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.
The Complexity Challenge
Posted: June 30, 2011 Filed under: complexity, systems thinking | Tags: complexity, contemplative inquiry, education, learning, mindfulness, organizational change, simplicity, systems thinking 2 Comments »
Is Learning Falling Down When it Comes to Complexity?
Before acting in a manner consistent with complexity principles, people need to understand what they are, how they are different from other systems, and what it means for their work. With mainstream education, professional practice so geared to linear forms of learning this bodes poorly for building better systems thinkers.
“Let’s just throw some social media at it” is a variant of an expression I often hear in my work in health communications consulting and training. Organizations seeking to use the new tools and media employed by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube genuinely want to “get in the game” and use them effectively. Where things get problematic is when I tell them that social media is principally about building relationships and that extends to organizations: you need to relate and therefore act according to how you build relationships.
Just as no one (at least no one I’ve met) would consider drawing up a flowchart and showing a prospective mate the planned trajectory of their dating relationship with milestone targets and deliverables, no organization should think that they can just shovel content to people and expect their audience to relate better to them.
At first one might attribute this to a lack of understanding of social media, but that is only a small part of it. Empathy is another. But the third and perhaps biggest reason is a fundamental lack of understanding of complexity and what it means.
The seductive nature of the “best practice” and the prescription for change in 5,7, 10, 12 or whatever easy steps is something that is endemic in our society. These forms of thought suggest a linear trajectory of events, suggest an ability to control for externalities and parse out their impact, and provide a prescriptive solution that removes much of the worry about unknowns. But H. L. Mencken’s often quoted phrase (which I’ve used often) suggests the folly in this.
Simplicity is another way to get around complexity. It is something sought, but rarely achieved in its application to the lived reality of the human condition, and although much discussed it hasn’t been widely achieved as a means of policy effectiveness. The reason lies with the nature of complexity itself and its resistance to reductionism. Evidence from biology through psychology (see previous links for examples) points to the considerable problem that science has with applying linear modes of thought and inquiry to complex systems.
The problems here are multifold and complicated, if not complex.
1. Our education system is designed for linear, progressive modes of learning not discovery and non-linearity. We sit kids (and adults) in rows, we talk at them, we present material front-to-back. In short, we don’t design education for learning, but for knowledge transmission. Complexity is all about learning. Every situation has a degree of novelty to it that presents new challenges and what happens today might not be the same thing that happens tomorrow even if much is similar. Teaching to discover, adapt, play and risk is something our system doesn’t do well. How can we expect complexity and systems thinking to thrive when the muscles used
2. It’s more convienient to think in dichotomies than spectrums. As I’ve written previously, spectral thinking is something critical to many of the issues we face in complex systems. Good/bad, strong/weak, X/Y lose their meaning in complex environments where there is a. Of all the dichotomies that work, only Ying/Yang comes close. But its a more difficult concept to grasp that maybe things aren’t all one way or the other, that there is use in even something that isn’t well constructed. This problem (and the ones that follow) are tied to the first one: education and learning systems are not set up for this. We are primed for either/or thinking. Think in criminal justice terms how easy it is to demand harsh punishment for criminal acts without considering that the perpetrators are human too, even if their behaviour is unacceptable.
The only dichotomy that works in complex systems?
3. Our decision-making tools are ill-equipped to handle ambiguity. Health care is a great example of how badly we do at complexity thinking. Consider the systematic review, often viewed as the gold standard for evidence for adoption into healthcare organizations. If it has a good systematic review, then the chances that we will see that evidence translated into practice is good, right? No. Surprisingly, even systematic reviews of systematic review use shows a mixed bag in adoption. Systematic reviews are designed to reduce ambiguity, but (for those on human social systems at least) they only illustrate how much there is. A systematic review only looks at the evidence created, it doesn’t include all those questions that were never asked, never funded for inquiry, or couldn’t be structured in a manner that fits the criteria for a good review. It is, by its design, reductionistic in its approach to complexity.
