What the Slutwalk, Marshall McLuhan and Rebecca Black Have in Common
Posted: April 3, 2011 Filed under: complexity, social systems | Tags: complexity, health promotion, Marshall McLuhan, media, social justice, Social media, Toronto, women's rights 3 Comments »
How famous are you?
The speed at which information is translated into ideas, intentions and actions is now global and nearly instantaneous, which has consequences for collective action.
In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes. – Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol‘s oft-quoted phrase from 1968 hinted at a future that Marshall McLuhan saw encaptulated in his famous concept of the global village and the idea that the medium is the message:
The medium is the message – Marshall McLuhan
UK artist Banksy has gone so far to proclaim that in this new social media, always connected, perpetually broadcast media world we will all be anonymous for 15 minutes (see above photo). If true, this has implications that go beyond simply getting ready for fame, but more deeply into the way in which media messages are constructed and construed within a social media landscape. Some cases of how the quick-release created by media this week got me to thinking more about what this might mean for health and creating better communities.
One case is the Internet sensation-of-the-moment Rebecca Black and her widely viewed (which was up to more than 80 million hits as of the time of this writing), parodied, and celebrated video “Friday” . Within the span of two weeks, a 13-year old girl who was largely unknown outside her classmates, friends and family was portrayed as everything from a new talent to a no talent in social and mainstream media circles by pundits, the public and journalists as a whole. One small, yet intricate, act of creating a video and publishing it set off the most talked about musical event since Susan Boyle.
On a matter far more serious, Torontonians — women and men — came out in the thousands to voice their concern over insensitive, negative stereotyping of women in the first ever slutwalk. The website for the organizing team described the instigating issue like this:
As the city’s major protective service, the Toronto Police have perpetuated the myth and stereotype of ‘the slut’, and in doing so have failed us. With sexual assault already a significantly under-reported crime, survivors have now been given even less of a reason to go to the Police, for fear that they could be blamed. Being assaulted isn’t about what you wear; it’s not even about sex; but using a pejorative term to rationalize inexcusable behaviour creates an environment in which it’s okay to blame the victim.
What Marshall McLuhan (add Warhol and Banksy here too), Rebecca Black’s “Friday” (and Susan Boyle’s “I have a dream”), and Slutwalk have in common is that they all gained, retained, and explained themselves through widespread media, intense emotion, and great misunderstanding resulting from the media form.
With McLuhan, the emotion is less (unless confusion counts), but there is still much resonance with his work and celebration of his theories aimed at helping people understand the relationship between media, the messages conveyed, and the cultural reproductions created through them all. While McLuhan’s words are well known, his theories are not, nor has there been much effort to get to know them. I know few who have read his original texts, slightly more who have read secondary accounts of his work in scholarly manuscripts, and most who have done neither or, at best, caught him in his movie cameo in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall.
Rebecca Black has the (mis)fortune to be one of Worhol’s famous people, albiet for more than just 15 minutes. Just as Susan Boyle no longer graces our aural landscape as she did, I suspect Rebecca Black will move closer to what Banksy speaks of within the span of a few weeks with her work to join Double Rainbow and Steven Slater (the JetBlue flight attendent who jumped out of the plane with two beer) as memes that have come and gone.
Slutwalk, I hope, finds a more generous fate. At present it is tied between something of substance (like McLuhan) and celebrity (Black), and is as misunderstood as both. Whereas McLuhan’s work is often overlooked in detail because it is rather dense and challenging, applied without consideration of the manifest ways in which media and messaging intersect, Black’s video is taken up without any thought at all, yet not critically analyzed. (For music fans, I suggest spending an hour with Lady Gaga on her recent visit to Google to see someone who walks the line between McLuhan and Black well, taking the highest art form from both and addresses Black’s fame in answering an audience member’s question).
Reading through the Twitter feeds with #swto and #slutwalk found some cheers, and some questions about what Slutwalk is. Sadly, some of the comments were the (to be expected, I suppose) sexist comments that represent the take-without-thinking approach (Black) from misinformed or misogynist (or both) tweeters. Yet at the same time, there were some who thought about the issue a lot, yet may have been overly analytical about certain aspects of the situation (McLuhan) to the point of making small things into bigger ones. In the latter, there were over-generalized attacks on the police officer who initiated the walk in the first place (and has apologized – the sincerity of which is unknown by me) and the establishment of the police service as a whole.
