Normative Complexity: Breaking Up is Hard To Do
Posted: March 26, 2013 Filed under: complexity, innovation, psychology, systems thinking | Tags: complexity, design, jeans, mental health, mindfulness, minimum specifications, normative behaviour, psychology, psychotherapy, Russell Ackoff, social innovation Leave a comment »
Normative behaviour is what we expect from others operating in the world around us. It is what defines the world “normal”. It’s based on a complex array of history, social conventions, mores, values, context and timing, but it is the reason we know weird or odd from something else. Weird, is by definition, something that is not normal.
What I Learned From Denim
Many years ago I saw a TV special looking at the world of fashion and was struck by the process of designing denim jeans for men. The audience was told that jeans are often designed based on the prototype of the ‘average’ man and then worked out from there. What struck me was that they also said the ‘average’ man has a size that matches about 1 in every 7500 men. So the average — the normal — is not average at all. Indeed, he is particularly rare. Male models who represent this size do very well in their profession.
While there is a norm of social behaviour, there are actually very few people who are wholly ‘normal’ in their actions, nor are there obvious cases where normal is indeed, then norm in social systems. Why? Because social systems are complex by their very nature. They bring together diverse, overlapping, dynamic elements together operating at different scales simultaneously. This is complexity.
Just as individuals we bring our familial history, education, gender, sex, age, faith (if it exists), height, race (which might be highly mixed), experience, physical abilities, fashion choice, body type, vocal acuity, energy level and on to every single interaction we have. Every one of those factors — of this limited group — bring with it a set of unique attributes that individually and socially have differing weight and ‘normality’ depending on the circumstance. To imagine that there is a place where all of these line up with everyone else is utterly absurd if not statistically impossible.
Yet, we cling to the idea that normal exists and might even be something to aspire to. We push a conformity on to our expectations of each other and our research that is unreasonable and often harmful.
It’s not unexepcted. From our earliest days in the society we belong there is pressure to conform. Norms are what hold societies together. They are what creates culture. But where the confusion comes in is with the treatment of norms as truly common things that is universally positive (if attainable).
It is the often mis-attributed following quote to many that still stands out as true:
There is nothing so uncommon as common sense
In complexity science, norms are not disregarded, but are only minimally useful in helping understand patterns of activity. There are path dependencies, which guide certain activities and point to the importance of knowing where things start to help trace the manner in which they project outward. There are things called minimum specifications, often referred to as ‘simple rules’, that can help us create certain conditions within boundaries to shape behaviour. Yet, no matter how we shape these, the normative condition is not and will not be normal in any sense like your favourite pair of jeans.
What Relationship Break-Ups Can Teach Us About Complexity
Psychology and Psychotherapy, when operating at its best, helps people to understanding their true selves independent of, although interdependent with, the world around them. It falls short when it pushes people to conform to social norms apart from their true self. This is a shame.
Ask anyone who has endured a particularly heartfelt breakup of a relationship about normal and you’ll see the pain caused when we ascribe normative behaviour to complex systems. Sensemaking in a breakup is hard to do because of the massive cultural and social baggage we attach to them. Marriages, engagements, boy/girlfriend partnerships, affairs, flings, and flirts all bring socially normative expectations (and taboos) with them. And yet, if you think to any of those relations you’ve had I suspect that you’ll find that at its core there was relatively little ‘normal’ actually going on. Each relationship has its own cadence, pattern and normalness to it.
The best relationships have their own way of creating patterns that are unique to themselves, which is why we can’t replace or hope to replace one with another. They are irreplaceable for the very reason they are special. Not necessarily better or worse — but perhaps more congruent, happy, loving and so on — but different. The things that turn one person on are not the same as some one else and this is what makes relationships hard, but also exciting. This is what a complex adaptive system is like in real life.
Unless there was some obvious punctuated event like an affair or assault or major crime, most relationships don’t end because of a single thing. There might not even be a clear sense of what the “thing” that caused the breakup was. Sometimes people drift apart, sometimes the spark disappears, other times individuals forget who they are, while in some cases people discover themselves to be altogether new. Even still, sometimes this all happens at the same time, over time, in ways that neither couple can see until they are too far apart to connect. A complex system.
Treat this like a linear system and you may find potentially catastrophic consequences and hence the drama that TV and film introduce in their break-up scenes. For a funnier, but no less important take on this, see the video below from Dave Snowden.
This happens with lovers, spouses and friends all the time. A look to popular psychology or media will suggest that there are ways to handle this and no doubt efforts will be made to show how ‘healthy’ people transition and what they do to do so. These ‘healthy’ people will represent the ‘norm’. They’ll take time out for themselves, they’ll ‘get back up on the horse’, they’ll do the Eat, Pray, Love journey.. All of these might work, but they are based on an assumption that whomever is recommending these strategies knows the complexity of the individual’s case to whom they are referring.
Some therapists do, many do not. If you’re in for two or three sessions it will undoubtedly fall to the latter.
This is parallel to what we do in our efforts to inspire systems change. We look to the norms of our society, our discipline, our sector, our community and so on and we hire people for the equivalent of one to three to five sessions to tell us what to expect and do. What we get is Dr. Phil, which sounds great, allows us to boil enormous complications into a one hour soundbite or self-help book, and feel good because we are doing something that matches society’s expectation and we end up with what Russell Ackoff suggests as doing the wrong things righter.
Minding Our Norms
We expect to go into these encounters being the 1 in 7500 male model for jeans, when we are our own model for our our denim.
Work in complexity means breaking up with normative expectations and becoming mindful of what our own unique ones are as well as what the minimum specifications are that link us to that common thread of humanity — society, discipline, family, community, whatever. This is not easy. Mindfulness is very hard, but remarkably simple.
The more mindful we are of the rules and norms we live by or try to live up to, the better we can understand where they fit and where they collide against our own specific condition and setting and better craft strategies and design opportunities for real, genuine social innovation and not a caricature.
We need to be the model for our own jeans. When we do that, the fit will be both bespoke and very fashionable.
Photo by Muffet Used under Creative Commons Licence
The Job Market Metric In Education
Posted: December 30, 2012 Filed under: design thinking, education & learning, evaluation, innovation | Tags: complex systems, complexity, contemplative inquiry, continuing medical education, design thinking, developmental evaluation, disruption, education, educational design, evaluation, foresight, jobs, journalism, learning, learning organization, mindfulness, path dependence, professional education, resilience, teaching, university 2 Comments »
Post-secondary and continuing education is continuing to be rationalized in ways that are transforming the very foundation of the enterprise. Funding is a major driver of change in this field: how much is available, when it flows, where it comes from, what is funded, and who gets the funding are questions on the minds of those running the academy.
At the centre of the focus of this funding issue is the job market. Training qualified professionals for the job market in various forms has been one of the roles a university has played for more than a century. Now that role has become central.
Let’s consider what that means and what it could do in shaping the various possible futures of the university. This second in a series looking at the post-secondary and continuing education focuses on the metrics of jobs.
“What are all these people going do?”
The employability of graduates is now the holy grail of education industry statistics. Earlier this year I was sitting on the stage at an academic convocation with a senior colleague staring out at a sea of soon-to-be-graduates when he leaned over and asked the question quoted above. Staring at a sea of masters and doctoral graduates numbered in the hundreds and knowing that this ceremony was held twice per year, the question stuck and remains without an answer.
