Disruption by Design

Posted: March 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: design thinking, Education & Learning, innovation, Social media | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

DISRUPT by Paul Woot

Innovation, new thinking, and a change in consciousness can upset the way we see our world and the manner in which we relate to it. This disruption can happen by happenstance or intention encouraging us to consider ways to design change before forces outside our influence change us. 

disrupt |disˈrəpt|

verb [ with obj. ]

interrupt (an event, activity, or process) by causing a disturbance or problem: a rail strike that could disrupt both passenger and freight service.

• drastically alter or destroy the structure of (something): alcohol can disrupt the chromosomes of an unfertilized egg.

DERIVATIVES

disrupter (also disruptor |-tər|)noun

Observing the city I live in, the media I consume, and the way I learn, I can’t help but be amazed at how much of my life has been disrupted over the past few years. I can access nearly everything I need to run my business and do my research from my handheld or a tablet computer. I can hand that tablet or handheld to someone else and allow them to interact with the content on it by using gestural movements, not a keyboard.

If I am engaged in health communications or scholarly research, I look to places like Twitter and blogs as much if not more than I do academic databases. Many of the journals I respect and publish content that counts in fields like public health, such as the Journal of Medical Internet Research, are open access and free to anyone who wants to read them. And these open access publications are becoming leaders in their fields, not just cheap versions of “real” journals. This makes the content of my academic work and that of my many colleagues accessible and much more likely to be used.

If you’re a graphic designer your work has never been more important. Whether websites, infographics, high-quality interpretations of traditional media (for a great example see the re-imagined journal article by my colleague Andrea Yip) the world has become more visual and the weight of good graphic design is heavier than ever. At the same time, tools like easel.ly allow anyone to make an infographic, or WordPress for those who want websites (this one included), and even offers to do a $42 logo as reported in Creative Review.

Want to raise awareness of issues? Grab a film camera and put together a small film like Kony 2012, the most viral success story of any video to date.

Or write a book on an important, if somewhat arcane, topic like the meaning of making and get people from all over the world to invest in it on Kickstarter (that’s what Seung Chan Lim or Slim as he is known did and I invested in this venture with enthusiasm).

Or  charge a mere $5 like comedian Louis C.K. did for a high-quality copy of his recent comedy show filmed at the Beacon Theatre in New York and let your buyers download up to five copies at once for one price.

Or write a book and let your customers determine its price (including free!) like Jon Kolko and his AC4D colleagues have done with Wicked Problems.

This couldn’t have happened five years ago. The production costs were too high, the distribution channels too primitive, and the bandwidth too low. Now, it’s all different and the disruptions are no longer happenstance, but designed.

Harvard professor Clayton Christensen coined the term ‘disruptive innovation‘ which  ”describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves ‘up market’, eventually displacing established competitors.”

Christensen adds:

An innovation that is disruptive allows a whole new population of consumers access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill.  Characteristics of disruptive businesses, at least in their initial stages, can include:  lower gross margins, smaller target markets, and simpler products and services that may not appear as attractive as existing solutions when compared against traditional performance metrics.

Health promotion and public health are fields ripe for this kind of innovation, so is healthcare. Indeed, movements like those embodied in Patients Like Me, a social network portal aimed at supporting human empowerment in health care.

We are on the cusp of this taking place in health promotion and human services — whether they are governmental, non-profit or social enterprise based. Health promotion is largely about enabling individuals, groups and communities to better adapt to change, support themselves and gain greater control over the social determinants of health. At present, we teach students theory and research, but what about business dynamics or systems thinking or visual methods of presentation or social innovation? These are the tools and strategies that the abovementioned examples used. Many of them also used design.

The same challenge holds true for social work, psychology and education.

These are the fields that are key supports for promoting wellbeing in our community. It is perhaps not surprising that the concept of design is noticeably absent from all of these fields.

That doesn’t need to be the case.

This past week I had the privilege of spending an afternoon with Scott Conti and his staff at the New Design High School in New York City. There I saw students working through everyday problems using design, building business ideas to support themselves and their communities, and applying their various creativities to making a difference in their lives using design as the lens. This environment was where social work, education, psychology and health promotion intersect. Scott — who delivers a great talk on his work as part of TEDX Dumbo — is a health promoter and social innovator. So are his teachers.

None of them were trained for what they do. They have adapted, modified, created and innovated. They disrupted their own patterns of work and learning so that they could better disrupt those around them, for good. They did this by design.