Neither of these perspectives tell the whole story, but when viewed through the lens of social media, safe ground is harder to find. Nuance is not something that Twitter posts do well. A post by the Toronto Sun shows what would have to be the most stereotypical picture of the “sluts” on its cover (which I see as intentional), with no hint at the diversity of women (and men) who joined the march to specifically highlight that it doesn’t matter what you wear, all women have rights to be who they are and be free from violence. The immediacy of social media and online media, makes this a more complex argument when either the overly simple is favoured and the overly complex is posed as a counter. It is easier to attack someone or to mock them, but harder to understand that person. If we are to design better social systems, understanding is key.
Why write about this here? Because these are the issues we face in health promotion all the time. Poverty, racism, access to health services, mental health and wellness, and education are all issues that are complex. They cannot or will not allow themselves to be understood in simple terms, yet are issues that speak to the wellbeing of society. Slutwalk was about rights and freedoms for more than one half of our population. It was about respecting people for who they are, honouring their sexuality, and educating everyone about the prevalence, consequences and risks associated with unwanted sexual advancement and assault. When it becomes a Rebecca Black Friday issue, it is about things like the salacious use of risque’ language and when it is a McLuhan issue, it takes a library to understand it.
Surely with our amazing tools we can find some middle ground to make the complex accessible, and the simple more sophisticated.
** Photo by fstutzman used under a Creative Commons License from Flickr.
Design for Sex, Gender and Health (Celebrating International Women’s Day)
Posted: March 8, 2011 Filed under: design thinking, health promotion, public health, social systems | Tags: design, designer, gender, health, health equity, health promotion, sex, woman, women's health Leave a comment »
Woman, (1965) Oil on wood by Willem de Kooning, American, born Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 1904 - 1997.
Today marks the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day prompting some reflection on how we design for sex and gender in a world that often fails to consider either seriously enough.
Sex is important and it deserves attention in designing for health. Today the global community recognizes one half of the world’s population, their challenges, struggles and successes and I can think of fewer causes more worthy of such attention. Although sex is biological and brings its own issues with health, gender has social overlays incorporating role and identity that create more complex determinants of health, that require attention when designing programs and policies.
This attention to sex, gender and health requires problematizing the issue in the first place and recognizing that one-size-fits all approaches to social planning and policy do little to address the complexity of how these social determinants manifest themselves and interrelate. Gender is one determinant that is highly knotted up with other health issues such as economic security and employment (PDF), safety, and education. It’s complexity and pervasiveness demand that we consider this as something worthy of attention in our design and health promotion work if we wish to create a more equitable, healthy society.
Designing for health requires that we pay attention to these issues and consider them deeply in all of our work. Sex issues manifest themselves in ways that are unacknowledged, unconscious, or may be at odds with our intentions for promoting better health. It is rare that I’ve seen designers speak of sex and gender in discussing their work. And while health promoters bring sex and gender issues into prominence in their work, yet do not explicitly refer to design principles in such discussion, missing an opportunity to more intentionally shape their actions.
Design is taking some steps to make this a bigger priority. Yesterday’s announcement that global design leader IDEO was creating a non-profit arm that would focus on developmental issues, many of which are related to women’s needs, is a place to put hope for design. Health promotion’s foray into design issues has been on the built environment and on promoting equitable policies for access to health care, which is itself a start.
Bringing both of these fields closer together has the potential to do women and everyone better by considering the locations — social and physical — in which sex influences health and wellbeing and consciously designing situations that improve it. Doing so also means acknowledging where both design and health promotion knowledge come from, ensuring gender equity not only in society, but specifically within the fields of health promotion and design. Can you think of many “rock star” designers that are women? Those numbers are few. And while women are well-represented in the field of health promotion, the key texts and theories largely are male-authored. How this translates into equitable policies and practices for both genders is unclear, but the absence of discussion of these issues in much of the design and health discourse is less so.
While ensuring better design for health equity and promotion it is important to also add health equity and promotion to design through an empowered woman-friendly environment for learning and practice in these two areas.
So as you celebrate this International Women’s Day, consider ways to make sex and gender more conscious in your work and how we might design for both at a foundational level and not just as a means of ameliorating problems that manifest from poor design.
** Picture of Woman, (1965) Oil on wood by Willem de Kooning, American, born Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 1904 – 1997. by Clif1066 used under Creative Commons License from Flickr
Designing for Innovation: The Role of Time and Space
Posted: February 28, 2011 Filed under: art & design, design thinking, health promotion, innovation, social systems | Tags: architecture, design, innovation, space, time 1 Comment »
The language of design is geared towards birthing products and services, but rarely about their sustainability and life over time. What else might move the dialogue from studio to ecosystem?
