The Complexity Challenge
Posted: June 30, 2011 Filed under: complexity, systems thinking | Tags: complexity, contemplative inquiry, education, learning, mindfulness, organizational change, simplicity, systems thinking 2 Comments »
Is Learning Falling Down When it Comes to Complexity?
Before acting in a manner consistent with complexity principles, people need to understand what they are, how they are different from other systems, and what it means for their work. With mainstream education, professional practice so geared to linear forms of learning this bodes poorly for building better systems thinkers.
“Let’s just throw some social media at it” is a variant of an expression I often hear in my work in health communications consulting and training. Organizations seeking to use the new tools and media employed by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube genuinely want to “get in the game” and use them effectively. Where things get problematic is when I tell them that social media is principally about building relationships and that extends to organizations: you need to relate and therefore act according to how you build relationships.
Just as no one (at least no one I’ve met) would consider drawing up a flowchart and showing a prospective mate the planned trajectory of their dating relationship with milestone targets and deliverables, no organization should think that they can just shovel content to people and expect their audience to relate better to them.
At first one might attribute this to a lack of understanding of social media, but that is only a small part of it. Empathy is another. But the third and perhaps biggest reason is a fundamental lack of understanding of complexity and what it means.
The seductive nature of the “best practice” and the prescription for change in 5,7, 10, 12 or whatever easy steps is something that is endemic in our society. These forms of thought suggest a linear trajectory of events, suggest an ability to control for externalities and parse out their impact, and provide a prescriptive solution that removes much of the worry about unknowns. But H. L. Mencken’s often quoted phrase (which I’ve used often) suggests the folly in this.
Simplicity is another way to get around complexity. It is something sought, but rarely achieved in its application to the lived reality of the human condition, and although much discussed it hasn’t been widely achieved as a means of policy effectiveness. The reason lies with the nature of complexity itself and its resistance to reductionism. Evidence from biology through psychology (see previous links for examples) points to the considerable problem that science has with applying linear modes of thought and inquiry to complex systems.
The problems here are multifold and complicated, if not complex.
1. Our education system is designed for linear, progressive modes of learning not discovery and non-linearity. We sit kids (and adults) in rows, we talk at them, we present material front-to-back. In short, we don’t design education for learning, but for knowledge transmission. Complexity is all about learning. Every situation has a degree of novelty to it that presents new challenges and what happens today might not be the same thing that happens tomorrow even if much is similar. Teaching to discover, adapt, play and risk is something our system doesn’t do well. How can we expect complexity and systems thinking to thrive when the muscles used
2. It’s more convienient to think in dichotomies than spectrums. As I’ve written previously, spectral thinking is something critical to many of the issues we face in complex systems. Good/bad, strong/weak, X/Y lose their meaning in complex environments where there is a. Of all the dichotomies that work, only Ying/Yang comes close. But its a more difficult concept to grasp that maybe things aren’t all one way or the other, that there is use in even something that isn’t well constructed. This problem (and the ones that follow) are tied to the first one: education and learning systems are not set up for this. We are primed for either/or thinking. Think in criminal justice terms how easy it is to demand harsh punishment for criminal acts without considering that the perpetrators are human too, even if their behaviour is unacceptable.
The only dichotomy that works in complex systems?
3. Our decision-making tools are ill-equipped to handle ambiguity. Health care is a great example of how badly we do at complexity thinking. Consider the systematic review, often viewed as the gold standard for evidence for adoption into healthcare organizations. If it has a good systematic review, then the chances that we will see that evidence translated into practice is good, right? No. Surprisingly, even systematic reviews of systematic review use shows a mixed bag in adoption. Systematic reviews are designed to reduce ambiguity, but (for those on human social systems at least) they only illustrate how much there is. A systematic review only looks at the evidence created, it doesn’t include all those questions that were never asked, never funded for inquiry, or couldn’t be structured in a manner that fits the criteria for a good review. It is, by its design, reductionistic in its approach to complexity.
4. Our institutions are resistant to complexity. Complexity takes time, nuance, and relationship development; all the things that screw up plans. You can’t plan a relationship, but you can anticipate some things. You might even be able to use scenario tools and strategic foresight methods to anticipate what might happen, but you can’t plan it. John Lennon is right:
Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans
While we plan, the complex systems move along. We can plan and fail, fail and plan, or plan to fail and work build the strategic foresight to know what to do with these “failures”.