Maybe there were enough jobs for that cohort, but this process gets repeated twice each year at universities around the world and each year that I’ve been a professor those numbers (of graduates) seem to go up. Some of our programs in the health sciences are admitting three times the number of students than they were just ten years ago. There is much demand for education (as judged by departmental applications), but are there jobs demanding this kind of education in its current form?
Yes, the Baby Boom is moving into an age of retirement and increasing needs for health services, but do we need to graduate 80+ Physical or Occupational Therapists to meet this need this year? Do we need a few dozen more epidemiologists or health promotion specialists to add to the pool? How about psychologists or social workers: how many of those do we need? The answer from my colleagues in these fields is: We don’t know.
Chasing the Wind
Jobs are a red herring. It’s one thing to have a job, but is it the job that you trained for? (And is having that job even a reasonable goal?) Being employed is not the same as building a career. What if you were trained perfectly for a job that no longer existed? Imagine a Blacksmith in the 20th century or a Bloodletter. These questions are not asked, nor is much asked about quality of education relative to the pressures of recruitment, cost-cutting and educational rationalization. Most of us don’t know what quality education is in real terms because we are measuring it (if we are measuring anything at all besides jobs) by standards set for the jobs of the past, not the future (or even the present?).
“Skate where the puck is going, not where it’s been.” – Wayne Gretzky
Jobs are living things and very few in 2013 will resemble what they did even 10 years ago. The citizens of the developing world are entering this rapidly changing job market ready for change (See also McKinsey Global Institute report on future of work in advanced economies) because they don’t have the old ways to rely on. They are primed for change and if professional education is to meet the needs of a changing world, it needs to change too. It means getting serious about learning.
If education is rationalizing itself to focus more on jobs, then it also needs to get serious about clarifying what jobs mean, defining what ‘success’ looks like for a graduate, and whether those jobs are designed for where the proverbial puck is now or for where it is going.
Disruptive Learning / Disturbed Education
“The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change -” ― Heraclitus
I’ve pointed out that learners have an uneasy relationship with learning principally because it means disrupting things. This is a topic I’ll be covering in greater depth in a future post, but if one considers how our social, economic, and environmental systems are changing it is not unreasonable to call this the age of disruption .
Change in complex systems is often logarithmic, not linear. It may be massively punctuated like a Lévy Flight or it could be closer to a random walk. In environments with a change coefficient that is large the level of attention must be more fine-grained than 5-year reviews. It requires developmental evaluation methods and learning organizations, not just conventional approaches to generating and assessing feedback. It requires mindful attention and contemplative inquiry to guide a regular reflective practice if one is to pay attention to the subtleties in change that could have enormous impact.
For example, if journalists and news media waited every five years to assess the state of their profession, they would have missed out on Twitter and come late to blogging, two of their (now) powerful sources of competition and tools of the trade. Some have waited, which is why they are no longer around. Metrics for journalism education today might consider the amount of exposure and proficiency in social media use, digital photography, use of handheld tools for communication, and real-time reporting skills. Metrics of the past might focus on newspapers and radio broadcasting. Which mindset, skillset and toolset would you rather be trained in today?
Questions for educators, learners (and evaluators):
Whether health sciences, journalism, human services or any field, what might some questions be that can help determine the role of job training in professional education? Here are five starters:
1. What is the state of your profession right now and are you training people for existing in this state? Are you preparing people for the next evolution?
2. Where is your field of practice going? What are the possible futures for your profession in the next 5, 10, and 20 years? Will it still exist? Are you a blacksmith looking for more horses in the automobile age or Steve Jobs waiting to attract people to a new graphical user interface?
3. Is your mindset, skillset or toolset in need of re-consideration? Does it still do the job you’ve hired it to do?
4. What do people need that your skills can help with? What unfilled needs and expectations are there in the world that your mindset, skillset and toolset could solve?
5. What would happen if your field of practice disappeared? How else could you apply what you know to making the contribution you wish to make and earn a living? What other skills, tools and ways of thinking would you need to adapt?
Design thinking can greatly help shape the way that one conceives of a problem, works through possible options, and develops prototypes to address the needs of the present and the future. Foresight methods help lay additional context for design and systems thinking by providing ways to anticipate possible futures for any given field. Lastly, knowing what the state of things are now and how they got to where they are now can help determine the path dependencies that education may have fallen into.
We can’t change what we don’t see and better foresight, hindsight and present sight is critical to better ensuring that education outcomes are not imagined, but based on something that can actually improve learning.
Reflecting on Gratitude and Going Beyond Thanksgiving
Posted: November 22, 2012 Filed under: education & learning, health promotion, innovation, psychology | Tags: gratitude, inspiration, learning, mindfulness, positive psychology, research, Robert Emmons, teaching, Thanksgiving Comments Off
Today is the day that Americans come together to celebrate Thanksgiving, a day dedicated to gratitude (in Canada, we celebrate Thanksgiving in October, to traditionally align with the harvest).
What a wonderful holiday concept: spending time focused on gratitude for what one has.
There are many good reasons for giving thanks. Psychologist Robert Emmons and other researchers working within the emergent field of positive psychology have looked intently at the psychological effects of gratitude and found it positively correlates with well-being and goal-attainment. For example, Emmons and McCullogh (2003) conducted a series of experiments comparing those with a grateful outlook to those who did not and found those who expressed gratitude more often reported higher levels of subjective wellbeing in some of those studies. (For those interested, Emmons’ 2007 book Thanks! is an accessible primer on the research on gratitude).
Giving thanks is a way of introducing a small disruption in the everyday and inspiring reflection on the present moment. Gratitude is a part of many meditiation and yoga practices, as well as mindfulness practice (PDF – example).
So in solidarity with my American friends who are giving thanks on this day and all of us who take time to express gratitude on any day, I offer a departure from the usual post and share some things I am thankful for (in no particular order):
- To Artists. Those who share their creative outputs with the world openly and encourage us to see and think differently. Artistry can be aesthetic, part of performance and innovation (says Hilary Austen), and something that Seth Godin believes we all are, when we listen to what is important. Its the writers, performers, teachers, journalists, and engaged audiences that are all part of the creative tapestry around us when they choose to make their art available.
- To those scientists and researchers who spur exploration and share what they learn widely and openly and make the world better through making their work accessible, including supporting open access of scientific knowledge. The world has too many hoarders. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants because they bent down to help us up.
- To everyone who is willing to fail, get up again, improve and work to succeed and tell others about their story so others can be inspired to fail and succeed in new ways.
- To teachers (and that doesn’t have to be the person at the front of the class). To those who take the time to help others to learn, really learn, and understand material. This could be trainers, classmates, or grandparents — anyone who cares that I learn something and tries to help myself and others toward that goal.
- To students of life. Those who are willing to be taught, to learn, to adapt and to innovate when necessary. This includes clinicians and scientists using the best evidence to make decisions and pointing out where it doesn’t exist (and taking action on filling the gaps). It’s people asking hard, but important questions — including those about their own closely held beliefs. It’s those who see learning as fun and seek to infect that sense of joy in their fellow knowledge travellers. It also includes all of those who work in knowledge translation and exchange to help the learning process along in professional and personal life.
