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 Quality Metric in Education
Posted: January 15, 2013 Filed under: education & learning | Tags: cognition, complex adaptive systems, complexity, education, educational design, evaluation, graduate education, innovation, knowledge translation, learning, metrics, psychology, Sir Ken Robinson, systems thinking, teaching, university 1 Comment »
What goes on the pedestal of learning?
What is quality when we speak of learning? In this third post in series on education and evaluation metrics the issue of quality is within graduate and professional education is explored with more questions than answers about the very nature of learning itself.
But what does learning really mean and do we set the system up to adequately assess whether people do it or not and whether that has any positive impact on what they do in their practice.
What do you mean when you say learning?
The late psychologist Seymour Sarason asked the above question with the aim of provoking discussion and reflection on the nature and possible outcomes of educational reform. Far from being glib, Sarason felt this question exposed the slippery nature of the concept of learning as used in the context of educational programming and policy. It’s a worthwhile question when considering the value of university and professional education programming. What do we mean when we say learners are learning?
The answer to this question exposes the assumptions behind the efforts to provide quality educational experiences to those we call learners. To be a learner one must learn…something.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines learning this way:
learning |ˈlərniNG|
noun
the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, practice, or study, or by being taught: these children experienced difficulties in learning | [ as modifier ] : an important learning process.
• knowledge acquired in this way: I liked to parade my learning in front of my sisters.
This might sufficiently answer Dr Sarason except there is no sense of what the content is or whether that content is appropriate, sufficient, timely or well-supported with evidence (research or practice-based); the quality of learning.
Knowledge translation professionals know that learning through evidence is not achieved through a one-size-fits-all approach and that the match between what professionals need and what is available is rarely clean and simple (if it was, there would be little need for KT). The very premise of knowledge translation is that content itself is not enough and that sometimes it requires another process to help people learn from it. This content is also about what Larry Green argues: practice-based evidence is needed to get better evidence-based practice.
How do we know when learning is the answer (and what are the questions)?
If our metric of success in education is that those who engage in educational programming learn, how do we know whether what they have learned is of good quality? How do we know what is learned is sufficient or appropriately timed? Who determines what is appropriate and how is that tested? These are all questions pertaining to learning and the answers to them depend greatly on context. Yet, if context matters then the next question might be: what is the scope of this context and how are its parameters set?
Some might choose academic discipline as the boundary condition. To take learning itself as an example, how might we know if learning is a psychology problem or a sociology problem (or something else)? If it is a problem for the field of psychology, when does it become educational psychology, cognitive psychology, community psychology or one of the other subdisciplines looking at the brain, behaviour, or social organization? Successful learning through all of these lenses means something very different across conditions.
Yet, consider the last time you completed some form of assessment on your learning. Did you get asked about the context in which that learning took place? When you were asked questions about what you learned on your post-learning assessment:
- Did it take into account the learning context of delivery, reception, use, and possible ways to scaffold knowledge to other things?
- Did your learner evaluation form ask how you intended to use the material taught? Did you have an answer for that and might that answer change over time?
- Did it ask if your experience of the learning event matched what the teachers and organized expected you to gain and did you know what that really was?
- Did you know at the time of completing the evaluation whether what you were exposed to was relevant to the problems you needed to solve or would need to solve in the future?
- Did you get asked if you were interested in the material presented and did that even matter?
- Was there an assumption that the material you were exposed to could only be thought of in one way and did you know what that way was prior to the experience? If you didn’t think of the material in the way that the instructors intended did you just prove that the first of these two questions is problematic?
Years of work in post-secondary teaching and continuing professional education suggests to me that your answer to these questions was most likely “no”, except the very last one.
These many questions are not posed to antagonize educators (or “learners”, too) for there are no single or right answers to any of them. Rather, these are intended to extend Seymour Sarason’s question to the present day and put in the context of graduate and professional education at a time when both areas are being rethought and rationalized.
Learning to innovate (and being wrong)
A problem with the way much of our graduate and professional education is set up is that it presumes to have the answers to what learning is and seeks to deliver the content that fills a gap in knowledge within a very narrow interpretation. This is based on an assumption that what was relevant in the past is both still appropriate now and will be in the future unless we are speaking of a history lesson. However, innovation and discovery — and indeed learning itself — is based on failure, discomfort and not knowing the answers as much as building on what has come before us. There is no doubt that a certain base level of knowledge is required to do most professional and scientific work and that building a core is important, but it is far from sufficient.
