The Wicked Problem of Wicked Problems
Posted: February 13, 2012 Filed under: behaviour change, complexity, design thinking, innovation, Systems science, systems thinking | Tags: AC4D, complexity, design, Jon Kolko, planning, strategy, systems thinking, wicked problems 2 Comments »
All Knotted Up...Like a Wicked Problem
Wicked problems are receiving a lot of attention these days giving much excitement to systems thinkers and designers alike. Yet what these problems mean for planning and understanding social programs and policies is not clear and may be even more wicked that it first appears.
I was excited to learn that Jon Kolko and his creative band of learners at the Austin Center for Design (AC4D) are coming out with a book on wicked problems. As one who studies and helps others to intervene in addressing such problems, this was like being a Star Trek fan learning that Leonard Nimoy was coming to speak at the Trekkie convention in my hometown. It is refreshing to see that the concept of the wicked problem is gaining traction beyond the small band of scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of complexity, systems and design thinking (which, admittedly is where many AC4D folk inhabit, but hopefully their audience will not).
But it’s not just one book. We are seeing transformations in education and science — with calls for a ‘new breed of scientist’ being created at places like Massey University in New Zealand — or spread through the news or business stories in various forms.
The concept of the wicked problem was originally posed by management science scholar and systems thinker C. West Churchman with planners Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber. The Wikipedia entry on wicked problems provides some examples of what these things are:
Classic examples of wicked problems include economic, environmental, and political issues. A problem whose solution requires a great number of people to change their mindsets and behavior is likely to be a wicked problem. Therefore, many standard examples of wicked problems come from the areas of public planning and policy. These include global climate change[4], natural hazards, healthcare, the AIDS epidemic, pandemic influenza, international drug trafficking, homeland security, nuclear weapons, and nuclear energy and waste.
In recent years, problems in many areas have been identified as exhibiting elements of wickedness – examples range from aspects of design decision making and knowledge management[5] to business strategy.[6]
As our social lives become more interconnected through the Internet, globalization, and mass migration, the complexity of the situations we find ourselves in grows. More of anything in diverse forms interacting together is likely to create complexity as new properties emerge and those properties change the trajectory of actions and reactions of the parts dynamically.
As one who is interested in wicked problems and works with people to address them, I should be thrilled to see the term used so widely. I am, but cautiously so. There is a risk that in the enthusiasm to embrace the lexicon of complexity that the meaning gets lost, which is what one gets from the hype cycle (See below).
The Hype Cycle: Coming to a Wicked Problem Near You?
The hype cycle is described as phenomonena initiated by a technology (or idea) and, once caught on, spikes the expectations beyond reason leading to discouragement, mass abandonment of the idea, and then — hopefully — a return to a level of reasonable return.
While the “cycle” (it is not a cycle) has limitations, the analogy here is well suited to fads of various types and the rapid ascension of the concept “wicked problem” in past years is indicative of a trend. Below are two representations of the amount of citations of the work “wicked problem” and “wicked problems” from Google’s Ngram service:
Wicked Problem Citations: 1950-2008
Wicked Problem(s) Citations: 1973-2008
It appears that wicked problems (plural) are increasing and reference to a single problem is staying the same.
Regardless, an upward trend is evident. What it means is another matter…
If wicked problems are becoming talked about more often and by more people, it is appropriate to ask what kind of impact that this new thinking will have on not only the way the problems are posed, but how people seek to address them.
To that end, it is worth envisioning the future with caution. One of the reasons for this is that wicked problems are often not wholly wicked in their composition or the strategy required to address the problem — which ironically makes these types of problems even more wicked.
This has to do with the interconnected, multidimensional, and embedded nature of the problems themselves which contain within them many interconnected non-wicked problems. I’ve started to see difficulties with organizations developing strategy that fails to consider this. It is, as I’ve discussed before, an artefact of either-or thinking. Tackling the kind of wicked problems like poverty, chronic disease, and global finance require a meta-level strategy that recognizes, shapes and adapts to complexity, while accounting for micro-level issues that are indeed, very linear and simple.
Finding, training and retaining the right talent to work with diverse communities on problems that are poorly supported or funded from many sources is wicked. The human resource needs for payroll, supply management, and field support might be much less so. Yet, both are joined-up and require strategies that can extend beyond traditional management and strategy, but also embrace some of the very ‘best practices’ that seem at the outset to be antithetical to complexity.
Just as I shake my head in frustration at seeing complexity dealt with using amplified linear strategies that ‘do the wrong things righter‘, I have surprised myself by how much I’ve been twitching at hearing recent converts to systems thinking rail against the traditional ways of planning as if anything other than seeing problems as complex would be wrong.
At issue is that wicked problems are made more so by having both complex and non-complex elements working together, requiring a level of strategy development that is far more sophisticated than many first thought. Even a review of the better management texts using complexity give short shrift to the relationship between the complex, the simple and the complicated working simultaneously in environments and how we plan for that. The Cynefin Framework provides a start, but just a start.
Until we recognize this complexity — no pun intended — in the way we plan, there is great risk of replicating the hype cycle when our sole use complexity-based models yield poor results of a different nature than the poor results we are seeing from traditional linear, reductionist thinking models applied to many of the problems we deem as wicked today.
Picture credits: A Close Up on Knotted Rope by Sundariel used under Creative Commons License from DeviantArt
Graph: Gartner Hype Cycle by Jeremy Kemp used under licence from Wikipedia.
Knowledge Hypocrites: Take Two!