- To the organizers, funders, sponsors and participants behind and in front of TED, Thinkr, the RSA, Google Zietgeist Minds and all the organizations and individuals out there sharing stories of success, creativity, and inspiring us all to think in new ways. It’s easy to take all this for granted so today, I am not.
- To every person that smiles freely and often (and at me!). Smiles are contagious (PDF – example)
- To everyone who takes the time to listen and seeks to understand . We all don’t agree, but if we try to truly understand each other by listening, cultivate empathy, and mindfully reflect on our impact on the world, those differences can be sources of learning and creativity than unproductive conflict, hatred and ignorance. Too much of that and in a world of the 140-character sound bite, it’s too easy to be seduced by quick outrage and self-supported misconceptions.
- To the individuals who work at inspiring others to be their best selves through compassion and creation. The diverse voices of people like Seth Godin, Jonathan Fields, Brene Brown, John Maeda, and Jon Kabat Zinn who all provide means of making sense of human life and inspiring a greater appreciation of what happens along its journey.
- To the Internet and every person and organization responsible for developing it, delivering it, and maintaining it and fighting for the rights, freedoms and responsibilities that come with having so much knowledge, information and entertainment at our fingertips. It’s easy to take this enormous treasure trove of knowledge and services for granted.
- To every administrator or department chair who marshalls power to change the structure of the workplace to make it more humane, by rewarding earnest effort while providing the space to slow time to pause and think, nurture the organization’s collective mental health, and allow everyone to genuinely learn and share their best with those they engage with. Work takes up a lot of our lifetime — imagine if it buoyed us and sustained us rather than trapped us?
- To every person who says, means and listens to the message that we are all enough. The rat race is for rats and the human race is intended for human beings, not human doings.
- To everyone who feeds us — from farm to market to fork to the earth. Most of us have little comprehension of where our food comes from, travels to, goes through, or ends up and if we did, we might act a little (or a lot) differently. We have the luxury of ignorance in North America, but should we? Spend time with a farmer and you’ll be amazed at what you don’t know about the very things that sustain us.
- To every blogger and Tweeter out there who takes the time to share their thoughts and promote positive, critical thinking about topics that inspire new thinking. Thanks to the amazing blogosphere and Twittersphere, I have made a lot of wonderful friends I’ve never met in person, but who inspire me every week.
Thanks to everyone out there making the world better. Today is the day I give thanks to all of you.
What are you grateful for?
Photo By Marjory Collins, photographer for Farm Security Administration. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
The Mindful Socially Innovative Organization
Posted: October 16, 2012 Filed under: complexity, emergence, evaluation, innovation, social systems, systems thinking | Tags: awareness, consciousness, contemplative inquiry, mindfulness, organizational development, organizational psychology 2 Comments »
Mindful Eye on the Organization
In complex systems there is a lot to pay attention to. Mindfulness and contemplative inquiry built into the organization can be a way to deal with complexity and help detect the weak signals that will make it thrive and be resilient in the face of challenges.
Most human-centred social ventures spend much of their time in the domain of complexity. What makes these complex is not the human part, but the social. As we interact with our myriad beliefs, attitudes, bases of knowledge, and perceptions we lay the foundation for complexity and the emergent properties than come from it. It’s why we are interesting as a species and why social organizing is such a challenge, particularly when we encourage free-flowing ideas and self-determination. Because of this complexity, we get exposed to a lot of information that gets poorly filtered or synthesized or missed altogether. Yet, it is in this flotsam and jetsam of information that keys to future problems and potential ‘solutions’ to present issues might lie. This is the power of weak signals. But how to we pay attention to these? And what does it matter?
The Strength of Weak Signals
A human social organization, which could mean a firm, a network, or a community — any collection of people that is organized by itself or other means — most likely generates complexity, sometimes often and sometimes occasionally. If we consider the Cynefin Framework, the domain of complexity is where emergent, novel practice is the dominant means of acting. In order to practice effectively within this space, one probes the environment, engages in sensemaking based on that information, and then responds appropriately. Viewed from another perspective, this could easily be used to describe mindfulness practice.
Mindfulness is both a psychological state and activity and a psychospiritual practice. I am using this in the psychological sense, even if one could apply the psychospiritual lens at the same time if they wished. Bishop and colleagues (2004) proposed a two-component definition of mindfulness:
The first component involves the self-regulation of attention so that it is maintained on immediate experience, thereby allowing for increased recognition of mental events in the present moment. The second component involves adopting a particular orientation toward one’s experiences in the present moment, an orientation that is characterized by curiosity, openness, and acceptance (p.232)
Weak signals are activities that when observed across conditions reveal patterns that provide beneficial (useful) coherence that has meaningful potential impact on events of significance, yet yield little useful information when observed in discrete events. In other words, these are little things that get spotted in different settings, contexts and times that when linked together produce a pattern that could have meaningful consequences in different futures. By themselves, such signals are relatively benign, but together they reveal something potentially larger.
One reason weak signals get missed is the premature labelling of information as ‘good’ and the constrained definition of what is ‘useful’ based on the current context. Mindfulness practice allows you to transcend the values and judgements imposed on data or information presented in front of you to see it more objectively.
Mindfulness involves quieting the mind and focusing on the present moment, not the past or the possible implications for the future, just the here and now. It is not ahistorical, however. Our past experience, knowledge and wisdom all come to bear on the mindful experience, yet they do not guide that experience.
Experience provides a frame of reference to consider new information, not judge it or apply value to it. It is what allows you to see patterns and derive meaning and sense from what is out there.
Building Mindful Organizations
A review of the research and scholarship on mindfulness finds a nearly exclusive focus on the individual. While there is much literature on the means of using mindfulness and contemplative inquiry as means of being active in the world, this is done largely through mechanisms of individuals coming together as groups, rather than the organizations they form as the focus of analysis.
There is an exception. Social psychologists Weick and Sutcliffe (2007, summarized here and here – PDF) wrote about resiliency in the face of uncertainty using a mindfulness lens to understand how organizations make better sense of what they do and experience in their operations. In their manuscript, Organizing for High Reliability: Processes of Collective Mindfulness (PDF), they lay down a theory for the mindful organization and how it increases the reliability of sensemaking processes when applied to complex informational environments.
They describe the conditions that precipitate mindfulness in organizations this way (p.38):
A state of mindfulness appears to be created by at least five processes that we have induced from accounts of effective practice in HROs (High Reliability Organizations) and from accident investigations:
1. Preoccupation with failure
2. Reluctance to simplify interpretations
3. Sensitivity to operations
4. Commitment to resilience
5. Underspecification of structures
It is notable that the aim here is not to reduce complexity (or impose simplicity), nor is it to focus on ‘positivity’, rather it is focused on events that help contribute to moving in particular direction. In that regard, this is not neutral, but it is not active either. It enables organizations to see patterns, focus on structures and information that encourages resilience to change, and contemplates what that information means (sensemaking) in context. Doing so provides useful information for decision making and taking action, but doesn’t frame information in those terms a priori.
Seeing Beyond Events
At issue is the development of consciousness of what is going on within your organization moment-to-moment, rather than punctuated by events. Events are the emergent properties of underlying patterns of activity. When we spend time attending to events without understanding the conditions that led to those events, we are doing the equivalent of changing the dressing on a wound in the absence of preventing or understanding its cause.