The latest issue of Fast Company (the magazine) is focused on the top 50 innovative companies. The list features technology-focused companies, architectural firms, design studios and social innovators. Apple is there, so is IDEO, along with a group of people and concepts that were less familiar.
The focus for the issue was on who was innovating well this past year. On Apple they write:
Forget Apple’s ascension to the most valuable tech business. Forget the iPhone 4′s drama-defying success. If all Apple had going for it were the iPad, it would still be atop our list. Most impressive of all, though, is how Apple’s platforms have enabled an ecosystem of creativity, from gaming to finance to chipmaking.
What stood out here was how Apple was developing an ecosystem of creativity. Here, the focus is on creating an entire culture of innovation within a particular company. Cultural production is not something done lightly, nor easily.
Tony Schwartz, writing for the Harvard Business Review, suggests six ways or “secrets” to building this kind of innovative culture:
- Meet People’s Needs. Recognize that questioning orthodoxy and convention — the key to creativity — begins with questioning the way people are expected to work. The more people are preoccupied by unmet needs, the less energy and engagement they bring to their work.
- Teach Creativity Systematically. It isn’t magical and it can be developed. There are five well-defined, widely accepted stages of creative thinking: first insight, saturation, incubation, illumination, and verification. They don’t always unfold predictably, but they do provide a roadmap for enlisting the whole brain, moving back and forth between analytic, deductive left hemisphere thinking, and more pattern-seeking, big-picture, right hemisphere thinking. The best description of the stages I’ve come across is in Betty Edward’s book Drawing on the Artist Within. The best understanding of the role of the right hemisphere, and how to cultivate it, is in Edwards’ first book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
- Nurture Passion. The quickest way to kill creativity is to put people in roles that don’t excite their imagination. This begins at an early age. Kids who are encouraged to follow their passion develop better discipline, deeper knowledge, and are more persevering and more resilient in the face of setbacks. Look for small ways to give employees, at every level, the opportunity and encouragement to follow their interests and express their unique talents.
- Make the Work Matter. Human beings are meaning-making animals. Money pays the bills but it’s a thin source of meaning. We feel better about ourselves when we we’re making a positive contribution to something beyond ourselves. To feel truly motivated, we have to believe what we’re doing really matters.
- Provide the Time. Creative thinking requires relatively open-ended, uninterrupted time, free of pressure for immediate answers and instant solutions. Time is a scarce, overburdened commodity in organizations that live by the ethic of “more, bigger, faster.” Ironically, the best way to insure that innovation gets attention is to schedule sacrosanct time for it, on a regular basis.
- Value Renewal. Human beings are not meant to operate continuously the way computers do. We’re designed to expend energy for relatively short periods of time — no more than 90 minutes — and then recover. The third stage of the creative process, incubation, occurs when we step away from a problem we’re trying to solve and let our unconscious work on it. It’s effective to go on a walk, or listen to music, or quiet the mind by meditating, or even take a drive. Movement — especially exercise that raises the heart rate — is another powerful way to induce the sort of shift in consciousness in which creative breakthroughs spontaneously arise.
Schwarz’s argument underscores the importance of considering time and space for healthy design. If one is to consider designing for human systems we need strategies that recognize the conditions in which humans have evolved to thrive in. The modern office cubicle is just over a half century old. Fluorescent lights have been in use for twice as long. Our modern educational system with its rows and stiff structure modeled on the factory is just a little older than that.
None of these were designed as human-centred supports for learning, rather they aim at economizing time and space to produce a product. Innovation is not really a product, it’s too complex and not very specific. But, like many of the best things in life, it can bring value beyond what is known in the moment its conceived.
Consider what a design plan might look like if we planned our products for ecosystems, to be a part of a larger complex whole where it was intended to function for a longer time, producing value on its own over that lifecourse. What might that look like relative to a product that or service designed for a very particular time and space that is seen to not evolve? We speak of timeless designs, but those are designs that have an integrity that lasts beyond the moment and a function that reveals greater use or sustainability over successive periods.
In health and social service terms, this might be developing strategies that address not only the immediate conditions, but create a developmental approach to evaluation and adaptation that supports the adaptation of this program to changing conditions.
By factoring time and space into design, the promise of creating more responsive and sustainable products emerges and the more likely people will take design as something beyond producing the latest trend.
