Transformative Mindsets: Special Issue Introduction with Dr. Simon Divecha
The Mindsets of Transformation special issue – the first ARJ of 2026 – showcases six papers. The Editorial offers an introduction and handrails for what may first appear unfamiliar, brave ideas. You’ll find a brief introduction with links to the full paper below. There’s also a podcast interview in which Hilary Bradbury and Simon Divecha talk about the special issue having just completed the editorial. Listen in.
Let’s start by accepting that we have reached the end of an era in which we thought about change in overly limited ways. We solely privileged strategy, technical systems and linear structures. We’re now realizing that those approaches fail us when we engage in transformation. We have been missing half the picture. What half?! The inner world, that is the sensemaking accessed by subjectivity among those involved in change. This includes how each holds values and emotions that shape outer conditions.
In brief: our attention to inner worlds is required when involved in changing the outer world!
Now, as action researchers, what do we do with that? It helps to accept the need to integrate inner attention. You, I, all of us who practice Action and Research with transformative intention have an extraordinary head start here. As a practice we can repeatedly ask, where is my attention? On the stakeholders? The context? myself? All of us and all of it? This is not easy and, as the papers clarify, we also have responsibility to build capacity for this. And it goes beyond noticing cerebral focus.
We might even say we’re beautifully positioned to assist ourselves, as well as those around us in meeting needs at a time of transformation. We may even help usher in softer landings as global and personal insecurity rises. Attention and cultivation of inner lives makes life more worth living! And not just for ourselves but all sentient species, with whom we are entangled.
Most relevant to those who practice with Action Research is the insight that what we inquire into alters our actions, as in turn, our actions simultaneously shape the inquiry.
How do we step up further?
The Mindsets of Transformation special issue showcases multiple authors across six papers who step up. The Editorial offers handrails and help in applying ourselves to catalyse more powerful positive outcomes, so that more of us may host conditions conducive to emerging-flourishing shifts.
Transformation, then, is the moment we stop treating knowledge as a possession of the mind and begin recognising it as an event in the field — co-generated with Earth, time, and sentient species…
Transformations ripple because the field of entanglement ripples. This is reflected in ourselves as sensing, feeling and intuiting into entireness, meta-trust using ourselves as parts-wholes-source of a living, responsive field.
Commentators on the special issue:
“This special issue is answering a call to felt scholarship, embodied epistemology, unfolding ontologies, co-emergent agency.”
“It’s supporting systematic curiosity through which you can invite in profound integrity resonances, wholeness and creating from all of your experience.”
The editorial provides a window for you to meet the papers, blogs and pod interviews. We invite you to breathe in and be inspired as you also notice what is useful for you and your work/life!
Podcast interview:
Hilary Bradbury and Simon Divecha talk about the special issue having just completed the editorial. Listen in
Citation and forever link:
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