Posted: February 4, 2012 Filed under: knowledge translation, public health, systems thinking | Tags: beliefs, health promotion, hypocrisy, knowledge mobilization, knowledge translation, reflective practice, values 3 Comments »Knowledge Hypocrites: Take Two!.
The link above points to a great post by KMBeing that deserves some re-blogging here. It looks at the issue of hypocrisy in espousing the values of taking knowledge and putting it into practice, without practicing it. It’s worth a read.
There are a lot of professions and practices where we say one thing and mean another. This is something that can apply to health promotion, design, evaluation and social justice work in any guise.
What do the words and ideas mean and what do they mean in practice?
These two concepts are part of reflective practice and also require good communication, the kind that that allows people to find out what the meaning of their words are in the eyes and ears of another. Good communication requires speaking clearly, listening clearly, and clarifying clearly and doing so honestly and openly.
One of the issues with many of knowledge practitioners is that the rhetoric of knowledge translation/mobilization is so seductive. It is so common-sensical and even trendy. But the idea of sharing what we know, building relationships, and working together in true collaboration is much harder when viewed in reality where people have different resources, power structures, perceptions, reflective capacities, skills, knowledge, and time.
Knowledge mobilization is about not just strategy or tactics, but building up a system that supports it all. David Phipps, who wrote the original article looking at these hypocrisies was referring to this by commenting on the fact that there are too few incentives to change the way things are done and so without a top-level strategy to support change and no incentive from the bottom, the system remains the same.
Designing and living a system that works requires living and designing practices that support our values and communication now.
The Complexity of Planning and Design in Social Innovation
Posted: January 7, 2012 Filed under: complexity, design thinking, evaluation, Systems science, systems thinking | Tags: complexity, design, developmental design, developmental evaluation, evaluation, health, human services, Social media, systems thinking 2 Comments »
The Architecture of Complex Plans
Planning works well for linear systems, but often runs into difficulty when we encounter complexity. How do we make use of plans without putting too much faith in their anticipated outcome and still design for change and can developmental design and developmental evaluation be a solution?
It’s that time of year when most people are starting to feel the first pushback to their New Year’s Resolutions. That strict budget, the workout plan, the make-time-for-old-friends commitments are most likely encountering their first test. Part of the reasons is that most of us plan for linear activities, yet in reality most of these activities are complex and non-linear.
A couple interesting quotes about planning for complex environments:
No battle plan survives contact with the enemy – Colin Powell
In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable – Dwight D. Eisenhower
Combat might be the quintessential complex system and both Gens Powell and Eisenhower knew about how to plan for it and what kind of limits planning had, yet it didn’t dissuade them from planning, acting and reacting. In war, the end result is what matters not whether the plan for battle went as outlined (although the costs and actions taken are not without scrutiny or concern). In human services, there is a disproportionate amount of concern about ‘getting it right’ and holding ourselves to account for how we got to our destination relative what happens at the destination itself.
Planning presents myriad challenges for those dealing with complex environments. Most of us, when we plan, expect things to go according to what we’ve set up. We develop programs to fit with this plan, set up evaluation models to assess the impact of this plan, and envisage entire strategies to support the delivery and full realization of this plan into action. For those working in social innovation, what is often realized falls short of what was outlined, which inevitably causes problems with funders and sponsors who expect a certain outcome.
Part of the problem is the mindset that shapes the planning process in the first place. Planning is designed largely around the cognitive rational approach to decision making (PDF), which is based on reductionist science and philosophy. Like the image above, a plan is often seen as a blueprint for laying out how a program or service is to unfold over time. Such models of outlining a strategy is quite suitable for building a physical structure like an office where everything from the materials to the machines used to put them together can be counted, measured and bound. This is much less relevant for services that involve interactions between autonomous agents who’s actions have influence on the outcome of that service and that result might vary from context to context as a consequence.
For evaluators, this is problematic because it reduces the control (and increases variance and ‘noise’) into models that are designed to reveal specific outcomes using particular tools. For program implementers, it is troublesome because rigid planning can drive actions away from where people are and for them into activities that might not be contextually appropriate due to some change in the system.
For this reason the twin concepts of developmental evaluation and developmental design require some attention. Developmental evaluation is a complexity-oriented approach to feedback generation and strategic learning that is intended for programs where there is a high degree of novelty and innovation. Programs where the evidence is low or non-existent, the context is shifting, and there are numerable strong and diverse influences are those where developmental evaluations are not only appropriate, but perhaps one of the only viable models of data collection and monitoring available.
Developmental design is a concept I’ve been working on as a reference to the need to incorporate ongoing design and re-design into programs even after they have been initially launched. Thus, a program evolves over time drawing in information from feedback gained through processes like evaluation to tweak its components to meet changing circumstances and needs. Rather than have a static program, a developmental design is one that systematically incorporates design thinking into the evolutionary fabric of the activities and decision making involved.
Both developmental design and evaluation work together to provide data required to allow program planners to constantly adapt their offerings to meet changing conditions, thus avoiding the problem of having outcomes becoming decoupled from program activities and working with complexity rather than against it. For example, developmental evaluation can determine what are the key attractors shaping program activities while developmental design can work with those attractors to amplify them or dampen them depending on the level of beneficial coherence they offer a program. In two joined processes we can acknowledge complexity while creating more realistic and responsive plans.
Such approaches to design and evaluation are not without contention to traditional practitioners, leaving questions about the integrity of the finished product (for design) and the robustness of the evaluation methods, but without alternative models that take complexity into account, we are simply left with bad planning instead of making it like Eisenhower wanted it to be: indispensable .