So now what? Being aware of these things is a start, but making systems change is really the key. Making change is about questioning the way we have been taught to learn, and what our assumptions are about the universe are. Learning the difference between a simple, complicated, complex and chaotic system and the means to identify when those systems present themselves (and how they often change) is another. This means finding like minds, sharing stories, and building networks. It means creating space for relationships — even in our linear planning models if we must keep them (or better yet, get rid of most of them) — and considering what kind of returns we get from paying attention, being mindful of our systems, and what kind of things contemplative inquiry might offer that simple, detached data analysis does.
These are starting points, but not all of them. Addressing the challenge of complexity is, ironically or perhaps appropriately, complex. But the challenge of dealing with the negative outcomes resulting from overly simple approaches to dealing with complexity will ultimately be far more so.
Developmental Thinking and Evaluation
Posted: June 20, 2011 Filed under: evaluation, innovation, research | Tags: design, developmental design, developmental evaluation, evaluation, systems thinking 1 Comment »
Think developmentally before evaluating developmentally
Developmental evaluation is difficult to initiate, largely because the thinking behind it is so foreign to normal program planning and reporting. It appears that developmental thinking needs to be in place before one can hope to implement a DE project successfully.
Over the next few days I will be meeting with colleagues working with the Social Innovation Generation Group, Michael Quinn Patton and others who share an interest and wrestle with developmental evaluation (DE) in practice.
Over the course of the last year we have been meeting monthly to discuss our experiences, challenges and learning on the issue of developmental evaluation. Although our group members come from diverse fields — government, academia, non-profit and others — and are focused on projects that range in scope, we all share one common experience: frustration with implementing DE.
Reading through a case study the other night I couldn’t help be see something I’d seen before: the principal barrier to the implementation of DE is that the program, its partners, or the stakeholders associated with the program didn’t individually or collectively function in a manner that supported DE. Whether they actually bought into DE in the first place is also not known, but it seems to me that the two are related.
Developmental thinking about social issues has shown itself in my work to be a linchpin for any progress on developmental evaluation. Commiserating with colleagues in this area, it seems evident to me that assessing for DE is a critical step in the pre-work that needs to come before any evaluation takes place. Without developmental thinking, developmental actions and evaluation is hard to reasonably achieve.
If you do not see your program as one that evolves, but rather just gets bigger, better, stronger, weaker etc.., having real-time evaluation tools will be less useful or perhaps even harmful in the absence of a thinking framework to make sense of the data. Real-time, consultative evaluation, and its utilization-focused actions makes DE stand apart from other approaches to evaluation, even if the methods and tools are similar.
The implications for this assertion in practice are enormous. It means that a DE practitioner cannot be just an evaluator or at least must find others that can work with a program to educate, inspire and contemplate collaboratively about developmental thinking and what it means for a program. It also brings the evaluation function far closer to program planning than evaluators (and program planners) might be used to. It also means holding a willingness to think different, not just implement different thinking. To that end, knowledge of motivation and some sense of how one provokes or creates space for change is also important.
Taken together, we have ourselves a real challenge. The “core competencies” for DE already include qualities like people skills, knowledge of complexity, and communication skills (in addition to fundamental skills in evaluation methods and process implementation), but now we are adding additional ones. Systems thinking, behaviour change, program planning and design are all reasonable skills that would assist an evaluator in doing this work. Nice in theory, but how about in practice? Can we reasonably expect that there are enough people out there with these skills to do it well? Or is this a call for more of a team-science (or rather, team evaluation) approach to evaluation?
Boundaries: The Food Example
Posted: June 8, 2011 Filed under: systems thinking | Tags: boundaries, complexity, food, food systems, systems thinking Leave a comment »Identifying boundaries and setting them in moving forward with modeling and planning is a critical step in systems thinking practice so much so that it may be time to consider seeing boundaries as a core skill or competency for work in complex systems.
Traveling is one of the activities that embodies systems thinking concepts in almost everything. From security screening through to the arrangement of flights, connections, and imagining how it all gets done is truly systems thinking in action. One of the lesser-thought-of aspects of the travel-as-systems-thinking phenomenon is food. Food has been profiled here before, but for this post I want to highlight a different quality here.