A mindful organization, like the image of the Buddha above, can emphasize the eye, but not at the expense of the rest of the picture. It is attuned to both simultaneously, noting events (e.g., like the square highlighted eye above), but that it is only through the underlying pattern beneath it that the highlighted context makes sense (the rest of the pictured squares). Yet, the only way the organization can learn that the yellow square is different or to ascertain its meaningful significance is through a sense of the whole, not just the part and that is social.
The Curious Organization
Mindfulness and its wider-focused counterpart Contemplative Inquiry both have a root in attending to the present moment, but also in curiosity about the things that is brought to the mind’s attention. It’s not just about seeing, but inquiring. What makes it distinct is that it does not impose judgement on what is perceived not seeking to change it while in that state of mindful awareness. This judgement and imposition of value on to what is going on is where organizations can get trapped.
In complex systems, the meaning of information may change rapidly and is likely uncertainty. The wisdom of experience, shared among others contemplating the same information without judgement, allows for a sensemaking process to unfold that does not impose limitations, yet also keeps a focus on what is going on moment-to-moment. Gathering this data, moment-to-moment, is what developmental evaluation with its emphasis on real-time data collection seeks to do and can serve as a valuable tool for organizing data to allow for a mindful contemplative inquiry into it that will illuminate weak signals.
Creating an organizational culture where open sharing, questioning, experimentation, and attention to the adjacent possibles that come from the data and experiences from operations is the foundation for a mindful organization. This means slowing down, valuing non-doing instead of the constant push to action, cultivating contemplative inquiry and reflection, while also being clear about the directions that matter. Thus, strategy in this case is not divorced from mindfulness, rather it gently frames a directionality of effort. In doing so, it creates possibilities for innovation, attention to quality, and a mechanism for building resiliency within organizations and those working with them and within them.
In creating these mindful systems we move closer to making sense of complexity and better prepare ourselves for social innovation.
Image Saddha by gnosis1211 from Deviant Art used under Creative Commons Licence
How Serious Are We About Learning?
Posted: July 26, 2012 Filed under: behaviour change, education & learning, health promotion, innovation, public health | Tags: behaviour change, Dan Pink, discovery, education, innovation, Jonah Lehrer, knowledge integration, learning, mindfulness, organizational change, psychology, public health, Robert Scott Root-Bernstein, social innovation, social systems, Steven Johnson, systems thinking, Toronto, University of Toronto 6 Comments »
How Serious Are We About Learning?
When journalist and book author Daniel Pink tweeted the above image the other day it provoked thinking about what real learning means and what it takes to achieve it. We produce enormous amounts of knowledge, yet struggle to put it into use, but we also teach much and learn little because the systems we’ve designed for education and experience don’t match our expressed interest and rhetoric around learning.
In my graduate course on behaviour change I would ask students on the first day why they were taking the class in the first place. Aside from the few students for whom the course was required everyone else was doing it by choice because there were many others to choose from. So why would they choose this one?
The answers would vary, but inevitably I’d hear over and again that students love learning and wanted to understand more about behaviour change, because they were interested in change and some would even say they were good at it and wanted to help others do it.
These are all well-meaning and said in a spirit that I think was honest and true. Except the reality is that it is likely a big, huge lie and one that we all share in its telling.
I would counter with two things:
- Loving the idea of learning something new is different than actually seeking out learning opportunities and that most of us love the former, but are not so enthused about the latter;
- The only people who regularly welcome change are babies with soiled diapers.
To illustrate the first point I simply ask people to consider the last conference they went to where there were options on what sessions to attend. How many of the sessions did they attend that featured content that confirmed or gently extended what they already knew versus content that was new? If you’re a health promoter doing community engagement work, sessions on Bayesian modelling for epidemics might offer far more learning than a session on working with diversity in communities (particularly if that is what you already do). Even more, how often do people go to sessions from people they know or have already seen speak? Chances are, many.
One could argue that there are subtleties that a conference presentation might offer on a familiar topic that are worth attending and while I would say that has merit, most learning that has impact is uncomfortable at some level. It extends our thinking, challenges our beliefs, or re-arranges our worldview — in ways small and large.
Wanting knowledge and living learning
Many people will say “I love change”, but that is usually in the context that everyone else is changing, not them. When I was the boss and said “things must change” it was very different than when my staff or my boss would say “things must change“. As a behaviour change educator and intervener, I need to be mindful of my own ironies and resistance to change. So should we all.
The same thing goes for knowledge. Academics are famous for ending studies with “more research is needed”. We never seem to have enough knowledge. There are two problems with this idea.
The first is that, in dynamic and evolving environments, we will never have perfect knowledge that fits like a glove, because the contexts are always novel. This isn’t to say that evidence isn’t useful, but ‘good enough’ knowledge might be a more reasonable demand than ‘best evidence’ in many of the situations where complexity is high and so is change. That’s why data gathering techniques like developmental evaluation aren’t attractive to those who need certainty.
But there is another problem with the knowledge quest and that is one of integration. In our efforts to seek more knowledge, are we integrating what we are learning from what we already have? Are we savouring the data we collect, the articles we read, the Tweets and blogs that get forwarded are way?
We quest for more, but should we quest for better?
A newly published paper synthesized research on event horizons on memory and found that shifts in activities around an event — boundaries — can prompt forgetting and recall. We remember transitions between activities, but they also prompt forgetting depending on the mindfulness associated with the act. When we are deluging ourselves with more data, more media, more everything, we are increasing the potential remember rate, but due to the volume of content, I would surmise that we are increasing the forget rate much more. Simply reflect on your high school or undergraduate education and ask yourself if you remember more than you forgot about what you learned.
We are so busy with our search for new knowledge that we interrupt opportunities to learn from what we have.
Serious learning means non-doing
Returning to the tweet from Dan Pink, it’s worthwhile considering what it means to learn and the systems we have in place to facilitate learning. The tweet links to a discussion of how German companies give their employees five days of off-site continuing education each year. This concept of Bildungsurlaub is a leave designed to allow employees to stretch their thinking and integrate something new. Not only is off-site learning important, but the time associated with integrating material is critical.
A read of the literature on innovation and research shows consistently how time off, quiet time, slow time and down time all contribute to discovery. Robert Scott Root-Bernstein’s brilliant Discovering, Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine, or Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From are all books that dive deep into creative production and show that great discoveries and innovations come from having time (with limits) to integrate material to learn. Freedom to create, explore and sit and mindfully reflect are all united concepts in the pursuit of good learning. Not everything requires this, but big concepts and bold ideas do from mathematics to science to social science and philosophy.
Yet, at an organizational and systems level, where is the support for this? Even university faculty (the tenured ones at least) who have generous vacations and sabbaticals are finding themselves crunched for time between the fight for one of the ever-fewer grants, increasing numbers of students and teaching demands, and the added push to ensure knowledge is translated. The image of faculty sitting and reading and thinking is truly an imagination. Most of my colleagues in academia do little of this, because they are out of time.
In the corporate and non-profit world this is worse. Every hour and day is to be accounted for. The idea of sending people off to learn and to think seems anathema to productivity, yet research shows incredible powers associated with taking a break and doing less and not more.
