John Heron
Sage Publications, London, 1996
John Heron
Sage Publications, London, 1996
ISBN 0803976844
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Buy it from Amazon.co.uk
This is a comprehensive tour of the theory and practice of co-operative inquiry, written by its inventor. It is clear and well-written, practically useful and theoretically solid.
Heron himself was the founder of the human potential research project at the University of Surrey, and has written several books on facilitation and group work. Together with Peter Reason he has developed the co-operative inquiry method; this book is the most complete account available of what the method entails. At its most basic, it is a cycle in which practical action alternates with reflection, so as to get the benefits of both. Other methods attempt to combine the two simultaneously, with doubtful success. Co-operative inquiry is a well-tested method and has worked in many different domains. Incidentally, it resembles the Deming cycle known in manufacturing industry, and the SCENiC inquiry cycle independently invented by Colin Potts for requirements engineering.
There is a fundamental problem in ordinary, empirical scientific or engineering research when applied to domains (such as requirements and systems engineering) which involve humans. This is that contrary to the so-called positivist worldview, no-one can rightly claim objective knowledge of "facts" about what other people want or feel or believe. To take a practical example, a requirements engineer cannot simply send out a survey form or questionnaire and do some statistics on the replies to determine what a group of system users want. The structure of the survey, the choice of questions on the form, and the beliefs of the engineer doing the analysis all colour and distort the results.
If you want to discover what people actually want, or what they believe could and should be done to improve their working practices (for instance), you have to involve them. This inevitably puts you, the non-impartial observer, into their world; the inquiry becomes co-operative, and your role in it becomes part of the inquiry. There is an obvious parallel with physics, where in the world of Heisenberg and Schrödinger, the observer appears in the experiment as a force that alters the experiment's results. There is no need, though, to invoke quantum uncertainty to explain this in human terms: how people respond to questions and what they may say about their work depend to a large extent on how the inquiry is conducted.
Heron goes into the resulting issues in careful detail. For example, it is not enough to think of knowledge as a set of cut and dried facts or propositions; that is one way of knowing, familiar in engineering, but it leaves out immediate experience, presentation, and practical knowing or skill. The skill of riding a bicycle or playing a musical instrument, for instance, can be described in terms of physics and engineering as a set of (mathematical) propositions, but until a person has experience of doing it, has had training or practice in the skill presented to them, and has, finally, acquired practical knowledge can that person be said to know how to do it. In Heron's scheme of things - a taxonomy of epistemology, if you like long words - practical knowing is therefore the highest form of knowledge, above the propositional knowledge so long prized in the Western World (with its emphasis on classical, philosophical, academic, male, head-knowledge).
There is obviously plenty of scope in all this for academic wrangling and debate, but the pleasure in co-operative inquiry is that it is a simple method which anyone, academic or not, can readily learn and apply in their work.
This is a stimulating and possibly life-changing book, as well as a practical manual on how to set up and operate a co-operative inquiry.
© Ian Alexander 2000
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