Niels Agger-Gupta (niels.agger-gupta@royalroads.ca) is an Associate Professor in the School of Leadership Studies at Royal Roads University, Victoria BC Canada; Rebeccah Nelems teaches in the Master of Arts in Leadership program at Royal Roads University and is a senior evaluator, methodology expert, and facilitator.

The single hardest lesson I’ve ever had to learn is that the greater, grander plan is not mine to create or know…. When I surrender outcome, all things good and pure and peaceful come to me. My job is to choose what appears. Easy to say but hard to do, to get out of the way enough to allow the energy to flow (Wagamese, 2016, p.64).

Rationale

How might students sequence activities to lead an effective action-oriented capstone inquiry? For the Royal Roads University’s School of Leadership Studies (SoLS) Master of Arts in Leadership (MAL) capstone, students choose to conduct a real-world, action-oriented, collaborative change research project or thesis with a sponsoring organization or community to co-generate positive organizational and societal outcome. The action researcher must design methods along with an emergent process that fosters relationship-building across a diversity of organizational stakeholders through the sharing of stories, perspectives, and hopes for the future whilst engaging them in collaborative data analysis, identifying next-step strategies, outcomes, and associated knowledge products.

What is a successful design for this process, and who needs to be involved with which elements? How can students plan for the emergent and uncharted path ahead? In their second year, students participate in a two-week residency involving a course of study that delves into inquiry methods and capstone planning. Presented halfway through this course, the Mapping the Capstone Journey session supports students to visualize, map, and conceptualize the unique terrains, focus, and processes by which they will engage their partner organization and other stakeholders in their inquiry following their residency. This session marks the first time students consider their entire process—either nine months (project) or 12 months (thesis)—and aims to deepen their understanding of collaboratively designed change (Barrett et al, 1995; Gergen & Gergen, 2015; Gergen & Hersted, 2016; Hersted et. al., 2019).

At the end of the session, students have generated an initial visual map of their process and receive initial feedback from their peers and faculty on their design. Students subsequently refine their maps and present them to faculty and peers for further formative feedback. The revised map is included in students’ outline of their capstone proposal, and is assessed based on a range of competencies including: selecting a leadership approach appropriate to the partner organization’s change context; creating a systematic inquiry that leads to learning and evidence-based action for positive change at the organizational level; and design of a coherent logic and sequence of individual and group methods and engaged actions appropriate and understandable for the intended actors.

Part of the design sequence involves the logistics of when, how, and with whom the data analysis for each of the included methods are addressed. Is analyzing data a researcher-focused activity, shared with a ‘research team,’ or begun by participants in a ‘harvesting’ activity at the end of the methods? While there are many decisions to be made by the student, the point of this mapping activity is for the student to begin by generating a visualization of their whole potential process, no matter how preliminary this may seem at this stage of their capstone design. Methods may include interviews (Roulston, 2010), surveys (Fowler, 2009), focus groups (Morgan, 2019), learning circles (Baldwin, 1998), group methods such as World Café (Brown & Isaacs, 2005), Open Space (Owen, 2008), Liberating Structures approaches (Lipmanowicz & Griffin, 2016), or arts-based methods (Bishop et al., 2017; Etmanski et al., 2016), among other possible approaches. In addition, students are invited to overlay a particular epistemological stance, whether from Appreciative Inquiry (Agger-Gupta & Perodeau, 2017; Reed, 2007; Stavros & Torres, 2018), Indigenous and decolonial methodologies (Kovach, 2010; Smith 2016; Wilson 2008), anti-oppressive (Potts & Brown, 2015), or other approaches to change. Some of these approaches incorporate multiple methods in the change process, such as the 5-D Appreciative Inquiry process (Watkins et al, 2011) or Scenario Planning (Kahane, 2012). Students usually only have enough time in organizational action research to help stakeholders create alignment, as described in the Action Research Engagement model (Rowe et al., 2013). Many students more used to more conventional approaches to research have questions about how change might occur through their project, and this activity and the subsequent dialogue helps clarify this.