** Photo by alancleaver_2000 used under Creative Commons Licence from Flickr
Art / Design / Science / Literacy
Posted: January 22, 2011 Filed under: art & design, complexity, design thinking, public health, social systems, systems thinking | Tags: arts, communication, complexity, creativity, design, design thinking, education, health communication, learning, literacy, science, systems thinking 1 Comment »
Szonyi Istvan: Man Reading (artist's father)
Literacy has many forms and art is one of the ways in which these forms come together and present some of the best opportunities for engaging diversity in complex social systems.
The relationship between art and science has been long noted by those looking at the history of discovery, and the nature of creativity and human innovation. In theory, the idea that two creative ventures that use different methods and media as the vehicle for expression should fit together is natural. But that is where theory and practice diverge sharply.
From my perspective, art and design are not perspectives warmly embraced within the scientific community. There is much suspicion among scientists about the validity, reliability and practical utility of art and design in solving important problems. Aesthetics may be nice for culture, but science tackles serious things.
Yet, one of the more serious matters for science is the concept of literacy. Scientists have been worried about the inability of people to pick up and understand the basics of how science works and its implications for society, prompting this to become an educational priority for some.
Science literacy can be defined as:
PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) 2006 defines science literacy as an individual’s scientific knowledge and use of that knowledge to identify questions, to acquire new knowledge, to explain scientific phenomena, and to draw evidence based conclusions about science-related issues, understanding of the characteristic features of science as a form of human knowledge and enquiry, awareness of how science and technology shape our material, intellectual, and cultural environments, and willingness to engage in science-related issues, and with the ideas of science, as a reflective citizen.
This definition is highly referential to the concept of science, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as:
science |ˈsīəns|
noun
the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment : the world of science and technology.
• a particular area of this : veterinary science | the agricultural sciences.
• a systematically organized body of knowledge on a particular subject : the science of criminology.
This term is rooted in the Latin scire, which is to know . If one looks at the first definition on its own, independent of the second definition and conjunction with the most popular applications of the term science, there seems to be little room for art and design. Yet, when revisiting the definition of science itself, the idea of the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment, a door opens up to some new possibilities.
Design is largely about the study of human situations and interacting with people, ideas, and space to create solutions that emerge within those spaces. Unlike science, which has a focus on observation and understanding, design is about taking such understanding and applying it to problem solving. Milton Glaser describes design as intervention into the flow of events and the introduction of intention into human affairs.
Art is a means of expression and for exploring the intangible and making it so. It is for such reasons that art + design go together so much.
Reading the different definitions of literacy and considering what science, design and art do, it seems to me right that we contemplate the ways in which they come together. Art and design are part of the normative scientific lexicon, but perhaps they should. As the human-centred problems that science aims to tackle become more complex, abstract and intangible — climate change, chronic disease, food security, social inclusion/exclusion and mass migration/globalization — the need to visualize the problems in new ways and create (design) solutions based on science becomes imperative.
The only way this will take place is to have greater literacy on how this can be in order to recognize the opportunities that science, design and art present and the ability to transform that into true positive intention into human affairs.
** Image used under Creative Commons Licence from Flickr Pool, by freeparking. http://www.flickr.com/photos/freeparking/2351767932/
Complexity and Child-Rearing: Why Amy Chua is Neither Right or Wrong
Posted: January 16, 2011 Filed under: complexity, Education & Learning, evaluation, social systems | Tags: Amy Chua, child rearing, children, complex adaptive systems, complexity, developmental evaluation, family, social systems 2 Comments »
Family
Science strives for precision and finding the right or at least the best answers to questions. The science of complexity means shifting our thinking from right answers to appropriate ones and what is best to good. The recent debate over parenting (particularly among Chinese families) illustrates how framing the issue and the outcomes makes a big difference.
Amy Chua “is probably the most reviled mother in America” according to Margaret Wente writing in the Globe and Mail. In her column, Wente is looking at the phenomenon that Chua writes about in her new book on parenting, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. What has drawn such attention to Chua and her book is that she advocates for a very strict method of parenting in a manner that achieves very specific objectives with her children. The payoff? Her children are very successful. This is not a new argument, particularly when it comes to Chinese and other Asian cultural stereotypes. But like many stereotypes, they emerge from something that has a kernel of truth that gets used in ways that gets applied as a universal, rather than in context. Judging by the comments on the original Wall Street Journal story that attracted attention and the Globe and Mail’s review page, I would say that there is some truth to this stereotype and some wild overstatements as this gets applied universally to parenting.
