The Inquiring Practitioner

Book, 2026

Many organisations invest significant resources in development efforts, yet still struggle to learn systematically from what they do in their everyday work. Knowledge often remains with individuals, projects, or reports, while shared learning, deeper understanding, and lasting improvement fail to materialise. This handbook addresses that gap by showing how a scientific approach can be integrated with practical work in the flow of everyday operations.

The book introduces and develops the research and development method Designed Action Sampling (DAS)—a way of turning everyday actions, emotions, and reflections into analysable material for collective learning. Rather than separating work and learning, DAS is built on small, designed actions tested in practice, followed by brief in-the-moment reflections and collective analysis in recurring cycles. In this way, everyday work becomes a laboratory for development, where many people can learn simultaneously from similar experiences.

The handbook is aimed at employees, managers, learning leaders, and development professionals in both the public and private sectors. Through concrete examples, models, and principles, it shows how organisations can build a learning culture that is scientifically grounded, practically feasible, and sustainable over time. Key themes include work–learn balance, collective analysis, psychological safety, the role of leadership in legitimising rather than controlling learning, and how scientific methods can be democratised without being diluted.

The Inquiring Practitioner is not a book about conducting research in a traditional sense, but about how work itself can become more meaningful, effective, and developmental when structured scientific learning is embedded in what is already being done. The book offers a framework for organisations that want to move from doing a lot to also understanding why things work — and, in doing so, become truly learning organisations.