However, leadership capstone projects can have deeply political dimensions: projects may be controversial within an organization, and actors may be brought together in new ways in the process. Additionally, projects within one’s own organization can create a range of “power-over” and conflict of interest challenges that students must creatively navigate, sometimes by using a third-party facilitator. The intent of the SoLS principle of “leadership as engagement” (Harris & Agger-Gupta, 2015) applied to the capstone on stakeholder ownership of the change, can be challenging in tightly hierarchical organizations. Zimmerman and her colleagues (2013) demonstrated greater commitment and ownership of the change design when changes are co-developed with the front-line stakeholders who will implement the change. Creating stakeholder ownership requires ceding control of the process, meaning students cannot simply use individual methods to gain knowledge from stakeholders and then present a report back, as this misses the essential step of stakeholders engaging with one another to determine their own collective next steps. At some point in the process, students must convene and hold spaces for a diversity of stakeholders in the partner organization to come together to learn about each other’s experiences and aspirations, and collaboratively generate emergent next-step planning for change.

Overview and Observations

The session starts with a land acknowledgement, followed by a short presentation on mapping, including examples of maps to support students’ own capstone journey visualizations. Students are asked to create a visual including: their name; their partner organization; their inquiry team; their primary inquiry question and subquestions; the overall project goal; participants and stakeholders; their choice of the sequence of events including their inquiry methods, components, and/or steps in their capstone journey; and an approximate timeline.

Students commence by discussing their sequence of activities in their learning partner groups of two or three students before working alone on their design for an hour. Students with questions may come back to the main room to ask for help from faculty. Students use pencil, pen, coloured markers, crayons, and sticky notes, allowing them to move identified methods around on the flipchart paper.

At the end of the hour, students in the in-person residency return to the classroom and post their flipchart posters on the walls and windows in the room. We then commence what we call a ‘gallery walk’ sharing session, with students and faculty circulating physically around the room, half the class at a time, for about 30 minutes each, to engage in dialogue about the ‘maps’ with the students who have remained with their posters. An example of the kind of flipchart poster we typically see is seen in Figure 1, which depicts MAL student Phil Leffelaar’s flow chart of his intended capstone journey, as part of an in-person cohort in 2016.

Figure 1

Example of a flipchart poster

The sudden restrictions imposed by COVID-19 in 2020 required moving the Mapping the Capstone Journey session into an online version. In keeping with SoLS’ core value of “orientation to possibility” (Harris & Agger-Gupta, 2015), faculty and students co-creatively re-designed this activity for online engagement. In this version, students use what is at hand in their location to support their visualization of the process and then take a snapshot or upload an image of their draft map into an online whiteboard application that allows the class to view and comment on each other’s posts. Requiring more detail than a simple whiteboard permits, we have used the application called, Padlet, for this ‘gallery walk’ activity, but other apps, such as Mural, Miro, or Stormboard could also serve the same purpose. The feedback, from both student colleagues and faculty in the app, enables students to reconsider their own plans based on the feedback they are seeing and giving to others and allows for what Heifetz would call “balcony view” insights into their own plans (Heifetz et al., 2009, pp. 7-8).

Online students went well beyond the bounds of the typical flip-chart page, with one student arranging images, objects, and words on a physical shelf in their home (see Figure 2). Students commonly created visual art. The online space enabled much greater depth and breadth of engagement across students and faculty who post and view the maps online, leave each other comments, ask, and respond, to questions, and then asynchronously iterate their maps long after the session ends. Starting with learning partner breakout groups before moving to individual work, the online session takes about an hour less time than the in-person version. MA-L student Celestine Eagle’s photo of her bookshelves is one example of the kind of capstone map, created as part of an online cohort in May 2020 (Figure 2).

Figure 2

Example of a student’s map photo shared online

Reflections, Implications, and Conclusion

Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before (Solnit, 2006, pp. 22-23).

Maps are sometimes thought of as a tool that was historically used for colonization and empire building. However, maps have been created and used by all cultures around the world and across time. From mapping bird song distributions, Indigenous relationships with the land, or human migrations, cartography can be used in a multitude of ways that reflect a diversity of worldviews and methodologies. The mapping activity is intended to help students visualize the outline of the terrains they hope to traverse, the stakeholders they hope to engage, and the processes and sequence of methods they hope to use in their journeys. Creating a map is less about knowing the places they might find on the journey and more about clarifying intended trajectories and processes to prepare for their journeys into emergence.

