line between method and tool is not always well defined, but I don’t place much importance on this.

At any rate, I have a wide range of work approaches and methodologies in my toolkit.  However, there are a few that spring to mind, which I would like to talk a bit more about.

Naturalistic Inquiry (NI) 

Naturalistic Inquiry is a method for qualitative research with the aim of answering the question of how research can increase the client’s performance capacity. Especially suited to “messy” situations in which opinions are divided over what is actually going on.

An organisation comprises a complex system. The influence of parts and of people on each other is variable. Furthermore, the persons involved each have their own ideas about it: there are different interpretations of the rules and of events. This means that the scientific method of inquiry is not well suited here, since there will be multiple truths.

NI’s features and differences from traditional social research:

Experience from practice

For a governmental department I did an inquiry for success and fail factors of projects, using the method of Naturalistic Inquiry. I did this inquiry together with a close colleague of a consultancy bureau for contract management. Reviewing the reports I notice that the impulses for progress came in particular from the bottlenecks or the things that went wrong in our process of inquiry.  We were forced to think of something new or to ask for help.

De member check, were we presented our experiences and conclusions to the interviewees, appeared to be a powerful instrument for change. The report gains support of a group of people in concern, not only of the inquirers. That makes it hard to ignore the conclusions or to put aside the report.

In a next inquiry I want to have more member check meetings, to organise an ongoing conversation about important factors and their coherence.

Another conclusion is that you have to do this type of inquiry with at least two persons, to interpret the results from different points of view.

NI can be an intervention for reflection and for action. GUBA & LINCOLN give some risks of NI: misleading, violation of trust, invasion of privacy, misunderstaning when relations become too intimate. Their book  Fourth Generation Evaluation gives more information about practice of NI. Work forms that can be applied in a NI process are given in the book of SIMON & CASELL. 

I see contra-indicaties for Naturalistic Inquiry when:

• there is not enough time to build trust for cooperation of people in the organisation

• you are not really interested in the matter

• you have close relationships with the organisation

Post-its, play a big role in my designs. You can even prepare them by printing words or figures.  

I use post-its for:

• data-analyses in NI

• inventories of opinions, remarks or tasks in meetings and workshops

• categorizing material for a report or article

• building Causal Loop Diagrams and flow diagrams with groups

Post-its are flexible, everyone can use them. U can apply them in large amounts, stick them almost everywhere, they make no noise and are quite cheap.  After a meeting you can photograph them and make copies for a report.

Interviews: design

Interviews are widely used in qualitative research, in a variety of types. Criteria for design of interviews are:

Clairvoyant method for interviews

1. Imagine, you meet a clairvoyant, somebody who can actually foretell the future. You have the opportunity to ask three questions about the future of the organisation. What would you ask the clairvoyant?

2. Imagine you are the clairvoyant yourself. How would you answer these three questions yourself if all your dreams came true? 

3. What would the answers be if your worst nightmare was realized?

Hermeneutic circle

The hermeneutic circle is a means to gather information, with the aim of constructing an overview of the opinions and visions regarding an issue. The circle starts with an interview with one person. At the end of the interview you pose the question: There must be someone who feels very different form the way that you do. Would you be willing to give me that person's name? Then you go to that second person, you present the first opinion and asks the second person: How do you feel about this? At the end you ask again for different views or who has a stake in this issue. After a series of interviews you go back to the first person to complete or correct your findings.

You can identify stakeholder groups in the beginning and perform a separate hermeneutic circle for each group. Afterwards the circles can be linked.

The hermeneutic circle can be a part of a fourth generation evaluation, in which a diversity of constructs of reality is portrayed. The history of evaluation research methodology, the assumptions and procedures of the fourth generation evaluation are extensively described by  GUBA & LINCOLN in Fourth Generation Evaluation.

Business Idea

Purpose: Round of interviews to gain insight into the Business Idea of a company or organisation, to get a better grasp of the nature of the company as a starting point for devising a strategy.

The Business Idea is the specific business formula consisting of:

·         the distinguishing factors for the company (these factors must be the driving force for the strategy)

·         What is unique about the specific formula and why are others incapable of applying it?

Method: a round of interviews with between 10 to 15 people, in which the clairvoyant method for interviews can be used. After the round of interviews, the highlights are selected (between 40 and 60 per interview) and presented in a package to the interviewees in a feedback session. For the diagnosis/analysis of the data, you can examine what archetype is applicable here and what driving force it would be possible to use.

The method is described by VAN DER HEIJDEN in Scenarios, the art of strategic conversation.

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