As one who aspires to eat relatively well, traveling can be hell when it comes to food. I am currently in a city that has, like many American cities, abdicated the culture and cuisine of its core to the suburbs, which is bad on too many levels. Say what you want about suburban life, but good, healthy, available, economic food is not something that comes to mind (at least, not together). So as an urbanite who is somewhat accustomed or desirous of eating reasonably well (i.e., food that tastes good, is good value, and isn’t horrible to my body, the environment or those who make it) I get spoiled and feel disappointed when places I travel can’t offer this. Ironically, this was the way that most food was cooked and readied for consumption up until the last part of the 20th century.
In this case, the boundary conditions of the system I am looking at is the availability of good food. Where I am and how I got here meant airports, hotels, on-the-go-meals and staying in a relatively large city that has no interior life to it that isn’t about an office building.
The boundaries of good eating imposed on me has meant that my individual choices are seriously constrained. This happens a lot, yet doesn’t get acknowledged as much when we consider health behaviour and its limits. We too often blame individuals for not exercising, or eating well, or doing both without looking at the real problems associated with such activities when the boundaries of the system they are working under are taken into account. (And by the way, it was 41 degrees Celsius in the city I am staying in so there goes any outdoor exercise).
If we narrow our boundaries too close, we miss some considerable systems limitations. I would surmise that students learning systems thinking might want to consider boundary definitions as a critical skill.
Standing Out / Outstanding: The Standards Problem
Posted: June 5, 2011 Filed under: innovation, social systems | Tags: Cynefin Framework, evidence, innovation, systems thinking, university Leave a comment »
Building up to be unique...just like everyone else?
Human service providers live in paradox by stressing best practices while wishing for some recognition of the unique qualities that they bring. Can being unique be the standard we need?
Recently, I was with a colleague discussing the challenges that universities are facing with respect to the twin issues of curtailing costs and expanding revenues. Standing out is getting to be more important than ever.
What captured our attention was the great irony that we are at a time when there is such a great drive to standardize when the marketplace is so crowded. The very competitive advantage that comes with being unique is being subsumed under pressure to be like everyone else.
In education, health sciences, and social and human services we are seeing this remarkable drive towards things such as accreditation of programs, implementation of best practices throughout the curriculum, and certification of activities that once did not require it. The underpinning logic is that having some kind of benchmark and standard that all programs or activities of a similar nature can adhere to will ensure that there is sufficient quality for the consumer of such programs.
While there are certainly activities where standards and consistency work well (for example, I don’t really want the pilot of my next flight expressing his creativity through the way he maneuvers the airplane), these standards or best practices are based on a view that the world is relatively simple, or a least principally ordered. The Cynefin Framework can help identify certain conditions where these type of systems thrive.
However, in fields like health promotion, community psychology, the arts, much of social work, and those working in the open systems found in communities and many organizations, order is a fleeting condition and unstable.
To be good at what you do in these domains, whether it is hosting a design charrette or doing community-based research, one has to pay considerable attention to subtle difference and adjust a strategy accordingly. This customization of activity — which does not require a wholesale abandonment of what has been done before - are the very things that signify empathy, create connection, and represent a true mark of competence in this domain. Being different across settings and conditions — standing out — is what makes a service outstanding.
This tension or paradox is something that could benefit from much more exploration and might serve as something for universities and professions to consider taking seriously. Ironically, the establishment of much of what “best practice” seeks to achieve might be accomplished through celebrating difference.
** Photo Unique by rossaroni used under Creative Commons License from Flickr
Thinking Developmentally About Social Issues
Posted: June 4, 2011 Filed under: Education & Learning, innovation, systems thinking | Tags: complexity, design, developmental design, developmental evaluation, education, feedback, innovation, learning, systems thinking 1 Comment »
Thinking About Development or Being Consumed By Linear Progress?
An often unstated assumption in efforts to provoke change in complex, developmental environments is that people are primed to think in those terms. That might be a false assumption and the reason why concepts like developmental evaluation are so hard to take root.
Difference is hard to grasp. So too, is development. Add the two together and you have a real problem. This is an opinion I’ve formed through my work in complexity science, education and health promotion.
We humans are great at categorizing things. Our eyes are in the front of our head and our bodies are designed for forward movement so we are biologically positioned to look forward. Over the last few centuries, forward has often been linked with progress. Forward imposes a directionality to it and progress imposes an evaluative standard. But what if what we were dealing with in social issues had neither of these assumptions proven right?