The learning systems we’ve created for ourselves are based on a factory model of education, not for addressing complexity or dynamic systems like we find in most social worlds. We do not have a complex adaptive learning system in place, one that supports innovation (and the failures that produce new learning) because:
If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. – Sir Ken Robinson, TED Talk 2006
The above quote comes from education advocate Sir Ken Robinson in a humorous and poignant TED talk delivered in 2006 and then built on further in a second talk in 2010. Robinson lays bare the assumptions behind much of our educational system and how it is structured. He also exposes the problem we face in advancing innovation (my choice of term) because we have designed a system that actively seeks to discourage wide swaths of learning that could support it, particularly with the arts.
Robinson points to the conditions of interdisciplinary learning and creativity that emerge when we free ourselves of the factory model of learning that much of our education is set up, “producing” educated people. If we are assessing learning and we go outside of our traditional disciplines how can we assess whether what we teach is “learned” if we have no standard to compare it to? Therein lies the rub with the current models and metrics.
If we are to innovate and create the evidence to support it we need to be wrong. That means creating educational experiences that allow students to be wrong and have that be right. If that is the case, then it means building an education system that draws on the past, but also creates possibilities for new knowledge and learning anchored in experimentation and transcends disciplines when necessary. It also means asking questions about what it means to learn and what quality means in the context of this experimental learning process.
If education is to transform itself and base that transformation on any form of evidence then getting the right metrics to evaluate these changes is imperative and quality of education might just need to be one of them.
Image: Shutterstock
Design Thinking: Thinkers, Science and Practice
Posted: September 6, 2012 Filed under: design thinking, systems science, systems thinking | Tags: AIGA, Bruce Nussbaum, community of practice, design, design education, design research, design thinking, DMI, education, evaluation, experiment, metacognition, practice, psychology, research, social innovation, systems thinking, William Storage 1 Comment »
If to think and be aware of those thoughts (to think about thinking) is a defining feature of what it means to be human, why is it such a challenge to think about types of thinking? An answer to that question might help explain why design thinking is so difficult to translate into action and scholarship and why it continues to be the recipient of intense criticism and boosterism.
The other day a colleague reminded me of an essay on the demise of design thinking that I commented on in an earlier post . The post by William Storage adds further to the growing list of critiques of design thinking and ends this way:
In short, Design Thinking is hopelessly contaminated. There’s too much sleaze in the field. Let’s bury it and get back to basics like good design. Everyone already knows that solution-focus is as essential as problem-focus. Stop arguing the point. If good design doesn’t convince the world that design should be fully integrated into business and society, another over-caffeinated Design Thinking book isn’t likely to do so either.
Storage is right to argue that another book will not convince people of the merits of design or design thinking (which is different), but I can’t imagine it is just because of its merits. There appears to be something that troubles people with picking up metacognitive concepts.
Thinking about (Design) Thinking
Metacogntion is thinking about thinking and concepts like design thinking and systems thinking are, at their most basic, about the thought processes involved in contemplating systems or design. What commentators like Storage and Bruce Nussbaum are railing against is how this more sophisticated concept of design thinking (design metacognition if you will) has over time become synonymous at best, but a wholesale replacement at worst with a set of tools and creativity exercises.
Here we see the gap between the methods and their methodology.
Systems thinking, having had a few decades jump on design thinking seems to be faring better in that its common use is treated more as a metacognitive exercise than just a method, but only slightly. Why does adding thinking to something make it so difficult to communicate?
There is a reductionist push towards making thinking — design thinking, systems thinking, critical thinking, visual thinking — into a discussion of methods and tools. The concern, not unfounded, is that concepts like design thinking is pitched as a set of very simple techniques to provoke innovation while being stripped of its genuine innovation potential and reflective capacity, ironically removing the “thinking” part of the approach. These tools are manifest expressions of thinking and facilitators of it, but they are not thinking on its own.
The business and evidence of thinking
Maybe this is our fault for not putting thinking into the development of these concepts from the start. For example, the field of design suffers greatly from a lack of scholarship and theory around its methods and approaches. Designers are a practical bunch and seek to create and build things over theorizing and submitting their own processes to research. There are notable exceptions to this of course, but overall it is safe to say given design’s pervasiveness in our world that we know relatively little about it.
Systems thinking (as it applies to human systems) is in a different position, almost an opposite position. Whereas design thinking has come from a long history of practice with little formal research supporting it, systems thinking has emerged largely from academia and has far less empirical support for its applications to social affairs.