Getting serious about learning
To illustrate the scope of the problem, the University of Toronto holds one of the finest academic library systems in the world and has over 11.5 million books and 5.7 million microform materials. It is one university (of many) in one city. Add in the local Toronto public library system, the network of universities and other libraries it is connected to, local and global bookstores and all the content freely available online that is not part of this system and I challenge anyone working in social innovation or public health to say with conviction that there is a lack of knowledge out there on any important topic. Yes, we don’t know it all, but we don’t do nearly enough with what we do know because there is so much.
We will not read it all nor can we hope to synthesize it all, but we can do much with what we have. Just looking at my own personal library of physical books (not including all I have in the digital realm between books and papers) it’s easy to see that I have more than enough knowledge to tackle most of what I am facing in my work. Most of us do. But do we have the wisdom to use it? Do we have the systems — organizations and personal — that allow us to take the time and soak this in, share our ideas with others, and be mindful of the world around us enough to learn, not just consume?
When we spend as much time creating those spaces, places and systems, then we can answer “yes” to the question of whether we’re serious about learning.
Enough knowledge here?
Complexity and the Senseless Marketing of the Future
Posted: July 16, 2012 Filed under: complexity, systems science, systems thinking | Tags: climate change, complex adaptive systems, complexity, environment, FastCoExist, foresight, futurists, innovation, marketing, marketing complexity, mindfulness, networks, Pareto distribution, resilience, simplicity, social networks, systems thinking Comments Off
Futurists take what we know now and project into the future ideas about things will be like years from today using the models that have worked consistently up to now. Those models applied to human systems are changing quickly making marketing the future based on them senseless and potentially dangerous.
Earlier this past week a post on FastCoExist caught my attention and brought to mind why I have such an uneasy relationship with futurists and futures as a field. The post, 8 Ways the World Will Change in 2052, is look at the next 40 years written by Jorgen Randers, a professor of climate strategy at the BI Norwegian Business School and written with all the confident swagger that typifies futurists making statements about what is to come. After all, it’s hard to draw an audience (and the benefits that comes with that) when you don’t have a confident answer on your subject matter — even if that answer is wrong. In this latest post in the series on marketing complexity I look at futurists and their predictions and what it could mean for making sense of the threats and opportunities we will face in the years to come.
The Mathematical Problem of Futures and Complexity
The FastCoExist article paints a picture of a world that looks a lot like the one we have today, just with some shifts in economic and social structures. It suggests that much will remain the same even though a few key things will change, but our general relations will remain constant. It is that consistency that raises my concerns about futurist thinking (not all, to be sure) and its use of the data today to make predictions tomorrow. There is an assumption of linearity that weaves its way through the narratives spun by futurists that do not fit with how complex systems behave, nor does it account for the network effects created by interconnected systems.
Where I live now (Toronto), we have seen an almost uninterrupted heat wave for more than three weeks and that is forecast to continue for the week to come. This is the hottest year in recorded history (video), and as this short news clip shows the implications are many. At our current level of focus the implications may seem slight: changing growing conditions for gardens, better cottage swimming weather, brown lawns etc.. But at another scale and perspective, the interconnections between these things will start to reveal themselves if the pattern continues.
It is here where I see futurists getting it wrong as their predicts rest on largely linear trajectories of change and scientific knowledge that uses linear models to create predictions. The mistake is taking linear phenomenon and grafting that knowledge on to complex cases, while another mistake is taking science that works for static things and applying it to dynamic objects.
Complexity often produces change curves that follow a Pareto distribution, which is a way of accounting for things like ‘tipping points’, and is rarely linear in its effects for long periods of time. As the news report mentions, Toronto has an average temperature of 3.5 degrees higher than normal in a single year. It could be an aberration, but when we see record-breaking temperatures for years on end that looks like a pattern forming.
Climate change is not just about things getting warmer, cooler, wetter or dryer. From a human standpoint, how we adapt to these changes is what counts and in a networked world is that adaptations happen simultaneously and in a dynamic, interconnected manner. That means that many things change at the same time and that the relationship between dynamic objects means that the overall quantity and rate of change in the system is likely to be logarithmic (exponential) not additive.
Reframing change models: the language of complex systems.
If we are to create models that are more useful to us, we need to develop them with complexity in mind, think in systems and act as designers. To do this requires a change in the thinking models we use and the ways we communicate these models to the wider world. Yet, it isn’t as alien as it seems; we do it all the time with ourselves in explaining our social lives.
- A child goes from being peaceful and quiet to a tantrum in a matter of seconds.
- A calm, composed individual bursts into tears at a seemingly random event.
- A polite, warm conversation quickly turns cold at the slightest mention of a particular phenomenon
In many of these cases the ’cause’ might not be obvious. An example I use with my students is this:
Imagine a couple in their bedroom and one partner sees a wayward sock that has been left on floor and gets intensely angry at the other partner upon discovery of the sock. Why? Is is that the sock on the floor is so problematic that it reduces an otherwise peaceful environment into a space of conflict? Is the sock really that bad? Or is the sock a catalyst for something else? Does it represent something (or many things) that are embodied in the sock being left carelessly on the floor? Does the sock serve as a vessel for accumulated grievances and stressors only loosely related to its position on the floor?
This example of the sock illustrates how a Pareto distribution of social tensions in a relationship could be expressed. It points to how the most ‘obvious’ linear answer might not always be the case even if initial appearance suggest a relationship.
Explaining the reasons for problems opens a door to solving them. But we can do more.
The power of weak signals
The way to interject into a complex system is not to pay attention to everything all of the time, but to small things that show patterns. Eric Berlow has a remarkable 3 minute TED talk that illustrates how signals can be extracted from networks to reveal simplicity in complexity. A 2008 paper in the journal Physical Review shows the ways in which weak signals can be detected by reducing the overall volume of information or nodes in a network.
But what to pay attention to? This is where mindful evaluation and attention comes in. Mindfulness is not just a way to connect to one’s inner life, but also the outer world around us. A mindful approach to monitoring and evaluation means watching what happens around us and positioning tools, metrics and data gathering processes to give us the necessary feedback on our systems around us. To take the example of the couple’s conflict over the sock, paying attention within the relationship to minor conflicts, areas of tention, and moments of release earlier could have diffused energy enough to mean the sock was just a sock.
In social systems, this means paying attention to areas of intersection where natural tensions occur due to difference. These differences could be perspective, attitude, knowledge, beliefs or capabilities. These points of intersection are often where novelty emerges and innovation takes place, but they are also where deeper problems can begin. Constant, evolving and dynamic methods of data collection that recognizes change in non-linear and linear forms is more likely to enable the sorts of weak signal detection that can help us see the future more clearly.
That can help us make sense of future possibilities, rather than make empty predictions that guide what we do now at the expense of paying attention to what might come (and what is really happening).
The Complex Consequences of Simple and Easy
Posted: July 9, 2012 Filed under: business, innovation, psychology | Tags: Annie Murphy Paul, complexity, guru, leadership, learning, London School of Economics, marketing, mindfulness, psychology, Seth Godin, social media 1 Comment »
In this second post on marketing complexity I look at how the allure of simple and easy lulls us into seeing past complexity and focusing on the least powerful forces that impact sustained change and meaningful innovation.