Romantic relationships provide an example. Classic literature to pop culture typically present relationship narratives as linear (e.g, characters meet, date, fall in love, get married, buy a home, have kids, grow old together…), which has the effect of imposing an enormous burden of expectation on society that seems out of sync with the manner in which we live as human beings. Why can’t relationships come into being, intensify, draw back, morph, fade and grow simultaneously?
There are many healthy relationships out there and the one described above might only be one example rather than the standard. The problem is that we seek to create standards — best practice – and impose these standards when they might be ill-fitting to the circumstances or context. They don’t take into account development or contextual differences, nor do they appreciate complexity.
We do this with education too, assuming that people all learn the same way. Consider the absurdity of lumping all kids together in grades based on age. Is it reasonable to assume that because you and I were born the same year that we will learn content and evolve our knowledge base about the world in the same way? We put kids (and adults — even graduate students) in rows and talk at them for hours hoping that they will all absorb knowledge and do the same thing with it. That might explain why many students struggle and teachers get frustrated.
Thinking developmentally means attenuating oneself to nuance, punctuated learning, ongoing feedback, and inconsistent behaviour. I don’t blame people for wanting to impose a simple cause-and-effect narrative on the world, but doing so doesn’t mean its useful. As I’ve argued elsewhere, unless we consider changing our thinking we may continue to spend time devising ways to do what systems thinker and management leader Russell Ackoff called “the wrong things, righter”.
It is one thing to complain about this, but another to do it. And it is here that the lens needs to be turned back on us systems thinkers and developmental evaluators or designers. Perhaps it is time to stop assuming that people think this way and shift it towards assuming the converse, yet adding that people have the capability to think this way. Of course many will surprise us by already thinking in terms consistent with development and find it very comforting, but that exception will delight us rather than inspire frustration at the thought of “why doesn’t everyone else think like this?”
With so many social narratives that point towards linear thinking about the world we should not be surprised when we find something akin to psychologist Abraham Maslow‘s often paraphrased sentiment:
When the only tool you own is a hammer, pretty soon every problem resembles a nail
A developmental perspective on things, supported through concepts like design thinking, systems thinking, and creative education and learning is something that isn’t standard in our work, but perhaps should be. Building these muscles, much like a good personal trainer does with his or her client, requires attuning oneself to where a person is at and what kind of space they are in to work.
As this 30-day blogging challenge exploring social innovation, design and creativity continues so too will this discussion. It will be, developmental.
** Photo titled dimensional change by alasis used under Creative Commons license from Flickr
The Lies Told By Innovation
Posted: May 11, 2011 Filed under: behaviour change, design thinking, environment, systems thinking | Tags: Calgary, environment, innovation, systems thinking, Toronto Leave a comment »
You Can Build It, They Will Come, But Can it Last?
Being innovative requires a sense of the system that innovation takes place and the design sensibilities to make change last. Are we letting innovation lie to us?
I’ve been on the road much of the past three weeks and one stop I was very glad to make was to my hometown of Calgary, Alberta.
The city is nestled in the Alberta foothills with a view of the Rocky Mountains and an hour’s drive from some of the most beautiful prairie, mountain, and river-filled countryside you’ll find. The city I grew up in has been widely known as an innovator, particularly on issues of the environment. It’s light-rail transit system is powered by wind-generated electricity. Everywhere, there were examples of innovative technologies and conversations about innovation in the news and visible as one drives through the city. Calgary’s vigorous culture of outdoor activity, the natural beauty of the Bow Valley combined with a historical connection to land for food and lifestyle has made it hard to ignore the role of the natural environment in everyday life.
And yet, driving through this city — one that has nearly tripled in size since I was born there — it is hard to not see the innovation forest and trees disconnect. Yes, there are waste diversion programs and hybrid cars and more transit, but the city continues to grow (literally) well beyond its traditional borders into territory that was once farmland with barely an eyeshot of the city. I’ve always known Calgary as a physically large urban centre, but the rampant push towards making more suburbs seems at odds with the desire for a liveable, environmentally responsible city.