4. Our institutions are resistant to complexity. Complexity takes time, nuance, and relationship development; all the things that screw up plans. You can’t plan a relationship, but you can anticipate some things. You might even be able to use scenario tools and strategic foresight methods to anticipate what might happen, but you can’t plan it. John Lennon is right:
Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans
While we plan, the complex systems move along. We can plan and fail, fail and plan, or plan to fail and work build the strategic foresight to know what to do with these “failures”.
So now what? Being aware of these things is a start, but making systems change is really the key. Making change is about questioning the way we have been taught to learn, and what our assumptions are about the universe are. Learning the difference between a simple, complicated, complex and chaotic system and the means to identify when those systems present themselves (and how they often change) is another. This means finding like minds, sharing stories, and building networks. It means creating space for relationships — even in our linear planning models if we must keep them (or better yet, get rid of most of them) — and considering what kind of returns we get from paying attention, being mindful of our systems, and what kind of things contemplative inquiry might offer that simple, detached data analysis does.
These are starting points, but not all of them. Addressing the challenge of complexity is, ironically or perhaps appropriately, complex. But the challenge of dealing with the negative outcomes resulting from overly simple approaches to dealing with complexity will ultimately be far more so.
Creating Campires For Innovation and Knowledge Translation
Posted: June 21, 2011 Filed under: complexity, environment, innovation, knowledge translation | Tags: campfire, collaboration, communication, complexity, design, intimacy, knowledge translation, meditation, storytelling Leave a comment »
Gather round
A campire has been a beacon for human life for centuries and may provide the ideal analogy and literal tool to engaging people in creating new things. The opportunities for it to shape our thinking and actions is enormous.
The campfire is a place where we go for warmth, intimacy, safety, light, food and inspiration. As camping season comes upon us in the Northern part of the Americas, it seems fitting to consider the ways that the campfire might be used to stoke the sparks of imagination and flames of passion (pun firmly intended).
Metaphors and analogies are commonly used in systems thinking and complexity science to illustrate concepts that are, on their own, relatively complex and awkward to describe literally. A campfire provides both a metaphor for bringing people together, but also a literal tool that could be used more effectively in work with groups struggling to innovate, collaborate and contemplate together. From a design perspective, campfires and the social system that they create around them provide an opportunity to enhance intimacy quickly, allowing for the potential to explore issues in ways that are more difficult to do in other settings.
Consider some of the following properties of the campfire.
Lighting has been found to have a strong environmental effect on many behaviours and moods, and the type of inconsistent light that is thrown by a campfire is similar to that which induces relaxation and intimacy (PDF).
It can be argued that storytelling has been our most powerful vehicle for sharing what we know throughout human history. Research on narrative effectiveness has found that emulating the environments created by a campfire (PDF), the close-in, small-group, open dialogue sharing kinds of spaces, leads to more effective communication in business contexts.
The sensory richness of a campfire — the smell of wood and smoke, the crackle, the sight of sparks and flame, the feeling of heat — all create an environment that differs from much of what we are used to, provoking psychophysiological stimulation that has been associated with learning outcomes. Research linking environmental design and architecture has explored the phenomenon of sensory richness and how modern designed environments reduce this and (potentially) limit learning. (See program example here).
Another quality of a campfire is that it creates space for meditative inquiry. Anthropologists and psychologists have speculated that it was the campfire and the meditative rituals that it created that led modern humans to separate from Neanderthals. The focus on something like a fire draws attention away from the chaos of the world and channels into a circle that is generated through the campfire.
One of the benefits of a campfire is the circle that it creates. Leadership scholar Meg Wheatley, Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea reflected on their use of the circle and how it has been used historically as a means of creating a common space where participants are on more equal footing with one another as a means of leadership promotion. In a circle, everyone can (usually) see everyone else and no position is held as more important than others, which privileges all participants and not just some.
