The Complexity of Planning and Design in Social Innovation
Posted: January 7, 2012 Filed under: complexity, design thinking, evaluation, Systems science, systems thinking | Tags: complexity, design, developmental design, developmental evaluation, evaluation, health, human services, Social media, systems thinking 2 Comments »
The Architecture of Complex Plans
Planning works well for linear systems, but often runs into difficulty when we encounter complexity. How do we make use of plans without putting too much faith in their anticipated outcome and still design for change and can developmental design and developmental evaluation be a solution?
It’s that time of year when most people are starting to feel the first pushback to their New Year’s Resolutions. That strict budget, the workout plan, the make-time-for-old-friends commitments are most likely encountering their first test. Part of the reasons is that most of us plan for linear activities, yet in reality most of these activities are complex and non-linear.
A couple interesting quotes about planning for complex environments:
No battle plan survives contact with the enemy – Colin Powell
In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable – Dwight D. Eisenhower
Combat might be the quintessential complex system and both Gens Powell and Eisenhower knew about how to plan for it and what kind of limits planning had, yet it didn’t dissuade them from planning, acting and reacting. In war, the end result is what matters not whether the plan for battle went as outlined (although the costs and actions taken are not without scrutiny or concern). In human services, there is a disproportionate amount of concern about ‘getting it right’ and holding ourselves to account for how we got to our destination relative what happens at the destination itself.
Planning presents myriad challenges for those dealing with complex environments. Most of us, when we plan, expect things to go according to what we’ve set up. We develop programs to fit with this plan, set up evaluation models to assess the impact of this plan, and envisage entire strategies to support the delivery and full realization of this plan into action. For those working in social innovation, what is often realized falls short of what was outlined, which inevitably causes problems with funders and sponsors who expect a certain outcome.
Part of the problem is the mindset that shapes the planning process in the first place. Planning is designed largely around the cognitive rational approach to decision making (PDF), which is based on reductionist science and philosophy. Like the image above, a plan is often seen as a blueprint for laying out how a program or service is to unfold over time. Such models of outlining a strategy is quite suitable for building a physical structure like an office where everything from the materials to the machines used to put them together can be counted, measured and bound. This is much less relevant for services that involve interactions between autonomous agents who’s actions have influence on the outcome of that service and that result might vary from context to context as a consequence.
For evaluators, this is problematic because it reduces the control (and increases variance and ‘noise’) into models that are designed to reveal specific outcomes using particular tools. For program implementers, it is troublesome because rigid planning can drive actions away from where people are and for them into activities that might not be contextually appropriate due to some change in the system.
For this reason the twin concepts of developmental evaluation and developmental design require some attention. Developmental evaluation is a complexity-oriented approach to feedback generation and strategic learning that is intended for programs where there is a high degree of novelty and innovation. Programs where the evidence is low or non-existent, the context is shifting, and there are numerable strong and diverse influences are those where developmental evaluations are not only appropriate, but perhaps one of the only viable models of data collection and monitoring available.
Developmental design is a concept I’ve been working on as a reference to the need to incorporate ongoing design and re-design into programs even after they have been initially launched. Thus, a program evolves over time drawing in information from feedback gained through processes like evaluation to tweak its components to meet changing circumstances and needs. Rather than have a static program, a developmental design is one that systematically incorporates design thinking into the evolutionary fabric of the activities and decision making involved.
Both developmental design and evaluation work together to provide data required to allow program planners to constantly adapt their offerings to meet changing conditions, thus avoiding the problem of having outcomes becoming decoupled from program activities and working with complexity rather than against it. For example, developmental evaluation can determine what are the key attractors shaping program activities while developmental design can work with those attractors to amplify them or dampen them depending on the level of beneficial coherence they offer a program. In two joined processes we can acknowledge complexity while creating more realistic and responsive plans.
