Bob Williams, Joan O’Donnell The third of a series of blogs on using systems thinking in research Let’s start with a true story. It follows on from our last blog about focus and scope. But it highlights our tendency to start with focusing in on the subject of our research…

Authors: Bob Williams, Joan O’Donnell Nobody would deny that research is a complex business. One of the most complex decisions is deciding the focus of your research among the vast range of possibilities that lie within its scope. This blog explores how understanding and addressing three different kinds of complexity…

Joan O’Donnell & Bob Williams This blog is the first of a series of blogpost contributions outlining basic Systems Thinking concepts presented at the ADVANCE CRT Summer School that Joan and Bob helped to design in June 2022, held in Maynooth University Ireland. ‘The Systems Thinking summer school opened up…

Barbara Schmidt-Abbey (Open University) Joan O’Donnell (Maynooth University) Kirsten Bording Collins (Adaptive Purpose) The title of the 14th European Evaluation Society’s Biennial conference in Copenhagen in June 2022 posited that evaluation finds itself at a watershed and called for “actions and shifting paradigms in challenging times”. At the time of…

What do we do when we do not know what to do next, but are under pressure to do something? Too often something becomes anything, and anything is something that we have done before. Credit to: Photo by Lena Khrupina from Pexels The pandemic prompted speedy innovation and improvisation: it…

Continuous advances in technology and Assistive Technology (AT) enhance the range of work that people can do outside the office environment, making working-from-home (WFH), hybrid or remote working a realistic option for many workers with disabilities. …

It’ time to ditch failing strategies and embracing an inclusive future of work Covid-19 has compounded the difficulties disabled people face with regard to work, but it did not cause the fault-line in Irish social policy that resulted in Ireland having the poorest EU participation rates of disabled people in the workforce…even before the pandemic. Despite the shift in emphasis to remote working…

I wrote this piece for Unpsychology, as a response to meeting the earth rising in the shape of a Buddhist nun, whose fearsomeness pivoted me into an uneasy and more honest relationship with myself. The sky outside is darkening, turning the feeling of the room to mahogany, I taste the…

As an embodied being, you have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Getting to grips with this fact of life leads to endless possibilities — and a new story The narrative you weave for your life cannot be outsourced. You cannot rely on promises of salvation via vaccines, politics…