Too Much Social Media, Not Enough Social Message
Posted: July 30, 2012 Filed under: business, marketing, social media | Tags: Cluetrain manifesto, communication, complexity, Edmund Snow Carpenter, emergence, Facebook, idea markets, knowledge integration, knowledge translation, learning, markets, Marshall McLuhan, media ecology, social media, Twitter, Web 2.0, YouTube 1 Comment »
Social media is any networked information technology, tool or platform that derives its content and principal value from user engagement and permits those users to interact with that content. But last time I checked (in), the content stream being produced through my media stream was becoming a lot less social (Web 2.0) and more of a throwback to the media of old (Web 1.0); the implications could be considerable for those wishing to reach new audiences or create them in the first place.
It’s been a rough ride for social media companies. On Friday Facebook’s shares were at a record low since their IPO a couple months ago. Last month, Twitter provoked much concern after dropping its partnership with LinkedIn as part of its desire to have greater control over its messaging, prompting concern that Twitter might end up closing itself off to 3rd party applications like EchoFon, HootSuite and Tweetbot to ensure quality. This desire for tailoring and control of messages and trends has prompted some to suggest that Twitter may be ruining itself in the process.
The issue is not just one of control, but of a disrespect for the complexity and conversation that makes social media attractive to its users. In short: it’s about the social, not the media.
Social media, non social content
Scanning through my Facebook page its easy to see why their stock is dropping and will continue to do so. In their quest to justify their valuation, Facebook needs to find ways to make money from what people post and pictures of people’s kids, quips about daily hassles and joys, sharing cat videos, and posting check-ins at a local restaurant aren’t enough to justify a $100bn valuation. To do this, they need advertising dollars and deals with game makers and app developers to drive revenue up. Aside from the possibility of games, there is little social about advertising, no matter what kind of spin is offered.
Within a year my Facebook page has gone from a loose collection of social miscellany from friends and family to a steady stream of non-social junk with advertisements in the form of page updates, news stories that require me to accept an app that sends me more ads, and a litany of non-essential information.
The signal to noise ratio has officially flipped from more noise and less signal.
Bit by bit, Facebook is choking its users to death with ephemera and it would not surprise me if in two years we refer to it as we do MySpace today. YouTube is also running perilously close to offering too much media with not enough message as users increasingly have to sit through advertisements or click on banner ads before accessing content. News sites like the Globe and Mail will run a 30 second advertisement before allowing you to see a 20 second news clip, a 150% advertisement to content ratio on some stories.
I remember a few years ago when my email took the same turn. Now, probably 75 per cent of my received (non-spam!) email goes unread and is immediately deleted on sight. This isn’t necessarily spam, much of it is bacn, the kind of updates that I might have subscribed to voluntarily or I receive as part of a professional membership or affiliation. However, it’s severely disabled email’s potential and is now a ‘necessary evil’ instead of a useful tool I welcomed having in my toolkit.
Speaking to colleagues, it is not unreasonable to hear of people receiving messages in the hundreds each day and spending more than 3 hours per day just managing that content alone. How is this helping us communicate better? To learn?
This is one gigantic distraction and is not proving useful to improving our communications or helping us integrate the knowledge we receive and already have. Some claim that the era of big data will allow advertisers to target their ads with such exceptional focus and appropriateness that they will be serving us as much as we are needed to service them. I somehow doubt that.
From Web 2.0 back to 1.0
Consider the definition of what social media is on Wikipedia (as Web 2.0):
Web 2.0 is a concept that takes the network as a platform for information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design,[1] and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumers) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumers) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups and folksonomies.
When my social media stream is filled with promoted tweets, sponsored posts, ‘like’ requests on advertisements or updates from projects, I lose the social and just end up with media.
Social media is at its best when it is a conversation. Sometimes the conversation involves a lot of talking on one side, but there is a genuine back-and-forth, an unpredictability to it, and a non-linear dynamic that makes it interesting. Straight-to-viewer messages that offer no ways to engage except to watch, click off or ‘like’ don’t make for a conversation.
Imposing Structure and Losing Complexity
In trying to turn a setting where complexity, emergence and non-linearity come alive and work to create conversation, social media property managers are stifling the very thing that makes their tools and platforms so attractive. Creativity is born from serendipity and diverse connections. In imposing structures that remove or highly limit this potential for discovery by adding unnecessary noise, we are a risk of losing some of the best tools for idea testing, discussion, and knowledge translation we have ever known by reducing the opportunities for serendipity.
It is the commercial drive that contributed to bringing these tools in the first place, however that drive can lead to blindness creating an Internet ivory tower rather than a true marketplace of ideas as advocated in the Cluetrain Manifesto, which looked at how markets operate as innovation hubs by promoting conversations.