Such approaches to design and evaluation are not without contention to traditional practitioners, leaving questions about the integrity of the finished product (for design) and the robustness of the evaluation methods, but without alternative models that take complexity into account, we are simply left with bad planning instead of making it like Eisenhower wanted it to be: indispensable .
Merry Christmas 2011
Posted: December 24, 2011 Filed under: complexity | Tags: Christmas, design, health, personal, systems thinking 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
Health for Design
Posted: July 14, 2011 Filed under: design thinking, health promotion | Tags: conference, design, design thinking, health Leave a comment »The Design4Health conference is on this week bringing together designers from different fields together with health policy, practice and research professionals. While the focus is on the relationship between design and health, it is also inspiring thoughts of how health itself is designed.
This week the first Design4Health conference is being held in Sheffield, UK. The conference attendees includes designers looking at interactions, service, interiors, architecture, fashion, and industrial areas of design. Mixed with is group are physicians, physiotherapists, psychologists sociologists, health promotion practitioners, artists, and policy researchers. This mix represents much of what makes the design and health intersection so exciting, but also the (somewhat) predictable “Tower of Babel” with many disciplines working to be understood by the others.
The language issues have been relatively minor, but on one level the more complicated area of confusion is not where one might guess (the application of design to health issues), but rather the understanding of health itself relative to design.
To illustrate, much has been presented on the way design has re-fashioned devices for those with some form of physical disability. From wheelchair designs that are aesthetically pleasing and light to female portable urinals to address issues of incontinence and the social issues women face trying to relieve themselves in non-toiletted spaces, the products being discussed have shown what some design thinking can do to potentially improve people’s lives. But what if those lives don’t need improvement in the way we think?
Consider the language of health in popular use, which focuses on the ability to control conditions and both be free of physical discomfort and mental stress. These are deficit-oriented models that focus on what must be absent or is undesirable, rather than what a person does with their life and their capabilities to act on their values and interests. What if we viewed health differently?
Further, what happens to design when we focus it’s talents on alleviating pain and discomfort as defined by some standard that is both ideal and unattainable at the expense of promoting personal wellness as defined by the person living their life? What we’ve not talked about is the idea that someone with a substandard medical device might have creative ways to live a life where the sub-standard product becomes nearly invisible. This is not to suggest that we lower the bar, but it does beg the question why we are so focused on ‘problems’ of a particular perceived nature and not opportunities?
We also seem to be poor at reflecting the diversity in the public and their relationship to their bodies, minds and lives that we embrace in our attendance at our conferences. Just as we come from different disciplines, so too do people’s sense of what is a ‘problem’ and what contribution design has to addressing that problem. This is about designing health, not the design for health.
The Design of Health
Posted: June 24, 2011 Filed under: design thinking, health promotion, innovation | Tags: design, health, health promotion, innovation, public health, social innovation Leave a comment »
The Pulse of Health Promotion & Design is Different
Design and health promotion have a great deal in common and enough to complement one another that makes them a great match. However, it is the scale and rhythm of the two that brings them together and keeps them apart.
Although the two fields are distinct, design and health promotion are a natural fit. Health promotion is a field that seeks to address social, environmental and care-related factors that keep people well and reduce the resource gap between those that have good health and those that do not.
Designers seek to develop products — objects, services, structures — that meet the needs of their client and, in the cases of social design, the larger society that they are a part of.
Both fields operate systems thinking environments and consider the opportunities for engagement of wide-scale participation in the creation of their products. But where the two fields differ is where the greatest opportunity for collaboration lies.
Health promoters — and health professionals in general — are not great designers. While they are good at engaging the community in assessing need and opportunity, there is a bias in the sector to looking to what is to inspire what could be. This means drawing on current evidence and spending considerable time defining the issue at hand in the first place in light of this. Health promoters are adept theorists and practitioners, however the theories used are often contested and widely debated — something health promoters embrace. The risk for health promotion is that they will use the solutions already developed or they will get mired in debate over the meaning of potential solutions to come.