Lastly, the campfire creates not just internal peace, but social intimacy as well. Indeed,modern social media has been compared to the campfire (PDF) in its ability to potentially replicate the focused, shared space that a campfire occupied for much of human life. For the reasons listed above, the social media effect is likely limited, but nonetheless the metaphor may partly hold in light of a lack of alternatives.
In practice, lighting a chord of wood in the middle of an urban setting might be problematic, but it is worth considering for those of us looking to create those social spaces where people can gather. Taking a break and leaving town might be worth doing as well. Failing that, what are the campfire-like spaces that we can create with what we have.
Designers, health promoters or anyone seeking to bring together ideas while working in complex spaces may wish to give this more thought — or meditate on it, which might (as it has done before) spark a new evolutionary shift attributed to the campfire.
Boundaries: The Food Example
Posted: June 8, 2011 Filed under: systems thinking | Tags: boundaries, complexity, food, food systems, systems thinking Leave a comment »Identifying boundaries and setting them in moving forward with modeling and planning is a critical step in systems thinking practice so much so that it may be time to consider seeing boundaries as a core skill or competency for work in complex systems.
Traveling is one of the activities that embodies systems thinking concepts in almost everything. From security screening through to the arrangement of flights, connections, and imagining how it all gets done is truly systems thinking in action. One of the lesser-thought-of aspects of the travel-as-systems-thinking phenomenon is food. Food has been profiled here before, but for this post I want to highlight a different quality here.
As one who aspires to eat relatively well, traveling can be hell when it comes to food. I am currently in a city that has, like many American cities, abdicated the culture and cuisine of its core to the suburbs, which is bad on too many levels. Say what you want about suburban life, but good, healthy, available, economic food is not something that comes to mind (at least, not together). So as an urbanite who is somewhat accustomed or desirous of eating reasonably well (i.e., food that tastes good, is good value, and isn’t horrible to my body, the environment or those who make it) I get spoiled and feel disappointed when places I travel can’t offer this. Ironically, this was the way that most food was cooked and readied for consumption up until the last part of the 20th century.
In this case, the boundary conditions of the system I am looking at is the availability of good food. Where I am and how I got here meant airports, hotels, on-the-go-meals and staying in a relatively large city that has no interior life to it that isn’t about an office building.
The boundaries of good eating imposed on me has meant that my individual choices are seriously constrained. This happens a lot, yet doesn’t get acknowledged as much when we consider health behaviour and its limits. We too often blame individuals for not exercising, or eating well, or doing both without looking at the real problems associated with such activities when the boundaries of the system they are working under are taken into account. (And by the way, it was 41 degrees Celsius in the city I am staying in so there goes any outdoor exercise).
If we narrow our boundaries too close, we miss some considerable systems limitations. I would surmise that students learning systems thinking might want to consider boundary definitions as a critical skill.
Thinking Developmentally About Social Issues
Posted: June 4, 2011 Filed under: Education & Learning, innovation, systems thinking | Tags: complexity, design, developmental design, developmental evaluation, education, feedback, innovation, learning, systems thinking 1 Comment »
Thinking About Development or Being Consumed By Linear Progress?
An often unstated assumption in efforts to provoke change in complex, developmental environments is that people are primed to think in those terms. That might be a false assumption and the reason why concepts like developmental evaluation are so hard to take root.
Difference is hard to grasp. So too, is development. Add the two together and you have a real problem. This is an opinion I’ve formed through my work in complexity science, education and health promotion.
We humans are great at categorizing things. Our eyes are in the front of our head and our bodies are designed for forward movement so we are biologically positioned to look forward. Over the last few centuries, forward has often been linked with progress. Forward imposes a directionality to it and progress imposes an evaluative standard. But what if what we were dealing with in social issues had neither of these assumptions proven right?