From markets to artists, the messages that are created by media are related to the media itself. Marshall McLuhan knew that and so did his peer, Edmund Snow Carpenter. Mathematician-artist a Youtube video maker vihart knows this too and spoke to Carpenter’s thesis in a terrific short video below.
In critiquing the push for standard ‘best practices’ in social media, vihart (and Carpenter, by posthumous extension) point to the ways in which the traditional media formats that advertisers desperately wish to use to contain your attention (and limit your feedback) is exactly the opposite of the new media.
Taken from the forward of Carpenter’s book, They Became What They Beheld, (and explicated beautifully by vihart) come some rules of communication commonly pursued by traditionalists and reasons why we shouldn’t pay attention. These rules as noted by Carpenter are:
1. Know your audience and address yourself directly to it
2. Know what you want to say and say it clearly and fully
3. Reach the maximum audience by using existing channels
Whatever sense this may have made in world of print, it makes no sense today. In fact, the reverse of each rule applies.
If you address yourself to an audience, you accept at the outset the basic premises that unite the audience. You put on the audience, repeating cliches familiar to it. But artists don’t address themselves to audiences; they create audiences. The artist talks to himself out lout. If what he has to say is significant, others hear & are affected.
The trouble with knowing what to say and saying it clearly and fully, is that clear speaking is generally obsolete thinking. Clear statement is like an art object: it is the afterlife of the process which called it into being. The process itself is the significant step and, especially at the beginning, is often incomplete and uncertain.
The problem with full statement is that it doesn’t involve: it leaves no room for participation; it’s address to consumer, not co-producer.
One is left watching this video with the question: what happens when social media has too much media, not enough message?
Wet and Dry Design for Social Innovation
Posted: May 28, 2012 Filed under: complexity, design thinking, emergence, innovation | Tags: boundaries, change, change leadership, complex systems, complexity, design, design thinking, emergence, Facebook, innovation, leadership, learning, scale, self-organization, social innovation, social networks Comments Off
Wet and Dry Social Innovation Design – Like Nature
Social innovation is often about engaging complicated systems like technology (dry) with complex systems like humans (wet). The implementation and evaluation approaches we take must match wet with dry and knowing when we are dealing with each.
Seth Godin recently wrote on thriving in a wet environment, which he compares code and human interaction spaces:
If you’ve ever fixed any kind of machinery, you know that a device that’s exposed to the elements is incredibly difficult to maintain. A washing machine or the underside of a car gets grungy, fast.
On the other hand, the dryest, cleanest environment of all is the digital one. Code stays code. If it works today, it’s probably going to work tomorrow.
The wettest, weirdest environment is human interaction. Whatever we build gets misunderstood, corroded and chronic, and it happens quickly and in unpredictable ways. That’s one reason why the web is so fascinating–it’s a collision between the analytic world of code and wet world of people.
Much of social innovation is becoming like this: a collision between the wet world of people and the dry world of technology. It is hard not to be impressed at the technological capabilities we have at our disposal and how they can be put to use to serve humankind. Mobile handsets, low-cost portable computing tablets, social network platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn, or digital common spaces created by tools like Reddit and Twitter all provide incredible means to connect people and ideas together. Stop and think about what we have at our disposal and it is truly mindblowing, particularly when you think how much that’s changed in just 5 years, 10 years or 20 years.
Yet, the enormity of the scale of these tools and their ubiquity can mask their significance and not always for good. Take Facebook, which just launched its IPO and is the current champion of social networks with over 900 million users. It’s easy to forget that Facebook didn’t even exist 8 years ago and now almost one in 7 citizens on this earth have an account with its service.
This could be a tremendous opportunity for social innovation. Yet, it also speaks to the issue of Seth Godin’s wet and dry analogies for design.
Tom Chatfield, a tech writer from the UK, recently blogged about rethinking our social networks. He points to Dunbar’s number, a well-researched figure that estimates the limits to meaningful human relationships to be between 100 and 230. The drive to scale technologies (the dry) to ever-expanding and increasing numbers is problematic if the limits to my ability to meaningfully connect with the networks they create (the wet) are relatively fixed or difficult to change.
He writes:
It’s dangerously easy simply to gawp and grimace at the sheer scale of the networks connecting us. The numbers are staggering, and offer a powerful index of how much and how fast our world is changing. But we mustn’t overlook the great lesson to be drawn from work like Dunbar’s: the weight of a special few will always outweigh the many, no matter how great the “many” becomes.
Some have argued that Dunbar’s number is a fallacy in the social media world, choosing to rely more heavily on sociologist Mark Granovetter’s work often summed up as the argument for The Strength of Weak Ties . His early research (see link [pdf] for original paper) focused not on the strong ties between people who were close, but the ‘friends of friends’ effects on transmission of information, which is the space where many innovations and novelty comes from in a network.
This confuses the potential innovation and the human capability to connect across large, diverse networks (a technical, ‘dry’ issue) with the quality of the interaction (a relational, ‘wet’ one). Both exist and both will exist, but there is a difference between learning something new and taking it to scale.