Another issue is economic. The drive for innovation-led market advantages in many fields is pushing anything to support such activity — something design thinking can do — into high demand. Markets abhor vacuums so they get filled and early markets favour the swift and bold, not necessarily quality. As my doctoral advisor once told me when I was hesitating on publishing my research: “people remember the first, not necessarily the best“.
Thus, we have entire business enterprises founded on teaching people design thinking without much depth in their process or intellectual foundations to support their work. They are out there in spades and contributing to the reasoned distrust, frustration and dislike of design thinking by many who could be its biggest advocates. Whether that’s hopeless or not remains to be seen.
Where to?
So what is to be done? One option, that taken by Bruce Nussbaum, is to consider design thinking a failed experiment and seek alternative terms and concepts that capture the essence of what it does to improve innovative thinking, but in a manner that is less distorted. The challenge here is that, even if a new term does supplant design thinking, what is to prevent that concept from being co-opted and distorted as well with the same innovation-related market drivers in place?
Some argue that by formalizing design thinking into accredited programs, designations, certificates or degrees can assure quality just as we’ve started to see creep into the field of evaluation,. This presumes that have an empirically supported or widely agreed definition of what design thinking is and what are its core competencies. It also presumes we have the faculty with these skills and in positions to train people using methods tested to produce specific outcomes. Neither of these is true at present. This is the equivalent of suggesting that artists must have art degrees. Some artists do, but many do not and there is little to distinguish the difference in quality of the work between them.
A third option, the more complicated one and the most flexible, is to consciously build a community of practice around design thinking aimed at improving the scholarship, research and communications about design thinking to enable the wider world to learn about it, debate it, and apply it. This is already starting to form through such venues as the Design Thinking LinkedIn group and the Design Thinking Network. To that end, we could see a tremendous opportunity for professional organizations such as DMI and AIGA to contribute to this by opening themselves up to the wider community in the focus of their events and training options. By increasing commitment from those doing design and design thinking to education and contemplative inquiry into their craft we are naturally developing a field of practice that forms an attractor basin for better thinking and action.
Some further suggests to this point:
- Follow what psychology did after the American Psychological Association President George Miller suggested they “give away psychology” to the world. Psychology was once an elitist, opaque field of therapy and science and now is widely taught, incorporated into nearly every human-centred discipline, and is founded on a strong scientific and practice base. Democratize design thinking.
- Enlist creative professionals from fields like environmental studies, public health, social work, and education into the design thinking fold beyond traditional design disciplines. Get those living the spirit of Herb Simon who are out there trying to actively change current conditions into preferred ones — the social innovators, the public servants, the entrepreneurs of every stripe — to contribute their stories and insights on design thinking and get those into the public sphere for debate and dialogue.
- Fund and support more research programs beyond examples of my own modestly-supported Design Foundations project , which has sought to study design thinking by interviewing those experts that do it and the literature on its practice across disciplines. And rather than proclaim design thinking’s success and power, prove it and document it.
- Evaluate the programs that teach it, the processes used and determine what works, under what context, and document what happened along the way so we can learn more and be better at advocating for the power of design than simply proclaiming its worth.
Let’s contemplate more, study more, and reflect more about design thinking and maybe we’ll become better design thinkers.
What are your thoughts? Comment below.
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?
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.
Disruption by Design
Posted: March 13, 2012 Filed under: design thinking, education & learning, innovation, social media | Tags: Andrea Yip, Clayton Christensen, design, disruptive innovation, education, graphic design, health, health promotion, human services, infographics, innovation, psychology, public health, social determinants of health, social innovation, social work, technology 1 Comment »
DISRUPT by Paul Woot
Innovation, new thinking, and a change in consciousness can upset the way we see our world and the manner in which we relate to it. This disruption can happen by happenstance or intention encouraging us to consider ways to design change before forces outside our influence change us.
disrupt |disˈrəpt|
verb [ with obj. ]
interrupt (an event, activity, or process) by causing a disturbance or problem: a rail strike that could disrupt both passenger and freight service.
• drastically alter or destroy the structure of (something): alcohol can disrupt the chromosomes of an unfertilized egg.