If we are to expect that the fields most connected to social action and the promotion of wellbeing are to contribute to our betterment in the future, they need to change. Disruptive design for programs, services and the ways we fund such things is what is necessary if these fields are to have benefit beyond themselves. Long past are the days when doing good was something that belonged to those with a title (e.g., doctor, health promoter, social worker) or that what we called ourselves (e.g., teacher) meant we did something else unequivocally (e.g., educate). Now we are all teachers, all health promoters, all designers, and all entrepreneurs if we want to be. Some will be better than others and some will be more effective than others, but by disrupting these ideas we can design a better future.

 

The Wicked Problem of Wicked Problems

Posted: February 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: behaviour change, complexity, design thinking, innovation, Systems science, systems thinking | Tags: , , , , , , , | 5 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.

The PR Problem for Design, Evaluation,and Complexity

Posted: January 29, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: complexity, design thinking, evaluation | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

I (heart) PR

Complex concepts like evaluation, design and even complexity itself provide insight, strategies and applications that provide usable solutions to real-world problems, but also suffer from widespread misunderstandings, confusion and even derision. If they are to take hold beyond their initial communities of interest, they need to address their PR problem head on. 

This past week was Design Week in Toronto. As one works extensively with design concepts and even has a health promotion-focused design studio, one couldn’t be faulted for thinking that this would be a big week for someone like me who lives and works in the city.  Well, it came and went and I didn’t attend a single thing. The reason was partly due to timing and my schedule, but largely because the focus of the week was not really on design writ large, but rather interior design. Sure, there were a few events that focused on social issues (what I am interested in) like the Design With Dialogue session on Designing a Future for our Future, but mostly it was focused on one area of a large field.

And thus, interior design was left to represent all of design.

So why does this matter? It matters a lot because when people hear the term design, most of what was presented this week fits with that perception. The problem is that design is so much more than that. It is about making things, creative thinking and problem tackling (design thinking), social innovation, and responsive planning for complex situations. Architects, business leaders, military strategists, social service agencies and health promoters all engage in design. Indeed, Herbert Simon‘s oft-quoted and often contested definition fits nicely here:

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones

If one accepts that we are all designers and all of what we create and use for change is design, than a week devoted to the topic should offer much more than innovative concepts in furniture or flooring. Yet, this high-concept style showcase is what most people think about when they first hear design. Give people a choice between a Philippe Stark Juicy Salif citrus juicer and creating a trades-based, social change curriculum for low-income kids such as the work by Emily Pilloton as the example of design and they will probably guess think Stark over Pilloton, when both are equally valid examples.

Evaluation (another area I focus my work on) is equally fraught with perception problems. If you want to raise someone’s blood pressure or heart rate, tell them that either they or their work will be the focus of an evaluation. Evaluation may be the longest four-letter word in the English language. Yet, tell someone that you have a strategy that can enable people to learn about what they do, its impact, and provide intelligence on ways to improve, adapt and outperform their competitors and you’ll find an inspired audience for evaluation services.

Lastly, complexity presents the same challenge. It’s very name — complexity — can make people shy away from it. As humans, we crave the simple in most things as it is easier to understand, manage and control. Complexity offers none of these things and, if anything, reveals how little control we have. Entire fields of inquiry have been established around complexity science and its related theories and practices. Complexity can help us make sense of why things don’t work as we think they ought to and allow us to better navigate through unpredictable terrain with greater resilience than if we tried to tackle such problems as if they were linear in their cause and consequence.

In all of these cases — design, evaluation and complexity — there exists a PR problem. The advantages that they pose are tremendous, yet these concepts are frequently misunderstood, dismissed, or inappropriately used . When this happens, it creates even greater distance between the potential benefits these concepts offer and their real-world application.

This distance is partly an artefact of poorly articulated definitions and examples, but also by design (no pun intended). There are those who relish having these concepts appear opaque to those outside of their social cluster. Thus, we have the ‘superstar designer’ who seeks to create products and personas that are built upon their rarity, rather than accessibility. There are evaluators who exploit the fear that people have of evaluation and lack the understanding of the methods and practices of evaluation (vs concepts like research or innovation consulting) to gain contracts and social influence within their field. Complexity, with its foundations in physics and systems biology, can appear to the layperson as otherworldly, making its practitioners and scientists seem all the more powerful and smart. These tactics benefit a small ‘elite’(?) number of professionals, while robbing a far larger audience of the potential benefits.

In 1969, then president of the American Psychological Association, George Miller, implored members to “give psychology away“. His message was that psychology was too important to be left just to the professional, graduate-trained practitioners to use. If psychology was to confer social benefits, it was necessary to ensure that everyone had access to it — it’s theories, methods, models and treatments. It is perhaps no surprise that psychology remains one of the most popular undergraduate degree programs in the arts and social sciences and the focus of television shows, magazines and and an array of services. Miller was commenting on the need to change a field that he perceived was becoming elitist and not serving the needs of society.