Novelty of information and new ideas comes from the intersection created by cognitive diversity in the design process. This is why designers seek to bring people with different perspectives together to explore concepts and generate ‘wild ideas’ as part of an ideation phase. Lots of information can be very useful in this situation and allow designers (social and otherwise) to see things they might miss if they stuck with a narrow band of perspectives. Yet, bringing these ideas to focus, refining them and transforming them into a social innovation that matters to people is far more relational than we give credit for.
Facebook might be great at linking us to ‘friends’ we’ve lost track of, but in applying a model where all of these friends are treated more or less equally, along with all of the information streamed at us through the main feed, our ‘wet’ interactions are made to feel ‘dry’. Drawing the motivation to scale ideas and engage in the efforts needed to make real change happen from such an approach is unlikely.
A recent post from FastCoExist, part of the Fast Company network of sites, by Ashoka changemakers Alexa Kay and Jon Camfield pointed to the barriers and facilitators for making change happen. Among their principal barriers is the need to connect deeper, rather than broader with each other:
How do we learn to be change makers? Much of the art of change making involves soft skills that we absorb from others that model or demonstrate change making behaviors. This means that learning opportunities are limited by one-to-one interactions and by exposure to other change makers. Compared to traditional fields like entrepreneurship, where there are plentiful resources for training, the practice of change making is still far from being widespread.
One of their principles for change reflects the complexity of social change by encouraging and supporting self-organized networks:
Often leaders or institutions promote dependency with a community. But successful change making communities depend on reducing dependence on one anointed leader. Flat networks and peer-based accountability structures are necessary if a community is to sustain change beyond one individual. The need for change communities and networks to be self-regulating is vital for their sustainability.
This is where walled gardens like Facebook are likely to fall down, just as many custom Ning-based communities have fallen into disuse. Create systems that are too bounded (dry) and we risk sucking the moisture from the human elements (the wet) that make real social innovation happen. Our challenge is finding the right balance between the controlled, stable environments that these new technologies afford and the self-organized, emergent and innovative environments needed to implement and scale our initiatives more effectively.
Wet Leaf By Faustas L, via Wikimedia Commons used under Creative Commons License
What is Developmental Evaluation?
Posted: November 19, 2011 Filed under: complexity, evaluation, innovation, systems thinking | Tags: complexity, developmental evaluation, emergence, Michael Quinn Patton, program evaluation, road trip, strategic learning, systems thinking 8 Comments »
Developmental evaluation (DE) is a problematic concept because it deals with a complex set of conditions and potential outcomes that differ from and challenge the orthodoxy in much of mainstream research and evaluation and makes it difficult to communicate. At a recent gathering of DE practitioners in Toronto, we were charged with coming up with an elevator pitch to describe DE to someone who wasn’t familiar with it; this is what I came up with.
Developmental evaluation is an approach to understanding the activities of a program operating in dynamic, novel environments with complex interactions. It focuses on innovation and strategic learning rather than standard outcomes and is as much a way of thinking about programs-in-context and the feedback they produce. The concept is an extension of Michael Quinn Patton’s original concept of Utilization Focused Evaluation with concepts gleaned from complexity science to account for the dynamism and novelty. While Utilization Focused Evaluation has a series of steps to follow (PDF), Developmental Evaluation is less prescriptive, which is both its strength and its challenge for describing it to people (things I’ve discussed in earlier posts).
So with that in mind, our group was charged with coming up with a way to explain DE to someone who is not familiar with it using anything we’d like — song, poetry, dance, slides, stories and beyond. While my colleague Dan chose to lead us all in song, I opted to go with a simple analogy by comparing DE to a hybrid of Trip Advisor and the classic Road Trip (due to lack of good vocalizing skills).
Trip Advisor has emerged as one of the most popular tools for travellers seeking advice on everything from hotel rooms to airlines to resorts and all the destinations along the way. Trip Advisor is averaging more than 13 million unique visitors per month and, unlike its competitors, focuses on user-generated content to support its service. Thus, your fellow travellers are the source of the recommendations not some professional travel agent or journalist. At its heart are stories of varies tones, detail and quality. People upload various accounts of their stay, chronicling even the most minute detail through photos, links to their blogs, video, and narrative. If you want to get the inside details on what a hotel is really like, check Trip Advisor and you’ll likely find it.
However, like any self-organizing set of ideas, the quality of the content will vary along with the level of reportage and the conclusions will be different depending on the context and experience of the person doing the reporting. For example, if you are a North American who is used to having even the most basic hotel chain offer a room with full-service linens, a bathroom, closet, desk and separate shower, you’ll have a hard time adjusting to something like EasyHotel in Europe.