A summary of the comments and commentary on this, crudely, fall into two camps (which, for reasons I’ll elaborate on later is ironic given how problematic the whole idea of reducing arguments into twos is, but go with me on this): 1) Amy Chua is recalling my childhood or parenting reality and its nice to hear someone acknowledge it and 2) Amy Chua is promoting harmful, inaccurate, racist stereotypes.
Child-raising is a common example of a complex system, showing how past experience is not necessarily a formula for future success. Thus, you can have the same parents, same household, even same genes (in the case of twins) and get two very different outcomes. Complex systems do not lend themselves to recipes or “best practices”. You can’t shoehorn complexity into “right” / “wrong” and either/or positions.
What is interesting about the discussion around Chua’s parenting style, which she claims reflects traditional Chinese behaviour (I am not Chinese so this is out of my realm for comment) is that the focus is on raising successful children, not necessarily happy, well-adjusted, self-determined or even creative children. And success, in the terms referred to means achieving or exceeding certain prescriptive standards for socially acceptable activities. This might mean acceptance at a prestigious school, an error-free performance, or a straight A report card. It is a rather narrowly proscribed form of achievement based upon a particular set of cultural conditions and assumptions.
One of the problems I see in this debate is that people are conflating the two types of outcomes, which is where the complexity comes in. What Chua has done is actually refer to parenting in line with a set of complicated activities and outputs, rather than part of a complex system. She has sought to reduce the complexity in the system of parenting by focusing on issues of tangible measurement and has created a familial system aimed at reducing the likelihood that these objectives will not be met. Her benchmark for success are visible outcomes, not the kind that come from growing one’s self-esteem, building true friendships, or learning to love. This isn’t to say that her children or those raised by “tiger parents” don’t have such experiences, but this isn’t what her method of parenting is focused on. And therein lies the rub and why much of the debate surrounding Chua’s book is misaligned.
If you are assessing the life of a person and their total experience as a human being, Chua’s method of parenting is quite problematic. Success in this situation has many different paths and may not even have a clear outcome. What does it really mean to be successful if love, happiness, and self-fulfilment is the outcome of interest – particularly when all of those things change and evolve over a week, a month or a lifetime? It is the kind of task that one might use developmental evaluation to assess if you were looking to determine what kind of impact a particular form of parenting has on children’s lives. Margaret Wente’s article uses some examples of “tiger parenting” outcomes with those who achieved much “success” using the benchmarks of externally validated standards and found mixed outcomes when “success” was viewed as part of a whole person. Andre Agassi grew to loathe tennis because of his experience, while Lang Lang appears to love his piano playing. Both have achieved success in some ways, but not all.
These two examples also go to show that with human systems, there is little ability to truly control the outcomes and process. Even if one can reduce outcomes to complicated or simplistic terms, those outcomes are still influenced by complex interactions. Complicated systems can be embedded within complex ones or the opposite. So no matter what kind of prescription a person uses, no matter how tight the controls are put, the influence of complexity has a way of finding itself into human affairs.
So is Amy Chua’s method of parenting successful or not, supportive or harmful, right or wrong? The answer is yes.
Designing Education for Learning
Posted: January 8, 2011 Filed under: complexity, design thinking, Education & Learning, social systems, systems thinking | Tags: Bruce Mau, complexity, continuing medical education, creativity, design thinking, education, educational design, feedback, innovation, learning, systems thinking, teaching 4 Comments »
Injecting Knowledge or Foolishness?
Education strives to prepare learners to meet the social, scientific and technical demands of a changing world, yet does so in a manner that seems antithetical to change. We put people in rows, we create arbitrary time horizons and rules, and rely on a model that looks more like a factory than a place of learning. What gives?
As a new academic term begins, the old one closes, and all those year-end lists and year-beginning previews flood the media world I’ve found myself asking the twin questions: what did we teach/learn/discover and what did it matter?
In a previous post I discussed the problem with grades and their lack of fit with learning in complex systems. Here, I want to continue that thread, with a focus on post-secondary education (although it most certainly applies to all forms of structured learning) and knowledge translation in professional practice.
Feedback is critical to adaptation and the emergence of new patterns of order in complex systems. Adaptation comes from the incorporation of this feedback into new cognitive, social or physical structures. This is learning.