Calgary is not alone. As I fly to my home in Toronto, the same conversations are taking place and there, like out West, there is the belief that innovation will save the day. As fuel prices spike as they have over the past few days (and reasonably can’t be expected to lower much anytime soon), I find it hard to imagine how innovation is going to reduce costs and impact for people in the short term.
Whether it is on the issue of the environment, improved knowledge translation in health, or better social design for services, innovation can be seen as the answer. If we just come up with the best idea, the thinking goes, we will be able to solve anything. We are creative people, we can do it.
I actually think this is the lie we tell ourselves to avoid going where real innovation is needed and that is: personal and social change. Without a systems approach and a design for those systems, we will continue to ride our horse (to pick up a Calgary stereotype) in the wrong direction. More clever ways to reduce the impact of our lives on the environment doesn’t change that we’ve created systems that pollute and damage the environment in the first place by design.
Creating sophisticated knowledge translation systems aimed at getting the “right information to the right person as the right time” sounds sexy, but doesn’t work unless there is a system designed to support people in accessing that information when they need it and having the time and space to process that information to make meaning of it. Otherwise, we are just shovelling bits at people and making ourselves feel better because we developed something that, on the surface, looks good, but in reality doesn’t address the bigger picture.
If the forest and trees are part of the natural environment, then we need to consider them both at the same time — literally and metaphorically — in the systems we work in and do so with intent (design) otherwise we will continue to perpetuate the lies that innovation allows us to tell ourselves so well.
*** Photo Calgary Dusk Skyline by fung.leo used under Creative Commons License from Flickr
Thinking Different Requires Different Thinking
Posted: April 11, 2011 Filed under: design thinking, Education & Learning, public health, social systems, systems thinking | Tags: complexity, design thinking, learning, systems thinking, teaching, thinking 2 Comments »
Think Different
Novelty, innovation and doing things differently are seen as the key to competitive advantage and scientific discovery. How we think is as important as what we do and use of the term thinking might be one of the most valued things we do of them all.
Recently Tony Golsby-Smith wrote on the Harvard Business Review blog about the potential contributions of those from non-traditional disciplines (aka: the Humanities) to improving innovation. He states:
People trained in the humanities who study Shakespeare’s poetry, or Cezanne’s paintings, say, have learned to play with big concepts, and to apply new ways of thinking to difficult problems that can’t be analyzed in conventional ways.
The reason? those in the humanities and related disciplines are trained to consider “what if?” questions at the outset. Golby-Smith adds:
This is because our educational systems focus on teaching science and business students to control, predict, verify, guarantee, and test data. It doesn’t teach how to navigate “what if” questions or unknown futures. As Amos Shapira, the CEO of Cellcom, the leading cell phone provider in Israel, put it: “The knowledge I use as CEO can be acquired in two weeks…The main thing a student needs to be taught is how to study and analyze things (including) history and philosophy.”
Ouch. That has to sting for those who just spent $80K on an MBA to get to the C-suite.
But this is not just about business, it extends to a lot of sectors, including health. The focus — almost tyranny — of evidence in health systems has created the same kind of mindset that we see in the scenario described above and the absence of “what if” thinking. Evidence, as it is distilled and presented in the health sector, tends be used to guide actions based on what has happened on the past, not the future. In many cases this is perfectly reasonable and, indeed, ideal (life saving even!), yet evidence can be used as a blunt instrument in areas where precision and learning from the past do not apply. Much of health policy and public health fall into this realm.
To understand this requires another different kind of thinking beyond discipline to areas of transdisciplinary arenas like that of systems thinking. Systems thinking is not systematic thinking, rather it is a different way of seeing problems. It is the difference between hard and soft systems, described by Peter Checkland as the following:
The key difference between them, little understood as yet in the literature, is that the hard tradition assumes that systems exist in the world and can be engineered to achieve declared objectives. The soft tradition assumes that the world is problematical, always more complex than any of our accounts of it, but that the process of enquiry into the world can be engineered as a learning system…
What Checkland suggests is that we can create systematic ways of knowing about the complexity around us and that is what (soft) systems thinking is about. Another way of looking at these problems is using the Cynefin Framework, which illustrates areas where hard systems thinking might prove useful and where a “softer” (to use Checkland’s terms) might be more appropriate.