How Systems and Design Thinking Can Address Violence Against Women
Posted: December 6, 2011 Filed under: behaviour change, psychology, social systems, systems thinking | Tags: design, design thinking, gender equality, men, sex, systems thinking, violence against women, women 1 Comment »
The Never Ending Campaign
Twenty-two years ago a 25-year old male walked into the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal and killed 14 women in a hate crime that injured scores, devastated families and friends of the victims, wounded a school, city and country, and change my life forever. Today, men and women across Canada (and beyond) pause to take stock of the relations between the sexes, the role of violence in our society, and to honour women as they remember the events of that day.
I don’t remember where I was when I heard the news in its fullest. It came out in spurts as these things tend to do when there are so many unknowns happening and much activity. I did know that the enormity of what happened at the Ecole Polytechnique that December 6th took a long time to sink in. Reports on the news that there had been a shooting on a college campus were scary enough, but as details emerged that it was women who were specifically targetted and as the depth of the carnage unfolded, I felt a profound sense of loss and kinship as many of the victims could have been my peers. This was not just a mourning for the victims themselves, but a loss of innocence (and ignorance) that I never regained. That day changed my life in ways that I wouldn’t come to understand until many years later.
The Montreal Massacre as it was called led me, for the first time in my life, to feel a sense of shame for what I was (a man), not just who I was or what I had done. I didn’t commit the crime, nor did I do anything to stoke the fires of hatred in Marc Lepine, but I started to question what role my society had in the killing and me by extension as male member of that society. That feeling of shame was profound, slow-building and completely opened myself up to a world that I had been too ignorant of. It raised many questions in me about sex, gender roles and my own place within both of those topics.
I was (and am) lucky. I had the fortune to be born into a family of strong women who cared for me and set great examples of what and who humans could be. From my Mom to my cousins, aunts and my grandmothers, I had a remarkable number of female role models to look up to. But I was also born into a society where sexist imagery, jokes, and patriarchal power dynamics were (and are) dominant. Without the openness to discuss these things, challenge them, and with few male role models who did, it was easy to absorb messages — from mainstream media (movies, TV, magazines), the fashion world, professional sports, and pornography that portrayed women as subservient, sex objects (instead of sexual beings), and weaker-thans — and to hold those positions as unchallenged or taken in uncritically. It was hard to reconcile what I saw in my family with what I saw everywhere else, but somehow these poles just sat in my conscious and unconscious self.
December 6, 1989 changed that and brought those two perspectives into collision.
My world opened up that day and the role that sexism and violence plays in everyday life became apparent and obvious in ways it hadn’t before. Ever since then, the role that violence, sexism, inequality and the insidious ways that these forces are manifest has been at the front of my consciousness. I haven’t always known what to do with these issues, but I have tried to make a difference and continue to be true with myself and others in addressing them whenever I have an opportunity to. This has brought me to many moments with other men that have been uncomfortable; sometimes I’ve done the right thing and spoke out and other times I haven’t. I’m not proud of the latter moments, but I at least know what I didn’t do wasn’t helpful.
Being aware is the first step. But awareness is only a first step and as a researcher, designer, and citizen I demand more.
I have since come to understand those feelings I had that December day and channel them into something productive, but it wasn’t easy. For example, it is sometimes difficult to reconcile activities that are expressions of a certain type of masculinity with those that lead to sexist oppression or intimidation. Sports is a great example of highlighting the best and worst of masculine behaviour. It is too easy to jump towards oppressing men just as men have (sometimes unwittingly or unknowingly) oppressed women. Attacking men isn’t the answer.
While I think I am aware of how my social position can negatively influence my interactions with others, I certainly do not have the answers for what to do. What I do know is that I need to be vigilant as the system that props up psychological and physical violence against women is powerful indeed. The White Ribbon Campaign (illustrated above) is laudable, but it is a short-burst effort to raise awareness. It isn’t 365 days long and in our minds it should be.
So what should the vigilant, conscientious man do? The following list comes from the Say No to Violence campaign which operates parallel to the White Ribbon Campaign in Canada. It suggests a series of small, but very important steps that men can tangibly take to address this issue in practical terms, but hints at a larger systems answer:
1. Think about the kind of man you want to be: kind, responsible, one that shares equally in family life and respects women and girls.
2. Be respectful towards women, girls, and other guys. Sexism and homophobia hurts us all.
3. Ask first. Whether it’s holding hands, kissing, or more, it’s important to communicate and seek consent.
4. Never use coercion, threats, or violence in your relationships with others.
5. Wear a white ribbon and pledge to never commit, condone, or remain silent about violence against women and girls. Visit our website to order ribbons.
6. Teach your students and the youth in your community about gender equality and healthy, equal relationships.
7. Be a good role model and share with the boys and young men around you the importance of respecting women and girls. Visitwww.itstartswithyou.ca to find out how.
8. Learn about the impact of violence against women in your community. Volunteer with a local shelter or a women’s organization.
9. Challenge and speak out against hurtful language, sexist jokes, and bullying, in your school, community, workplace, or place of worship.
10. Link your website to ours or place a banner for our It Starts With You Campaign on your website or blog and help us spread the word.
11. Accept your role as a man in helping to end violence against women. It affects everyone.
12. Start a White Ribbon Club or Campaign in your school or community. Visit our website to find out how.
13. Order our awareness materials and help educate others in your school, community, or workplace about men’s violence against women and girls.
14. Watch our collection of powerful digital stories to learn about the important connection between masculinity and gender equality.
15. As a community leader, policy maker, funder, or NGO staff member, read our issue brief to learn about the important role that men and boys can play in ending gender-based violence.