DERIVATIVES
disrupter (also disruptor |-tər|)noun
Observing the city I live in, the media I consume, and the way I learn, I can’t help but be amazed at how much of my life has been disrupted over the past few years. I can access nearly everything I need to run my business and do my research from my handheld or a tablet computer. I can hand that tablet or handheld to someone else and allow them to interact with the content on it by using gestural movements, not a keyboard.
If I am engaged in health communications or scholarly research, I look to places like Twitter and blogs as much if not more than I do academic databases. Many of the journals I respect and publish content that counts in fields like public health, such as the Journal of Medical Internet Research, are open access and free to anyone who wants to read them. And these open access publications are becoming leaders in their fields, not just cheap versions of “real” journals. This makes the content of my academic work and that of my many colleagues accessible and much more likely to be used.
If you’re a graphic designer your work has never been more important. Whether websites, infographics, high-quality interpretations of traditional media (for a great example see the re-imagined journal article by my colleague Andrea Yip) the world has become more visual and the weight of good graphic design is heavier than ever. At the same time, tools like easel.ly allow anyone to make an infographic, or WordPress for those who want websites (this one included), and even offers to do a $42 logo as reported in Creative Review.
Want to raise awareness of issues? Grab a film camera and put together a small film like Kony 2012, the most viral success story of any video to date.
Or write a book on an important, if somewhat arcane, topic like the meaning of making and get people from all over the world to invest in it on Kickstarter (that’s what Seung Chan Lim or Slim as he is known did and I invested in this venture with enthusiasm).
Or charge a mere $5 like comedian Louis C.K. did for a high-quality copy of his recent comedy show filmed at the Beacon Theatre in New York and let your buyers download up to five copies at once for one price.
Or write a book and let your customers determine its price (including free!) like Jon Kolko and his AC4D colleagues have done with Wicked Problems.
This couldn’t have happened five years ago. The production costs were too high, the distribution channels too primitive, and the bandwidth too low. Now, it’s all different and the disruptions are no longer happenstance, but designed.
Harvard professor Clayton Christensen coined the term ‘disruptive innovation‘ which ”describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves ‘up market’, eventually displacing established competitors.”
Christensen adds:
An innovation that is disruptive allows a whole new population of consumers access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill. Characteristics of disruptive businesses, at least in their initial stages, can include: lower gross margins, smaller target markets, and simpler products and services that may not appear as attractive as existing solutions when compared against traditional performance metrics.
Health promotion and public health are fields ripe for this kind of innovation, so is healthcare. Indeed, movements like those embodied in Patients Like Me, a social network portal aimed at supporting human empowerment in health care.
We are on the cusp of this taking place in health promotion and human services — whether they are governmental, non-profit or social enterprise based. Health promotion is largely about enabling individuals, groups and communities to better adapt to change, support themselves and gain greater control over the social determinants of health. At present, we teach students theory and research, but what about business dynamics or systems thinking or visual methods of presentation or social innovation? These are the tools and strategies that the abovementioned examples used. Many of them also used design.
The same challenge holds true for social work, psychology and education.
These are the fields that are key supports for promoting wellbeing in our community. It is perhaps not surprising that the concept of design is noticeably absent from all of these fields.
That doesn’t need to be the case.
This past week I had the privilege of spending an afternoon with Scott Conti and his staff at the New Design High School in New York City. There I saw students working through everyday problems using design, building business ideas to support themselves and their communities, and applying their various creativities to making a difference in their lives using design as the lens. This environment was where social work, education, psychology and health promotion intersect. Scott — who delivers a great talk on his work as part of TEDX Dumbo — is a health promoter and social innovator. So are his teachers.
None of them were trained for what they do. They have adapted, modified, created and innovated. They disrupted their own patterns of work and learning so that they could better disrupt those around them, for good. They did this by design.
If we are to expect that the fields most connected to social action and the promotion of wellbeing are to contribute to our betterment in the future, they need to change. Disruptive design for programs, services and the ways we fund such things is what is necessary if these fields are to have benefit beyond themselves. Long past are the days when doing good was something that belonged to those with a title (e.g., doctor, health promoter, social worker) or that what we called ourselves (e.g., teacher) meant we did something else unequivocally (e.g., educate). Now we are all teachers, all health promoters, all designers, and all entrepreneurs if we want to be. Some will be better than others and some will be more effective than others, but by disrupting these ideas we can design a better future.
