I began this phase of my inquiry by seeking out programmes involving storytelling, embodied creative practices, and imaginal processes. Although still interested in studying creative leadership development, I had begun to believe that the kinds of development I was interested in tracking and understanding were first and foremost, personal in nature. Personal growth, I reasoned, would inevitably have a ‘ripple-out’ effect into all other spheres of an individual’s life. Studying development within an organisational context brought its own complex issues, and so I focused on personal development in groups of self-selected individuals.
The programmes selected, I reasoned, need not be specifically termed as personal development programmes, but would need to offer the possibility of creative emergence, to enable me to investigate the affective and imaginal modes and processes of interest to my inquiry: what conditions are conducive to creative processes in groups and individuals, what techniques and methods can be used to initiate creative processes, what is the lived experience of working in affective and imaginal modes with creative and/or developmental aims, and what are the internal and external processes involved? What kinds of knowing emerge from these modes of presence? Does intuitive knowing arise, and if so, can its origins and process be tracked? Are personal and transpersonal aims included or accounted for in the design and facilitation of programmes, and if so, how?
It was important to me to choose programmes that would be personally meaningful to me by furthering my own development desires to become a more creative
designer and facilitator of TL experiences, to better understand myself, and to expand the boundaries of my current frames of reference. If I were to study the experience and process of TL, I could only do so authentically by being a fully engaged
participant in any programme I studied. Whilst a dispassionate stance may be desirable in some research situations, it was unsuitable for my aims.
I dismissed taking an observational role instead of a participatory one, not wanting to separate myself from the experience or participants. The shared experience with others minimised misinterpretation of meanings expressed in the narrative accounts of experience that some participants shared with me in later interviews. Interviews were important, because stories are a way of speaking about the felt-meaning of experience. Sometimes they help us make sense of experience, as they did for me and, I hope, for some of the participants. I attended to my own experience to provide rich descriptions of process and identified core themes and key developmental aspects as they occurred for me. I then expanded my perception with experiences of others to deepen my understanding of the process.
I was unsure at first how to analyse the complexity of experience. I did not want to deconstruct elements of a programme or experience at the expense of losing the essence of the whole, and yet I knew that I must identify and separate elements in order to understand their roles within the whole. Moustakas advocates using intuition to make possible “the perceiving of things as wholes” (1990, p. 23). He explains that
Rachel Lovie May 2017 72 intuitive knowing in heuristic inquiry comes from attending to the clues provided by observation, experience, and by making connections and seeing relationships. He recommends viewing the phenomenon under inquiry from as many angles as possible, until a deeper and richer understanding of the whole forms. It is a unifying, integrative process.
In early 2012, I began to research and make initial contact with likely organisations and programmes. In the spirit of intuitive inquiry, I scattered the seeds and waited to see which had fallen on fertile soil. My first opportunity came unexpectedly, when my supervisor, Andrew Quick, invited me to join a theatre-based workshop at Lancaster University in the summer of 2012. As theatre director and member of experimental theatre company ‘Imitating the Dog’, who ran the programme, Andrew was also lead facilitator of the workshop. The programme promised a week of collaborative
storytelling and creative activities, followed by a performance. My motivations for attending this programme were primarily personal. I had spent the previous year on Lancaster’s HighWire Masters and PhD programme, largely immersed in theory and getting to grips with new ways of working in the unfamiliar territory of doctoral inquiry, at a university very different from the progressive arts institutions I was used to. I had felt like a fish out of water at Lancaster, and was still trying to find my way. I lacked the passion for my doctoral inquiry topic that I knew I needed. My creative practice had suffered due to the intense workload, and I felt oppressed by my intellect. I embarked on the ITD workshop in the hope of rebalancing myself by engaging in creative process, and rekindling my passion for my inquiry. I was not disappointed.
In my thesis, I chose to write about the programmes in a different order to how I experienced them chronologically. The subject of chapter 4 is the ITD workshop, then I place the Mythodrama programme next (chapter 5), followed by the Vision Fast (chapter 6). The Vision Fast experience seemed appropriate to place last of the three programmes for several reasons:
• Its impacts were the most profound and developmental of the three.
• It was the longest in terms of its unfolding learning. The Vision Fast remained 'alive' in me for much longer than the Mythodrama programme.
• The inquiry group of fellow participants of the VF, set up to share the continuing
unfolding of our learning, continued to meet online for more than a year. The follow-up interviews with some of those participants took place between a year and three years after the event. I include their retrospective insights and reflections in chapter 6, which I completed in 2017.
• I had not fully processed the Vision Fast experience when I attended the Psyche and Eros programme, and as a result of the Mythodrama programme I was better able to make sense of the Vision Fast.
• When considering where to place my accounts and discussions of the programmes in the thesis, the Mythodrama programme seemed to provide a natural bridge, particularly in terms of storying the thesis and showing the development of my thinking, between the creative aims of the ITD workshop and the more radical 'self-knowing' aims of the Vision Fast.
Rachel Lovie May 2017 73 During my viva voce, my examiners asked, when the Vision Fast provided so much rich data, why I also then felt it necessary to investigate a Mythodrama programme. After the ITD programme in 2012, I had become very interested in Victor Turner's writing on ritual and performance, especially the rite-of-passage. Although I
understood it in theory and could readily identify with the liminal phase from my arts practice, I did not have an embodied sense of the purpose or significance of the first and third phases. I put these thoughts to one side while I pursued my relationship with Richard Olivier and OMA, still at that time hoping to conduct some of my inquiry in the space of organisationally commissioned leadership development.
Richard invited me to participate in the Psyche and Eros programme as a way of introducing me experientially to the Mythodrama methodology and process. Thus, I had arranged to attend that programme prior to gaining a place on the Vision Fast. When, in February 2013, I was presented with the opportunity to attend the Vision Fast and further explore the questions I had concerning the phases of the rite-of- passage in an embodied way, I took it. It made sense to me at the time to continue my research activities with Mythodrama and OMA, and although I did not manage to conduct much further research with them in the organisational sphere, the Psyche and Eros programme proved to be a valuable piece of the puzzle of my inquiry.
Rachel Lovie May 2017 74