Yet consider the manner in which we structure our educational environments. They are not really designed for learning much at all. At least, they aren’t if you believe that people learn at different times, in different ways, using a complex array of media that requires multiple literacies, through interaction with other people, fail and fail often in a manner that is safe, in settings that allow for “mess” and promote ways to structure or unstructure their environment.
A colleague of mine and I were walking back from a meeting of a continuing medical education committee and stopped in front of the hospital to chat about the kind of challenges she faces in professional education in the hospital with doctors.
The only time I can get people in the same room is to do continuing education is 7am. There is one hour when the night shift (which is usually 12 or 24 hours long) is ready to go home and the new shift is ready to start. And we expect people to actually learn? Nearly everyone is asleep and everyone’s mind is on something else. I have to be really entertaining to make this stuff stick.
Is this learning? This continuing education effort is a failure not of the learners, nor the teachers, but of educational design. If 7-8am before/after shift is the only time that the scheduling system will allow for face-to-face learning, then that’s what has to take place first. Shifting the system as a whole must come soon after.
What made this conversation so well timed was that it took place after a meeting in which we spoke for two hours on ways to encourage online learning in effective ways. The problem, as we noted in that meeting, wasn’t that the tools were ineffective, but that they required people to access them from home, in their private time because there were no structured time to do it on the job, and firewalls to prevent access to most Web-based programs in the first place. In this case, the system was designed to thwart learning opportunities except those that require inordinate levels of educational skill, lots of coffee, and an unreasonable level of motivation among learners (the 7am con-ed moment).
The idea of bringing design to education has started to take root. Bruce Mau, who has inspired social design through his Massive Change projects, along with his design firm has teamed with OWP/P Cannon Design and furniture maker VS America to create the Third Teacher collaboration that is aimed at bringing design thinking to education. The work, initially focused on primary schools, has expanded to include the entire Arizona State University campus. The ASU experience has adopted the idea of the purpose-driven university through use of design strategies to help the university and its community find, affirm and commit to their purpose.
The collaboration looks to explore ways to create physical spaces, intellectual spaces, and facilitate the interaction between all spaces to enhance learning. This interaction space creates the feedback potential that ignites creativity, innovation and discovery. This is what an education system for learning could look like.
(Photo credit: Education by smemon87, used under Creative Commons Licence)
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A Complex View of New Year’s Resolutions
Posted: December 28, 2010 Filed under: behaviour change, complexity, design thinking, health promotion, psychology, social systems, systems thinking | Tags: behaviour change, complex adaptive systems, complexity, design, design thinking, health, new year's resolutions, simplicity, systems thinking 5 Comments »
A Happy, Simple New Year (CC- WilliamCho)
The end of the year is coming and, despite good advice and the warning about how they don’t work, you’re still determined to come up with a really good New Year’s Resolution and this year, dammit, you’re going to stick with it.
It’s simple, right? Make a commitment, come up with a plan to stick to it, and you’re ready to go.
Firstly, change in human systems is rarely a matter of simplicity, which is why New Year’s resolutions tend to benefit the diet industry and fitness clubs, but few others.
Another reason lays in the meaning of the term simple. Simplicity implies that there are relatively straightforward mechanisms that underlie a cause and consequence, that these can be predicted with reasonable certainty and consistency, and that we can derive “best practices” from such events given their reliability and efficiency. When we see something as simple, we usually have a high level of control.
Yet, it is the very nature of human systems that makes control such an elusive concept when wish to change something. Complexity science provides us with a different way to handle these problems. It provides a means of understanding complex situations — those where there are multiple causes and consequences that interact and change dynamically — that represent the lives of human beings. Rather than predict what is going to happen based on flawed assumptions of control, complexity science helps anticipate change and prepares people to adapt to these changes wisely.
Diet and exercise tend to be near the top of New Year’s Resolutions. Typically, people will make a resolution to start an exercise plan and reform their diet all in one swoop. The thinking is akin to “go hard or go home”. The problem with this is that what we eat, how we eat, and the activities that we do on any given day are part of a complex weave of activities that shape our lives. Few of us have jobs or lifestyles where everything is the same day to day. If you have children, you’ll know firsthand that even with the most regimented schedule for them and you, every day brings new surprises. But for the most part, these are little surprises that happen consistently and, consistent with a complex system, you adapt.
If your diet consists of a lot of take-out food, pre-prepared foods like frozen dinners or canned goods, the idea that you will suddenly start cooking at home, eating healthy meals and changing the portion sizes right away is setting yourself up for failure. This change alone requires shifts in your time (now you need to shop, cook, clean, and plan in advance), which suddenly changes how you use the rest of your time as it might impact upon work, play, social activities and so on. This isn’t to suggest that such investments in this new lifestyle are not worth it, but that simple shift will drastically change not just your diet, but your lifestyle as a whole all at the same time. That’s a lot of stress to put on the system that is your life.