The PR Problem for Design, Evaluation,and Complexity
Posted: January 29, 2012 Filed under: complexity, design thinking, evaluation | Tags: complexity, design, design thinking, evaluation, George Miller, language, psychology, public relations, social change 2 Comments »
I (heart) PR
Complex concepts like evaluation, design and even complexity itself provide insight, strategies and applications that provide usable solutions to real-world problems, but also suffer from widespread misunderstandings, confusion and even derision. If they are to take hold beyond their initial communities of interest, they need to address their PR problem head on.
This past week was Design Week in Toronto. As one works extensively with design concepts and even has a health promotion-focused design studio, one couldn’t be faulted for thinking that this would be a big week for someone like me who lives and works in the city. Well, it came and went and I didn’t attend a single thing. The reason was partly due to timing and my schedule, but largely because the focus of the week was not really on design writ large, but rather interior design. Sure, there were a few events that focused on social issues (what I am interested in) like the Design With Dialogue session on Designing a Future for our Future, but mostly it was focused on one area of a large field.
And thus, interior design was left to represent all of design.
So why does this matter? It matters a lot because when people hear the term design, most of what was presented this week fits with that perception. The problem is that design is so much more than that. It is about making things, creative thinking and problem tackling (design thinking), social innovation, and responsive planning for complex situations. Architects, business leaders, military strategists, social service agencies and health promoters all engage in design. Indeed, Herbert Simon‘s oft-quoted and often contested definition fits nicely here:
Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones
If one accepts that we are all designers and all of what we create and use for change is design, than a week devoted to the topic should offer much more than innovative concepts in furniture or flooring. Yet, this high-concept style showcase is what most people think about when they first hear design. Give people a choice between a Philippe Stark Juicy Salif citrus juicer and creating a trades-based, social change curriculum for low-income kids such as the work by Emily Pilloton as the example of design and they will probably guess think Stark over Pilloton, when both are equally valid examples.
Evaluation (another area I focus my work on) is equally fraught with perception problems. If you want to raise someone’s blood pressure or heart rate, tell them that either they or their work will be the focus of an evaluation. Evaluation may be the longest four-letter word in the English language. Yet, tell someone that you have a strategy that can enable people to learn about what they do, its impact, and provide intelligence on ways to improve, adapt and outperform their competitors and you’ll find an inspired audience for evaluation services.
Lastly, complexity presents the same challenge. It’s very name — complexity — can make people shy away from it. As humans, we crave the simple in most things as it is easier to understand, manage and control. Complexity offers none of these things and, if anything, reveals how little control we have. Entire fields of inquiry have been established around complexity science and its related theories and practices. Complexity can help us make sense of why things don’t work as we think they ought to and allow us to better navigate through unpredictable terrain with greater resilience than if we tried to tackle such problems as if they were linear in their cause and consequence.
In all of these cases — design, evaluation and complexity — there exists a PR problem. The advantages that they pose are tremendous, yet these concepts are frequently misunderstood, dismissed, or inappropriately used . When this happens, it creates even greater distance between the potential benefits these concepts offer and their real-world application.
This distance is partly an artefact of poorly articulated definitions and examples, but also by design (no pun intended). There are those who relish having these concepts appear opaque to those outside of their social cluster. Thus, we have the ‘superstar designer’ who seeks to create products and personas that are built upon their rarity, rather than accessibility. There are evaluators who exploit the fear that people have of evaluation and lack the understanding of the methods and practices of evaluation (vs concepts like research or innovation consulting) to gain contracts and social influence within their field. Complexity, with its foundations in physics and systems biology, can appear to the layperson as otherworldly, making its practitioners and scientists seem all the more powerful and smart. These tactics benefit a small ‘elite’(?) number of professionals, while robbing a far larger audience of the potential benefits.
In 1969, then president of the American Psychological Association, George Miller, implored members to “give psychology away“. His message was that psychology was too important to be left just to the professional, graduate-trained practitioners to use. If psychology was to confer social benefits, it was necessary to ensure that everyone had access to it — it’s theories, methods, models and treatments. It is perhaps no surprise that psychology remains one of the most popular undergraduate degree programs in the arts and social sciences and the focus of television shows, magazines and and an array of services. Miller was commenting on the need to change a field that he perceived was becoming elitist and not serving the needs of society.
The same might be true of design, evaluation and complexity if we let it. It’s not a surprise that these three concepts are intimately tied together, as those training to apply design thinking and strategic foresight learn. Perhaps its time to start giving these ideas away, but to do so we first need to rehab their image and apply some design thinking and brand development strategy to all three ideas. As practitioners in any or all of these fields, giving away what we do by educating, reinforcing, and ensuring that the work we do is of the highest quality is a way to lead by example. None of us is likely to change things by ourselves, but together we can do wonders.
