Designing for Resilience
Posted: April 11, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: complexity, design thinking, ecology, environmental health, integrative thinking, resilience, sustainability, systems thinking Leave a comment »
A recent post on the environmental sustainability site Worldchanging caught my eye and reflects what I see as a growing connection between design and systems thinking and supporting a greater need for new ways of handling complexity. The post, by Worldchanging staff writer Alex Steffen, argues that we need to re-think our views of sustainability by redefining the concept and focusing on resilience and adaptation. This is not always a popular position to take because it focuses on the potential negative consequences of past actions that are expected to arrive in the future, rather than emphasize prevention on its own. Consider it a secondary prevention messsage rather than a primary prevention one. But while it is not the most optimistic position, I also think its the most realistic. Anyone who has been paying attention to the environmental discourse and the data behind has to be thinking the future isn’t going to be all rosy. But, as Steffen argues, it can be something we can save and adapt to in the process of making the world better.
To do this, Steffen focuses on four key points: The starting point is acknowledging the complexity of the issue and making the messy stuff visible.
1. Defining the scope of resilience is critical.
One of the defining characteristics of post-industrial capitalism is that it hides its backstories. Because branding is so important, and consumer choices are made often on completely intangible perceptions, most of messy destruction and systemic oppression that support our lives happens in places obscured from our view. This is why it’s so critical we work on making visible the invisible, doing supply chain transparency and backstory activism. Sunlight does wonders for sustainability.
But there’s a second side to this coin that we rarely address: because so much of the harm we do indirectly is hidden from us, we have really profoundly distorted ideas of how our lives work.
This focus on making the invisible visible is critical. Whether it is the harm we do or the organizations we’re a part of, we are often ignorant of the true impact of what we do and the unintended consequences of our actions. Systems dynamic models and social network maps are one ways in which we can methodologically address these issues by showing visual representations of the causes, consequences and actors associated with a given problem.
2) Sustainability needs to be a systemic effort.
If we want to live sustainable lives, we need to make sustainable places, and in the modern world, where metropolises drive the economy and culture, that means making sustainable cities. We may not be able to do that everywhere in the time we have; but the idea that we can thrive without doing it many places is delusional. Fail to make cities resilient at a broad scale, and we’re talking the breakdown of social order, which means all other plans are pointless.
In order to make cities sustainable, we need to understand the proper scale of urban sustainability, which is regional. The same mistaken vision that leads us to focus on problems close at hand often leads us to define the solutions as small-scale and immediately local. This, again, betrays the fact that larger systems are often hidden from our view.
Scale is the important word here. By understanding the appropriate boundaries of the systems we wish to influence, we are far better equipped to deal with the problems at a local, global and ‘glocal‘ levels. It means employing social innovation in a manner that creates opportunities to scale up things that work well, but also avoiding the scaling fallacy that befalls many designers and social planners by assuming that something that works at one level can simply be created larger or smaller and produce the same result.
3) Ruggedness is something we don’t talk enough about.
Because sustainability thinking has largely grown out the environmental movement, there’s still a mental dichotomy between natural and fallen; that is, we often think the point is to save the green places, save virgin nature, and that anything that has been incorporated into the human world is lost, and of secondary importance at best.
One problem with this thinking is the entire planet and every corner and crevice within it has now been incorporated into the human world. Wild, “virgin” nature doesn’t exist anymore. We’ll be needing to manage the consequences of our interventions in nature to extents few of us are prepared to think about, for centuries to come.
Another, even bigger problem with this thinking is that it has tended to make us into all-or-nothing thinkers. We have been warning for decades about the need to prevent catastrophe, coloring everything on the other side of catastrophe “unthinkable.”
Most of what we interact with on a daily basis is designed by humans in some capacity. With rare exception, if you live in an urban area, nearly everything you encounter has been designed — even parks and greenspaces. Acknowledging this is the first step towards to working with the world we’ve created, rather than aspiring for something that doesn’t exist independent of those places where humans don’t reside. Just because something is of nature (like a tree) doesn’t mean its context is natural as any observation of a tree-lined street should attest.
At the same time, recognizing the place of trees and the like also helps us reconnect with the natural world, but in doing so requires integrative thinking, the ability to hold two differing, but related (and perhaps opposite) ideas at the same time.
4) The future demands new thinking.
We need to have the capacity to change quickly, to reinvent, to distribute innovation and explore new realities: and we’re going to have to do all that while the world gets weirder and many places crumble into chaos from time to time. We have to be built rugged enough to fight our way through the future’s troubles, strong enough to serve as bulwarks that can help and protect the more vulnerable.
