LEADERSHIP FOR A CHANGING WORLD:
RESEARCH AND DOCUMENTATION

Approach to Research

As the Research and Documentation partner on the Leadership for a Changing World program, RCLA worked with social change leaders to generate new knowledge about the ways in which communities trying to make social change engage in the work of leadership.

Lens: We looked at leadership as a process in which people come together to pursue change, and in doing so, collectively develop a shared vision of the world, making sense of their experience and shaping their decisions and actions.

Focus: We thus focused our attention on the work done by communities towards a common purpose, rather than on the individual leaders or their direct relationship with followers.

Stance: As "engaged scholars" studying leadership from the inside-out, we chose a stance of co-inquiry and co-production, a participative approach of doing research with rather than on leaders and communities.

Methods: RCLA's approach to leadership as a collective achievement and the need to understand the experience of leadership, as opposed to the behaviors and traits of individual leaders, required a multimodal design. RCLA is committed to giving voice to practitioner perspectives, and each of the collaborative methods used brought a different angle to the research and reflected multiple voices from the organizations and communities.

RCLA's research looks beyond questions of who is a leader and what leaders do, to how leadership is practiced and how leadership makes change possible.

Ethnography

Collaborative and community-based ethnographies were used to create portraits of relationships, practices and processes within which communities engage in the work of leadership over time and in context.
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Cooperative Inquiry

Award recipients formed inquiry groups of eight to ten members each that focused on an inquiry topic of their choosing and which represented a burning area of learning around their leadership. Groups met five to six times over the course of their inquiry in an action-reflection-action sequence.
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Narrative Inquiry

Iterative rounds of appreciative conversations resulted in a Leadership Story about the work in each community. These conversations were taped and transcribed to generate a large and rich data base of narratives about the work of leadership in social change organizations.
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