For those interested in evaluation, I suggest catching up on the AEA365 blog sponsored by the American Evaluation Association, where evaluation bloggers and practitioners share ideas about how to practice evaluation, but also how to communicate it to others. For those interested in design, I would encourage you to look at places like the Design Thinkers LinkedIn group, where practitioners from around the world discuss innovations and way to promote and apply design thinking. A similar group, and opportunity, exists with the Systems Thinking LinkedIn group or by joining the Plexus Institute, which does considerable work to promote complexity and systems thinking in North America.
Photo: I (Heart) PR by The Silfwer used under Creative Commons Licence from Flickr.
Do Relationships Scale?
Posted: October 31, 2011 Filed under: art & design, design thinking, innovation, knowledge translation | Tags: Coca Cola, conference, design, design management, evolution, evolutionary psychology, New York City, Paul Antrobus, Powers of Ten, psychology, scale, systems thinking 3 Comments »
Go Small to Go Big?
There is much discussion about scaling social innovation – bringing small successes to a larger theatre — yet little is known about the properties that make something work at one level successful at another. When the “thing” to scale is relationships, such as the case with knowledge translation and design, is bigger better or even possible?
Last week the Design Management Institute held its annual North American conference themed: Design at Scale. The conference featured many prominent names in branding, market development, graphic design, and design management together to discuss the ways in which the creative process used in design can be leveraged from one level to another.
One of the best technical examples came from David Butler and Gerardo Garcia from Coca Cola who showed their modular design system being used to transform the way small local retailers in South America can create large or small displays with products that are regionally appropriate with ease. While it was interesting to see how one could create retail displays that could easily adapt and scale, I was left wondering whether the same system would permit the social variables associated with each of these 1 million vendors to do the same thing. Are these vendors likely to view the modular system in the same way that Coke does? Does it even make sense to them? Surely for some that will be a “yes”, but will it be as many as Coke thinks and does this system solve a problem that the retailers have as much as it aims to satisfy Coke’s goal of doubling its revenue in the next decade?
While the physical product generated from this system might scale, the relationships that surround its implementation might not.
Which got me to thinking about the other lessons that came from the conference. Perhaps the most intriguing ones were those presented by Jamer Hunt, the Director for Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons The New School for Design. Hunt drew on the work of design legends Charles and Ray Eames and their film the Powers of Ten as a means of illustrating scale and what it really means (which he wrote about in Fast Company article last year).
An aside: The Powers of Ten was shown on the first day of my first class in psychology when I was an undergraduate at the University of Regina and was used by my professor, the truly remarkable Paul Antrobus (PDF), to illustrate the realm that psychology could play in the universe. “This is the realm of psychology” he declared. It is something that has probably never been uttered in another class in psychology anywhere and probably should be everywhere. It changed the perspective I brought to my work and has changed my life in ways I can’t fully comprehend.
What The Powers of Ten does is illustrate scale at the macro and micro level by showing how great, yet relatively consistent, the differences are between different scales. Scalar changes happen at an order of magnitude that becomes difficult to grasp as one shifts up or down due to the massive, exponential change that, at small scales seem palpable, but at large scales seem incomprehensible. Jamer Hunt made this all the more concrete when he used the example of an ant taking a shower. No matter how intentional an ant might be about wanting a shower, the water molecules from a shower are too big and would crush him (or her). The water doesn’t scale.
Social innovation, social design and communications (particularly knowledge exchange and translation) is largely about relationships. Developing intimacy, expressing empathy, creating trust, and having authentic and meaningful conversations are the hallmark of healthy and strong human relationships. They also tend to cluster with good, effective practice in the above-mentioned areas. There are good reasons why (contrary to what Paris Hilton might suggest) we don’t have a lot of BFF‘s in our lives: we can’t maintain that level of closeness with a lot of people. It is precisely because we create a sense of intimacy with a few, that the relationship with the many is able to be maintained as it is. Relationships change, evolve, grow and whither, but the absolute number of close, personal relationships for people tend to remain relatively constant, even if that number differs between people.
The work by evolutionary psychologist and anthropologist Robin Dunbar has looked at these relationships and found that, by and large, we are not able to maintain meaningful relations (nevermind close relations) with more than about 150 (with a large standard deviation). While the variance in this number is large, the implications for scaling might be larger. Some of Dunbar’s original research with primates suggests that our brains are simply not evolved enough to handle the complexity of too many more relations.
