Leading for Change in Complex Organisations: Critical Realist Action Research.

The need for an education system able to thrive in the current climate of fast-paced change is widely recognised, but the tools required to facilitate such adaptability remain elusive. Through research conducted within a Local Authority in Wales, aimed at exploring the implementation of the Learning Organisation framework to bolster the system's capacity for learning, it became evident that an innovative methodological approach was essential. This research fused complexity theory with Critical Realism (CR), culminating in the development of a framework for Critical Realist Action Research (CR AR) within a professional context, drawing on the works of Danermark et al. (2002) and Ram et al. (2014).

The CR AR framework engaged education colleagues in a process of collaborative reflection, focussing the lens on causality and the collaborative construction of our understanding of causal mechanisms influencing our ability to engage with change. Engaging participants with systems thinking and encouraging them to contemplate the broader system and its interconnected learning dynamics, this research effectively served as an "active intervention" (Ackroyd and Karlsson, 2014: 39).

Moreover, the application of a CR AR framework facilitated the research in addressing what Van de Ven refers to as the "dual hurdles of relevance and rigor" (Van de Ven, 2007: 34); bringing together changes to professional practice within a complex organisational context with theoretical discourse surrounding complexity and systems theory and their role in driving educational change.