An alternative is to make small shifts, ones that don’t upset things too much like perhaps making one meal on the weekends. Once that is in place, perhaps change the meal to allow for leftovers so that one day or two you pack a lunch instead of eating out. Maybe then shift towards changing the lunch options you choose when you do eat out one or two days per week. The key is to take one thing, do it and do it well and then build upon it by introducing another thing. Over time, your schedule will adapt and you’ll find the ways to make the changes without them feeling so big.
Exercise is the same way. Rather than sign up for a year’s membership at the gym and workout 2 hours a day for the first week only to find yourself so sore and tired that you can’t imagine going back, try upping the activity level you engage in with different strategies. If you don’t go to the gym at all, starting there might not be the best option. Try walking a little more around your neighbourhood or take the stairs when there is an escalator. Maybe get off the bus one or two stops early and walk the rest of the way home. Once you start doing that, try a day pass a gym and do some very light weights or some simple cardio workouts like walking on a treadmill. As you build up over time, you will find what works and doesn’t work in terms of your likes and dislikes and what seems to be effective. This is called feedback, another critical component of complex systems.
By paying attention — being mindful — of what you’re doing and how it is working, you can start to build a longer-term strategy or pattern of activity that moves you along to where you want to go. It also prevents you from the let down at having not achieved your goals, but setting yourself up for success rather than failure. In doing so, you work with the complexity of human systems and our daily lives rather than against them.
Coffee Culture and Ideas: A Need for A Break
Posted: December 9, 2010 Filed under: design thinking, Education & Learning, innovation, social systems | Tags: coffee, culture, ideas, innovation, time 3 Comments »
A little departure this week. Think of it as a coffee break.
There is a theory that the Industrial Revolution and the intellectual flourishing that came from it in England was due to one thing: coffee. Up until then, people were mostly, well drunk. When water sanitation is poor and the options for getting water intake few, beer and wine were among the only options for people seeking means to hydrate. So for centuries there were entire generations of people who largely pickled from day to day (no wonder the lifespan was less than 40 for many).
Then along came coffee, allowing you do something with boiled water that tasted — well, better than boiled water. (Although as one who is a bit of a coffee connoisseur, I can only imagine that it tasted horrible back then, but I digress). Coffee had a bonus effect: it is a stimulant. So instead of swilling back a pint of ale at the pub, which leads to sleepiness, proclivity for getting into fights or having unwanted/unplanned sex, and general unwellness (not mention a big gut), we had people perky, with neurons firing wanting to chat and coming up with ideas — lots of them. And the recipe for coming up with a good idea, is to come up with lots and lots of ideas. The author Steven Johnson talks (and writes) about this in a very interesting and recent TED talk .
For me coffee has had a very special place in my heart (and tummy I suppose). I discovered coffee in the dog days of high school when coffee shops were one of the only places we could hang out. But it was in university that I really enhanced my love of the bean and used it various ways. It was an escape from studying: “I’m just going for a coffee”
Or work: “coffee break time”.
Sometimes it was to help me wake up, and sometimes it was used to help me stay up.
But what I loved most about it were those times when it was the catalyst for the kind of discussions that Steven Johnson talks about. I had three different places I frequented, but none were as enjoyable as Stone’s Throw, which was literally a stone’s throw from the university campus, where I lived for the last two years of my degree. During my time there I made friends, and grew friendships, but also found solace in books and my journals that I kept. It really was a time when my ideas lived large and ruled my life as I somehow managed to find a way to fit my friends, loved ones, work, academic pursuits, hobbies and down time.
We are our ideas and what we do with them and its that simple act of taking pause over a cup of coffee (or tea, or matcha latte, or ….) that can remind us of what those ideas are and, in the process, who we are as people. The idea of the “to go” cup is anathema in some cultures, because it takes the act of communion that coffee brings out of the equation and just leaves you with a pressed drink of beans, water, and maybe some milk. I agree to some extent, but even the act of going out for coffee — particularly with friends or people who love (who are often both) — is a way of creating possibilities by engaging people in dialogue, through a shared experience of a drink.
You cannot travel to any culture where food and drink is not part of a welcome or hosting arrangement. To offer someone something to drink is a sign of hospitality. I’ve been reminded of the importance of this a lot over the last few weeks and with it, what ideas have been nurtured along with it.