Romantic relationships provide an example. Classic literature to pop culture typically present relationship narratives as linear (e.g, characters meet, date, fall in love, get married, buy a home, have kids, grow old together…), which has the effect of imposing an enormous burden of expectation on society that seems out of sync with the manner in which we live as human beings. Why can’t relationships come into being, intensify, draw back, morph, fade and grow simultaneously?
There are many healthy relationships out there and the one described above might only be one example rather than the standard. The problem is that we seek to create standards — best practice – and impose these standards when they might be ill-fitting to the circumstances or context. They don’t take into account development or contextual differences, nor do they appreciate complexity.
We do this with education too, assuming that people all learn the same way. Consider the absurdity of lumping all kids together in grades based on age. Is it reasonable to assume that because you and I were born the same year that we will learn content and evolve our knowledge base about the world in the same way? We put kids (and adults — even graduate students) in rows and talk at them for hours hoping that they will all absorb knowledge and do the same thing with it. That might explain why many students struggle and teachers get frustrated.
Thinking developmentally means attenuating oneself to nuance, punctuated learning, ongoing feedback, and inconsistent behaviour. I don’t blame people for wanting to impose a simple cause-and-effect narrative on the world, but doing so doesn’t mean its useful. As I’ve argued elsewhere, unless we consider changing our thinking we may continue to spend time devising ways to do what systems thinker and management leader Russell Ackoff called “the wrong things, righter”.
It is one thing to complain about this, but another to do it. And it is here that the lens needs to be turned back on us systems thinkers and developmental evaluators or designers. Perhaps it is time to stop assuming that people think this way and shift it towards assuming the converse, yet adding that people have the capability to think this way. Of course many will surprise us by already thinking in terms consistent with development and find it very comforting, but that exception will delight us rather than inspire frustration at the thought of “why doesn’t everyone else think like this?”
With so many social narratives that point towards linear thinking about the world we should not be surprised when we find something akin to psychologist Abraham Maslow‘s often paraphrased sentiment:
When the only tool you own is a hammer, pretty soon every problem resembles a nail
A developmental perspective on things, supported through concepts like design thinking, systems thinking, and creative education and learning is something that isn’t standard in our work, but perhaps should be. Building these muscles, much like a good personal trainer does with his or her client, requires attuning oneself to where a person is at and what kind of space they are in to work.
As this 30-day blogging challenge exploring social innovation, design and creativity continues so too will this discussion. It will be, developmental.
** Photo titled dimensional change by alasis used under Creative Commons license from Flickr
Complexity and Innovation: Lessons from elBulli
Posted: June 3, 2011 Filed under: complexity, innovation | Tags: complexity, creativity, innovation, restaurants, service industry Leave a comment »
Cooking up new ways to do things
Good chefs know a lot about innovation in complex environments as they prepare meals for their customers. We can learn a lot from watching what they do and how they do it.
There is a renaissance in the food industry that is underway where local, seasonal foods and attention to regional specialties are replacing a homogenous generic set of flavours and dishes. Yes, we still have our fast food chains, but traveling to different cities in North America, it is refreshing to see that difference is beginning to replace the same-old-same-old. While there are arguments to made for how local food positively impacts flavour, economic development, sustainability and environmental responsibility, one positive is not efficiency. Cooking local, organic or ethically all add layers of complexity to meal planning and preparation as certain foods are simply not alway available and some require serving in very small windows of time.
For these reasons, chefs and their kitchens are ideal case studies for innovation and complexity.
Perhaps nowhere is this more true than at elBulli, the restaurant often considered to be the best in the world with its chef, Ferran Adria, considered to be the best as well.
Chef Adria was recently interviewed for the Harvard Business Review where he spoke of the innovation process at elBulli and how that applies beyond the kitchen. In that interview, he places a high value on the concept of creativity and how it is nurtured through teamwork. When asked about how this collaboration and creativity produces innovation, Adria replies:
First, if it opens a new path, and second, if it excites you.