Designers on the other hand are great dreamers and doers when it comes to creating things that are novel. Designers are comfortable with working with conflicting information and abductive reasoning to solve problems before them. And then they move on. Design’s focus on the here and now for the product or service gives them focus, but loses the thinking about the wider implications of their product – something that keeps health promotion in debate.
There are exceptions to the examples provided above, but they are exceptions and not the rule.
In a health context, designers systems think about the way their product is established, where health promoters think about the values that underpin that product and the wider implications for its use beyond its creation. Bringing these two fields together provides an opportunity to make health promotion more innovative and action-oriented and design more evidence-based and socially responsive.
The social challenges from chronic disease, environmental threats, social migration, aging populations, economic disparities, and a more globalized, multicultural world require strategies that bring the best ideas to the table, strategies to realize them, and values that make these actions more equitable for everyone. Health promotion + design is one way to achieve this.
Gaming the Health System for Innovation and Change
Posted: June 10, 2011 Filed under: art & design, design thinking, innovation | Tags: collaboration, design, gaming, health, innovation, research, serious games Leave a comment »Yesterday I attended the Cure4Kids Global Health Summit at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. The three day event (continuing for the next two days) aims to bring together researchers, practitioners, and clinicians working on issues of importance to child and youth health — including an emphasis on the role of engaging young people. Of the many presentations and conversations that were had on the first day of the event, the ones that struck me the most were on the potential of games and gaming to engage people and promote literacy.
Games are entered into voluntarily and allow for natural collaboration, creative exploration, and constant, developmental learning.
Developing serious games for health often requires artists, designers, users, engineers, social scientists, educators and health professionals working collaboratively so it provides a natural laboratory for design research and studies on participatory engagement on health issues.
But what excited me the most was seeing how games were being developed through games themselves. Small competitions, limited budgets and compressed timelines along with mentorship produced some amazing results (which will be discussed in a later post).
Watching it all, it opened my eyes to how gaming — the games and the process of creating the game itself – could offer so much to learning about innovation, discovery and collaboration.
Branded Knowledge: Does This Make Sense for Health?
Posted: May 23, 2011 Filed under: complexity, knowledge translation | Tags: brand, branding, complexity, health, health care, knowledge translation, marketing, public health Leave a comment »Commercial products relying heavily on branding to entice their purchase and use in a crowded marketplace. Is this something that the health sector should consider and, if so, what might it look like?
I’ve just spent a rare free weekend in Chicago walking around, taking in the sights, and doing what a lot of other people do when they travel to another country or city: shop. It is hard to avoid some shopping when down in the Loop on Saturday or Sunday as that is what much of Chicago’s core is made for. The same can be true of most major centers, if you exclude the office buildings that are often semi-vacant on weekends.
A brief tour of many of the shops, from the discounters (Filene’s Basement, TJ Maxx, and Nordstrom Rack) to the mid-range stores (Macy’s) to the higher end department stores (Nordstrom) and the many boutiques, one is easily amazed by the abundance of goods on sale. But what intrigued me as I stood and watched what was around me was that many of the branded goods available at all of these places (including many of the boutiques) were the same. Big names in fashion were at all of them. And the products themselves were virtually indistinguishable from one another except for 1) price and 2) seasonality.
The first is perhaps the most obvious, but as one who is not as attuned to the seasons in fashion beyond the warm-weather/cold weather distinction as many, it the second part that I find most interesting. What makes last year’s $150 pair of Lacoste sunglasses worth $25 this year is nothing other than its seasonality. In other words, they are last year’s model and no longer as coveted.
It struck me that we do this in the health sciences all the time. If your reference list isn’t up to date, people question the sources and the validity of the findings. While probably appropriate for work in basic and clinical sciences, it seems less true for health promotion. It also seems less appropriate for areas where there is great complexity.