But neither of these particular models are useful without the shift in thinking outright. Until one starts to see systems, to acknowledge complexity, and to devise ways of organizing that recognize both of these in the way in which knowledge is produced, curated, translated and integrated this is a moot point. Further, until one considers applying such thinking consciously and with in intent to shape the world around us, which I would describe as (partly) design thinking , we will continue to use evidence, the past, and the wrong questions to get the answers we look for (not the answers we want) in addressing health-related challenges and issues.
Taking up the point that Golsby-Smith makes in HBR, getting new players into the mix is one start. I have some others:
- Teach thinking. We rarely get taught how to think in school, just what to think and why to think about it. The two are very different. Include systems and design thinking in courses aimed at training people who work in areas of complexity. Whether it is in formal school settings or continuing education environments, don’t assume that people know about these thinking approaches or that they will pick them up quickly. The non-linear, highly contextualized nature of complex systems and the strategies used to navigate through them are difficult for most people trained in the Western scientific tradition. Yet, the rewards are great for those willing to persevere.
- Take the boundaries of discipline and their points of confluence seriously. While a “hot topic”, transdisciplinarity — working at the intersection of disciplines, not just at the margin of them, is important. Understanding where you come from — in terms of training, experience, life philosophy — helps place you within a system of enquiry and enables you to see boundaries. Too often we fail to acknowledge boundaries at all, assuming that evidence is universal and understood across settings and contexts, which isn’t true.
- Build in diversity..and support it. Humanities scholars and engineers working together? Why not. However, throwing people together isn’t the same as nurturing an environment where diversity is respected. Scott Page’s work on diversity and complexity has looked at the dialogical nature of this relationship and how one feeds the other. Creating — designing — environments that bring the best of diversity out is something that requires much attention and brings many rewards.
- Thinking is a participatory sport.Although thinking is most often considered a solitary, cognitive activity, support for teams and wide engagement with thinking-related materials and methods is the way to support true integration of knowledge and learning. It is one thing to think of systems, it is another to really experience them. One strategy I’ve tried with some success is to have systems learners use photographs or videos or other arts to capture the tacit and everyday expressions of systems in their lives. When learners go beyond what the evidence tells them, see systems for themselves, and share that with others they are better able to point to spaces where new thinking can generate innovations and how what is known matches with what is possible.
Understanding not only what we think about, but how we think about it in relation to the issues we face is important if we are derive strategies that take the complexity of human systems into account. Teaching for thinking and not for knowledge in itself requires different thinking and acting. The question is: Are we ready and willing to do this? Most people love change so long as they don’t have to do anything different. Hopefully, our health and research systems are different. And if not, how can we inspire the thinking to make them so?
*** Photo Think by jon_skilling used under Creative Commons Licence from Flickr
The Know-Do Gap in Knowledge Translation Human Resources
Posted: April 6, 2011 Filed under: knowledge translation, research, social systems, systems thinking | Tags: Allan Best, cancer control, health communications, health human resources, knowledge integration, knowledge translation, systems thinking 5 Comments »
Lots of thinking, not as much doing
Knowledge translation is about putting evidence into practice, but what about putting practices into place that support evidence creation and the people who are in charge of this? Until this missing link is addressed, our knowledge-practice gap will not shrink anytime soon.
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do – Goethe
There is a widely held, mistaken belief that knowledge translation (KT) is all about knowledge. During my post doctoral work on KT and systems science I came to know just how strongly this view is held and how faulty it is in terms of practice. Spend time observing how people actually generate, share and take in knowledge and you’ll see that the actual content is a small part of the equation. Quality relationships, networks of people working together, and the right systems and environments in place to facilitate interaction of those people and ideas is what moves knowledge into action.
I was part of a review team that looked at the evidence for knowledge translation and how it fit within cancer communications and we found that much of what has been published focuses on content, not context. While good, appropriate and timely content is a necessary factor in KT, it is hardly sufficient if there are no people or environments where that knowledge can be appropriately contemplated, learned and applied. This is knowledge integration and it requires people and systems working together.
The systems part is tricky enough and has received growing attention over the past decade (see the linked paper above for a short history of knowledge-to-action research), but it is the human side that remains neglected. To make matters worse, it is our future leaders who are bearing the brunt of this lack of attention.
Consider three examples that presented themselves to me over the past week:
1. A young, bold, charismatic and clear communicator with all the skills, knowledge and enthusiasm and desire to be a knowledge broker who is working on the latest of a string of one-year contracts for different organizations. How is this person supposed to be effective at building relationships when she has to start over in a new role in a new organizational every 12 months?