The Road Trip part (capitalization intended here to denote something different than a regular trip by road), denotes the experience that comes from a journey with a desired destination, but not a pre-determined route and only a generalized timeline. A Road Trip is something that is more than just traveling from Point A to Point B, which is usually accomplished by taking the shortest route, the fastest route or a combination of the two; rather it is a journey. Movies like National Lampoon’s Vacation (and, European Vacation), Thelma and Louise, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, and (surprise!) Road Trip all capture this spirit to some effect. I suppose one might even find a more grim example of a Road Trip in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy or The Road.
Road Trips have a long history and are not just a North American phenomenon as this article from the Indian Newspaper, The Hindu reports in some detail:
“Road trips are fun when they are not planned point-to-point. As long as you have accommodation booked, that is enough. Its better not to have agendas; get as spontaneous and adventurous as you can. My friends and I went on a road trip to Goa last year. It was loads of fun as it was the first time we took off on our own without parents. To me, it was more than just a trip with friends. It showed that I could take care of myself and that I was now a grown-up, free to do what I wanted,” says Siddharth, who is doing his engineering.
Chance favours the prepared mind
Road Trip Advisor for Developmental Evaluation
“Road-tripping is a great way to bond with the people you are travelling with and I would strongly recommend it to people. It not only makes you appreciate yourself as an individual but is an amazing experience as you get to meet new people, know different cultures and sample different cuisines. I can never forget biking on sleet, riding though torrential rains, gobbling hot rotis at dhabas, the beautiful snow-capped mountains and guy talk with friends on the trip,” says Dheeraj, who recently went to Ladakh.
all is not hunky dory during these trips. You have to be way about accidents and mishaps. And, realise that freedom comes with responsibility. Says Arjun: “I had borrowed my friend’s bike for the trip, and though it looked good, it gave problems on the foothills of Kodaikanal and we couldn’t do the climb. Being a weekend, there were no mechanics. It helps to know your machine. A passion for road-tripping is not enough. You need to be equipped to take care of yourself also.”
Here, the story parallel is about being prepared. Know evaluation methods, know how to build and sustain relationships and to deal with conflict. A high tolerance for ambiguity and the flexibility to adapt is also important. Knowing a little about systems thinking and complexity doesn’t hurt either. Developmental evaluation is not healthy for those who need a high degree of predictability, are not flexible in their approach, and adhere to rigid timelines. Complex systems collapse under rigid boundary conditions and do evaluators working with such restrictions in developmental contexts.
So why do people do it? “Well, my memories of my favourite road trip were an injured leg, chocolates, beautiful photographs and a great sense of fulfilment,” recalls Arjun.
It is youngsters like these who have transformed road-tripping from just a hobby to an art.
After all, friendship and travel is a potent combination that you can’t say no to.
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 Comments Off
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.
Clowning Around For Better Empathy and Design
Posted: February 9, 2011 Filed under: art & design, complexity, emergence | Tags: arts, collaboration, creativity, design, emergence, innovation, performance art, teams, teamwork Comments Off
Clowning & Miming for Better Empathy
Clowning might seem either silly or scary to some, but the art of non-verbal communication is just that: an art. And like art, it opens the door to myriad interpretations, but also to greater empathy and that only benefits design.
Tonight I attended my first of what I hope will be many monthly meetings of the Design With Dialogue community of practice being held at OCAD University in Toronto. The topic of the evening was What do clowns know that you don’t ? The hosts were an international clown troupe comprised of Patricia Kambitsch, Heidi Madsen, and Elsa Lam. The answer to the question posed by the evening is: a lot.
The night began with a series of exercises done first in pairs, then pairs of pairs, and then as teams of four. What struck me was that, prior to this evening and a few Twitter follows, I didn’t know a single person at this event. Yet, after the course of two and a half hours, I felt I had a room full of new “peeps”. I was thrilled to find an interesting, engaged and dynamic group of people who could perform for each other without the safety net provided by familiarity.
So what brought this about and what does it have to do with clowns? Actually, the clowns were not made up nor was there even mention of clowning beyond the introduction of the hosts. In the case of tonight’s activity, the clowning was due more to physical performance, and particularly the use of non-verbal communication. Over the course of two hours we went through four sets of activities:
1. In pairs, determined by how tall you were (which isn’t relevant, it just allows for a creative way of splitting the room up), introduce yourself using gestures — particularly exaggerated ones — and then mirror that response back to your partner with no words expressed between you.
2. As a pair, join with another pair and use the non-verbal communication rapport generated from the first exercise to work together to non-verbally communicate a particular emotion (including some tough ones like passed over and pity — try acting these out, you’ll see how hard that can be).
3. Working with both pairs together as a foursome, the new group of four is asked to act out a particular phrase. They are to do this while walking across the room where the rest of the participants are asked to guess the phrase. There is little communication between the four people in this new group.
4. The four individuals sit on four chairs and acts out a skit called “four clowns on a bench” where one person is whispered a scenario and the other three are asked to follow along, not knowing what the actually phrase is.