16. As a father or a family member, teaching the boys in your life about healthy equal relationships helps you do your part in creating healthy families and strengthening family bonds.
These suggestions all can help. Perhaps not surprisingly to readers of this blog, I would argue that there is a big role for systems and design thinking here. It’s one thing to be the change you wish to see in the world, but like Mohandas Ghandi who said this first, you need to change the system and design a strategy for doing it with others for that change to take root with others and spread. Campaigns like White Ribbon are one start. Another is to create the kind of sex and gender-positive organizations (including schools) that provide the scaffolding for allowing people to be themselves to the fullest without fear of violence, discrimination or abuse.
Yet another is to support women (and men) in being able to talk about these issues openly without judgement; design interaction spaces for dialogue just as some are trying with the occupy movement. As a man thinking back on the events of December 6th, 1989 I can remember feeling so alone in my ability to have conversations about the subject matter that didn’t resort into a guilt-trip (for being a man), seeing the event as the act of a lone, crazy individual (being dismissive), or just invoking a sense of despair at the complexity of it all (giving up). There was and is something that can be done. It’s just that it won’t change overnight and is an issue so entrenched into our society that it will be hard to untangle, but it can be done. This is a more wicked problem that it needs to be, but it nonetheless is one. In addressing its root causes and its superficial and deep consequences, we need to think bigger, smarter and act in ways that fit with a complex system.
So where to? From a systems perspective there are things we can do:
- Follow the list above — as many or as few items as possible — and do it as often as possible. Small, coordinated steps instill change in ways that don’t disrupt the system to create a backlash, nor does it let it the status quo rule;
- Share your experiences (maximize feedback, evaluate), learn from others and integrate this learning into your life and adapt your strategies based on this feedback. Keep changing, evolving and learning;
- Get diverse: bring in those that might have new perspectives and might not be the most obvious champions for women’s safety and gender equity and equality (improve learning). Some of the greatest insights and opportunities may come from going beyond the realm we’re familiar with;
- Find specific issues and topics that a wide range of people can see themselves in (create an attractor and probe) and make it something that people can self-organize around. Rather than ‘set the agenda’, throw out ideas and nurture the ones that people gravitate to and leverage that momentum into something that can emerge;
- Try being oblique (in your strategy). Consider indirect routes to tackling the issue as sometimes thorny, complex issues are best tackled indirectly through other channels (e.g., sports)
- Be persistent. Systems change doesn’t happen quickly except in times of great crisis and chaos and not always to our advantage. Steady and continuous will win the day.
- Spend time finding out what the problem is. Is it violence? Is it something that leads to violence? Is it a structure that leads to something that leads to violence? Asking why a LOT can help. Designers spend a lot of time problem finding.
- Frame the issue in the context of the people involved. Get empathic. Men, consider what life might be like living in fear of violence, being denied opportunities because of your sex, or what it would be like to have your value judged solely by how you look or what you could do for the opposite sex. Take sides — both sides — and see imagine what it is like to be a women who is stalked, abused, neglected or ignored. Alternatively, consider what it might be like for a man to get so caught up that he physically assaults someone he genuinely loves, or imagine what it would feel like not to have love at all and to hate those that do. Contemplate what it might be like to be a child to see the two people she or he loves most nearly kill one another in a rage that often feels like you caused it or growing up with the idea that another sex is inferior because that’s all you’ve been told. None of these are particularly pleasant, but only when we can see the whole issue — including that of victims and perpetrators and see them with empathy, compassion and understanding can we design solutions that might alleviate the problem;
- Develop solutions with those most affected – and this might mean involving men more than women sometimes (which is the exact opposite of what we do now). The solutions might not reside in the most obvious place and maybe it means stepping out of the conventional spaces into something a little more uncomfortable, yet closer to the problem;
- Prototype. Try things out and evaluate what happens when you do something. Small, safe-fail experiments allow you to learn as you go rather than aim to change the entire system at once, offering a lot of options for innovation.
Today, as we remember the lives lost and damaged from the events of December 6th and the global challenge that this represents, consider taking up the challenge and perhaps together we can systems think and design our way to a healthier, more equitable world for men and women alike.
Imagine how we can create a system that makes the unthinkable truly so. As designers, envision what we could do if we engaged people in the design challenge to reimagine our sex and gender roles in a healthier image.
Yesterday, I wrote about how women are becoming the leaders in our complex world. The issue of violence against women is an area where men can step up and show some leadership too. Indeed, it is a space for all of us to take charge and lead. Let’s step it up.
And for men? Wear your ribbon proud today and carry that thought with you the remaining 364 days of the year.
White Ribbon, worn
Women and Leadership in Times of Complexity
Posted: December 5, 2011 Filed under: social systems, systems thinking | Tags: Annie Lennox, Aretha Franklin, complexity, design, design thinking, leadership, Rosie the Riveter, social innovation, wicked problems, women 2 Comments »
We Can Do It by J. Howard Miller
“The Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves” – Aretha Franklin & The Eurythmics
The old cliches of where a woman’s place ought to be have changed to mean: anywhere she wants to be. Women are poised to drive change in the age of complexity leading us all to consider why this might be the case and what we can learn from it.
There was a time when women repeated the line in graphic artist J. Howard Miller‘s famous piece: We Can Do It! Now, as Aretha and Annie sing, they are doing it for themselves…and in spades. The ‘it’ is leading and innovating in times of great complexity and change and not necessarily by role, but by action. When the challenges of ‘wicked problems‘ become great and pervasive, it is women not men who are stepping up to lead and that might have a lot to do with design. How?