This last point is the crux of the argument and fits with what Einstein observed many years ago:
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them
That thinking is looking increasingly like it needs to consider design, systems and integrate together and work to create more resilient, not resistant communities and organizations.
Knowledge translation in public health: Progress or doing the wrong things righter?
Posted: March 19, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: dissemination science, implementation science, knoweldge translation, NIH, population health, public health, research, research methods 4 Comments »
Knowledge translation has evolved from a term in relative obscurity to something that has become commonplace in much of the discussion on health care and public health. At its heart, knowledge translation is:
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has referred to knowledge translation as “a dynamic and iterative process that includes synthesis, dissemination, exchange and ethically sound application of knowledge to improve the health of Canadians, provide more effective health services and products and strengthen the health care system. The very fact that this term has gained visibility in health research represents a major shift in our priorities. In the past, considerable amounts of money have been spent on clinical research while relatively little attention has been paid to ensuring that the findings of research were captured by its potential beneficiaries. The biomedical and applied research enterprise represents an annual investment of $55 billion US worldwide (Haines, A and Hayes, B., 1998)!”
The reasons for this interest go beyond just money towards population health impact.
It has been estimated that it takes more than 17 years to translate evidence generated from discovery into health care practice (Balas & Boren, 2000) and of that evidence base, only 14 per cent of it is believed to enter day-to-day clinical practice (Westfall, Mold & Fagan, 2007). Some believe that this is an under-estimation and call for considerably more research in the area of dissemination and implementation if evidence-informed practice is to ever be achieved (Trochim, 2010).
This past week the NIH and its Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research held its third conference on the Science of Dissemination and Implementation with a focus on methods and measurement. The conference was a success from my point of view in that it provided a forum for discussion and dialogue on various models, methodologies and challenges, however one issue that wasn’t covered much was related to issues of reliability vs. validity. Our traditional models of research emphasize the former (the degree to which the same activity produces consistent results) at the expense of the latter (whether the findings translate into real differences or changes in the world) and this fundamental tension sits at the cornerstone of knowledge translation. This is best demonstrated in the appalling rates of uptake of most clinical practice guidelines into everyday health care activities [see here for one of many examples]. Russ Glasgow and others have argued that we need to do much more in shaping research that has external validity.
The elephant in the large room was this issue and the more that we continue to ignore it, the more we risk doing what management theorist Russell Ackoff described as “doing the wrong things righter.” That is, we continue to develop evidence in a manner that we hope, if it is just good enough, uses the best methods possible, and boldly proclaims the “truth” people will listen. Yet, the message from this conference was that we don’t even know what people are listening to in the first place, let alone what they do with what they listen to. Are the messages not getting through? Are they getting through, but being mis-understood (or not understood at all)? Or are they being ignored altogether? Or, as I have seen, are they being listened to, but then discarded when they are found to be impractical for their context.
An example of this is web-based tools for collaboration or e-communities of practice. The idea of using tools like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all sound great in theory, but if your local public health unit won’t allow you to use any of these tools on the job, what good does it do? If you don’t have the bandwidth available in your local community to watch videos online without it chopping up and taking a long time to down how reasonable is it to expect that YouTube will have anything to offer?
These contextual questions are rarely looked at. It was encouraging to hear people like Allan Best and colleagues speak of systems models and the need for more qualitative (i.e., contextually-focused) research , which was well-received, but that was about it. A much wider dialogue about understanding the context in which knowledge is used and translated or not would do much to determine whether we’re making progress or just doing the same wrong things only better.
If you’re in the Toronto area and interested in discussing this topic further, a Lunch-and-Learn event is being held on March 25th from 12-1pm at the Health Sciences Building at the University of Toronto as part of the CoNEKTR series hosted at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.
Indispensibility and Organizational Change
Posted: February 26, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: behaviour change, innovation, organizational change, organizational learning, Seth Godin, social innovation, systems change, systems thinking Leave a comment »
Seth Godin‘s recent book throws out the challenge to its readers to be indispensable in the jobs that they do. This is a tall order for most, but Godin points to ways of thinking, approaching problems and examples of how even the most mundane, mechanical jobs can be more when we bring the best of ourselves to what we do each day — no matter what the job is. He wants us all to reclaim our genius. The message is an unusual one in that it applies very well to individuals — you and me — but is a lot harder to apply at the organizational level. This is an important issue for those wanting to create better, healthier systems and it is here that the role of individual and system can get confounded.