What happens after all of these is remarkable. I found myself acting in a group on something I didn’t know, yet perceived because of the empathy that I developed over the course of two short hours of working non-verbally. As a result, my group — team — and all the others put on performances that were funny, coherent, and creative with little to no verbal sharing of information.
This stoking of empathy and the insight it produced demonstrated enormous potential for design and teamwork. Building on work that Keith Sawyer has done looking at improv and creativity, this session demonstrated just how powerful non-verbal, emergent communication can be and how us designers — in whatever situation we inhabit — dismiss such opportunities for learning, creative expression and community building at our peril.
I wasn’t really a fan of clowns before tonight; now, I am.
Clown around.
** Photo by Peter Pearson under Creative Commons License from the Flickr pool
The Problem With Grades
Posted: January 7, 2011 Filed under: complexity, education & learning, public health | Tags: assessment, complexity, education, emergence, evaluation, grading, learning, public health, teaching, university 6 Comments »
Good little factory workers (Photo CC Flicker Michael 1952)
Grading is the tyrrany of higher education and this week I had to face it full-force and get reminded why we value the appearance of education rather than true learning.
This week I submitted the final grades for my graduate course on health behaviour change. Submitting grades is always an emotional time for me. I’ve watched students do poorly not due to lack of understanding, but circumstance. I’ve also seen students turn things around after having started out slow and ending on a high note. In every case, I end up assigning a letter (sometimes with a + or – attached to it) to assess the quality of the work done, which is supposed to be a proxy for learning. The truth is far from that.
More than any other semester in my teaching history I found myself struggling with grading. Grades are holdovers from a system designed to produce good little factory workers who would have enough knowledge not to hurt themselves and do the job right, but not quite enough to truly challenge the system that said they had to work the way that they did. Unfortunately, old habits are hard to break (which is, ironically perhaps, the theme of the course I teach).
I am fortunate enough to have a room to teach with moveable chairs and tables, although there is really only a few designs open to me given that the room is literally filled to the capacity set by the fire marshall. It’s still better than the circumstance illustrated in the above photo, with students sitting in rows all looking the same. I am pleased that many of the students in my course call me “Cameron” and not just “Dr. Norman” or “Professor”. We’ve made a lot of progress, but at the same time there is much illusion about the nature of education today.
A wonderful illustration of the problems of education and its historical roots can be viewed as part of a TED talk summary by Sir Ken Robinson.
I teach up to 30 graduate students — both masters and doctoral level students — at a time. When you pile 30+ learners (including the TA’s, guest lecturers, guest students) into one room, the type of teaching and learning you are able to do is seriously limited by the size of the class, the room, the complexity of the material being presented, and the time you have available to explore that material. I do my best and the students do theirs, but it is limited. And yet, we call this graduate education. We call it education; period.
It is as if individuals have no prior experience of their own and couldn’t possibly add to the discussion in any meaningful way. As such, we set up a system of evaluation that suggest that I, as the implied smartest person in the room, can truly judge the worthiness of any idea with complete objectivity, precision, and efficiency and that is worth something. Well, when it comes to health behaviour change or systems thinking (the two courses I teach) I can confidently say that I have more codified, structured, academically acceptable knowledge than any one person in my classroom. But do I have more than the class combined? No way. I’m not even close.
So it would surmise that some method of tapping into that knowledge of the 10, 20, or 30 students is a good idea. But doing so means acknowledging that the professor — the said “smart person” in the room — might not have all the answers and maybe some of the students have those answers. Or in the case of complex and novel problems that we see in public health more often these days, maybe no one has the answer. Maybe the answer needs to be generated by collaboration, discussion and bringing diverse groups together.
But what does this mean for grading? If five people help derive a solution to a problem, who gets the grade? Some models might suggest the leader gets more credit than the others as we see in the academic peer-reviewed publication traditions . While others might have some form of negotiated hierarchy of authors. A systems thinking perspective might throw the whole authorship issue out altogether because it was the contribution of the team acting as such that generated the knowledge. Yes, some may have worked longer hours, taken bigger roles, but the entire product is the sum of the whole of the parts, therefore every component is considered vital. If we took this into account, we’d have to award the same grade to everyone if producing knowledge that was useful was the goal of the activity.
That’s pretty heretical stuff where I come from. Yes, it is true we can have group grades, but this is speaking to a fundamental issue of contribution and acknowledging that not everyone will add the same value and that is OK, because in the end it is what people add in its totality that is most important the whole.
In complexity terms, grading is anathema. It suggests that we can know what is “right” and “wrong” and “effective” and “ineffective” in each circumstance. In simple systems, that might be true. When we have “best practice” that is reliable and valid and can be assessed consistently, then grades are perfectly reasonable. Yet, when we work in spaces where the context changes, the variables multiply and shift, and the outcomes can, at best, be anticipated but not predicted, the idea of assessing people based on concrete, objective standards seems silly at best, dangerous at worst. But that’s what we do all the time.