H.L. Mencken’s oft quoted phrase (including on this blog) about simple answers being wrong lest we commit to doing the wrong things righter (as Russell Ackoff said) . Simplicity however, is seductive,”neat”, “clean” and wrong when it comes to addressing complex problems. Such problems require complex responses and such responses are hard to market to a public used to the neat and clean. To take a look at how this happens it’s first worth contemplating ways we get people to buy into the simple, wrong ideas in the first place.
Going past the guru
We’ve all seen the gurus and maybe have a few of their books on our shelves. They can make us feel good as they feel our pain and propose 3, 5, 7, 10, 101 simple, easy steps to success. Lists are everywhere packed with gems toting advice on how we can be better, live better, perform better and beyond. The track record of success for these books is mixed in their impact on human action, but they might make people feel better about themselves. Mitch Joel over at Six Pixels of Separation / Twist Image even noted how this desire for inspiration in simple motivational messagin has found its way increasingly into the world of Facebook.
“If you cannot find peace within yourself, you will never find it anywhere else.” - Marvin Gaye. I just saw an image on Facebook of this quote. It’s not the first time. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve noticed a veritable onslaught of motivation and personal development quotes that are embedded in images (with varying degrees of artistic quality). Some of them are profound and powerful and some of them are quirky and cheesy. My added interest in this trend is the request to share, comment and spread them.
They are everywhere and I’ve shared some of them on Facebook and Twitter, too. But the sheer volume of these messages ironically might be their undoing in effect. It is as if the world is fine and we’re OK and life really is simple at its core. This, like many profundities in this world, is both the truth and a lie. Being true to yourself and aware is incredibly powerful, but it alone doesn’t change our collective wellbeing unless most of us do it together. For that, we need to do the work outside ourselves and within simultaneously. These messages imply change is simple (and sometimes easy), but the mistake is in thinking changing your world is changing the world at the same time.
Aspiring for change and doing the work to get it
This is both a marketing and unmarketing problem. Simple sells. It’s easy to Tweet and relatively simple to package. It’s also easy to mislead people into a sense of false progress and inspiring guruship with those who are the prophets or thought leaders behind this simplistic thinking. The next step is taking the meaning in these messages of hope and inspiration and connecting them to something beyond ourselves into something larger. It also means wishing for better, thinking healthier and acting on these in the world requires work. A lot of work… and that is unsexy and complicated.
Seth Godin is one who I find to be an ‘unsexy’ (with apologies to Seth, this is about his ideas not him) truth-telling antidote to the guru. His messages about success are both inspirational and aspirational, but always gilded with a message that the path is complex: it is about discovering our art, committing to it, sharing it with the world, and keeping at it over the bumps (work hard) while knowing when or if to quit.
In an age where there is a quick fix, discovering one’s art no matter what it is and living life through it not something that has a recipe attached to it. It requires we pay attention to ourselves (and our world) and our deepest needs, but also the patterns forming around us. Yet, with so much information swirling around us, we run into a problem of a widening signal to noise ratio. In marketing every message we send has to get through the din created by all the other marketing messages on every medium or device, all the other correspondence, the social media channels, the billboards, the books and pamphlets and on-the-field paint that bombards us with signals that are largely about creating an image of cause and effect.
Simple (but not obvious) rules
So how to get through it? One of the ways we naturally navigate through complexity is the use of heuristics (PDF book link). Heuristics are guidelines* that serve as simple rules to follow, providing a start point in the complex environment from which to act on. A tongue-in-cheek hueristic is to follow someone when in doubt, building on Douglas Adams’ line in The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy:
Follow that car, it looks like it knows where it’s going.
But this can fail us in complex environments and sometimes simple ones. Our preoccupation with leadership, success, and champions can be leading us on the wrong path. In a post earlier today, Annie Murphy Paul provoked some thinking about what it means to be #1 in a particular field and how it may be wiser to learn from #2 if we are seeking to emulate success in our work. Paul recognizes that success sometimes involves good fortune that cannot be planned, yet that there is research that suggests those not considered the guru might be worth paying attention to if we relax our gaze. She writes:
Tellingly, the most genuinely useful innovations tend to emerge from companies’ on-the-ground responses to economic and social challenges — not from business advice books. So concluded researchers Danny Miller and Jon Hartwick in an article in the Harvard Business Review, for which they tracked the coverage of business trends in academic, professional, business and trade publications over a 17-year period. Evanescent fads, they found, are usually simple, one-size-fits-all solutions promoted by charismatic “gurus.” Approaches with real staying power are more complex and multifaceted, and demand deep organizational changes.
Gurus, reputation and the failure of filters
One of the ways around this is to create filters based on reputation, which is at the core of social network research. However, it also falls into the trap mentioned by Murphy as attracting followers to the wrong gurus. Gurus can also be in the form of institutions. Another post by Mark Carrigan on the London School of Economics Impact of Social Sciences blog about how high impact journals also carry with them a sense of cultural power that off-loads much of the critical thinking to academic reputation. Drawing on the parallels with the art world, he points to the issue of time:
The obscenely wealthy but time-poor rely on such brands to guarantee the virtues of the art they invest in, assuaging the insecurities about their purchases which are only sustained because “they are not willing to spend the time required to educate themselves to the point of overcoming insecurity”.
We do this in scholarly work all the time and, I believe, even more so as the number of academic sources rise and our filters get filled. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, we are becoming overwhelmed by information and filter failure, short on time, and struggling to make sense of the complexity around us partly as a result of all of this. As complexity grows, the patterns of action become harder to see.
Carrigan challenges us to imagine what might happen if one of these patterns — prestige title — was removed:
Is it the case that within the academic world, inclusion in a prestigious journal becomes a substitute for, and certainly is a reinforcement of, intellectual judgement? As a thought-experiment: how would academic life differ if these status hierarchies weren’t available to help us navigate the knowledge system? How would we respond? I suspect that activities which are already everyday features of the academic world (particularly dialogue and debate within communities of practice) would take on a newfound importance. What else would be different?
For any marketing of complexity to work, the risk in creating a false guru is high, but so too is the risk of installing overly simplistic filters (reputation-heavy promotion). In both cases we need to address complexity with a complex response and doing so with one that doesn’t exacerbate the problem by adding too much extraneous information to our media ecology, getting us back into trouble elsewhere. This is pointing to problems, however there are possible ways to address them. In an upcoming post, I’ll explore what some of these are.
* I purposefully did not use the common term “rule of thumb” on account of its contested origin and overuse.
Mindful Navigation of Complexity and Social Media
Posted: July 4, 2012 Filed under: psychology, social media | Tags: Buddhify, Clay Shirky, complexity, contemplative inquiry, health behaviour change, information, Marshall McLuhan, media, media ecology, meditation, mental health, mindfulness, Mitch Joel, news, psychology, social media, wellbeing 2 Comments »
Social media is probably THE word of 2012. Facebook goes public, Twitter takes off, and YouTube and LinkedIn are hitting their stride. Add mobile data to the equation and the prospects for a truly interconnected web (no pun intended) of humanity in real time is becoming close enough to imagine being real. The singularity indeed may be near and social media is helping lead the way to a new global brain.