The same might be true of design, evaluation and complexity if we let it. It’s not a surprise that these three concepts are intimately tied together, as those training to apply design thinking and strategic foresight learn. Perhaps its time to start giving these ideas away, but to do so we first need to rehab their image and apply some design thinking and brand development strategy to all three ideas. As practitioners in any or all of these fields, giving away what we do by educating, reinforcing, and ensuring that the work we do is of the highest quality is a way to lead by example. None of us is likely to change things by ourselves, but together we can do wonders.

For those interested in evaluation, I suggest catching up on the AEA365 blog sponsored by the American Evaluation Association, where evaluation bloggers and practitioners share ideas about how to practice evaluation, but also how to communicate it to others. For those interested in design, I would encourage you to look at places like the Design Thinkers LinkedIn group, where practitioners from around the world discuss innovations and way to promote and apply design thinking. A similar group, and opportunity, exists with the Systems Thinking LinkedIn group or by joining the Plexus Institute, which does considerable work to promote complexity and systems thinking in North America.

Photo: I (Heart) PR by The Silfwer used under Creative Commons Licence from Flickr.

The Complexity of Planning and Design in Social Innovation

Posted: January 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: complexity, design thinking, evaluation, Systems science, systems thinking | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 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 .

Merry Christmas 2011

Posted: December 24, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: complexity | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment »

Light Up This Holiday Season

As we begin to say goodbye to 2011 and hello to the holidays that greet the end of one year and the beginning of a new one, I am writing to wish all my visitors and reader the warmest wishes for health, happiness, creativity, joy and love in these times. 

Christmas has been a special time for most of my life. In my family, the creative spirit is expressed most at the holidays with decorations, food, and the giving of gifts and time to each other and themselves. We read, watch movies, sleep, and care for ourselves and each other in ways that sometimes get a little neglected the rest of the year.  It’s the kind of spirit that, like many of the holiday songs suggest, really should be with us all year long. It’s also a time of gratitude for the things we have, a time of memoriam for those we lost or neglected, but mostly about the joy of coming together and giving of ourselves.

CENSEMaking has been a wonderful forum for expression, exploration of ideas, and a space to share reflections on what I see as the intersection of systems thinking, design, health and the ways we learn through engaging with it all. Thanks to all who’ve share their thoughts on the posts and added to them. It’s inspiring to consider how powerful the Internet is a force for sharing ideas, learning from each other, and meeting new people and I learned that more than ever this year.

For those of you celebrating Christmas, may it be merry.

For my friends of the Jewish faith, may your Hanukah celebrations continue with joy and light.

For those who are not of any particular faith tradition, may you find much in life to celebrate just because we don’t need a holiday to make our world bright.

In the bigger system of interactions, these small acts of kindness and good intention can make a substantial impact.

Complexity science shows us how small things working in consort can produce large effects.

Design offers us the means to channel these good acts and intentions into something positive.

And the act of creation is a sign of health.

How we make sense of it all is what brings us to life.

The warmest wishes of the season to all of you. — Cameron

How Systems and Design Thinking Can Address Violence Against Women

Posted: December 6, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: behaviour change, psychology, social systems, systems thinking | Tags: , , , , , , , | 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:

  1. 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;
  2. 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;
  3. 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;
  4. 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;
  5. 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)
  6. 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.
From a designer’s perspective, we can help by determining the position of the problem and finding out what it really is.
  1. 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.
  2. 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;
  3. 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;
  4. 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 | Author: | Filed under: social systems, systems thinking | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 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:

  1. 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;
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

Do Relationships Scale?

Posted: October 31, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: art & design, design thinking, innovation, knowledge translation | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Go Small to Go Big?

There is much discussion about scaling social innovation  – bringing small successes to a larger theatre — yet little is known about the properties that make something work at one level successful at another. When the “thing” to scale is relationships, such as the case with knowledge translation and design, is bigger better or even possible? 

Last week the Design Management Institute held its annual North American conference themed: Design at Scale. The conference featured many prominent names in branding, market development, graphic design, and design management together to discuss the ways in which the creative process used in design can be leveraged from one level to another.

One of the best technical examples came from David Butler and Gerardo Garcia from Coca Cola who showed their modular design system being used to transform the way small local retailers in South America can create large or small displays with products that are regionally appropriate with ease. While it was interesting to see how one could create retail displays that could easily adapt and scale, I  was left wondering whether the same system would permit the social variables associated with each of these 1 million vendors to do the same thing. Are these vendors likely to view the modular system in the same way that Coke does? Does it even make sense to them? Surely for some that will be a “yes”, but will it be as many as Coke thinks and does this system solve a problem that the retailers have as much as it aims to satisfy Coke’s goal of doubling its revenue in the next decade?