This activity allows students to take the exercise of mapping their change sequence to greater depth with respect to ensuring strong relational accountability, attention to process, and an awareness of ethical considerations, whilst orienting students towards the emergent nature of leading change projects within organizations and systems. In these ways, the activity partakes in what is increasingly being framed as decolonial mapping, or the reclaiming of the map-making process from its historical use to extract and expropriate knowledge and ownership. As Rose-Redwood et al., (2020) note, “mapping plays an important ontological role in the making, unmaking, and remaking of ‘worlds’” (p. 152). At the conclusion of this half-day activity, students are energized and excited about finally being able to see what their capstone inquiry could look like, and the students generally identify this activity as one of their highlights from their second residency. Students also share their maps with their organizational partners to better explain and support their work of engaging the relevant organizational systems.

By creating a capstone journey map, leadership students in the MAL program are engaging in a form of decolonial mapping rather than using maps to lay claim to a terrain of knowledge, as maps were used in the colonial expansion of empire-building. The maps are centred on process, relationships, and the means of meaningful dialogical engagement by which the journey of empowering and working collaboratively with stakeholders will be undertaken. In this way, the maps support students to let go of outcome, as Wagamese (2016) references, in service of emergence, relationship and collaborative design. The engaged participants might be stakeholders to an issue or members of a team, organization, or community, but the focus here is on building relationships and increasing knowledge about each other, creating an opportunity for the group to think together, which then allows for collective design for a co-created change. The feedback students gain from each other also helps them see how others are conceptualizing their capstones. While this energizing activity is about an action-oriented capstone, the process creates a systems-thinking temporal guide that allows students to be fully present to what emerges along their journey. Ultimately, the temporal map is a plan open to revision based on what the student finds out about the community of interest and their needs.

References

Agger-Gupta, N., & Perodeau, A. (2017). Chapter 11: Appreciative inquiry in RRU mid-career student life. In D. Hamilton, P. Márquez, N. Agger-Gupta, S. Grundy, G. Veletsianos, & V. Forssmann, (Eds.), Engaging students in life-changing learning: The Royal Roads University Learning and Teaching Model in practice (Revised ed., pp. 237–253). Royal Roads University. https://learningandteachingmodel.pressbooks.com/chapter/appreciative-inquiry-in-rru-mid-career-student-life/

Baldwin, C. (1998). Calling the circle: The first and future culture (Rev. ed.). Bantam. http://www.amazon.com/Calling-Circle-First-Future-Culture/dp/0553379003/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8#reader_0553379003

Barrett, F. J., Thomas, G. F., & Hocevar, S. P. (1995). The central role of discourse in large-scale change: A social construction perspective. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 31(3), 352–372. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886395313007

Bishop, K., Weigler, W., Lloyd, T., & Beare, D. (2017). Fostering collaborative leadership through playbuilding. In Catherine Etmanski, K. Bishop, & M. B. Page (Eds.), Adult learning through collaborative leadership (Winter 2017, Vol. 156, pp. 65–75). Jossey-Bass Quarterly Sourcebooks.

Brown, J., Voltoft, F., Lenzo, A., Isaacs, D., Margulies, N., Bennett, S., Gyllenpalm, B., Mota, C., Dosher, A., Rudebek, U., Mota, C., & World Cafe Community. (2015, July 4). World Cafe design principles. The World Cafe. http://www.theworldcafe.com/key-concepts-resources/design-principles/

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Fowler, F. (2009). Survey research methods (4th ed.). SAGE Publications, Inc. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452230184

Harris, B., & Agger-Gupta, N. (2015). The long and winding road: Leadership and learning principles that transform. Integral Leadership Review, January-February. http://integralleadershipreview.com/12569-115-long-winding-road-leadership-learning-principles-transform/

Heifetz, R. A., Linsky, M., & Grashow, A. (2009). The practice of adaptive leadership: Tools and tactics for changing your organization and the world. Harvard Business Press.

Kahane, A. (2012). Transformative scenario planning: Working together to change the future. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. 

