In my work, whether it’s clinical governance, investigations, or service transformation, I’ve increasingly found myself returning to the same core questions:
How do we know what works?
Whose knowledge counts?
How do we act wisely in complex human systems?
This blog is a reflection on the intellectual and professional influences that have shaped my recent approach which I can now articulate through a model of Four Ways of Knowing held together with Equity of Voice.
It’s also an act of gratitude: to my family, friends, colleagues, the thinkers, teachers, challengers and their lived-experience who inspire me to see more clearly, listen more deeply, and think more generously and artificial intelligence that allows me to verbalise my thoughts with clarity. I have only mentioned a few here but every connection makes a difference.
Knowing Is Not Singular — It Is Multi-Dimensional
Too often in professional settings, knowledge is treated as if it were a single dimension, something that can be measured, quantified, validated, and ranked. This narrow view elevates some ways of knowing while suppressing others, especially those that are contextual, embodied, relational, or existential.
Yet if we are honest with ourselves, we know that:
- time changes context,
- data can mislead,
- numbers without stories flatten reality,
- procedures without presence become mechanical,
- and expertise without listening excludes important voices.
From frontline practice to system-level investigation, the use of the Four Ways of Knowing has enabled me to move beyond policies, processes and perfection.
The Four Ways of Knowing
Over time, I have found great value in an epistemic framework that honours four distinct but interdependent ways of knowing:
- Propositional knowledge — facts, evidence, propositions
- Procedural knowledge — skills, practice, judgement
- Perspectival knowledge — contextual interpretation, lived perspective
- Participatory knowledge — relational knowing, co-creation, emergence
None of these on their own is sufficient. Together, they form a richer, more humane, and more responsible way of understanding complex situations.
Equity of Voice — An Epistemic Imperative
Equity of Voice is not just a fairness or inclusion move, it is critical.
In complex human systems, no single perspective can provide a complete picture. What we think of as “objective truth” often reflects only the voices that had the power to shape the narrative.
Equity of Voice insists that:
- lived experience must be treated as knowledge,
- professional voices must be understood as perspectives shaped by context,
- structural power shapes what knowledge is heard and what is silenced.
This stance is not secondary to quality and safety but is quality and safety, precisely because it enlarges the field of valid input, broadens sense-making, and reduces harm.
Influences That Helped Clarify My Thinking
My model did not emerge in isolation. It grew through engagement with ideas and people that challenged me, stretched me, and helped me refine what I already sensed in practice.
Dr Steve Suckling and Professional Challenge
I am also indebted to colleagues, in particular Dr Steve Suckling, whose rigorous critique and generous challenge have sharpened my thinking. Working with them has been a reminder that:
- intellectual growth comes through dialogue, dissent, and generative tension,
- professional practice is enriched not by consensus alone, but by responsible contestation.
Their influence isn’t a footnote, it’s part of the engine that drove this model from abstract idea into practical application.
His thoughts championed by some key friends influenced how I considered cognition, meaning, and wisdom cultivation. What resonates most for me is the insistence that:
True inquiry involves not just thinking, but attending and that attending shapes what we see, what we value, and how we act.
This intersects powerfully with my own move away from narrow technicism toward meaningful engagement with complexity.
His introduction into the work by Vervaeke has created a practical solution to rethink how we understand ourselves and our systems.
Psychological Safety and Reflexivity: Learning Through People
Ideas rarely arrive fully formed. More often, they are grown through relationships, challenge, and the courage of others to hold space for difficult conversations. Two people who have profoundly shaped how I understand and practise this work are Shaney-Ann Charles and Marg Bannerman.
Shaney-Ann Charles and the Practice of Psychological Safety
Shaney-Ann Charles has been instrumental in deepening my understanding of psychological safety not as a concept, but as a discipline.
What has been most striking in working alongside Shaney-Ann is her unwavering commitment to creating spaces where people are genuinely able to speak not perform, comply, or defend but think out loud. Her work consistently reminds me that psychological safety is not achieved through policies or statements of intent, but through moment-to-moment behaviours: how questions are asked, how disagreement is handled, how uncertainty is welcomed rather than closed down.
From Shaney-Ann, I have learned that psychological safety is not the absence of challenge. It is the presence of trust. It is what allows people to name discomfort, surface risk, admit uncertainty, and challenge power without fear of being diminished. In complex human systems, this is not a “soft” skill but a structural necessity.
Her influence reinforced for me that Equity of Voice only becomes real when psychological safety is actively cultivated. Without it, participation is selective, perspectives are filtered, and silence is misread as consensus.
