How would we know what is happening here?
Field Inquiry brings RIfT’s questions into real relationships and institutions, slowly and with consent, without deciding in advance what the inquiry must find.
- Why aren’t residents participating?→What might withdrawal tell us about participation here?
- How do we make employees more resilient?→What are people having to become resilient to?
- How do we get people to embrace change?→Who is being asked to risk what for this change to succeed?
The Relational Architecture Inquiry Set
A participatory card-based instrument for examining what an institution teaches people to become, how power and position shape what can be said, and whether what becomes known has anywhere to go.
No card asks a participant to accept its premise in order to answer it. “Nothing” and “no” are always valid answers, and refusal is part of the inquiry rather than a failure of it. The set is being developed and piloted in small sessions; what it can and cannot do is still being learned.
Feeling-State Mapping
An embodied method for making visible what people in teams and organisations feel as transformation moves through them, and what they need in order to stay present to it. It works through movement and placement rather than explanation.
An inquiry, not an answer
RIfT does not promise outcomes or sell a finished method. The work produces theories, methods and instruments, and holds each of them open to testing.
Begin with questions
rather than conclusions.
Preserve uncertainty
where the evidence does not yet settle the matter.
Welcome disagreement
as part of how knowledge improves.
Separate observation from interpretation
so others can see how we reached what we claim.
Field inquiries are currently few and small. RIfT is interested in people, organisations and communities meeting questions their existing ways of understanding transformation cannot adequately explain.
Perhaps something in an organisation keeps returning despite repeated attempts to change it. Perhaps people’s lived experience contradicts the institution’s account of itself. Perhaps a community or system is entering a transition for which the existing frameworks no longer seem sufficient.
If work like this is bringing you up against questions of formation, position, return or answerability, we would like to hear what you are finding.