Category Archives: Research Impact

Research as if people were human

I’m delighted to be a guest blogger for IRISS this week.  This post talks about how stories energise and restore people’s connections with each other and what they care about, so motivating people to work together.  Action research – a truly humane approach to … Continue reading

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Appreciative dialogue – co-production in action

Here’s a new article on appreciative dialogue by Belinda Dewar and Cathy Sharp. We discuss the role of appreciative dialogue in facilitation of practice development and action research. There’s not much guidance about the ‘how’ of facilitation – here we highlight one … Continue reading

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Better by Design

Research for Real has been selected, in partnership with Animate, to act as a Learning Partner to the Young Foundation and Taylor Haig in the 2 year BIG funded project Better by Design, which will be supporting 15 voluntary organisations in … Continue reading

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Stories – how to use them to bring work to life

Changing places with stories is a new resource developed by Space Unlimited with Research for Real to help groups of people to work with stories to support learning and inspire action to improve our places. Experience shows that story-telling can … Continue reading

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Everyone’s talking about impact…..

Nice blog by Heather Sim of Space Unlimited…measurement of change as an art as much as a science.

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Improvisation and the art of change

At a Total Place event today we were reminded “the revolution will be improvised”. A catchy meme for sure which reminded me of an article I’ve read some time ago by Frank J Barrett.   He makes the point that there are lots … Continue reading

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Really useful evidence?

Recently I was at the same event as Jackie Killeen, Director of the Big Lottery in Scotland.   It was great to hear her say this: “At BIG we have some positive experience of being able to find and utilise evidence … Continue reading

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Don’t do it unless you have to?

We know that multi-agency partnership working is difficult. “Collaboration is by nature inefficient.  It is only sensible to collaborate if real collaborative advantage can be envisaged.  The strongest piece of advice, therefore, is ‘don’t do it unless you have to’”.  … Continue reading

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How to create an appetite for evidence……

I’m just back from a very interesting gathering of folk who find evidence use fascinating and want to see more of it.    We at least seemed to agree that we want to create more of an appetite for evidence and want … Continue reading

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How action research can help to deliver better services

See this short creative storyboard – with thanks to IRISS for their support How action research can help to deliver better services from iriss on Vimeo.

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