Brands also matter with regards to where something is published. A premium is placed on scholarly work that is published in journals with high impact factors over those that are in lesser-known journals. The underlying assumption here is that the more people cite something and the more we believe a source to be high quality the higher the quality the knowledge. The strength of the brand of sources like JAMA, Science, the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet exceed the rest of the health field.
While this respect for such “brands” sounds reasonable, there are many problems associated with it. Most notable among these is that they publish a certain type of knowledge in a particular format that adheres to particular models of discovery and rewards particular ways of expressing information. This has advantages, but it also creates path dependencies that shape knowledge itself and restrict the sharing of other forms of knowledge. In doing so, there is some assumption that the “best” knowledge (i.e., that which fits with the brand) looks a certain way and fits a certain way.
An alternative is to create different brands, just as we see in the marketplace for clothing and other retail goods. Apple, once a brand favored by a small, but fervent group of supporters in the early 80′s, is now the world’s most valued brand. It was the small, scruffy underdog and now is the leader. The same might be said for other forms of knowledge. If we were to package health promotion into a form that had the same appeal as other sources, could we create a demand and cache for it in a manner that drew people to it? And would this be a good thing?
I’m not sure. But I do believe it is possible. A colleague of mine once did a study looking at factors that predicted uptake and citation of research knowledge in a particular domain by looking at study qualities across a number of dimensions including design, home institution, discipline and others. After all was considered only one factor predicted uptake: the study used an acronym. Yep, if you branded your study it was more likely to achieve uptake than if you didn’t. To my knowledge this data was never published, presumably because it was so embarrassing to us scientists as it provided evidence that evidence isn’t just what drives our work. Whether it holds over time is worth considering, but it does suggest that brands might matter.
Marketers and companies work hard to distinguish themselves in a crowded marketplace. In a world where there are literally tens of thousands of venues for publishing our findings that are chosen every week, the market is filled. And do we want to rely only on the big brands to fill our knowledge? If so, we run into the same scenario as I did shopping by seeing the same brand everywhere and, because of that, seeing its value discounted because there is so much of it and it expires quickly.
The comparison is not perfect, but neither is it outrageous. Could branding knowledge and knowledge translation be coming to an inbox, book, or library near you?
Design for Sex, Gender and Health (Celebrating International Women’s Day)
Posted: March 8, 2011 Filed under: design thinking, health promotion, public health, social systems | Tags: design, designer, gender, health, health equity, health promotion, sex, woman, women's health Leave a comment »
Woman, (1965) Oil on wood by Willem de Kooning, American, born Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 1904 - 1997.
Today marks the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day prompting some reflection on how we design for sex and gender in a world that often fails to consider either seriously enough.
Sex is important and it deserves attention in designing for health. Today the global community recognizes one half of the world’s population, their challenges, struggles and successes and I can think of fewer causes more worthy of such attention. Although sex is biological and brings its own issues with health, gender has social overlays incorporating role and identity that create more complex determinants of health, that require attention when designing programs and policies.
This attention to sex, gender and health requires problematizing the issue in the first place and recognizing that one-size-fits all approaches to social planning and policy do little to address the complexity of how these social determinants manifest themselves and interrelate. Gender is one determinant that is highly knotted up with other health issues such as economic security and employment (PDF), safety, and education. It’s complexity and pervasiveness demand that we consider this as something worthy of attention in our design and health promotion work if we wish to create a more equitable, healthy society.
Designing for health requires that we pay attention to these issues and consider them deeply in all of our work. Sex issues manifest themselves in ways that are unacknowledged, unconscious, or may be at odds with our intentions for promoting better health. It is rare that I’ve seen designers speak of sex and gender in discussing their work. And while health promoters bring sex and gender issues into prominence in their work, yet do not explicitly refer to design principles in such discussion, missing an opportunity to more intentionally shape their actions.