Mike Myatt, from Blogging Innovation, wrote a critique of the indispensibility position in terms of its implications for organizations. His post, a fair and appreciative one regarding Seth’s position in many areas, is nonetheless critical of the idea of fostering indispensibility in firms:
A well managed company does not allow itself to become dependent upon the performance of any single individual. Those individuals who attempt to hoard knowledge, relationships, or resources to attain job security should not to be valued or viewed as indispensable, but should be admonished as ineffective and deemed a liability. Corporate talent that cannot be shared, duplicated, distributed, or leveraged is not nearly as valuable as talent that can.
It is here that I first disagree. Godin is not advocating for valuing the hoarder, rather he is suggesting the opposite: unparalleled sharing and generosity. Someone who hoards will not advance system change: period. Systems rely on exchange of information and intense conservation of knowledge or information reduces the response capacity of a system (which could be an organization). An organization that relies on a hoarder for survival hasn’t been paying attention or created processes of openness that allow information to move through the system. If you have a hoarder, one needs to ask: how did we create an organization that enabled that person to become so important? How can we transform it so that person’s unique talents can come out and that knowledge that is sharable and distributed gets to whomever it needs to when its needed?
I would like to address two of Myatt’s issues:
Myatt goes on:
In fact, I would go so far as to say that anyone who sets out to make themselves indispensable would be the one committing career suicide for two reasons:
- Anyone who is “perceived” as indispensable in their current role completely eliminates any possibility of promotion
- Any good leadership team who finds themselves dependant upon a linchpin will immediately move to mitigate the risk of finding themselves in such an untenable position
Regarding point 1: What would one promote themselves to? This pokes a hole at the dominant model of organizational development that suggests that promotions work vertically (including the entire thinking about why we need directions to move, embedded in the term “promotion”). When you’re the best salesperson on a team doing something you love and are good at and you get a “promotion” does it mean pulling you off the sales team into a management position, which may rely on a completely different skill and mindset? Does this really make sense?
Regarding point 2: If you have a real linchpin, your task is creating a dynamic, exciting environment to let them do their thing well. After all, they are linchpins precisely because they are good at what they do. You’re always in an “untenable position” of not being able to replace them because they are, by definition, unreplaceable. Do you have a work culture that brings in unique talent and nurtures it to allow it to succeed or do you try to create positions that are defined by a set of duties that can be done by anyone?
Myatt’s argument is counter to what Linchpin is all about in its approach. If you create standards and clearly defined roles and evaluate solely based on those standards, which is the position that is being argued from, you will suffer under a linchpin promotion strategy.
Maybe. At least, your business model will suffer.
But that misses the bigger point: Why build an organization around such a model to begin with? Maybe the system needs to change as much as the individuals within it. Maybe then, a linchpin promotion strategy doesn’t look so strange or problematic.
The Genius of Seth Godin
Posted: January 29, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: behaviour change, book, complexity, innovation, inspiration, motivation, psychology, Seth Godin, social innovation 5 Comments »
In his new book, Linchpin, businessman, marketer, blogger, auteur Seth Godin asks the question: Are you indispensible?
Seth, if you don’t know, is a genius. On the first page of Lynchpin he describes what a genius is:
“If a genius is someone with exceptional abilities and the insightto find the not so obvious solution to a problem, you don’t need to win a Nobel Prize to be one. A genius looks at something that others are stuck on and gets the world unstuck”
By that account, Seth is a certifiable genius.
This blog is about making sense of a complex world and Seth is one of those people that does that, paradoxically, by making things simple. Paradox is a hallmark feature of complexity and one of the reasons why the world is so often puzzling to us. Efforts to quell terrorism lead to more terrorism, exercises in control lead to greater instability (for more examples see another great book by Joshua Cooper Ramo) — that sort of stuff.
Seth is a straight-talker without being arrogant or simplistic. He his assertive without being aggressive. He challenges, while supports and understands. He is a rare being and one that I think deserves a blog post and some promotion.
Some examples? In his book “The Dip” he makes the case for quitting. We often hear that quitters never win and winners never quit, yet Seth shows how that’s not the case. It’s thoughtful and strategic quitting that counts.
In his recent interview on CBC’s Spark, Seth courageous says: “If you can’t get over your fear of the stuff that’s working, then I think you need to give up and do something else” . Few people are willing to say this stuff, but its true. We often fear success, because we’re not supported in doing something that doesn’t fit the system of production created for us in work, school and society from the 20th century onward.
Another great interview from Seth (also on Spark) is available here .