Evolving our thinking and the role of social learning
We are at another inflection point in social cognition. We have evolved our thinking from units associated with families, to tribes, to institutions and more recently to networks. With each step, the complexity of the communications increases. Consider the Facebook status update and the myriad sets of relationships that are wrapped up in the audience for that post and the intricacies associated with deciding who should see that post or who should have access to it. (For the record, Google + is immensely more easy to navigate with its Circles, yet it still hasn’t quite caught on).
With every additional layer of connections so too does the complexity associated with those connections. It is no wonder that people are feeling overwhelmed, confused and disturbed by social media, and yet it is pulling us into a new (media) world order that is seemingly inevitable.
Let me unpack these ideas. Firstly, the move towards social media is as much a way forward, but also a return to the past when ‘news’ was transmitted socially. It is also a means of navigating complexity. When the abundance of information available to us is as great as it is, humans need ways to efficiently filter information for effective sense-making. To this end, recommendations from our peers and social learning is an efficient way to side-step this. We use a form of distributed cognition to mitigate the risk and assist in our decision making and use others as a proxy for thinking about problems. It’s not that we’re stupid or lazy, we’re being efficient.
Filter failure and the problem of information volume
Clay Shirky has argued: we are not living with information overload, but filter failure. This is true and not true, because we are exposed to more potentially meaningful bits of information than ever before, not just more information. While Shirky is correct that we have had more information than we could possibly consume at any one time for generations, the increase and ease of access to this information through electronic media and the personal relevance of this information makes our current circumstances different.
We now have tailored news services/apps like news.me and Zite that help filter information, but they also add to the number of sources that one regular checks to get news. I use Twitter as a primary news source, but as my list of followers increases along with those I follow, the number of engagements I have through that media increase every week. Add email, Facebook, Google +, my LinkedIn groups and connections and the RSS feeds I subscribe to and its amazing I am able to do anything with any of the information I get.
That is part of the problem. Contemplative inquiry and mindfulness is a potential solution.
Mindful escapes
This past week’s Opinionator column in the NY Times was on the busy trap that we find ourselves in. This was published the same week as The Atlantic published a piece on women’s challenge of ‘doing it all’ that I commented on in my last post. Both articles point to a trend toward expectations of having to do too much and not finding the time to squeeze it all in. Mitch Joel from Twist Image refers to this as the age of digital anxiety and points to some resources like calm.com that are designed to help people take themselves away from the fray, even for just a few minutes.
Another resource designed to help work with this complexity is Buddhify, a website and app designed to bring mindfulness into the everyday life of people on the go. I use this regularly and really enjoy it.
Yet, these are all ways to deal with the output of information and the complexity it produces in our lives (along with the attendant stress and time-pressure). What we are not doing is mindfully attending to this complexity as a whole, asking what it serves. Just as we humans created this social media landscape, so too can we re-create it. We are at a point in the evolution of our media ecology that Marshall McLuhan notes was at a point of serving us and is shifting to having us serve it, unless we engage in mindful (re)design of our system.
Before moving in this direction, we first must as a simple, but important design question: what was social media hired to do for us?
If we are to mindfully design our social media ecology and do it in a manner that promotes empathy and connection, rather than overwhelms us; engenders learning and insight over simple content absorption; and promotes creativity and innovation rather than just talks about it, we need to answer the question more intently and act accordingly.
Applying complexity questions and mindfulness to social media use
From a complexity perspective we can note a few things as we engage in contemplative inquiry on social media. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What are the boundaries of my (social) media ecological system?
- What are the attractors that organize my activity (what do I pay attention to voluntarily or involuntarily)?
- What new insights and patterns of behaviour emerge from these interactions?
- How have those new insights and behaviour patterns influenced what I do?
- How have the products of those changes been fed back into that media ecology (what have I taken away?, what have I given back?)
- What have I hired social media to do for me?
- Is this serving me and my interests (which include that of any social units — family, firm, community, network) ?
Contemplate that as you engage in social media use and you may find surprises. I’d love to hear about what those are.
Empathy: The Ultimate Design + Systems Challenge
Posted: July 1, 2012 Filed under: art & design, complexity, design thinking, psychology, social systems, systems thinking | Tags: complexity, contemplative inquiry, design, design thinking, empathy, mapping, mindfulness, perspective taking, psychology. social psychology, social determinants of health, social justice, systems thinking, visual thinking, visualization 4 Comments »
Empathy is a central feature of good human-centred design, yet is often practiced narrowly. Visualization with systems thinking and mindfulness are three additional features that can transform empathy from a simple tool to a vehicle for transformation by connecting us less to absolute problems and more to relative ones.
In today’s Globe and Mail newspaper online, the oft controversial columnist Margaret Wente offered an op-ed piece called I have ‘white people’s problems,’ and you probably do too. The column refers to an article in The Atlantic by Anne-Marie Slaughter looking at how women today still struggle to be successful at work, family and personal life simultaneously. Both Wente and Slaughter take pains to point out that they lead privilidged lives, yet that privilige does not shield them from experiencing social problems in a way that is both unique to their situation and widely shared by women across the social spectrum.
A read of the comments for both articles shows how much of a hot-button issue this is for people (Wente’s article had more than 700 comments within hours of being uploaded) and includes much discussion of the racist/non-racist/classist over and undertones to the content and topic. It might be tempting to rush in and judge these two articles for dwelling on the pains of a privileged few in light of problems of poverty, food insecurity, safety, sexual and gender-based violence, and absence of healthcare experienced by the greater number of people on this earth.
Yet, if we look at the issues as they are with less judgement we can see the reaction to these articles less as a battle of ideas, but an unconscious attack on empathy. There is this perverse pleasure for some in pointing out the arrogance, ignorance, or neglectfulness in others, but such criticism (sometimes falsely veiled as critique or critical thinking) often fails to deeply connect to empathy beyond the pale. How then do we promote empathy in such conditions?
Perspective Taking: It’s (Relative) Promise and Perils
As Micheal Marmot and others have shown consistently with evidence is that relative inequities, inequalities and health disparities are as significant or more so than absolute ones. Whatever challenges you face they are exacerbated by how you see yourself in relative position to those who deem closest to you. Saying: “it could be worse” works when you see your peers as worse off than you or your equal, but it doesn’t work as well when you’re surrounded by people you perceive to be in better shape. Thus, we have an issue that is both absolute and relative based on real and perceptive differences working simultaneously. In the case of Wente and Slaughter’s articles, most of us (the 95-99% not represented in these perspectives) see them to be in better shape and that has consequences for us and them.
Peter Coleman and faculty at the International Project on Conflict and Complexity have looked at how relative position and empathy fit together in the context of peace-building and mediation and have found that there are spaces where taking into account the lives of others can increase conflict, not dampen it. Of the many examples cited in their work (including Coleman’s recent book) is a decade-long initiative to build bridges between anti-abortion and pro-life advocates in the Boston area and how efforts to build empathy between these two foes often served to antagonize and create bigger gaps in position rather than closing them. These problems, often seen as intractable, represent about 5% of all the ones we face, but their effect is enormous.
Recent studies in social psychology have confirmed that bridge building requires more than just seeing the other side, it requires being heard (PDF – Bruneau & Saxe (2012), Journal of Experimental Social Psychology). A study by Kraus and colleagues (PDF) found that social distance can have an impact on the way that people empathize and the conclusions that they draw when trying to place themselves in the position of others.
