Organisational learning through collaborative reflexive writing

In an otherwise seminar-based educational program to develop the leadership in a Danish vocational academy, participating academy managers and university-based researchers took part in a supplementary process of reflexively writing ‘organizational dairies’ based on participants organizational experiences and perceived challenges in advancing the pedagogical practice of the vocational academy. This paper aims to describe the collaborative reflexive dairy writing as a participatory action research method of inquiring into organizational life and advancing organizational learning. The suggested research method, and the participant trajectories of both practitioners and researchers in the collaborative writing, draws on the process and complexity theory perspective of organizational life as complex responsive processes of interaction (Stacey & Mowles, 2016) and the autoethnographic practice of narrative reflexive inquiry (Stacey, 2012) suggested by complexity theory informed organizational scholars (see also Mowles 2011). The paper aims to exemplify and theorize the collaborative reflexive writing inquiry based on empirical case material, and draws on insights from the interpretive and ethnographic practice of writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005). Writing, most often presented as a method of inquiry performed by researchers (Ibid.), is elaborated into a practice of practitioners writing reflexively about their organizational experience and responding, in writing, to the reading of the organizational dairies of their management colleagues. Making the writing inquiry collaborative amongst educational managers in the vocational academy by asking the managers to respond reflexively to the organizational dairies of their colleagues holds a promise of organizational learning as and outcome of the collaborative writing inquiry. The paper seeks to bring out, as well as problematize, the organizational learning outcome of the collaborative writing inquiry.