That second part is what excited me (after opening a new path, so I guess this interview was innovative!) is the emphasis on personal engagement. Yet, this engagement also requires collaboration with others who think differently. Complexity requires exposure to diverse perspectives to address issues sufficiently and to this end, Chef Adria clearly advocates for going beyond the discipline:
It’s also very important to be connected to other disciplines: the world of art, of design, of science, of history. When an architect designs a building, he has to work with engineers and people in new technologies. It’s the same in cooking. We need experts in other fields. We turn to science, for example, to explain the “why” of things. Exploring and getting to know things is fundamental to ensuring that you don’t shut yourself off in your own little world.
The other key ingredient in this chef’s innovation pantry is focus and attention. Through the interview and others I’ve read of him, I see great attention towards the craft of cooking and keeping mindful attention on the task and doing it with a team.
It’s like any work. You need concentration and professionalism. And it’s very important to have passionate people with their own imagination. I’m the boss, and I pick the best team. We have 40 people in the kitchen and five managers with a great deal of focus. Everyone participates. And you create an environment that gives them space and the sense that they’re taking part in something very important. You can only improve the ones who are already good; you can’t do anything with the bad ones. Talent and capability lie with the person, not with the teacher.
The last point is worth noting too: teachers aren’t everything. I’ve been critical of our teaching environments and the way we structure formal learning as being too teacher and curriculum-centred and not creativity centred.
Finally, Adria emphasizes taking time to learn and integrate. Even when a famous restaurant that is open only 6-months a year, the creative pressures are still too much. More is needed. So, elBulli is closing. When asked why, Adria stresses the following:
The pressure to serve every day doesn’t offer the kind of tranquillity necessary to create as we would like. For the model we’ve had, six months a year was sufficient, but our new format will require a different focus. The most important thing is to leave time for regeneration. It’s important to “oxygenate” ourselves a bit—to let ourselves recycle and to adapt our vital and mental rhythms to a new set of demands.
In the health sector, we do the opposite: cram as much in as possible, despite the health implications.
So perhaps there is even more we can learn from the restaurant business and its lessons for innovation. Time to start cooking.
** Photo Cooks in an Italian Restaurant Kitchen, 1959 from Seattle Municipal Archives
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Branded Knowledge: Does This Make Sense for Health?
Posted: May 23, 2011 Filed under: complexity, knowledge translation | Tags: brand, branding, complexity, health, health care, knowledge translation, marketing, public health Leave a comment »Commercial products relying heavily on branding to entice their purchase and use in a crowded marketplace. Is this something that the health sector should consider and, if so, what might it look like?
I’ve just spent a rare free weekend in Chicago walking around, taking in the sights, and doing what a lot of other people do when they travel to another country or city: shop. It is hard to avoid some shopping when down in the Loop on Saturday or Sunday as that is what much of Chicago’s core is made for. The same can be true of most major centers, if you exclude the office buildings that are often semi-vacant on weekends.
A brief tour of many of the shops, from the discounters (Filene’s Basement, TJ Maxx, and Nordstrom Rack) to the mid-range stores (Macy’s) to the higher end department stores (Nordstrom) and the many boutiques, one is easily amazed by the abundance of goods on sale. But what intrigued me as I stood and watched what was around me was that many of the branded goods available at all of these places (including many of the boutiques) were the same. Big names in fashion were at all of them. And the products themselves were virtually indistinguishable from one another except for 1) price and 2) seasonality.
The first is perhaps the most obvious, but as one who is not as attuned to the seasons in fashion beyond the warm-weather/cold weather distinction as many, it the second part that I find most interesting. What makes last year’s $150 pair of Lacoste sunglasses worth $25 this year is nothing other than its seasonality. In other words, they are last year’s model and no longer as coveted.
It struck me that we do this in the health sciences all the time. If your reference list isn’t up to date, people question the sources and the validity of the findings. While probably appropriate for work in basic and clinical sciences, it seems less true for health promotion. It also seems less appropriate for areas where there is great complexity.