Design is taking some steps to make this a bigger priority. Yesterday’s announcement that global design leader IDEO was creating a non-profit arm that would focus on developmental issues, many of which are related to women’s needs, is a place to put hope for design. Health promotion’s foray into design issues has been on the built environment and on promoting equitable policies for access to health care, which is itself a start.
Bringing both of these fields closer together has the potential to do women and everyone better by considering the locations — social and physical — in which sex influences health and wellbeing and consciously designing situations that improve it. Doing so also means acknowledging where both design and health promotion knowledge come from, ensuring gender equity not only in society, but specifically within the fields of health promotion and design. Can you think of many “rock star” designers that are women? Those numbers are few. And while women are well-represented in the field of health promotion, the key texts and theories largely are male-authored. How this translates into equitable policies and practices for both genders is unclear, but the absence of discussion of these issues in much of the design and health discourse is less so.
While ensuring better design for health equity and promotion it is important to also add health equity and promotion to design through an empowered woman-friendly environment for learning and practice in these two areas.
So as you celebrate this International Women’s Day, consider ways to make sex and gender more conscious in your work and how we might design for both at a foundational level and not just as a means of ameliorating problems that manifest from poor design.
** Picture of Woman, (1965) Oil on wood by Willem de Kooning, American, born Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 1904 – 1997. by Clif1066 used under Creative Commons License from Flickr
Complexity, Interaction Design and Social Media
Posted: February 26, 2011 Filed under: complexity, design thinking, eHealth, health promotion, public health, Social media | Tags: Brian Solis, complexity, design, health, health communication, health promotion, interaction design, marketing, public health, Social media, strategy 1 Comment »
Social Media Targeting for Head & Heart
Social media, like all human activities, involves designed interactions in a complex environment. How we design for this space is as much about the social — and the complexity that results from it — as it is the media.
Yesterday I participated in a webinar on social media strategy hosted by the Program Training and Consultation Centre’s Media Network. The focus was on how public health professionals can use social media to engage their populations of interest to advance health promotion. Examples of how social media is being used were presented from ParticipACTION, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and my own research group’s Youth4Health initiative to show how these tools could enhance health communications.
What might have caught some of attendees by surprise was the introduction of complexity science concepts and design thinking into the discussion. These terms are not often used in public health, but as I’ve argued many times in this space, they ought to play a much larger role.
The other potential surprise for some might have been the emphasis on relationships, connection and the kind of things that Brian Solis showcases (see infographic above). Solis describes social media as:
Social media is a deeply personal ecosystem that I lovingly refer to as the EGOsystem. As such, there is a “me” in social media for a reason. It is quite literally a world in which we are at the center of our online experiences, a place where everything and everyone revolves around us. – Brian Solis
When a person is at the centre of an experience that is human formed and technology mediated, design is very important. How one engages with others and the opportunities afforded within that environment or EGOsystem is largely a product of design. For example, Facebook provides a great deal of opportunity to bring in your close “friends” into a conversation, but is relatively poor at bringing in strangers. In contrast, Twitter is about bringing anyone into the conversation, particularly strangers. As I like to put it:
Twitter enables you to learn answers to questions you never thought to ask, have conversations you could have never planned, and meet people you never knew existed
In both of these contexts, the manner in which one designs for interactions has a profound influence on what kind of conversations take place. To use Solis’ model above, attention to interaction design qualities of the technological and social space helps amplify the white arrows, dampen the effect of the blue arrows, with an aim of enhancing the power of the red arrow (belevolence).
This attention to these kind of patterns is at the heart (no pun intended) of complexity oriented planning and why social media, design and complexity require mutual consideration in developing strategy. When in complex spaces, the tempo, rhythm, and pattern of information exchange shifts constantly, just like in a regular conversation. So approaching the program from the perspective of a traditional, more linear-focused mindset will inevitably lead to a misalignment between program activities and the outcomes produced.