2. A knowledge mobilizer who speaks highly of his team and role on an enthusiastic, dynamic project aimed at transforming academic knowledge into useful, usable, and accessible forms for policy makers and how he is going to miss it as his contract is up (because his part of the project was funded for just one year). What is going to happen to his knowledge when he leaves?
3. A knowledge generator and health promoter who brings a talent for engaging the community and building networks between disparate voices and groups contemplates what it means to be told in one breath that her work (and that of her team and their projects) is so highly valued and impactful and with the next breath that the project will not be funded again, because it is only a one-year initiative. Are those networks she helped create going to grow without someone paying attention to the whole and not just the parts?
These are not content issues, they are human resource issues and systems ones. All the wonderful research scientists do and the amazing innovations that clinicians introduce are not going to amount to anything lasting without someone to carry the torch and to pay attention to getting that knowledge into practice. The knowledge-to-action system is too complex, too fast moving, and attentional resources are too thin to expect that all this can be done on its own without some forethought and committed focus on KT.
And KT and the relationships necessary for true knowledge integration are not things that can be compartmentalized and squished into one year contracts.
What Allan Best, Bob Hiatt and the panel we worked with found (as have others) is that the content itself needs systems in place to do support its integration into practice. These are human systems and those are built on relationships, and relationships are contiguous, not arbitrary or episodic. Yet that is how we view these activities given the way we structure projects and roles for people working in KT.
We are starting to pay more attention to the way in which content is created now it is time to pay as much attention to how it is translated in real human terms and create the same kinds of supports for people that we try to do for content. Otherwise, the young leaders I profiled above will leave the system and take with them their enthusiasm, energy and, ironically, their knowledge leaving us with little more than a name (KT).
*** Photo “Thinker” by dirvish used under a Creative Commons License from Flickr
Asking if Technology Can Reinvent Education is the Wrong Question
Posted: March 21, 2011 Filed under: Education & Learning | Tags: education, Harvard Business Review, learning, systems thinking, technology 8 Comments »
Harvard Business Review is running a multi-part series looking for answers to the question: Can Technology Re-invent education? While there are lots of answers, perhaps more importantly is considering whether that is the right question in the first place.
Technology captures our collective attention like few other social and technical artefacts. Whether it is robots, flying cars, jet packs, cold fusion, or sub-orbital rockets, we love our technology and expect that it will solve all kinds of social problems. Except, most often, these predictions of utopia are far off the mark.
Computers were supposed to make our lives easier, yet I don’t know many colleagues that find their lives easier — rather the opposite has come true: we live much more complicated lives, which are impacting our hearts and our health (even for public health professionals). Our faster computers do allow us to do more with less energy, yet somehow we manage to fill the time saved with more work (PDF), leading to an overall increase in work rather than a decrease.
So it is not a surprise that Harvard Business Review is asking the question about whether technology will reinvent education. If we could just use education the “right way” and to its fullest potential, imagine what we could do? Imagine how much time we could save? What kind of productivity gains we could achieve? It would be amazing.
It would be amazing, because it is unlikely that we are going to see much in the way of improved learning because of technology. We might be better at gathering information, distributing it, sharing it, and reaching people in new ways, but I am skeptical that we’ll see any real “reinvention” of education through technology. Do things different? Absolutely. Better? That’s not the right question.
To be fair, the author of the lead post in the Advanced Leadership Initiative for HBR, Robin Willner, doesn’t believe in a techo-utopia and, remarking on the success of Watson the computer against human Jeopardy champions, states:
It’s time to think systemically about the long standing barriers to school improvement and education reform.
Technology alone is never the answer — that’s the main lesson from Watson’s Jeopardy win. Technology supporting innovative teachers and school leaders will be the solution for our students.
Yet, the title of the series belies at least some faint hope that the problem of learning and educating can be solved with technology. If we just implemented the right tools we could solve the problem. Willner is writing on the issue of school improvement, not education and it is an important distinction.
As I’ve discussed before, the current model for schools do little to support learning relative to the apprenticeship-style models that they replaced. Most of this is due to a conflation between information provision and education. Computers and technology are excellent at providing information, and even displaying it in ways that enable learners to interact with it. Technology does not provide great opportunities to take content into social contexts where we apply lessons with real people or physical artefacts that are not machines. The complexities of the encounters — having conversations for example — are not easily mimicked by computers and thus, provide only weak substitutes. In short: technology is not about eduction, just better information delivery.
