Dominique Howard

Research Student

Theresa Parker is affiliated with The Open University's Department of People and Organisations.

You can email D ominique Howard directly but for media enquiries, please contact a member of The Open University's Media Relations Team.

Biography

I am born in France and grew up in Ivory Coast, DRC and Morocco. I also lived in Germany and Ireland where I raised my 2 sons. I graduated with the Open University - Master of Philosophy and Master in Human Resources - before endeavoring a PHD on how learning occurs and knowledge is applied in organizations.

I have 8 years experiences in managing administration, finance and human resources in the humanitarian sector, among which 3 years dedicated to designing and implementing learning and development interventions. I have a long standing experience of working with vulnerable groups, victims of conflicts or epidemics, victims of domestic violence and SGVB, and communities living in poverty and marginalized groups.

My thesis is about how learning occurs and knowledge is applied in organizations.

More specifically, it focus on how multi-disciplinary teams acquire, assimilate, reconfigure and apply knowledge to improve their decisions, practices, innovate, and solve problems.

This study is triggered by a phenomenon observed during my field visits as a Learning and Development Advisor. Although members of the medical and paramedical teams working in the projects of the organization acquire and assimilate new knowledge from the various learning interventions implemented, they experience difficulties in combining existing and new knowledge and applying the knowledge produced to a specific purpose. Furthermore, the organization encounters challenges to capture and integrate the knowledge used by these practitioners into its database and routines.

Acknowledging that the ways teams learn, create and exploit knowledge in the humanitarian sector remains an ill-defined and poorly understood phenomenon, (Taylor et al, 2015) the present study aims to unpack this phenomenon by confronting different theoretical perspectives and by conducting an empirical qualitative study in two projects from the organization.

From this research, insights will be gained to advance academic knowledge on organizational learning and absorptive capacity. At the operational level, the insights gained will assist HR professionals and managers to design strategies and processes to capture, organize, integrate and apply knowledge to improve daily medical practices and the care delivered to patients.

I will use the following research methods to collect data. These methods include observing some sessions of a specific learning intervention implemented by the Training Nurse in the projects I will visit for work purposes. I will also conduct semi-structured interviews and focus groups with the Nurses from these projects participating in the chosen learning intervention, their managers and colleagues. Finally, I will gather documentation about the context of the project, its activities and the learning interventions implemented.

Current Research

Learning and applying knowledge in the humanitarian sector.

This study examines how learning occurs in organizations. It focus specifically on how project teams operating in the humanitarian sector acquire, assimilate, reconfigure and apply knowledge to improve their decisions, practices, innovate and solve problems.