If you’re expecting to get a firm outcome from a social media strategy, you might be disappointed. If you are looking for surprises, consider more flexible outcomes, then social media may deliver the goods — but only if you design your strategy to suit the complexity of the context. A complex setting is one where there are multiple agents interacting and producing emergent new properties through such interaction. It it therefore fitting that the concept of interaction design be considered in examining how we engage in these environments.
Much of the discourse on social media from marketing and communication leaders hints at these concepts, but doesn’t name them. By explicitly making complexity, design and the social part of social media a focus we can more intentionally create better experiences that will engage our audiences, and in the case of public health, promote health.
Behaviour and Bodies, Systems and Design
Posted: February 20, 2011 Filed under: art & design, behaviour change, complexity, design thinking, health promotion, Systems science, systems thinking | Tags: biological systems, bodies, design, Fascial Stretch Therapy, health, health care, organizational design, systems thinking, yoga Leave a comment »
A book of life and interconnections
Drawing connections between our bodies and our behaviour reveals systems thinking in new ways that can lend themselves to contemplating greater ways to consider the relationship between design and its consequences on human health.
One of the reasons cited for not exercising is pain and discomfort, particularly if you are not regularly active. Yesterday I had the chance to confront this head-on as I lay on the table getting Fascial Stretch Therapy at my gym. I exercise regularly and do my best to stretch, but nowhere near enough as my therapist (painfully) pointed out to me. FST is a technique that involves controlled manipulation of your body to stretch your muscles in ways that go beyond what one might do with regular stretches on their own or through yoga.
FST and yoga are attractive not only to my body — which really needs the stretching! — but also my mind, and not just for the mental relaxation and body awareness that they encourage, but also because they inspire both systems thinking and design thinking. In doing so, it reveals to me how these two concepts so often need to be linked to fully appreciate how systems function and how design can contribute to solutions or problems within such systems.
A technique like FST or practice like yoga are systems-oriented in that they fundamentally recognize the interconnections between groups of muscles, biological subsystems, and the environment in which these intersect. Thus, while there may be discomfort in your back, the cause may be located in the hips or legs or feet — or all three — and that only by addressing these other areas can one reasonably hope to address the problem in a satisfactory manner. This is systems thinking about a biological problem.
The reason these problems persist is a matter of design. I am seeking help stretching my muscles because I work in an environment that has me sitting most of the day in meetings, facing a computer screen typing madly, or leaning up against a wall in the hallway. I do keep active by walking to work and taking the stairs and running back and forth between my research group‘s area and my office, but that only does so much. The design of my space, my job, and the social conditions that frame how both of those interact with my body has real implications for my health and wellbeing. The conditions in which my biological system is changed is a matter of design.
This is a system with a design problem and therefore requires systems thinking and design as the solution.
Speaking with my FST therapist, the distinctions between a systems approach to care and the more traditional models became more obvious than ever. I couldn’t think of an area of medicine that would deal with the systems problem I was seeking treatment for. And while there are many who deal with issues of ergonomics, workplace stress, and the architecture of buildings, I can’t think of any person or group that would deal with the design of my work in a manner that would improve my health at a systems level. Instead, there are many who would deal with a component of the problem, reducing the whole into parts, and treat them independently. In doing so, the amount of effort required to get things addressed increases, costs go up, and the effectiveness goes down. This is our modern health care system.
While FST works for muscles and biology, we need something similar for our social and organizational systems.
What would happen if we took a systems and design oriented approach to these problems, looking at our social systems like my therapist looks at my body as a biological system? What can we learn from more holistic approaches to treatment that can be applied to social systems and prevention? And how can design help us bring those together in a cohesive manner?
Until we ask these questions and vigorously pursue the answers to them, tight, inflexible and uncomfortable may be terms used for more than just our muscles.