While the physical product generated from this system might scale, the relationships that surround its implementation might not.

Which got me to thinking about the other lessons that came from the conference. Perhaps the most intriguing ones were those presented by Jamer Hunt, the Director for Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons The New School for Design. Hunt drew on the work of design legends Charles and Ray Eames and their film the Powers of Ten as a means of illustrating scale and what it really means (which he wrote about in Fast Company article last year).

An aside: The Powers of Ten was shown on the first day of my first class in psychology when I was an undergraduate at the University of Regina and was used by my professor, the truly remarkable Paul Antrobus (PDF),  to illustrate the realm that psychology could play in the universe. “This is the realm of psychology” he declared. It is something that has probably never been uttered in another class in psychology anywhere and probably should be everywhere. It changed the perspective I brought to my work and has changed my life in ways I can’t fully comprehend.

What The Powers of Ten does is illustrate scale at the macro and micro level by showing how great, yet relatively consistent, the differences are between different scales. Scalar changes happen at an order of magnitude that becomes difficult to grasp as one shifts up or down due to the massive, exponential change that, at small scales seem palpable, but at large scales seem incomprehensible. Jamer Hunt made this all the more concrete when he used the example of an ant taking a shower. No matter how intentional an ant might be about wanting a shower, the water molecules from a shower are too big and would crush him (or her). The water doesn’t scale.

Social innovation, social design and communications (particularly knowledge exchange and translation) is largely about relationships. Developing intimacy, expressing empathy, creating trust, and having authentic and meaningful conversations are the hallmark of healthy and strong human relationships. They also tend to cluster with good, effective practice in the above-mentioned areas. There are good reasons why (contrary to what Paris Hilton might suggest) we don’t have a lot of BFF‘s in our lives: we can’t maintain that level of closeness with a lot of people. It is precisely because we create a sense of intimacy with a few, that the relationship with the many is able to be maintained as it is. Relationships change, evolve, grow and whither, but the absolute number of close, personal relationships for people tend to remain relatively constant, even if that number differs between people.

The work by evolutionary psychologist and anthropologist Robin Dunbar has looked at these relationships and found that, by and large, we are not able to maintain meaningful relations (nevermind close relations) with more than about 150 (with a large standard deviation). While the variance in this number is large, the implications for scaling might be larger. Some of Dunbar’s original research with primates suggests that our brains are simply not evolved enough to handle the complexity of too many more relations.

It might also simply be less enjoyable. Meaning is something that requires attention to create and use and the more variables competing for attention in your life, the less meaningful things might be. If this is the case, can we design programs and initiatives that scale up from small to big? Or do we need to reframe the way we see scaling to something akin to a network, whereby there are a lot of small nodes connected together? Networking nodes seems to be a way to go big and go small.

If so, what does this mean for designing systems that scale? It might also mean that for those of us working to develop solutions that scale that we need to pay attention to the social and mathematical issues that come with scaling something. It means paying attention to psychosocial physics and dynamics and using research more intently to inform our designs and social innovations lest we scale in ways that create metaphorical water-droplets that are so big crush those we seek to shower.

The Shadow of Design and Creative Work

Posted: October 22, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: art & design, design thinking, psychology | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment »

Light and Shadow

Designers seek to put their best forward in their creations, but sometimes it is the dark rather than the light that provides an impetus for good design. Carl Jung’s look into our darker nature might provide a means of understanding the lighter side of what we produce. 

My work and related inquiry into design has led me to Carl Jung’s doorstep on many occasions, and this week his concept of shadow was brought into focus through a series of conversations and reflections. In interviewing designers the past few weeks for the Design Thinking Foundations project an initial point of interest that has emerged from the data is the importance of the designer’s connection to the designed product, something I wrote about earlier.

If one is to consider design, the act of making something with intent, as something of an act of personal expression it follows that it be subjected to the same moral and ethical scrutiny that other such acts are put to. This becomes particularly important when one considers the potential impact that our designed creations can have on the world around us. The manner by which we, as designers, shape this artificial environment of human-made objects has profound implications and thus, the factors that shape the designers are important.

Jung’s shadow of the psyche mirrors the qualities of the darkness created by objects standing in the light. It is that part of a person that is often unrecognized, unspoken, or unconscious that reflects aspects of a person that may be perceived to be less desirable to others or to the person themselves.

