Trainers And Consultants, What Do You Want To Know?
What’s Your Burning Question? What have You Done With Your Inner Researcher? Introduction: A Manifesto The time has come for applied behavioral science practitioners to more fully own and operate from their own curiosity, to appreciate the many ways we are creators of knowledge as well as consumers of knowledge in our daily practice, and finally to take more responsibility for generating useful knowledge from our experience. We need to appreciate more how each day we are posing and answering important specific, general, and global questions related to the nature of group and organizational life. Each day we are learning more about how to intervene and improve the functioning of individual, family, group, and bigger systems. Each day we leave many of these lessons learned unarticulated, unexplored, unrefined, and unshared. The reasons for this are complex. The incentives often aren’t there; our temperaments tend toward action more than reflection, and we have competing priorities. Perhaps that is why we have surrendered the social role of documenting learning (and the responsibility for acting on our own curiosity) to our academic colleagues. Their incentives, temperaments, and priorities are often different from ours and support their reflective activities and resulting knowledge products. The price that we and society have paid for this is real however. The voice and experience of the practitioner is under-represented in the published reports about the nature of social systems and the dynamics and methods of intervening.