** Photo (Untitled) by history-art-photos, used under a Creative Commons License from Flickr.
A Complex View of New Year’s Resolutions
Posted: December 28, 2010 Filed under: behaviour change, complexity, design thinking, health promotion, psychology, social systems, systems thinking | Tags: behaviour change, complex adaptive systems, complexity, design, design thinking, health, new year's resolutions, simplicity, systems thinking 5 Comments »
A Happy, Simple New Year (CC- WilliamCho)
The end of the year is coming and, despite good advice and the warning about how they don’t work, you’re still determined to come up with a really good New Year’s Resolution and this year, dammit, you’re going to stick with it.
It’s simple, right? Make a commitment, come up with a plan to stick to it, and you’re ready to go.
Firstly, change in human systems is rarely a matter of simplicity, which is why New Year’s resolutions tend to benefit the diet industry and fitness clubs, but few others.
Another reason lays in the meaning of the term simple. Simplicity implies that there are relatively straightforward mechanisms that underlie a cause and consequence, that these can be predicted with reasonable certainty and consistency, and that we can derive “best practices” from such events given their reliability and efficiency. When we see something as simple, we usually have a high level of control.
Yet, it is the very nature of human systems that makes control such an elusive concept when wish to change something. Complexity science provides us with a different way to handle these problems. It provides a means of understanding complex situations — those where there are multiple causes and consequences that interact and change dynamically — that represent the lives of human beings. Rather than predict what is going to happen based on flawed assumptions of control, complexity science helps anticipate change and prepares people to adapt to these changes wisely.
Diet and exercise tend to be near the top of New Year’s Resolutions. Typically, people will make a resolution to start an exercise plan and reform their diet all in one swoop. The thinking is akin to “go hard or go home”. The problem with this is that what we eat, how we eat, and the activities that we do on any given day are part of a complex weave of activities that shape our lives. Few of us have jobs or lifestyles where everything is the same day to day. If you have children, you’ll know firsthand that even with the most regimented schedule for them and you, every day brings new surprises. But for the most part, these are little surprises that happen consistently and, consistent with a complex system, you adapt.
If your diet consists of a lot of take-out food, pre-prepared foods like frozen dinners or canned goods, the idea that you will suddenly start cooking at home, eating healthy meals and changing the portion sizes right away is setting yourself up for failure. This change alone requires shifts in your time (now you need to shop, cook, clean, and plan in advance), which suddenly changes how you use the rest of your time as it might impact upon work, play, social activities and so on. This isn’t to suggest that such investments in this new lifestyle are not worth it, but that simple shift will drastically change not just your diet, but your lifestyle as a whole all at the same time. That’s a lot of stress to put on the system that is your life.
An alternative is to make small shifts, ones that don’t upset things too much like perhaps making one meal on the weekends. Once that is in place, perhaps change the meal to allow for leftovers so that one day or two you pack a lunch instead of eating out. Maybe then shift towards changing the lunch options you choose when you do eat out one or two days per week. The key is to take one thing, do it and do it well and then build upon it by introducing another thing. Over time, your schedule will adapt and you’ll find the ways to make the changes without them feeling so big.
Exercise is the same way. Rather than sign up for a year’s membership at the gym and workout 2 hours a day for the first week only to find yourself so sore and tired that you can’t imagine going back, try upping the activity level you engage in with different strategies. If you don’t go to the gym at all, starting there might not be the best option. Try walking a little more around your neighbourhood or take the stairs when there is an escalator. Maybe get off the bus one or two stops early and walk the rest of the way home. Once you start doing that, try a day pass a gym and do some very light weights or some simple cardio workouts like walking on a treadmill. As you build up over time, you will find what works and doesn’t work in terms of your likes and dislikes and what seems to be effective. This is called feedback, another critical component of complex systems.
By paying attention — being mindful — of what you’re doing and how it is working, you can start to build a longer-term strategy or pattern of activity that moves you along to where you want to go. It also prevents you from the let down at having not achieved your goals, but setting yourself up for success rather than failure. In doing so, you work with the complexity of human systems and our daily lives rather than against them.