Design and design thinking is fundamentally about strategies used to create, shape and influence. There are many definitions of the concept, but generally speaking it is about finding / clarifying problems at their root, framing them within a larger context, and addressing them using empathic methods. Quite often this involves intense engagement with the issue and those whom the issue most affects and these are areas where women are doing well.
Drawing on the growing literature base on design thinking and a series of ongoing interviews I have done as part of the Design Thinking Foundations project, there are three areas that sit at the core of this way of approaching problems. As it turns out, women are pretty good at all of them:
- Empathy. Getting to learn more about the person / people who are designing for / with by stepping into their shoes is a powerful vehicle for gaining insight into the nature of the problem at hand, its frames, and possible ways forward. Research looking at males and females consistently shows women expressing higher levels of emotional empathy than men (e.g, ). More recent work has begun to explore the ways in which women relate empathically to others, whereas men are more prone to what can be called Machevellian tendencies;
- Literacy. By this I refer to a constellation of skills that sit at the intersection of craft and knowledge to address a particular problem. A designer’s literacy most often includes creativity and the ability to analyze problems. These skills can fall within artistic realms, but also scientific and mathematical realms. Here in Canada, a recent report on the state of education finds that boys are lagging in literacy scores and, for the first time, science scores. They are tied with girls in math. The report (PDF-summary) adds greater weight to the shifting nature of boys and girls.
- Engagement. Designers — whether they are introverts or extroverts — need to be able to engage in diverse social situations in order to create useful products and services. Early work on online social networks is suggestive of this, building on a body of work looking at the strength of associations between gender, emotion and socialization (see 2010 chapter of the same name)
It used to be that women would express these three areas in social roles that were of lower status than men and generally following male leads (e.g., homemaker, assistant). However, the balance is starting to shift and women are no longer waiting for men to give things up, they are taking things for themselves. Indeed, women are becoming the new leaders and are designing themselves lives that will keep them in this position for the foreseeable future if indeed design is the new competitive advantage as has been suggested by Roger Martin at the Rotman School of Business in Toronto.
Lest we think this is isolated to Canada or the United States, the rise of women and girls is being seen globally. Earlier this year, the Economist explored how Asian women are marrying less and marrying later. One of the reasons is that they are no longer tied to men in the same way and are less willing to fill a role that sees them often as less than in their marriages. Indeed, Asian women are eschewing the practice altogether in rates never before seen and may be on the cusp of instilling deep and profound social change.
A lot of Asians are not marrying later. They are not marrying at all. Almost a third of Japanese women in their early 30s are unmarried; probably half of those will always be. Over one-fifth of Taiwanese women in their late 30s are single; most will never marry. In some places, rates of non-marriage are especially striking: in Bangkok, 20% of 40-44-year old women are not married; in Tokyo, 21%; among university graduates of that age in Singapore, 27%.(Economist, August 20, 2011)
One of the reasons is that women are more often placed in roles of great social complexity in the family/social sphere, yet without the power to make key decisions. This might mean child raising (often held as the ideal example of complexity), negotiating and planning social engagements, and doing much of the emotional maintenance in relationships. While these are not universal and suggestive of stereotype, there are libraries full of research that have found these roles tend to be persistent and consistent across most Western countries. Until now. These are also the kinds of skills that are needed in complex systems and to create means to navigate through them.
Women are no longer satisfied (nor should they be) with the roles assigned to them by men, but are shaping and crafting new ones for themselves and reclaiming and challenging outdated, sexist ones. A terrific example of this is the SlutWalk movement that started in Toronto in reaction to public statements by a police officer aimed at helping prevent rape that placed blame on victims, suggesting that women “stop dressing like sluts”. Here, women just took action and men followed.
As societies, we will (and do) need leaders and innovators who know how to manage complexity well and design solutions and women may be the first place to look because they are doing it already.
What is Developmental Evaluation?
Posted: November 19, 2011 Filed under: complexity, evaluation, innovation, systems thinking | Tags: complexity, developmental evaluation, emergence, Michael Quinn Patton, program evaluation, road trip, strategic learning, systems thinking 5 Comments »
Developmental evaluation (DE) is a problematic concept because it deals with a complex set of conditions and potential outcomes that differ from and challenge the orthodoxy in much of mainstream research and evaluation and makes it difficult to communicate. At a recent gathering of DE practitioners in Toronto, we were charged with coming up with an elevator pitch to describe DE to someone who wasn’t familiar with it; this is what I came up with.
Developmental evaluation is an approach to understanding the activities of a program operating in dynamic, novel environments with complex interactions. It focuses on innovation and strategic learning rather than standard outcomes and is as much a way of thinking about programs-in-context and the feedback they produce. The concept is an extension of Michael Quinn Patton’s original concept of Utilization Focused Evaluation with concepts gleaned from complexity science to account for the dynamism and novelty. While Utilization Focused Evaluation has a series of steps to follow (PDF), Developmental Evaluation is less prescriptive, which is both its strength and its challenge for describing it to people (things I’ve discussed in earlier posts).
So with that in mind, our group was charged with coming up with a way to explain DE to someone who is not familiar with it using anything we’d like — song, poetry, dance, slides, stories and beyond. While my colleague Dan chose to lead us all in song, I opted to go with a simple analogy by comparing DE to a hybrid of Trip Advisor and the classic Road Trip (due to lack of good vocalizing skills).