As Jung states:

There can be no doubt that man (sic) is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected. Jung, C.G. (1938). Psychology and Religion”. In Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.131

Jung believed that shadow requires confrontation, or at the least acknowledgement. For the designer, this means being self-aware to ensure that their motives are clear when they approach a project and the people connected to it.

This is not just an issue for personal development or the protection of others, it is about doing the best work. For design, this often means doing work with others. For the designer, it means doing the work on themselves, which includes an obligation to learn, develop and grow.

There is a deep gulf between what a man is and what he represents, between what he is as an individual and what he is as a collective being. His function is developed at the expense of the individuality. Should he excel, he is merely identical with his collective function; but should he not, then, though he may be highly esteemed as a function in society, his individuality is wholly on the level of his inferior, undeveloped functions, and he is simply a barbarian, while in the former case he has happily deceived himself as to his actual barbarism. Jung, C.G. (1921) Psychological Types, P.III

Psychologists and Social Workers might be used to integrating deep self-work into their professional roles, but designers typically are not. Creation on its own is a scary subject that terrifies artists and designers alike. It takes courage to put one’s work “out there” for people to see, critique and explore. It exposes our potential weaknesses, our vulnerabilities and our aspirations in ways that few encounters can. When design is done with passion and integrity, not just intent, it means putting a piece of ourselves into the product.

What we might not be aware of is that the self that is reflected in our work might include both the light and the shadow. As a designer, the fear of being under the gaze of others is amplified by the fear that such inquiry will reveal parts of our shadow.  To reveal one’s shadow, is to expose one’s truest self in its entirety, not just part of it.

To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self. Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle. Jung, C.G. (1959) Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology”In CW Civilization in Transition. P.872

The shadow introduces what Jung calls “a moral problem” to the enterprise of design. The products of design are intimately tied to the designer. It is perhaps for this reason that the field is often known for having practitioners with large egos and star-like status. But if one is to consider the manner in which the shadow is — or can be — expressed through design, the possibility for a design process that is overwhelmingly ego-driven is lowered.

It also presents the opportunity for a more authentic, if risky, form of design.

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge. Jung, C.G. Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.14

And isn’t design about taking risks? Perhaps to create the very best work in the light, we need to embrace the shadow’s that it helps create.

Design and the Designer

Posted: October 13, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: art & design, design thinking | Tags: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

The Designer in the Designed

This week professional designers from the United States and beyond descend on Phoenix to attend the AIGA Pivot conference. While much will be discussed about the art, science and craft of design, an equally important focus (and one that may not be as visible) is that of the designers themselves and the role they play in their own creations.

Yesterday volunteers and staff of the AIGA along with their exhibitors and partners feverishly worked to set up what looks to be an exciting array of things to see and do at Pivot, the annual design conference.

Design is all about making things — digital renderings, physical objects, services, and even ideas — and thus, is an attractive field for those who are or want to be creative. While the act of design is something that is familiar to most of us (after all, we all design things in some manner) the discourse on the designer him/herself in relation to that process of design much less so.

Certainly there is much written on the process of creation and volumes of work on the artistic process and the great artists, architects and designers of different generations. Yet, what is scant is work looking at how designers themselves bring who they are in to what they do. One of the few to do this is Debbie Millman, who is at AIGA Pivot to speak and sign copies of her new book on the process of branding (and other noble pursuits as the title suggests). Debbie has written extensively and spoken much on the role of the designer in the process of design, particularly through her web radio show Design Matters. Yet, she and her show are exceptions and not the rule.

Design and design thinking seem to have difficulty going beyond the thinking part. As the bust in the photo above, it is my experience that many design thinkers and designers operate from above the shoulders when discussing their work in relation to themselves. This is not the same as having emotional and other sensory experiences driving the creation of a product, something most designers I know would insist as essential. This is about understanding the role of the creator in the created. What are the values, beliefs, experiences and feelings that guide the work from the designer?

It is not unreasonable to think that these personal qualities — fears, aspirations, perceptions, experiences and so forth — influence what is created and the manner in which those objects are designed. As such, understanding who is behind the creation and what that offers is important.

A method for getting at some of the deep-seated reasons we do things — including design – is to ask yourself “why” five times about something you do. As part of my ongoing research on design thinking, my colleague and I are asking designers of different backgrounds this very thing in relation to why they see design thinking fitting in with their work. The reason is partly to do with an interest in understanding what role the designers themselves play in the creation of the designs they produce — even if that design process is highly collaborative.

This reflective and reflexive work is something that has been identified as useful for many professions and over the next five days I am hoping to get a better sense of how this might be played out in design and, through doing that, how we might be able to apply it more broadly to the creation of other things.

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