Marg Bannerman and the Discipline of Reflexivity
Marg Bannerman introduced me to reflexivity not as an abstract academic idea, but as a lived professional responsibility.
Through Marg Bannerman’s influence, I came to understand reflexivity as the practice of turning the lens back on ourselves: our assumptions, our positionality, our power, and the ways our presence shapes what is seen and said. Reflexivity asks not just “What am I observing?” but “How am I part of what is unfolding?”
This was transformative. It challenged the illusion of neutrality that often accompanies professional roles, particularly in investigation, governance, and clinical leadership. Marg’s work helped me see that reflexivity is not about self-criticism, it is about honesty to ourselves.
Reflexivity creates the conditions for humility. It allows us to notice when our training narrows our field of vision, when certainty closes down curiosity, and when authority unintentionally silences others. In this sense, reflexivity is inseparable from Equity of Voice because without it, power goes unexamined and knowledge becomes distorted.
Additional Intellectual Anchors
Many other thinkers have helped shape this orientation:
- Iain McGilchrist on the two modes of attention and the cognitive consequences of privileging abstraction over presence.
- Dave Snowden and anthro-complexity on human systems as meaning-making, emergent, adaptive, and not reducible to mechanistic rules.
- Jesús Martín González whose synthesis of ecological, social, psychological, and relational frameworks helped me see how deeply interconnected our domains of knowing really are.
- Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics) for grounding ethical ambition in bounded, relational systems thinking, where human wellbeing matters within ecological limits.
Why This Model Matters in Practice
This is not a philosophical indulgence. In clinical governance, in safety investigations, in system design and evaluation, what we count as knowledge determines what we do.
When systems:
- ignore lived experience,
- amplify norms,
- favour averages,
- supress context,
… they don’t become safer, they become brittle, exclusionary, and dehumanising.
By contrast, a model that:
- recognises everyones contribution and critically language used,
- invites diverse voices into sense-making,
- takes account of context, relationships, and the emergence of new knowledge,
- honours both evidence and experience,
This creates conditions for wiser decisions, safer practices, and more equitable systems.
Rewilding as a Response to Over-Controlled Systems
Many professional systems have become over-managed in the name of safety, quality, or assurance. In doing so, they have inadvertently stripped out variation, suppressed dissent, and constrained learning. Knowledge becomes fenced in by metrics, protocols, and averages which feel predictable, but are often disconnected from reality.
Over time, I have come to see this orientation as closely aligned with the idea of rewilding.
By rewilding, I do not simply mean ecological restoration (though that matters deeply) but using their learning to consider how creating a better environment, allows organic change to improve our systems.
Rewilding offers a different stance.
It invites us to:
- trust emergence rather than over-control,
- allow multiple ways of knowing to coexist without forcing premature consensus,
- create conditions where diverse perspectives can interact, rather than deciding in advance which voice carries most weight,
- recognise that resilience comes from diversity, relationship, and adaptability, not uniformity.
In this sense, rewilding is a practical response to complexity. It is how we move from brittle systems optimised for the mean toward regenerative systems that can learn, adapt, and recover.
Rewilding also reframes leadership and expertise. Instead of positioning ourselves as controllers of systems, we become stewards of conditions: designing spaces where people can think together, disagree safely, and make sense of uncertainty collectively.
This is where Equity of Voice becomes essential. Rewilding without equity simply reproduces old power dynamics in a looser form. But rewilding with Equity of Voice creates the possibility of new patterns — patterns that could not have been designed in advance.
Seen this way, the Four Ways of Knowing with Equity of Voice is not just an analytical model. It is a practice of attention, a way of staying open to what is unfolding, and a commitment to resisting the urge to oversimplify what is inherently human, relational, and complex.
It is, deliberately, unfinished.
Psychological Safety
Psychological safety is the soil in which:
- Equity of Voice can take root,
- participatory knowing becomes possible,
- perspectival knowledge is shared rather than suppressed,
- procedural expertise can be questioned and refined,
- and factual knowledge can be interpreted honestly.
Without this soil, diversity of thought exists only on paper. With it, systems become capable of learning from themselves.
A Regenerative Practice, Not a Static Model
The Four Ways of Knowing with Equity of Voice is not a static framework, it is a practice orientation. It shapes how I listen, how I investigate, how I learn, and how I support others to do the same.
It was shaped by:
- thinkers who helped me name what I was sensing,
- colleagues who pushed back,
- lived experience partners who helped me see what was invisible to me,
- teams who have allowed us to practice what I have learned
- and the systems that both constrain and enable us to act wisely.
Taking a thought for a walk 