Trip Advisor has emerged as one of the most popular tools for travellers seeking advice on everything from hotel rooms to airlines to resorts and all the destinations along the way. Trip Advisor is averaging more than 13 million unique visitors per month and, unlike its competitors, focuses on user-generated content to support its service. Thus, your fellow travellers are the source of the recommendations not some professional travel agent or journalist. At its heart are stories of varies tones, detail and quality. People upload various accounts of their stay, chronicling even the most minute detail through photos, links to their blogs, video, and narrative. If you want to get the inside details on what a hotel is really like, check Trip Advisor and you’ll likely find it.
However, like any self-organizing set of ideas, the quality of the content will vary along with the level of reportage and the conclusions will be different depending on the context and experience of the person doing the reporting. For example, if you are a North American who is used to having even the most basic hotel chain offer a room with full-service linens, a bathroom, closet, desk and separate shower, you’ll have a hard time adjusting to something like EasyHotel in Europe.
The Road Trip part (capitalization intended here to denote something different than a regular trip by road), denotes the experience that comes from a journey with a desired destination, but not a pre-determined route and only a generalized timeline. A Road Trip is something that is more than just traveling from Point A to Point B, which is usually accomplished by taking the shortest route, the fastest route or a combination of the two; rather it is a journey. Movies like National Lampoon’s Vacation (and, European Vacation), Thelma and Louise, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, and (surprise!) Road Trip all capture this spirit to some effect. I suppose one might even find a more grim example of a Road Trip in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy or The Road.
Road Trips have a long history and are not just a North American phenomenon as this article from the Indian Newspaper, The Hindu reports in some detail:
“Road trips are fun when they are not planned point-to-point. As long as you have accommodation booked, that is enough. Its better not to have agendas; get as spontaneous and adventurous as you can. My friends and I went on a road trip to Goa last year. It was loads of fun as it was the first time we took off on our own without parents. To me, it was more than just a trip with friends. It showed that I could take care of myself and that I was now a grown-up, free to do what I wanted,” says Siddharth, who is doing his engineering.
Chance favours the prepared mind
Road Trip Advisor for Developmental Evaluation
“Road-tripping is a great way to bond with the people you are travelling with and I would strongly recommend it to people. It not only makes you appreciate yourself as an individual but is an amazing experience as you get to meet new people, know different cultures and sample different cuisines. I can never forget biking on sleet, riding though torrential rains, gobbling hot rotis at dhabas, the beautiful snow-capped mountains and guy talk with friends on the trip,” says Dheeraj, who recently went to Ladakh.
all is not hunky dory during these trips. You have to be way about accidents and mishaps. And, realise that freedom comes with responsibility. Says Arjun: “I had borrowed my friend’s bike for the trip, and though it looked good, it gave problems on the foothills of Kodaikanal and we couldn’t do the climb. Being a weekend, there were no mechanics. It helps to know your machine. A passion for road-tripping is not enough. You need to be equipped to take care of yourself also.”
Here, the story parallel is about being prepared. Know evaluation methods, know how to build and sustain relationships and to deal with conflict. A high tolerance for ambiguity and the flexibility to adapt is also important. Knowing a little about systems thinking and complexity doesn’t hurt either. Developmental evaluation is not healthy for those who need a high degree of predictability, are not flexible in their approach, and adhere to rigid timelines. Complex systems collapse under rigid boundary conditions and do evaluators working with such restrictions in developmental contexts.
So why do people do it? “Well, my memories of my favourite road trip were an injured leg, chocolates, beautiful photographs and a great sense of fulfilment,” recalls Arjun.
It is youngsters like these who have transformed road-tripping from just a hobby to an art.
After all, friendship and travel is a potent combination that you can’t say no to.
Systems Thinking and the Design of Empathy
Posted: September 22, 2011 Filed under: complexity, design thinking, systems thinking | Tags: Charles Leadbeater, design, developmental design, developmental evaluation, empathy, organizational change, systems thinking Leave a comment »
Leadbeater's Systems Thinking - Empathy Grid
Scalability is an issue that faces practitioners in systems and design. How do we design systems at scale and if so, what might they look like.
Charles Leadbeater has been on a mission to find ways to make large organizations — particularly those in the social sector – more innovative. Leadbeater, like many social innovators, is hard to pin down to a single title or role. He is at once a researcher, a designer, a systems thinker, and a urbanist. Like most innovators, all and none of these descriptors truly fit.
Leadbeater was in Toronto earlier this week to speak on the issue of innovation in cross-sector collaboration for public good at the MaRS Discovery District. If you’ve seen Leadbeater speak (consider the talks on TED here or elsewehere), you’ll know that you’re in for some English-style self-depricating humour alongside of much about the manner in which people engage in change actions within a system. You’ll also get a lesson in social design, the kind that Victor Papanek advocated for.
To my delight, Leadbeater did not disappoint. Unlike other talks, the value came less from a focused “take home message” and more in a way of conceiving social systems through the combined lens of systems and design thinking (my terms, not his). At the heart of his talk was the challenge we face with building systems and empathy at scale. When things interact, eventually they become understood within a set of boundary conditions and interact, thus making a system. The system in turn begins to establish rules (or rather, the rules determine the system). These emergent properties thus shape the way the system operates or, in social situations, governs or guides the actions of those within it.
The problem is that at certain scales the very factors that create positive social relations, that is those that yield tangible emotional, resource, or informational benefits for one or more parties, get warped under the changes in that scaling. Thus, we have the countless stories of a beloved small business grown in a confined community that becomes a multinational corporation and, in doing so, loses the intimacy and connection to its customers in the process. Companies do this, government organizations show this, and so do cities.