Lastly, I want to say that Seth is one who not only speaks but he acts. He invited a couple thousand of his blog readers to get a free copy of Linchpin in exchange for a donation to the Accumen Fund, which aims to transform the lives of people in poverty worldwide, particularly in Africa. I took up this offer. Seth believes that the world works best when we’re able to tap into our natural motive for generosity and to further back that up, he sent me a SECOND book for free to give to someone else. I’ve done one, well five, better in return. I chose to purchase a five copies of the book for each of the members of my research team; a talented group who form a wonderful linchpin for the future of health promotion and social innovation.
I’ve endorsed a product like this because I think it has a message that is necessary in a complex world of rapid change, where making sense is hard and often confusing. But in an age of uncertainty, stress and the collapse of many of our institutions due to rapid change, Seth provides inspiration, guidance and clear-headed thinking in a way that few others have. If I can offer one thing to Seth in small payback for his inspiration in me, the least I can do is write about him and encourage you to follow his lead and, in doing so, follow you own.
The book can be bought online below or from your local independent bookseller:
Amazon (Canada)
Amazon (United States)
Chapters/Indigo (Canada)
Barnes&Noble (United States)
Borders (United States)
Taking in Less to Take in More (Information)
Posted: January 26, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: cognition, complexity, information overload, meditation, research, Social media, social networks 3 Comments »
After two weeks of travel I’ve found myself back at the office and the usual “stuff” of life. That is, the things that one becomes accustomed to like your office chair, your home, your neighbourhood and even your sock drawer. You know where everything is and there is a certain level of comfort in that. When you’re on the road, you wake up in new rooms to new smells and new places for your socks. But what is remarkable is how attentive you are to things in this new environment. You notice the smells, the texture of the sheets, the sounds from outside the window. But, with every night that goes by, the familiarity creeps in and you stop paying attention.
I tried a little experiment and shut out most of my Twitter feeds, Facebook posts and Google Reader feeds for the past two weeks. This was as much about not having a lot of time or reliable Internet connections, but also to try some of the low-calorie information dieting that I wrote about earlier. So what happened when I got back? I found myself getting a lot better at skimming through content, sifting through the noise that inevitably comes with any information channel. My Twitter feed, which has many nuggets of gold, nonetheless subscribes to the Pareto principle , which is basically the 80/20 rule. This means that, at best, 20 per cent of what I get is useful, while the rest is useless or not useful.
What taking a break did was enable me to recalibrate my message system and rest, which has shown itself to be a good predictor of cognitive performance. Meditation is another means of recalibrating one’s system to small extent, which can break the patterns of habit. The reasons are largely attributed to disrupting cognitive patterns enough to enable the brain to rewire itself, or at least provide new connections that could compete with the pre-existing pattern. These new connections are important, because it is through these that we learn and grow.
Just observing myself I found myself far more attendant to what I was learning in front of me (which happened to be some amazing things on complexity research and social interconnectedness).
What makes this so unnerving is how little we take time to break the habits, rest, reflect until it is too late, or at time of someone else’s choosing and not our own. Think of Haiti. That country has been suffering for decades, yet it took an earthquake for people to pay attention.
So let’s consider some ways to re-calibrate our organizations and ourselves by taking a break now and then from the relentless chatter of social media and the steady stream of information every so often. By doing that, maybe we’ll actually take in (and learn) more. I sure did.
The Future of Social Media: Chaos / Coherence?
Posted: January 16, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: blog, complexity, information, literacy, sense-making, Social media, Twitter, YouTube 3 Comments »
What is the future for social media?
These are great days for social media. Blogs are becoming popular and tools like Google Reader and other RSS aggregators are making it easier than ever to follow blogs and other new sources with little effort. Twitter enables us to find, follow, share and distribute ideas to the world from almost any platform. Combine tools available through mobile video and uploading capability on everything from Blackberries to iPhones to iPods to regular digital cameras and you have a panoply of opinions that are being transmitted to places like YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook at a rate that boggles the mind.
If you’re like me, you probably get a lot of value from social media. I don’t think I could be effective in my job if I didn’t have tools like Twitter and Google Reader at my disposal. And that says something considering I am an academic at a leading research university that has access to many of the best databases in the world.
This past week I delivered* a webinar presentation* to a group of health promotion professionals working in tobacco control. Over the span of two hours I introduced the audience* to a variety of social media tools and platforms and how they could be used to leverage the power of their constituents and their teams of colleagues for public health benefit. Along the way I was able to poll the audience and the results were pretty much what I expected: most had some familiarity with social media, but few had dived in and were creating content or using it anywhere near its potential. I suppose if they were, they wouldn’t have been on the call*. In a week we’ll have the results of the follow-up survey and (if I did my job) these numbers will shift somewhat, but not explode. In some ways, this might be a very good thing because social media could well be a case where we might want to be careful what we wish for.