Brands also matter with regards to where something is published. A premium is placed on scholarly work that is published in journals with high impact factors over those that are in lesser-known journals. The underlying assumption here is that the more people cite something and the more we believe a source to be high quality the higher the quality the knowledge. The strength of the brand of sources like JAMA, Science, the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet exceed the rest of the health field.
While this respect for such “brands” sounds reasonable, there are many problems associated with it. Most notable among these is that they publish a certain type of knowledge in a particular format that adheres to particular models of discovery and rewards particular ways of expressing information. This has advantages, but it also creates path dependencies that shape knowledge itself and restrict the sharing of other forms of knowledge. In doing so, there is some assumption that the “best” knowledge (i.e., that which fits with the brand) looks a certain way and fits a certain way.
An alternative is to create different brands, just as we see in the marketplace for clothing and other retail goods. Apple, once a brand favored by a small, but fervent group of supporters in the early 80′s, is now the world’s most valued brand. It was the small, scruffy underdog and now is the leader. The same might be said for other forms of knowledge. If we were to package health promotion into a form that had the same appeal as other sources, could we create a demand and cache for it in a manner that drew people to it? And would this be a good thing?
I’m not sure. But I do believe it is possible. A colleague of mine once did a study looking at factors that predicted uptake and citation of research knowledge in a particular domain by looking at study qualities across a number of dimensions including design, home institution, discipline and others. After all was considered only one factor predicted uptake: the study used an acronym. Yep, if you branded your study it was more likely to achieve uptake than if you didn’t. To my knowledge this data was never published, presumably because it was so embarrassing to us scientists as it provided evidence that evidence isn’t just what drives our work. Whether it holds over time is worth considering, but it does suggest that brands might matter.
Marketers and companies work hard to distinguish themselves in a crowded marketplace. In a world where there are literally tens of thousands of venues for publishing our findings that are chosen every week, the market is filled. And do we want to rely only on the big brands to fill our knowledge? If so, we run into the same scenario as I did shopping by seeing the same brand everywhere and, because of that, seeing its value discounted because there is so much of it and it expires quickly.
The comparison is not perfect, but neither is it outrageous. Could branding knowledge and knowledge translation be coming to an inbox, book, or library near you?
Thinking Different Requires Different Thinking
Posted: April 11, 2011 Filed under: design thinking, Education & Learning, public health, social systems, systems thinking | Tags: complexity, design thinking, learning, systems thinking, teaching, thinking 2 Comments »
Think Different
Novelty, innovation and doing things differently are seen as the key to competitive advantage and scientific discovery. How we think is as important as what we do and use of the term thinking might be one of the most valued things we do of them all.
Recently Tony Golsby-Smith wrote on the Harvard Business Review blog about the potential contributions of those from non-traditional disciplines (aka: the Humanities) to improving innovation. He states:
People trained in the humanities who study Shakespeare’s poetry, or Cezanne’s paintings, say, have learned to play with big concepts, and to apply new ways of thinking to difficult problems that can’t be analyzed in conventional ways.
The reason? those in the humanities and related disciplines are trained to consider “what if?” questions at the outset. Golby-Smith adds:
This is because our educational systems focus on teaching science and business students to control, predict, verify, guarantee, and test data. It doesn’t teach how to navigate “what if” questions or unknown futures. As Amos Shapira, the CEO of Cellcom, the leading cell phone provider in Israel, put it: “The knowledge I use as CEO can be acquired in two weeks…The main thing a student needs to be taught is how to study and analyze things (including) history and philosophy.”
Ouch. That has to sting for those who just spent $80K on an MBA to get to the C-suite.
