Everything I’ve written here so far has a particular character to it, and I want to name it plainly before going any further: it’s pattern-recognition, not research.
Four decades of noticing the same shape recur; a certification, a decade in uniform, an MBA unit, thirty countries of workshops, a national infrastructure redesign, and being right about it, or wrong about it, with no real way for a reader to tell the difference beyond whether the story sounded convincing.
That’s the nature of a career told in hindsight, it persuades by narrative, not by evidence.
On 3 March 2022, that changed. I received formal ethics approval from the University of Otago Business School, reference 22/024, to begin doctoral research into Pacific data governance under a Doctor of Business Administration. From that date, the pattern I’d been noticing informally for thirty years became something I had to actually test, not just narrate, held to a standard well beyond whether it feels true to the person who lived it.
The approach is called insider action research, and it’s worth explaining, because it shapes everything this newsletter becomes from here.
Most research methodologies ask you to step outside the thing you’re studying, to gain the distance that’s supposed to produce objectivity. Insider action research does the opposite on purpose: it treats being embedded inside the practice, inside the institutions, as the position, not a bias to be corrected for. Coghlan and Brannick, whose work grounds this approach, treat an insider's pre-understanding as something to be made explicit, disciplined and tested, not simply asserted.
That’s not a loophole around rigour. It’s a different, harder kind of rigour, because the researcher can’t hide behind distance from what they’re describing.
What that means practically, for anyone still reading by post eight: I’m not going to stop writing from the inside.
That was never really the point of pattern-recognition mattering to me in the first place, and it isn’t the point now. What changes is what I’m allowed to say I’ve found.
Six posts of biography could reasonably claim to notice a pattern. What comes after this one has to earn a claim before making it, held against actual field evidence rather than a career’s worth of hindsight, and labelled honestly for how confident that evidence actually makes it, not more.
I don’t know yet exactly what shape that takes here, post to post. I know the shape of the discipline behind it, and I know it’s a stricter one than the six posts before this one needed. That’s not a caveat. It’s the actual reason any of this is worth reading from here.
You’re right. I aimed the questions at advice a director receives, but the post is about the writer’s own inside knowledge: what it is worth, and how it gets tested. The questions should turn that on the reader, who is also an insider in their own organisation.
For a director or executive
What do you know about how your organisation really works, that comes from years on the inside rather than from anything you have tested?
Pick one conviction you act on without thinking. If it were wrong, how would you find out?
When you describe a pattern to your board or leadership team, do you say how well you know it: a hunch, something you’ve seen repeatedly, or something checked?
Want to know more about this Doctoral Programme at Otago University…it’s here.