Kovach, M. E. (2010). Indigenous methodologies: Characteristics, conversations, and contexts (Reprint). University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. https://utorontopress.com/9781487525644/indigenous-methodologies/

Lipmanowicz, H., & Griffin, K. H. (2016). Liberating structures: 1-2-4-All. Liberating Structures: Including and Unleashing Everyone. http://www.liberatingstructures.com/1-1-2-4-all/

Morgan, D. L. (2019). Basic and advanced focus groups. SAGE Publications, Inc. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781071814307

Potts, K. L., & Brown, L. (2015). Chapter 1: Becoming an anti-oppressive researcher. In S. Strega & L. A. Brown (Eds.), Research as resistance: Revisiting critical, indigenous, and anti-oppressive approaches (Second edition., pp. 17–41). Canadian Scholars’ Press & Google Books. https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=4UNVCgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&ots=WMFfOt9YmJ&sig=ylwLoTzs2ouA2xKhAOp8XsYEjdo#v=onepage&q&f=false

Reed, J. (Ed.). (2007). Appreciative inquiry: Research for change. Sage Research Methods Online; Sage Publications; SAGE Research Methods. https://methods.sagepub.com/book/appreciative-inquiry

Rose-Redwood, R., Blu Barnd, N., Lucchesi, A. H., Dias, S., & Patrick, W. (2020). Decolonizing the Map: Recentering Indigenous Mappings. Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 55(3), 151–162. https://doi.org/10.3138/cart.53.3.intro

Roulston, K. (2010). Reflective interviewing: A guide to theory and practice. Sage Publications.

Rowe, W. E. A., Graf, M., Agger-Gupta, N., Piggot-Irvine, E., & Harris, B. (2013). Action research engagement: Creating the foundations for organizational change. ALARA Monograph Series (Action Learning Action Learning Association Inc.), Monograph No. 5, 44. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259932785_Action_Research_Engagement_Creating_the_Foundations_for_Organizational_Change

Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (2nd Revised edition). Zed Books.

Solnit, R. (2006). A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Penguin Books.

Stavros, J. M., & Torres, C. (2018). Conversations worth having: Using Appreciative Inquiry to fuel productive and meaningful engagement. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. 

Wagamese, R. (2016). Embers: One Ojibway’s meditations. Douglas & McIntyre. https://www.amazon.ca/Embers-Ojibways-Meditations-Richard-Wagamese/dp/1771621338

Watkins, J. M., Mohr, B. J., & Kelly, R. (2011). Appreciative Inquiry: Change at the speed of imagination (2nd ed.). Pfeiffer (e-book: Books24X7). https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Appreciative+Inquiry%3A+Change+at+the+Speed+of+Imagination%2C+2nd+Edition-p-9781118015124

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the Xwsepsum, Lək̓ʷəŋən, and W̱SÁNEĆ ancestors and families on whose lands we live and work. Thanks to SoLS Associate faculty colleague, Dr. Phil Cady, who has also worked on delivering this seminar and who shared the photo of Celestine Eagle’s bookshelf map (with her permission). Thanks to Phil Leffelaar for his permission to share my photo of his capstone map. Thank you to other faculty and staff who have helped in delivering this workshop, and to Lila Linell, for finding space and art supplies for the on-campus version of this activity.

Niels Agger-Gupta. Born in Germany to German-Norwegian parents, I grew up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, on nêhiyawak (Cree), Oceti Sakowin (Sioux), and Métis territory, before I lived in Calgary for 20 years as a visitor to the Niitsitapi / Siksika (Blackfoot) and the Tsuut’ina (Sarcee) lands, and in California on Chumash lands. I am committed to decolonization, understanding the learning process, and addressing injustice in its intersectional dimensions in my personal life, in my work supporting mid-career leaders to create empowering change in their own communities, and in the world, especially from an appreciative stance.  I am an Associate Professor with the School of Leadership Studies at RRU.

Rebeccah Nelems. As a sixth-generation settler of Irish descent on Coast Salish and Straits Salish lands, I strive to be accountable in all that I do with the Indigenous nations and families on whose lands my family lives. I am Associate Faculty with the School of Leadership Studies and a Scholar Practitioner that advises leaders and organizations around the world on engaged, action-oriented change projects. My academic work focuses on eco-social empathy, decolonizing research, and relational leadership.