It might also simply be less enjoyable. Meaning is something that requires attention to create and use and the more variables competing for attention in your life, the less meaningful things might be. If this is the case, can we design programs and initiatives that scale up from small to big? Or do we need to reframe the way we see scaling to something akin to a network, whereby there are a lot of small nodes connected together? Networking nodes seems to be a way to go big and go small.
If so, what does this mean for designing systems that scale? It might also mean that for those of us working to develop solutions that scale that we need to pay attention to the social and mathematical issues that come with scaling something. It means paying attention to psychosocial physics and dynamics and using research more intently to inform our designs and social innovations lest we scale in ways that create metaphorical water-droplets that are so big crush those we seek to shower.
The Shadow of Design and Creative Work
Posted: October 22, 2011 Filed under: art & design, design thinking, psychology | Tags: Carl Jung, design, designer, psychology Comments Off
Light and Shadow
Designers seek to put their best forward in their creations, but sometimes it is the dark rather than the light that provides an impetus for good design. Carl Jung’s look into our darker nature might provide a means of understanding the lighter side of what we produce.
My work and related inquiry into design has led me to Carl Jung’s doorstep on many occasions, and this week his concept of shadow was brought into focus through a series of conversations and reflections. In interviewing designers the past few weeks for the Design Thinking Foundations project an initial point of interest that has emerged from the data is the importance of the designer’s connection to the designed product, something I wrote about earlier.
If one is to consider design, the act of making something with intent, as something of an act of personal expression it follows that it be subjected to the same moral and ethical scrutiny that other such acts are put to. This becomes particularly important when one considers the potential impact that our designed creations can have on the world around us. The manner by which we, as designers, shape this artificial environment of human-made objects has profound implications and thus, the factors that shape the designers are important.
Jung’s shadow of the psyche mirrors the qualities of the darkness created by objects standing in the light. It is that part of a person that is often unrecognized, unspoken, or unconscious that reflects aspects of a person that may be perceived to be less desirable to others or to the person themselves.
As Jung states:
There can be no doubt that man (sic) is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected. Jung, C.G. (1938). Psychology and Religion”. In Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.131
Jung believed that shadow requires confrontation, or at the least acknowledgement. For the designer, this means being self-aware to ensure that their motives are clear when they approach a project and the people connected to it.
This is not just an issue for personal development or the protection of others, it is about doing the best work. For design, this often means doing work with others. For the designer, it means doing the work on themselves, which includes an obligation to learn, develop and grow.
There is a deep gulf between what a man is and what he represents, between what he is as an individual and what he is as a collective being. His function is developed at the expense of the individuality. Should he excel, he is merely identical with his collective function; but should he not, then, though he may be highly esteemed as a function in society, his individuality is wholly on the level of his inferior, undeveloped functions, and he is simply a barbarian, while in the former case he has happily deceived himself as to his actual barbarism. Jung, C.G. (1921) Psychological Types, P.III
Psychologists and Social Workers might be used to integrating deep self-work into their professional roles, but designers typically are not. Creation on its own is a scary subject that terrifies artists and designers alike. It takes courage to put one’s work “out there” for people to see, critique and explore. It exposes our potential weaknesses, our vulnerabilities and our aspirations in ways that few encounters can. When design is done with passion and integrity, not just intent, it means putting a piece of ourselves into the product.
What we might not be aware of is that the self that is reflected in our work might include both the light and the shadow. As a designer, the fear of being under the gaze of others is amplified by the fear that such inquiry will reveal parts of our shadow. To reveal one’s shadow, is to expose one’s truest self in its entirety, not just part of it.
To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self. Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle. Jung, C.G. (1959) Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology”In CW Civilization in Transition. P.872
The shadow introduces what Jung calls “a moral problem” to the enterprise of design. The products of design are intimately tied to the designer. It is perhaps for this reason that the field is often known for having practitioners with large egos and star-like status. But if one is to consider the manner in which the shadow is — or can be — expressed through design, the possibility for a design process that is overwhelmingly ego-driven is lowered.
It also presents the opportunity for a more authentic, if risky, form of design.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge. Jung, C.G. Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.14
And isn’t design about taking risks? Perhaps to create the very best work in the light, we need to embrace the shadow’s that it helps create.
