Bring Your Own Enquiry (BYOE)

Published in News on 1 Jul 2016

We are seeking partners to work with around an explorative approach to organisational enquiry and action. 

This Bring Your Own Enquiry (BYOE) project will support cross-organisational teams to collaboratively address and act on an issue that they have identified as a group. We will initially be using a Community of Enquiry (CoE) approach to explore the experiences of those taking part and to build and develop a shared way forward. This approach is one that helps people go from sharing their own knowledge, to very quickly being able to develop consensus on an issue to be explored and acted upon. We view this process as a way of blending our approach to innovation and evidence:

Iriss sees innovation and evidence as being interwoven and engaged with through a reflective learning process. This weaving of innovation and evidence involves a ‘remix’ of ideas - ideas that have been copied, transformed and combined.

Iriss On… Weaving innovation and evidence together

BYOE project aims

  • Support participating organisations to embed an enquiry-based approach
  • Encourage evidence use, gathering and creation
  • Develop and deliver individual action plans
  • Share lessons from the approach and the actions to a wider audience

What we will do

We will facilitate two workshops with individual teams at the end of 2016 and beginning of 2017. 

Participants will be asked to complete a ‘week in the life’ style work diary to act as a stimulus for the first enquiry. An initial CoE process will then be used to develop one enquiry question that will be explored by the group.

Iriss will use the initial diary submissions to identify useful pieces of evidence that will form the stimuli for a second CoE as part of the first workshop. These discussions will then be used to inform a development plan for an intervention that will be worked up between workshop one and two.

The two workshops will be followed by a wider knowledge exchange event in April 2017 to share learning around the process and outcomes.  

What are the requirements? 

Iriss is seeking to work with teams from three different organisations. The criteria for these partner teams include:

  • Cross-organisation / level teams of 8-14 people
  • Continuity of people across the two workshops and final event
  • Commitment to these workshops and to the preparation/action needed around the workshop days

To register initial interest, please contact Stuart Muirhead (stuart.muirhead@iriss.org.uk) detailing why you are interested in taking part, by Wednesday 27th July.