The more one designs for the humans within the system in ways that create meaningful engagement, the greater the empathy. Yet deep empathy is often founded upon intimacy, which is something that is difficult to scale. Leadbeater illustrates the various ways in which firms and cities have addressed this on the graph above. In each case, there are examples that fit. In business for example, there is Ryanair, which embodies a highly structured system with low empathy (top left corner). Opposed to that is the local farmer’s market where one gets to know their grower, experience high mutual empathy, but in a manner that is unique, idiosyncratic and non-systematic in most ways. The challenge is how to design organizations at scale from the cosy-ness of the Farmer’s Market without becoming a Ryanair.
It struck me that the food service industry might be one of the areas where the scalability can be achieved. For example, Starbucks is a gigantic corporation with shops worldwide, yet it still manages to create a very homey, local feel at each one. In the mornings I go to the gym I stop by a location to get a smoothie and my server always remembers my order. At the location near where I take classes, they gave me a free drink because they couldn’t get the computer to take off my 10 cent reusable cup discount. In each location, the benefits were not just in customer service, but in the chit-chat and relationships that I develop with the staff. It’s not like I am speaking to owner-operators at some of the great independent coffee shops around my city, but it is close.
The Starbucks experience was thought through, intentional and thus, by design. We can do this with other systems. The key is whether or not the systems themselves are aware enough to know when they have, indeed, become systems. Starbucks today could not be empathic in exactly the same way as it was when it was a one-shop place at Pikes Market in Seattle. But it can create something similar, which is parallel to Simon’s notion that design is about the science of the artificial.
I’ve been developing and advocating for an approach to creating scale — in time and scope — that I call developmental design. A developmental design approach means shifting and changing over time and designing things in a manner that adjust to the complexities associated with dynamic systems. It brings together complexity, systems, design and the detailed feedback mechanism that comes through developmental evaluation. Leadbeater’s grid helps add to this concept by giving a focus to the development, from one level of empathy to another and one systemic scale to another.
Through thinking in systems and acting through design, perhaps then we can create the kinds of services and organizations that respond to the challenges we face.
And designing for empathy will help us know when we’ve achieved it.
Quid nunc cogitat? In search of a definition of design thinking
Posted: September 10, 2011 Filed under: complexity, design thinking, Systems science, systems thinking | Tags: Andrea Yip, complexity, creativity, definition, design, design thinking, innovation, OCADU, Richard Buchanan, Roger Martin, strategic foresight, university 3 Comments »
Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a concept that has gained much purchase in the creative industries and beyond, but what does it mean and does it matter? Determining an answer to this question might mean the difference between advancing it further or ending the concept’s use altogether.
The Latin form of the question of “what is design thinking?”, quid nunc cogitat?, asks about what is design thinking now? It implies a sense that design thinking is a moveable, dynamic concept and might better illustrate its true nature than trying to develop a singular definition.
I’ve been struck by the concept of design thinking for some time and this week I began a two-year journey towards a Masters degree in design at OCAD University in Toronto where the concept will be placed at the centre of the curriculum. Perhaps not surprisingly, the first course of the program is Business and Design Thinking. This was the first week of classes and after spending a few days with my classmates it might be expected that this group of mid-career professionals interested in design thinking might have a clear idea of what it is that sits at the centre of their studies, but that hasn’t been the case.
Nor was it the case a few weeks ago at the Design Thinking unconference that I posted on earlier where people from across North America (and beyond) gathered to spend two days discussing the subject. It seems that no matter where I look, whatever books I read, the answer to the question of what is design thinking seems elusive. All these design thinkers and no definition to unite them.
The simplest answer to the question of what it is might be : it is what designers think about when they work.
And a designer might be: anyone who creates something with a conscious intent.
While these might suffice for cocktail parties, they are unsatisfying to those of us who seek to explore the concept of design thinking further than the hors d’oeuvre tray.
Among the best examples of what design thinking is about are conveyed through metaphors, like the Periodic Table of Design (twice!) or the design enzyme, both by social designer Andrea Yip. Roger Martin and others have considered design thinking to be a form of abductive reasoning around complex problem solving. Richard Buchanan suggests that this is the kind of thinking that is applied to wicked problems.
These examples either illustrate the concepts in specific terms or generalized ways of thinking, but do not in themselves provide a definition of design thinking. It seems we are very good at delineating the key elements of design thinking (Andrea Yip), the ways of approaching design problems (Roger Martin) or defining the types of problems that design thinking works best at addressing (see Richard Buchanan), but we are less good at saying what it is.
Perhaps we are left with the paradoxical answer and question posed by Faith No More
What is it? It’s it.
Sudhir Desai has argued that we need terms that have little or no prior meaning to define what design thinking is, lest we risk creating more confusion resulting from pre-conceptions like the words “design” (design what?) and “thinking” (isn’t it about ‘doing’ things too?). Taken further, this argument suggests that we will not find a suitable definition using the existing terms.
I am not so sure. There is another road to take. Consider DT’s close peer, systems thinking. Although not uncontested, many systems thinkers and scientists agree that systems thinking refers to a class of theories, methods and tools that address systems-level issues in a coherent manner. Complexity science, system dynamics, soft-systems methodologies, and cybernetics are among the fields that fall under the broader systems thinking rubric. This organization is best articulated in Michael Jackson’s 2003 book on Systems Thinking, cited in the Censemaking library.
Another good example (also in the library) is the work by evaluators Bob Williams and Richard Hummelbrunner on systems concepts in action. In this concise and articulate work, the authors illustrate the various concepts that fall within the larger realm of systems thinking in a manner that allows people to appreciate the breadth and depth of the concept and its multiple ways of understanding systems.