Why? Right now we have more information than we can cope with (although NYU professor Clay Shirky would argue, and I mostly agree with, that our problems are more about poor filtering than too much information, which we’ve had ever since we crossed that point when there became more media sources than time to read / consume them all in a lifetime). David Weinberger argues that all information is now miscellaneous, meaning that the need for organizing information is no longer relevant because we have the tools to search-as-we-go and no longer have to sort things into piles and categories the same way we once did. To him, the problem posed by information volume is largely minor.
Both the filtering and categorizing strategies for making sense of information and generating new knowledge from social media are based on our present and past experience where very few of us actually create an substantive content in an area. But what happens if, to borrow from Clay Shirky’s recent book title, we see: here comes everybody!? It is possible that once the oldest, non-Internet-using generation passes on that we’ll have somewhere close to 100%** digital network penetration in Western societies and a continued rapid rise in developing nations. (** knowing full well that there are people who will, as now, never wish to or maybe need to adopt new technologies and will resist or deny their adoption. The ‘true’ rate will likely be closer to 90-95% as we saw with landline phones or TV’s when they were at their peak).
Right now, social media use is sitting in a place where most people are NOT engaging in it in any meaningful way way generates value for others. Perhaps they are posting a comment on a website, or maybe joining a Ning community, but otherwise the occasional Facebook update coupled with watching cats play the piano on YouTube is about all they do. They represent the ‘lurkers’ on a site; people who’s value to a community or tool is derived not by what they generate in terms of content, but by providing an audience for taking that content and applying it to other things. What happens when the cultural norms shift, they’re literacy levels increase and, for example, they start blogging seriously (even if the content isn’t “serious”) or Twittering or posting their own videos of cats playing the piano on a video-sharing site using their handheld device? Questions abound about whether we can handle the information or whether the unleashing of creative energy on such a level will create a new Renaissance in human creativity.
Internet innovator and “pioneer” of virtual reality, Jared Lanier, feels somewhat differently from either of those positions, but certain argues that a Renaissance is not forthcoming. Jared recently published a book that advances a hypothesis that social media is making us less social, coherent as a society and quite possibly destructive to creativity and innovation rather than supporting it. In a review of the book in the Wall Street Journal, Glenn Harlan Reynolds writes:
Mr. Lanier calls his book a manifesto, but it reads more like a collection of columns and notebook entries loosely organized around a central theme. More than anything else, he worries that those whom he calls “the lords of the cloud”—huge entities such as Google and Facebook—constrict their users, creating online environments in which true individuality is curtailed in favor of the extraction of marketing data and other intelligence. The practice is not only unfair and confining, he says, but perhaps even dangerous. “Emphasizing the crowd,” Mr. Lanier writes, “means de-emphasizing individual humans . . . and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad moblike behaviors.” At the very least current Web arrangements encourage a shallow, lemming-like conformity of judgment.
Lanier makes some provocative points (I will admit to having not read his manifesto yet, just some columns on these ideas). Our social media structure right now works quite well because the numbers associated with the expression of Pareto’s Principle (or Power Law — which, in social media terms means that a lot of content is generated by a few, while this long tail represents the bulk of the rest of the transactions. Think: ‘the 80-20 rule’).What is interesting to consider is what happens when the truly big shift comes into social media through ubiquitious Internet, GPS, geotagging, mobile video and such.
Will we consume as we have? Will we need low information diets? Will we develop better filters? And is it even possible to create coherence from all of this or will chaos reign? And how might the science of systems and complexity help us anticipate this future and prepare us to adapt to an information landscape that is far larger than we have now?
Some food for thought. More on this to come…
* what do you call these things in the context of a webinar, where conference call meets virtual lecture + slide show? I never have been able to get the language right for this. At least, in a manner that I feel comfortable with.
Public eHealth & Collaboration Networks Talk
Posted: October 20, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: complexity science, eHealth, engagement, health promotion, innovation, public health, Systems science 1 Comment »I will be giving a public lecture at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health on “Public eHealth & Collaboration Networks: A Systems Science Approach to Population Engagement for Health Promotion“. The talk will be held Thursday October 22, 2009 at 11am in Room 610, Health Sciences Building (155 College Street, Toronto). Everyone is welcome.
