On project design – reflections about some project examples

This section is to inquire into the recurrent question about how to design AR studies to make sustainable effects in real work contexts. This purpose is motivated by my view that approaches often do not fulfill the intended requirements of significant and sustainable results. Such a statement needs clarification of first which the requirements should be, and second, what hypothetical explanations there may be to the failures.

The focus here is on possible methodological shortages and unsatisfied theoretical suppositions. The material to be used for exploration is a very diverse sample of our own projects with different aims, contexts, sizes, resources, and methods. 

The comments are tentative and searching for possible insights into successes and failures, giving preliminary explanations and ideas about interventions. Hopefully, they will develop with time in amounts and quality.

An underlying thesis is that the complexity and diversity of organizational and work contexts are seldom captured in applied social science. As mentioned in the background sketch, we experienced early that principles of traditional organizational psychology were insufficient in action research, and we tried to devise models and interventions suited to the specific contextual needs. That often led to extensive demands of resources, which were not easily available in many cases.

One special focus will be on the difficulty to influence the interactions between different organizational levels in social systems.   

Management and communication between organizational levels have formal structures to handle the complexity of task accomplishment. This is especially clear in military organizations with their lines of commands and templates for decision-making and communication. The presence of formal structure is, of course, a necessary safety measure in most activities, though does not guarantee mistakes in the content of decision-making and action. In cases of complex tasks and diverse applications,  there are plenty of potential risks for misjudgments. Besides high cognitive demands, other psychological and social reasons can make task accomplishment uncertain and difficult to achieve.

Work forms are about to change because of the new tools for communication and data treatment. This opens up possibilities to examine the old ways of coordinating subsystems and agents at different levels and design more effective procedures for task accomplishment in complex cases...

The horizontal dimension of organizations concerns mainly the matter of diversity, within units and between parallel subsystems. Diversity is often conceived as an awkwardness for management. A contrary and less defensive view should be more fruitful for organization development. It would strengthen the case for inventing procedures to detect and use diverse information to improve conditions.

Development research needs systematic action in real working life to test hypotheses and create new inventions. But projects are often circumscribed due to demands from participating organizations and lack of sufficient resources. This complicates the investigation of overall organizational structures, and it limits the possibility to study diversity among people and units. Action research is a necessity to confront such problems, but it can also be conceived as a threat to existing schemes, and therefore opposed.