Design thinking may be ready to make the leap to this style of conceptualization. Rather than seek to kill the term and replace it with something else, as some have argued, perhaps its time to expand it while putting the effort forward towards articulating its components and the relations between them rather than seeking to come up with a gold-standard definition that suits everyone. The latter idea is one that has already suggested its doomed to fail.
Using this example, design thinking might be ripe to be re-defined as an umbrella term to support concepts like human factors design, plan-do-study-act approaches to change, and strategic foresight. Rather than design thinking be conceived of as a specific thing, it might be better off described as a set of things of which design and thinking are two of the central, unifying features.
Leaving my first full day of school, I walked a classmate to the subway and we discussed this fuzziness with the term and, prior to us parting said “it really is making things with some intent behind it, isn’t it?” to which the response was “yeah, pretty much “. Behind what seemed like a pat answer on both of our parts is a sense that we know design thinking is real and offers something of value that other concepts do not. That is the reason why the search for a definition is important and why this is not just an academic exercise in semantics, but a larger journey for understanding the role creativity plays in finding and addressing problematic issues and how we can better tackle them all.
So perhaps the new definition for design thinking now is: it is what creative people seek to find a definition for.
Design for Social Norms or Social Change?
Posted: August 6, 2011 Filed under: behaviour change, design thinking, health promotion, systems thinking | Tags: complexity, creativity, danah boyd, design, emergence, health inequity, health promotion, Keith Sawyer, social change, social design, social justice, Social media Leave a comment »
Social change or social norm?
Designing for how people live is part of good design practice, but what about designing for the way people could be? What does it mean to design for social norms and what role does design have in changing them?
Media scholar and youth researcher danah boyd recently wrote on the need for designers to consider social norms as part of their media creations. The post received a lot of attention in the mediasphere and came on the heels of another interesting post by Keith Sawyer on Chinese social norms and the Tiger Mom phenomenon (that I also wrote on a while back). Returning to boyd’s argument, she makes the case that designers don’t dictate the behaviour of people in the systems they create, the people tthemselves do:
Social norms aren’t designed into the system. They don’t emerge by telling people how they should behave. And they don’t necessarily follow market logic. Social norms emerge as people – dare we say “users” – work out how a technology makes sense and fits into their lives. Social norms take hold as people bring their own personal values and beliefs to a system and help frame how future users can understand the system. And just as “first impressions matter” for social interactions, I cannot underestimate the importance of early adopters. Early adopters configure the technology in critical ways and they play a central role in shaping the social norms that surround a particular system.
What boyd is arguing (using my words and concepts from complexity science) is that emergence and path dependency shape design’s manifestation in the social realm. In technology-oriented systems, the ‘early adopters’ are the ones who set the stage for how the next wave of users interact with the system and boyd points to examples from Friendster about how attempts to control its community helped drive people away from the site (ultimately leading to its demise).
People don’t like to be configured. They don’t like to be forcibly told how they should use a service. They don’t want to be told to behave like the designers intended them to be. Heavy-handed policies don’t make for good behavior; they make for pissed off users.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t or shouldn’t design to encourage certain behaviors. Of course you should. The whole point of design is to help create an environment where people engage in the most fruitful and healthy way possible. But designing a system to encourage the growth of healthy social norms is fundamentally different than coming in and forcefully telling people how they must behave. No one likes being spanked, especially not a crowd of opinionated adults.
The focus here is more on social media and online spaces, but the argument could be made for the same thing in social design. But unlike information technology, which favours a very particular group of people, social design has the potential to intentionally engage specific populations. Using boyd’s argument, one might assert that much of the technology we use from Foursquare to Instagram to the iPhone itself is shaped by the under-40 set of educated, middle class, largely white male hipster knowledge workers as they are typically the earliest visible adopters for such technologies (even if that is changing) .
In this model those with the most power, privilege and social capital at the outset greatly determine what comes next. This might be OK for technology, but is highly problematic for social justice and social inequities. A health promoting social design has the potential to change this by seeding that early adoption cycle with different people with potentially different values to shape outcomes not defined by a narrow set of social groups.
Keith Sawyer’s article points to the social norming around Chinese parenting (as defined through Amy Chua’s Tiger Mom) and how it clashes with a particular type of parenting model that dominates in the United States and our ideas of creativity. In describing his reaction to a recent review of Chua’s book and its contents, Sawyer points to the unease it creates in him when comparing norms and what it means for creativity and innovation:
I ought to be lined up with all of the horrified American parents who hate this book. But I just can’t side with them on this one. Creativity is hard work, and you don’t get creativity without paying your dues. No one magically learns how to play piano or violin (I’m reminded of the old joke: “Do you play the violin?” “I don’t know, I haven’t tried it yet.”) And as Amy Chua points out, there’s nothing like the joy that comes from being able to do something well, knowing that you earned it with hours, months, and years of hard work. As a child, I took piano lessons for eight years, and now thirty years later it’s a major source of joy in my life.
Chua’s parenting is an issue because it doesn’t fit with the dominant social norms, just as the self-esteem-at-all-cost approach that Sawyer rightly exposes as problematic in its own right would be in China.
These are designed systems. Just as we create path dependencies for one set of values, so too can we do the same for others and with other people. The focus on the outcomes of systems rather than their design is problematic if we want change. Starting with design and values at the outset, being conscious of who we invite in and how we engage them and by remaining contemplative about how these systems unfold and the emergent patterns that shape them, designers of all stripes may be better positioned to create social change rather than just for social norms.