Complexity does endorse — and indeed, thrives on — feedback. Getting some form of assessment is great so long as it is provides opportunities for adaptation. Without it, complex systems would become simple ones.
Imagine a system where we gave students feedback, allowed them to adapt, and to take the information they learn and apply it in ways that fit the context they are working in? Consider what that might look like in terms of grades and grading and how the absence of such almost arbitrary assessments could lead to knowledge that could truly advance the health and wellbeing of everyone, not just propose to do so.
This is not just systems thinking, but true systems change and that is what education is all about in my books.
Complexity and Emergency Reactiveness
Posted: September 28, 2010 Filed under: complexity, public health, systems science, systems thinking | Tags: complexity, emergence, emergency preparedness, planning, public health, Toronto Comments OffThis past weekend a fire broke out in a large apartment block in Canada’s most dense and multi-ethnic communities.
The fire, not as large as one could imagine when you hear “6-alarm blaze”, was still far greater in its impact than its size would suggest. As of last night, there remain 1700 people unable to return home. The building’s structural integrity is now in question, which could pose even further problems for a community that is not well prepared to cope with it. Reading through the stories of what happened in the community, which is where much my research group‘s work is focused on, it is hard to imagine how difficult it must be for people living in a modern city to be camped out in makeshift shelters that are propped up throughout the downtown.
One quote from the Torontoist’s coverage points at the cascading set of problems that these problems cause:
“I just want to know what’s going on,” said Romaniuk, a fourteen-year resident of 200 Wellesley Street with long red hair and an accent that was difficult to place. She had arrived home from work last night only to be denied access to her apartment by emergency responders. “At some point I need to get in. I need to go back to work. I have no clothes to go back to work.” She said she’d slept at her cousin’s home, and that she’d do so again tonight, if necessary. For those who had nowhere to go, the Community Centre was filled with cots, draped with Red Cross blankets. Some residents slept at other ad-hoc downtown shelters last night.
Here we see a remarkable dichtomy between the a part of the world where such sites are rare and those parts where such sites are common, perhaps even semi-permanent (PDF). In Toronto, emergency services have done a decent job of handling the crisis and moving quickly to find places to hold residents who are without a home. But what passes for good in these situations is usually a matter of perspective.
The cascading set of problems that these problems cause are usually examples of complexity in action. The interconnectedness between events and the unintended consequences that emerge from simple actions have ramifications that our post-event analyses only scratch the surface upon. They also cause much discussion about the suitability of emergency preparedness plans. Such plans, often designed to help communities respond quickly in a disaster, tend to work well when the parameters are known and the system constraints are reasonably tight. Airplane emergency safety planning is one area. In an emergency, those in a plane have very few options for escape and in those situations where a problem occurs and there is a chance of survival, most of the strategies, imperfect as they are, will do the job of getting people to safety. A plane is a closed system.
Communities are more troublesome beasts. They are open systems and it is virtually impossible to imagine the variety of scenarios that could unfold in the event that a large scale disaster takes place. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina showed clearly the flaws in both their plan, but also in the mindset that goes into planning in the first place. The mere act of planning is problematic when you consider a complex system.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a plan as:
plan |plan|
noun
1 a detailed proposal for doing or achieving something : the UN peace plan.
• [with adj. ] a scheme for the regular payment of contributions toward a pension, savings account, or insurance policy : a personal pension plan.
2 (usu. plans) an intention or decision about what one is going to do : I have no plans to retire.
3 a detailed diagram, drawing, or program, in particular
• a fairly large-scale map of a town or district : a street plan.
• a drawing or diagram made by projection on a horizontal plane, esp. one showing the layout of a building or one floor of a building. Compare with elevation (sense 3).
• a diagram showing how something will be arranged : look at the seating plan.
Consider the terms. The first is a detailed plan of what you are going to do. This means having some idea of what the context will be, what the parameters are, and the agents involved. How often can we do this reliably?
The second part, intention, is far easier. This is something that one can develop abstract, but focused sets of ideas about what is to be achieved.
The last part is about as problematic as the first.
Colin Powell had a more realistic, complex view of planning:
No battle plan survives contact with the enemy
Since Katrina and as the potential spectre of a pandemic influenza sits in our minds, public health has been focusing on emergency preparedness. Thinking in complex terms might enable us to get the best of our intentions to gel with what Powell speaks of: contact. The Toronto fire example provides a decent case for planning, but as the unplanned for consequences begin to reveal themselves (lack of ability to work, loss of pets, missing medication schedules, eating nothing but pizza for three days straight to name a few) the strength of this plan will be forgotten. Considering things as complex from the outset means that plans are no longer solid documents, but fluid, adaptive processes that require new ways of engaging this complexity.