Our ideas and the sharing of those ideas are the utmost expression of who we are. It is creativity: to create something. By offering tools and technologies, knowledge and opportunities to connect people to helpful services, we are inspiring in them ideas about how to engage in the world.
With a Starbucks on nearly every corner, it should be easy to generate ideas and get good ones. But it seems that what is missing is the break. Sit in any Starbucks or related cafe and you’ll see that most orders are “to-go”, creating all kinds of waste and also potentially stifling the opportunity to sit and reflect. What we’ve done is taken all the caffeine benefits from coffee, added sugar to it, and upped the calories without adding the most essential ingredient: time.
As the holidays approach, the days get shorter, and the number of demands increase, I am reminded about the benefits of coffee beyond the warmth it brings and how, with time (and maybe a little sugar), it can do wonders to stoke innovation.
Social Media / Social Activism
Posted: October 12, 2010 Filed under: innovation, Social media, social systems | Tags: activism, collective action, Facebook, Malcolm Gladwell, public engagement, social innovation, Social media, Twitter 3 Comments »
Activism 3.0?
Malcolm Gladwell’s recently published essay on social media and activism has been gaining a lot of attention from the tech world and social innovation crowd. For good reason too. He has managed to articulately skewer the idea that online social activism and the tools that advance it are any better or even as good as previous forms of activism such as the type witnessed during the civil rights movement.
Gladwell also takes aim at innovators.
Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model. As the historian Robert Darnton has written, “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.” But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.
Gladwell points to a new book, “The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change,” by business consultant Andy Smith and Stanford Business School professor Jennifer Aaker, and how they use illustrations of how small acts such as forwarding an email request to search out bone marrow donors as examples of activism. His comparison is with the acts perpetuated in the 1950′s and 60′s in the United States south as part of the Civil Rights Movement where people physically put themselves in harms way and literally took action.
The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.
This is an important distinction between participation and activism. But I argue that this paints things in too much of a black and white way of viewing the issue. What does activism mean? Gladwell doesn’t really say, pointing to examples like the protest at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, NC and how it grew through people literally standing up and sitting down for their rights, as activism. Using Gladwell’s example, one might not distinguish between those sitting at the lunch counter from those outside. But is there a difference? Does it matter if you are at the front or the back of the line, after all, it still is a line isn’t it?
I think that really depends on what the line means in terms of its goals and actions. Participation is the same way. Does it matter if you watch a football game at home compared to watching it in a stadium, live, with 40000 other people? What about if you are watching it from the sidelines, on the bench, or whether you’re in the game handing the ball? When does it cease to be participation and when does it begin?
Social media is like that. There are those with dozens, hundreds even hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. Some people I know have more than 800 Facebook friends, even if Dunbar’s number suggests that we really can only have close to 150 substantive relationships in our lives. So what does that mean?
The problem I have with Gladwell’s analysis is that it slips too far towards either/or thinking about social media without considering the nuance withing a social network. Indeed, there are many who will sign a petition, forward on an email, and join a Facebook group denouncing something, supporting something else, and advocating another thing with little real attention paid to the topic or outcome. But the same is true of anything social. Most human beings like to be where others are.
Thousands join protests, yet only a few commit to the issue enough to go beyond the protest to write letters, put up posters, vocalize, and study the problem. The same is true of social networks. The difference is that social networks enable passive engagement easier than through other means. So it makes sense that the gap between those who do little and those who do a lot is large, but in the end, are there more people active? The stats are hard to confirm, because activism is so much different now.
Back in the 1950′s and 1960′s, a protest and a sit-in was novel, thus it attracted a lot of attention. Today, we have protest staging areas at events like the G20 because they are expected and almost predictable. Thus, they’ve lost their ability to hold the same level of attention as they once did. Same with the petition.
We’ve hit marks with Facebook groups pretty quickly illustrating how quick things go from novel to trite. The lesson isn’t that social media doesn’t work, rather it is that the speed to which we adapt is increasing. Innovations are coming far faster. Twitter is now the rage, but soon it might be something else, maybe something with video. But they all will have some staying power, the issue is that we just don’t know what that will be.
But if we continue to view things as working/not working, good/bad, real/fake we start to miss the point that these tools and technologies are doing something and are supporting real people, some of whom are doing a lot; to dismiss that is to risk squashing the spirit and potential that we all have to advocate and participate in change.
