Introduction

We humans have studied our everyday lives since time immemorial. We have tried things out, observed what happened, drawn conclusions and adjusted our actions. In agriculture, medicine, community building and much else. Today we see it in healthcare, social care, education and social work in the public sector, and in engineering, product development, service, leadership and crafts in the private sector. We call this everyday inquiry: the practice of systematically studying one’s own work through action, reflection and shared learning. Everyday inquiry has probably always been a prerequisite for doing good work. Especially when situations are complex, when every encounter is unique, and when manuals don’t go all the way. That’s when an exploratory approach is needed—one that builds on professional judgment.

The inquiring practitioner is therefore not a new ideal. It’s an ancient approach, deeply human and deeply professional. Yet for a long time, there has been a lack of language, structures and legitimacy for workplace-based everyday learning. In many organisations, this kind of learning has been reduced to something private, silent, or informally oral. At the same time, demands for documentation, evidence and quality have increased sharply. The result has often been a strange gap—more and more analyses and directives, but less and less room for practitioners themselves to own and develop a deep understanding of their profession. This handbook aims to fill that gap. It is written for practitioners who want to reclaim ownership of knowledge development in their own work.

Professional work always happens in motion. It is relational, situation-dependent and emotionally charged. It cannot be fully standardised without losing what makes the work meaningful and effective. Yet much of the knowledge development concerning professional practice has gradually been moved away from those who actually do the work. Research, evaluation and development have increasingly become something done on professions, rather than by professions.

Today, many traditional professions find themselves in what can be described as a professional crisis. Demands are increasing, time is shrinking and complexity is growing. At the same time, more and more decisions about how work should be understood, measured and developed are made by actors far removed from everyday practice: academics, politicians, authorities, consultants and global tech companies. Often this happens with good intentions, but the consequence still risks weakening professionals’ own judgment. When others formulate the questions, own the data and interpret the results, power over professional development also shifts.

Recently, large-scale digital data collection—a kind of mass research—has become increasingly common. Various IT platforms silently collect extreme amounts of data about us. Never before has so much data been collected about people’s work and behaviour. Such mass research can create overview and make patterns visible that would otherwise be difficult to detect. But it also carries risks, see chapter 10. When complex practice is reduced to numerical indicators and metadata, there is a danger that what is easy to measure comes to govern, rather than what is important to understand in depth. The problem is not data itself, but what is measured and thereby given significance, who owns the interpretation, and who decides what the results should be used for.

Professional knowledge needs to be reclaimed by practitioners themselves. Not in opposition to academic research or large-scale analyses, but as a necessary complement. Many professions carry great social responsibility and therefore need to improve their quality over time. This requires approaches that enable practitioners to collectively study their own practice in scientifically robust yet everyday and time-efficient ways.

This is where Designed Action Sampling (DAS) comes in. DAS is a scientific method that makes it possible for practitioners to try out different actions in their own everyday work, reflect on what happens, systematically yet time-efficiently share experiences with others, and analyse patterns together. The method builds on three simple steps:

• Design testable actions (“Design the doing”),
• Carry them out in practice and reflect afterward
  (“take Action”), and
• Analyse the outcome together (“Sample the impact”).

By connecting reflections to concrete actions and by having many people participate simultaneously, both depth and breadth are created in the learning. Feelings, experiences and lived realities are taken seriously—not as noise, but as important signals in complex change processes.

The method is the result of 15 years of methodological research at Chalmers University of Technology. It’s not surprising that the method emerged at a technical university, given the role that advanced digital technology plays in making DAS possible. The research has been carried out in close collaboration with practitioners, primarily in Uddevalla municipality and at the Swedish National Agency for Education, but also in hundreds of other large and small organisations in the public and private sectors. The list of acknowledgments is long, and also includes school developers in Sundsvall, Åstorp, Hässleholm, at Praktiska Gymnasiet, Lärande i Sverige, Frida Education and in many other places.

This book is divided into three parts with ten chapters that don’t necessarily need to be read in numerical order. If you’re a manager, chapter 7 might be especially interesting. If you’re interested in the history of inquiry or in power and surveillance perspectives, perhaps chapter 10 should come first. If you like metaphors, don’t miss chapter 9. If analysis is your thing, go early to chapter 6.

In the first part of the book (chapters 1-3), central concepts around DAS and its scientific roots in everyday inquiry in professional work are introduced. The second part (chapters 4-6) is about how everyday inquiry can be organised in practice, by describing the three steps of DAS in detail—one step per chapter. The focus here is on how DAS is used in everyday work.

Chapter 7 describes the leadership and organisation around DAS, both the everyday and the more overarching leadership. Chapter 8 describes in detail the most common challenges we’ve seen when practitioners study their own practice, from time constraints and uncertainty to ethics, data quality and organisational resistance. Chapter 9 explores how metaphors can be used to make DAS understandable in everyday work. Finally, in chapter 10, inquiry is placed in a longer historical perspective, from humanity’s ancient everyday learning to today’s mass research. A discussion is held about what is at stake when professional knowledge development risks being taken over by other actors.

I provide reading suggestions in the form of references at the end of many sections in the book. Quite a few of these references are to my own texts, since this book is a summary of what I’ve written about DAS over the years. The references should not be interpreted as classic academic references to support various claims, but are simply there so that readers can find more in-depth information if interested.

Finally, this handbook is part of an open and free practitioner training offered by the research institute Everyday Institute. On the institute’s website www.everydayinstitute.se, there is an opportunity to read the book together with others, in a format that combines theory with practice. Participants receive action-based tasks in the spirit of DAS to carry out in their own everyday work, and are given the opportunity to reflect collectively on their experiences. In this way, the ideas from the book can be mixed with your own practice in a fine-grained, living and collectively exploratory way. A warm welcome!

Martin Lackéus

Inquirer at Everyday Institute

Researcher and teacher at Chalmers