Your Grief is Not the Same as My Grief
The above heading comes from a statement uttered in a group counselling context and has forever stuck in my head. It recognizes that we all experience things in a unique way, yet it was uttered in a spirit that suggests we can still come to share that experience in a manner that can build solidarity and connection.
This points to the ultimate design challenge: creating greater connection through empathy without widening social distance.
One might think this would be easier given that empathy is one of the principle tools of design, yet my experience suggests that designers might be more apt to identify this as important and have strategies to get to it, there is still much to be done. But as we all design for ourselves and some of us for others, imagining another’s perspective requires understanding both that another perspective exists and where in relation that perspective sits to your own. It is here that we need more than an empathic lens or a design lens, but a systems lens as well.
Visualization: Placing Empathy
Systems thinking provides cognitive tools for understanding entire domains and the relationships within it. Systems mapping takes these ideas and makes them visual by providing an architecture for that understanding. Visualization provides the means to connect these two worlds by providing a design sensibility with a systems perspective. The figure below illustrates this position.
Mapping the positions held or visualizing them allows an idea to be represented in a manner that invites dialogue and open comparison. Rather than keeping one’s perspective locked within their own mind, a visual representation allows both the individual and those who they seek (or we seek) to build empathy with the tools to better frame the position each holds relative to one another. Doing so goes beyond imagining what it would be like to walk in anothers’ shoes and actually sees it and allows us to test assumptions.
From here, a contemplative approach to inquiry based on mindfulness can allow people to sit — literally or figuratively — with this data and envision the positions in new ways. Contemplating the meaning of what a particular perspective holds can enable a perspective taking that goes beyond seeing this head on and perhaps sees it from above, below, behind or inside and gets us away from our forward orientation bias.
By redefining the space in which the problem exists by literally creating that space on the page or screen we can better see beyond our current position to imagine how things previously deemed impossible might exist. Returning to the original example, this means seeing that one can hold much privilege and social advantage and experience the world in a manner that feels as violated, limiting and stressful as someone of lesser absolute means. It can also facilitate the reverse perspective. In doing so, this type of visualizing + empathy + contemplative inquiry has the means to take away much of the judgement and see things as they are without reducing or amplifying problems beyond their current context.
In doing so, perhaps we can better see us all as interconnected members of a system with pains and hurts and joys and skills rather than devote more energy that is necessary to judging others and less on making lives better for everyone.
The Forward Orientation Problem With Complexity
Posted: June 26, 2012 Filed under: complexity, evaluation, social systems, systems science | Tags: complexity, contemplative inquiry, developmental design, developmental evaluation, mindfulness, mindset, perception, program planning, science, social innovation, time 6 Comments »
The human body is oriented towards forward motion and so too are our institutions, yet while this helps us move linearly and efficiently from place to place, it may obscure opportunities and challenges that come from other directions such as those posed by complexity. Thinking about and re-orienting our perceptions of who we are and where we are going might be the key to understanding and dealing with complexity now and in the future.
When heading out into the turbulent waters that face us we humans tend to look straight ahead and press forward. Our entire physical being and that of all mammals is aimed at facing forward. We look forward, walk forward and this often means thinking forward.
Doing this predisposes us to seeing problems ahead of us or behind us, but is less useful when what challenges us is positioned elsewhere. For this reason, fish and birds, with their eyes on the side of their head, are able to adapt to challenges from nearly any direction quickly. It also allows them to fly/swim in flocks/swarms/schools and operate with high degrees of coordination on a large scale.
These are skills that are useful for handling the social problems that are complex in nature and require mass action to address. But, we don’t have eyes on the side of our head and we tend to look forward or backward to orient ourselves and our activities.
One way this expresses itself in our perceptions of time. Thor Muller, writing in Psychology Today online, highlighted how our perceptions of time influence the way we handle appointments and punctuality with modern technology. Citing the work of anthropologist Edward T. Hall (although mistakenly referring to Manhattan Project contributor Edward Teller), Muller points to the differences in perceived time across cultures and the way that plays out in our treatment of time and technology used to “manage” it and the complexity of everyday life. Monochronistic and polychronistic time orientations matter to whether you see time as a linear, quantifiable phenomenon or a more non-linear, contextual one. One allows you to “bank” time while the other perception deals more with the present moment, less dependent on forward-backward thinking.
Western society and the technologies developed within it are oriented primarily towards dealing with a monochronistic form of time. This works well when patterns, problems and situations have a linear, ordered set of circumstances to them. The cause-and-effect world of normal science fits within this worldview.
Complexity is non-linear and not easily defined in cause-and-effect terms and conditions. Two-dimensional space doesn’t capture complexity the way it can for linear situations. It also means thinking solely in forward and back terms is problematic.
An example of where this comes to conflict is in program planning and evaluation. Traditional evaluation methods and metrics are set up for looking at programs that are planned to start and end with impacts developed and detected in between. This implies a certain level of consistency in the conditions in which that program operates. This control and measure aspect of evaluation is part of the hallmark features of scientific inquiry.
For programs operating in environments of great change and flux, this is a faulty proposition. We cannot hold constant the environment for starters. Secondly, feedback gained from learning about the program as it proceeds is critical to ensuring adaptation and promoting resilience in the face of changing conditions. In these cases, failure to act and adapt on the go may result in a program failing catastrophically.
This is where developmental evaluation comes in. Developmental evaluation works with these conditions to generate data in a manner that programs can make sense of and use to facilitate strategic adaptation rather than simply reacting to changes. As the name suggests, it promotes development rather than improvement.Developmental design is the incorporation of this feedback into an ongoing program development and design process.
Both developmental design and evaluation require ways of seeing the world beyond forward/backward. This seeing comes from understanding where one’s position is in the first place and that requires methods of centring that take us into the world of polychronistic time. One example of a strategy that suits this approach is mindfulness programming. Mindfulness-based programs have shown remarkable efficacy in healing and health interventions aimed at stress reduction across conditions. Mindfulness techniques ranging from meditation to contemplative inquiry (video) brings focus to the present moment away from an orientation towards linear trajectories of time, thought and attention.
Some forms of martial arts promote attentive awareness to the present moment by training practitioners in strategies that are focused on simple rules of engagement, rather than just learning techniques for defence.
These approaches combine inward reflection — reflective practice — with an openness to the data that comes in around them without imposing an order on it a priori. The orientation is to the data and the lessons that come from it rather than its directionality or imposing values on what the data might mean at the start. It means slowing down, contemplating things, and acting on reflection not reacting based on protocol. This is a fundamental shift for many of our activities, but may be the most necessary thing we can focus on if we are to have any hope of understanding, dealing with, and adapting to complexity.
All the methods and tools at our disposal will not help if we cannot change our mindset and orientation — even in the temporary — to this reality when looking at complexity in our work. One of complexity’s biggest challenges right now is that it is seductive in accounting for the massive, dynamic sets of conditions we face every day, yet it lacks methods beyond evaluation to do things with it. The irony of mindfulness and contemplative approaches is that they are less about acting differently and more about seeing things in new ways, yet it is that orientation that is the key to making real change from talking about change. It is the design doing that comes with design thinking and the systems change from systems thinking.