I don’t see much of that. But then, I’m too busy planning for other events that are equally as ludicrous (classes, papers, research projects). Perhaps we all would be wise to heed John Lennon:
Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.
For those interested in learning more or doing more for those affected by the fire in Toronto, here are some links:
ongoing activities and news: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=wellesleyfire
co-ordination wiki: http://www.torontopedia.ca/200_Wellesley_Fire
fundraising opportunities: http://twitter.com/WellesleyFireTO
Wayfinding in Complex Systems
Posted: May 8, 2010 Filed under: behaviour change, complexity, design thinking, emergence, social systems, systems science, systems thinking | Tags: behaviour change, complexity, emergence, health promotion, innovation, knowledge translation, public health, setting, social innovation, social networks, space, systems thinking, wayfinding 2 Comments »
Where am I?
One of the more taken for granted aspects of human life is knowing where you are. You probably have a clear sense of what you’re reading this on (e.g., laptop, mobile device), where you and that device are situated (e.g., home, office, sidewalk cafe), and where that situation is located in the world (e.g., city, state, country). In some of these settings, this could be viewed as a simple issue where there are clear markers, conventions and shared realities that dictate where you are. If I say “I’m at my desk at home” that conveys a very clear sense to those who know me about the physical space I’m in and where that space is located.
Online, things are a little more tricky because the locations are not tethered to something physical, only addresses that point to some server that presumably brings to Yahoo!, Google, Wikipedia, BBC News, the Journal of Medical Internet Research, create your own Star Wars movie, or wherever you’re intending to go. As diverse as these sites are, you still have some idea of where you are and where you’re going. The space in all these settings is defined by markers such as addresses, navigation bars, and the limits of the screen you’re using whether it be a 24 inch monitor, an iPad or a handheld phone. This is more complicated. So while I might be visiting the JMIR site, I could be on many of the hundreds of articles published, the author area, the editorial pages or somewhere linking between them. If I have multiple browser windows open, I could actually be at two places at the same time. But in each case, we can deduce through some effort about where I am.
Social systems, particularly those with multiple overlapping layers of organization (individuals within teams within organizations within communities) are complex. Understanding where someone is within that system provides only a partial sense of where a person really is. Consider social networks. Below is an example of a social network taken from a paper I published in 2006 with Tim Huerta that looked at the Web Assisted Tobacco Intervention community of practice.
Web Assisted Tobacco Intervention Network
Social networking maps are very useful for illustrating to people where they might fall within a social cluster, but more importantly, it also shows where others fall in relation to themselves. So while we’re obviously familiar with who we know, we might be less familiar with who knows us, and almost completely ignorant of who those we know are familiar with. These secondary connections are commonly referred to as weak ties, popularized by the work of Mark Granovetter. Often the most powerful changes come from mobilizing these weak ties — in large part because the further away from the starting point you go, the more diverse the elements are that you engage. Engaging diversity, creates conditions for new patterns of behaviour to emerge and thus, innovation, learning and change.
It sounds pretty simple: map the network, find the connections, exploit those connections and (shazam!) you have change (e.g., knowledge translation! healthy behaviours!). Unfortunately, as a phrase often attributed to H.L. Mencken suggests:
For every complex problem there is a solution that is neat, simple…and wrong.
Social networks are gaining in popularity. Recent mass-market books by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler and the newly released book by social network scientist Albert-Laslo Barabasi have (or will) accelerate this. But what is missing from the discussion of social networks is place and theories of taking these complicated visuals and translating them into strategies for navigating complex environments. Maps of social networks are great as a start, but they actually offer little practical advice on where to go or even where you are in terms of knowledge space. Yes, you see where you are relative to others in a graphical representation, but social networks for collaboration are layered with organizational bureaucracy, likes and dislikes, technological and time constraints that are easily forgotten about when one maps out connections on chart or PowerPoint presentation.
In other words, social networks are treated as complicated, when really they are complex in the manner in which they are negotiated. Wayfinding is considerably more complex when one considers the reality of trying to navigate through a social network to get something done. Just as design thinking might be viewed as a stance, its value goes beyond seeing things different towards actually producing new things that have value. Likewise, social network maps provide us with a stance for viewing the social landscape differently, but offer little in understanding how to traverse that landscape.
For knowledge translation and public health, better wayfinding in complex, rather than complicated systems is the next step in the journey towards navigating a path to health.