But this is not just about business, it extends to a lot of sectors, including health. The focus — almost tyranny — of evidence in health systems has created the same kind of mindset that we see in the scenario described above and the absence of “what if” thinking. Evidence, as it is distilled and presented in the health sector, tends be used to guide actions based on what has happened on the past, not the future. In many cases this is perfectly reasonable and, indeed, ideal (life saving even!), yet evidence can be used as a blunt instrument in areas where precision and learning from the past do not apply. Much of health policy and public health fall into this realm.
To understand this requires another different kind of thinking beyond discipline to areas of transdisciplinary arenas like that of systems thinking. Systems thinking is not systematic thinking, rather it is a different way of seeing problems. It is the difference between hard and soft systems, described by Peter Checkland as the following:
The key difference between them, little understood as yet in the literature, is that the hard tradition assumes that systems exist in the world and can be engineered to achieve declared objectives. The soft tradition assumes that the world is problematical, always more complex than any of our accounts of it, but that the process of enquiry into the world can be engineered as a learning system…
What Checkland suggests is that we can create systematic ways of knowing about the complexity around us and that is what (soft) systems thinking is about. Another way of looking at these problems is using the Cynefin Framework, which illustrates areas where hard systems thinking might prove useful and where a “softer” (to use Checkland’s terms) might be more appropriate.
But neither of these particular models are useful without the shift in thinking outright. Until one starts to see systems, to acknowledge complexity, and to devise ways of organizing that recognize both of these in the way in which knowledge is produced, curated, translated and integrated this is a moot point. Further, until one considers applying such thinking consciously and with in intent to shape the world around us, which I would describe as (partly) design thinking , we will continue to use evidence, the past, and the wrong questions to get the answers we look for (not the answers we want) in addressing health-related challenges and issues.
Taking up the point that Golsby-Smith makes in HBR, getting new players into the mix is one start. I have some others:
- Teach thinking. We rarely get taught how to think in school, just what to think and why to think about it. The two are very different. Include systems and design thinking in courses aimed at training people who work in areas of complexity. Whether it is in formal school settings or continuing education environments, don’t assume that people know about these thinking approaches or that they will pick them up quickly. The non-linear, highly contextualized nature of complex systems and the strategies used to navigate through them are difficult for most people trained in the Western scientific tradition. Yet, the rewards are great for those willing to persevere.
- Take the boundaries of discipline and their points of confluence seriously. While a “hot topic”, transdisciplinarity — working at the intersection of disciplines, not just at the margin of them, is important. Understanding where you come from — in terms of training, experience, life philosophy — helps place you within a system of enquiry and enables you to see boundaries. Too often we fail to acknowledge boundaries at all, assuming that evidence is universal and understood across settings and contexts, which isn’t true.
- Build in diversity..and support it. Humanities scholars and engineers working together? Why not. However, throwing people together isn’t the same as nurturing an environment where diversity is respected. Scott Page’s work on diversity and complexity has looked at the dialogical nature of this relationship and how one feeds the other. Creating — designing — environments that bring the best of diversity out is something that requires much attention and brings many rewards.
- Thinking is a participatory sport.Although thinking is most often considered a solitary, cognitive activity, support for teams and wide engagement with thinking-related materials and methods is the way to support true integration of knowledge and learning. It is one thing to think of systems, it is another to really experience them. One strategy I’ve tried with some success is to have systems learners use photographs or videos or other arts to capture the tacit and everyday expressions of systems in their lives. When learners go beyond what the evidence tells them, see systems for themselves, and share that with others they are better able to point to spaces where new thinking can generate innovations and how what is known matches with what is possible.
Understanding not only what we think about, but how we think about it in relation to the issues we face is important if we are derive strategies that take the complexity of human systems into account. Teaching for thinking and not for knowledge in itself requires different thinking and acting. The question is: Are we ready and willing to do this? Most people love change so long as they don’t have to do anything different. Hopefully, our health and research systems are different. And if not, how can we inspire the thinking to make them so?
*** Photo Think by jon_skilling used under Creative Commons Licence from Flickr
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.