Simulations, one of the areas where technology offers much promise for learning, are often designed for particular purposes, thus enhancing specific skills, but less about general ones. But this is only one narrow use of technology for education, although certainly promising.
But all of this gets us away from the question itself, which focuses on technology’s ability to reinvent education. Education is a human endeavour and a social one at that. Technology may aid in our strategy development, implementation of certain tactics for teaching, but it will not provide the grist for improving the social component of learning. Just as Facebook friends are (mostly) extensions of the friendships we create in everyday life without technology, so is learning. Technology is an aid, not the purpose and thus, focusing on the aids as the means for reinvention sidesteps whether we’re educating effectively in the first place and risks us doing what Russell Ackoff calls doing the wrongs righter. Without questioning the very system in which that technology is deployed, we will continue to do just that and this is where asking new, bigger questions comes into play.
Behaviour and Bodies, Systems and Design
Posted: February 20, 2011 Filed under: art & design, behaviour change, complexity, design thinking, health promotion, Systems science, systems thinking | Tags: biological systems, bodies, design, Fascial Stretch Therapy, health, health care, organizational design, systems thinking, yoga Leave a comment »
A book of life and interconnections
Drawing connections between our bodies and our behaviour reveals systems thinking in new ways that can lend themselves to contemplating greater ways to consider the relationship between design and its consequences on human health.
One of the reasons cited for not exercising is pain and discomfort, particularly if you are not regularly active. Yesterday I had the chance to confront this head-on as I lay on the table getting Fascial Stretch Therapy at my gym. I exercise regularly and do my best to stretch, but nowhere near enough as my therapist (painfully) pointed out to me. FST is a technique that involves controlled manipulation of your body to stretch your muscles in ways that go beyond what one might do with regular stretches on their own or through yoga.
FST and yoga are attractive not only to my body — which really needs the stretching! — but also my mind, and not just for the mental relaxation and body awareness that they encourage, but also because they inspire both systems thinking and design thinking. In doing so, it reveals to me how these two concepts so often need to be linked to fully appreciate how systems function and how design can contribute to solutions or problems within such systems.
A technique like FST or practice like yoga are systems-oriented in that they fundamentally recognize the interconnections between groups of muscles, biological subsystems, and the environment in which these intersect. Thus, while there may be discomfort in your back, the cause may be located in the hips or legs or feet — or all three — and that only by addressing these other areas can one reasonably hope to address the problem in a satisfactory manner. This is systems thinking about a biological problem.
The reason these problems persist is a matter of design. I am seeking help stretching my muscles because I work in an environment that has me sitting most of the day in meetings, facing a computer screen typing madly, or leaning up against a wall in the hallway. I do keep active by walking to work and taking the stairs and running back and forth between my research group‘s area and my office, but that only does so much. The design of my space, my job, and the social conditions that frame how both of those interact with my body has real implications for my health and wellbeing. The conditions in which my biological system is changed is a matter of design.
This is a system with a design problem and therefore requires systems thinking and design as the solution.
Speaking with my FST therapist, the distinctions between a systems approach to care and the more traditional models became more obvious than ever. I couldn’t think of an area of medicine that would deal with the systems problem I was seeking treatment for. And while there are many who deal with issues of ergonomics, workplace stress, and the architecture of buildings, I can’t think of any person or group that would deal with the design of my work in a manner that would improve my health at a systems level. Instead, there are many who would deal with a component of the problem, reducing the whole into parts, and treat them independently. In doing so, the amount of effort required to get things addressed increases, costs go up, and the effectiveness goes down. This is our modern health care system.
While FST works for muscles and biology, we need something similar for our social and organizational systems.
What would happen if we took a systems and design oriented approach to these problems, looking at our social systems like my therapist looks at my body as a biological system? What can we learn from more holistic approaches to treatment that can be applied to social systems and prevention? And how can design help us bring those together in a cohesive manner?
Until we ask these questions and vigorously pursue the answers to them, tight, inflexible and uncomfortable may be terms used for more than just our muscles.
** Photo (Untitled) by history-art-photos, used under a Creative Commons License from Flickr.