Complex Change and Energy
Posted: December 8, 2009 Filed under: behaviour change, complexity, emergence, psychology | Tags: complexity, emergence, energy, engagement, health behaviour change, inspiration, psychology, TED 2 Comments »
Simple, straightforward and predictable things are pretty boring, but they at least can be understood without much effort. And sometimes that simplicity provides comfort that we can’t find in complicated, complex or chaotic events. As we find ourselves working long hours eating badly and sleeping less hours than our body would like its no surprise that we find a lot of organizations trying to make complex change using simple processes (that won’t work). It’s tiring thinking about complexity and simplicity is, well, simple. We don’t need to consider the pushback that could come from making our morning coffee, we need not worry about the unintended consequences of ironing our shirts, or contemplate the emergent patterns that come from picking a green M&M out of the holiday party bowl over the red one. After a long day at the office or an emotional conversation with a loved one, these ‘simple pleasures’ as they are often referred to provide us comfort that can’t be found in complexity.
But change is rarely a pleasure, but always an adventure; When it comes we need to be ready and have the energy to tackle it.
It is perhaps for that reason that people try to deny it or over-simplify problems. Its the very reason why the self-help book section of a store is so big, why New Year’s resolutions are so popular (do you have yours yet?), and why late night infomercials and daytime talkshows still persist in their efforts to sell us the quick and easy change. Change your life in three, five, seven, 10 or 12 easy steps!
It is never that easy. If it was, I could teach my students health behaviour change in an evening seminar at a hotel airport instead of a semester-long graduate course that is, at best, showing the ice floating above the waterline. However, in that proverbial sea of self-help resources one of the few ideas that stands out comes from The Power of Full Engagement. In the book, authors Jim Loehr and and Tony Schwartz point out that a key to change is managing energy as much as it is our cognitions, emotions and behaviour. It is the energy we bring to situations that is the necessary precondition to becoming fully engaged and able to change. It’s why its so hard to pay attention in class or a meeting when you’re tired. Or why you tune out when the message itself is tired; the same old stuff trotted out again and again.
Change in human systems is complex.
Tired individuals and organizations tend to opt for those solutions to complex problems that are simple and, as H.L. Menken said, wrong, — see my last post. Ever seen profound change take root in an exhausted environment? Not me. It’s one of the reasons why effective leaders are those that aim to spark emotion and raise the energy level of those that follow them as much as instill new ideas. Indeed, if you look at many of the best leaders out there, they tend to create environments where new ideas come from introducing new ways to see the complex and make it exciting. A terrific example of this is Benjamin Zander’s talk at TED looking at how the complicated structure and complexity of classical music can enliven the spirit.
So perhaps our first strategy to change is to take a nap, play some Chopin and watch an inspirational movie than try and solve it otherwise we might end up with simple and wrong solutions to complex problems and be no better off for it.
Mindful Systems
Posted: November 22, 2009 Filed under: complexity, research, systems science, systems thinking | Tags: emergence, meditation, mindfulness, neuroscience, research methods, systems thinking, visualization 2 Comments »
The benefits of standing still and looking around at the systems around us never cease to reveal themselves.
Mindfulness is something that is most often associated with individuals. Mindfulness is a pillar of Buddhist practice and is increasingly being used in clinical settings to help people deal with stress and pain.
Mindfulness sometimes get unfairly linked to individuals, groups and movements that, for lack of a better term, could be described as ‘flaky’. Its association with many spiritual movements can also be problematic for those who are looking for something more aligned with science and less about religion or spirituality. Yet, the spiritual and scientific benefits of mindfulness need not be incompatible. Google, while innovative and often unusual in the way it runs its business, is certainly not flaky. As a company, it understands the power of mindfulness and has hosted a few talks on its application to everyday life and its neuroscientific foundations and benefits. For companies like Google, promoting mindfulness yields health benefits to its individual staff members, but also to its bottom line because being mindful as a company allows them to see trends and the emergence of new patterns in how people use the Internet and search for information. Indeed, one could say that Google with its search engine and productivity tools could be the ultimate mindfulness company, aiding us to become aware of the world around us (on the Internet anyway).
We are often profoundly ignorant of the systems that we are a part of and while the idea of having us all sit and mediate might sound appealing (particularly those of us who could use a moment of peace!) it is not a reasonable proposition. One of the things that meditation does is enable the mediator to become aware of themselves and their surroundings often through a type of mental visualization. Visualization allows the observer to see the relationships between entities in a system, their proximity, and the extended relationships beyond themselves. In systems research and evaluation, this might be done through the application of social network analysis or a system dynamics model. Through these kinds of tools that allow us to enhance visualization potential of systems, this is almost akin to creating a mindful systems thinking tool.
My colleague Tim Huerta and I have been developing methods and strategies to incorporate social network analysis into organizational decision making and published a paper in 2006 on how this could be done to support the development of communities of practice in tobacco control. I’m also working on creating a system dynamics model of the relationships within the gambling system in Ontario with David Korn and Jennifer Reynolds.
By creating visuals of what the system looks like consciousness raising takes place and the invisible connections become visible. And by making things visible the impact, reach, scope and potential opportunities for collaboration and action are made aware. And with awareness comes insight into the connections between actions and consequences (past, current and potential) and that allows us to strategize ways to minimize or amplify such effects as necessary.
