Tag: organizational learning

complexityeducation & learningpsychologysystems thinking

Complex problems and social learning

on September 14, 2017

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Adaptation, evolution, innovation, and growth all require that we gain new knowledge and apply it to our circumstances, or learn. While much focus in education is on how individuals attend, process and integrate information to create knowledge, it is the social part of learning that may best determine whether we simply add information to our brains or truly learn. 

Organizations are scrambling to convert what they do and what they are exposed to into tangible value. In other words: learn. A 2016 report from the Association for Talent Development (ATD) found that “organizations spent an average of $1,252 per employee on training and development initiatives in 2015”, which works out to an average cost per learning hour of $82 based on an average of 33 hours spent in training programs per year. Learning and innovation are expensive.

The massive marketplace for seminars, keynote addresses, TED talks, conferences, and workshops points to a deep pool of opportunities for exposure to content, yet when we look past these events to where and how such learning is converted into changes at the organizational level we see far fewer examples.

Instead of building more educational offerings like seminars, webinars, retreats, and courses, what might happen if they devoted resources to creating cultures for learning to take place? Consider how often you may have been sent off to some learning event, perhaps taken in some workshops or seen an engaging keynote speaker, been momentarily inspired and then returned home to find that yourself no better off in the long run. The reason is that you have no system — time, resources, organizational support, social opportunities in which to discuss and process the new information — and thus, turn a potential learning opportunity into neural ephemera.

Or consider how you may have read an article on something interesting, relevant and important to what you do, only to find that you have no avenue to apply or explore it further. Where do the ideas go? Do they get logged in your head with all the other content that you’re exposed to every day from various sources, lost?

Technical vs. Social

My colleague and friend John Wenger recently wrote about what we need to learn, stating that our quest for technical knowledge to serve as learning might be missing a bigger point: what we need at this moment. Wenger suggests shifting our focus from mere knowledge to capability and states:

What is the #1 capability we should be learning?  Answer: the one (or ones) that WE most need; right now in our lives, taking account of what we already know and know how to do and our current situations in life.

Wenger argues that, while technical knowledge is necessary to improve our work, it’s our personal capabilities that require attention to be sufficient for learning to take hold. These capabilities are always contingent as we humans exist in situated lives and thus our learning must further be applied to what we, in our situation, require. It’s not about what the best practice is in the abstract, but what is best for us, now, at this moment. The usual ‘stuff’ we are exposed to is decontextualized and presented to us without that sense of what our situation is.

The usual ‘stuff’ we are exposed to under the guise of learning is so often decontextualized and presented to us without that sense of how, whether, or why it matters to us in our present situation.

To illustrate, I teach a course on program evaluation for public health students. No matter how many examples, references, anecdotes, or colourful illustrations I provide them, most of my students struggle to integrate what they are exposed to into anything substantive from a practical standpoint. At least, not at first. Without the ability to apply what they are learning, expose the method to the realities of a client, colleague, or context’s situation, they are left abstracting from the classroom to a hypothetical situation.

But, as Mike Tyson said so truthfully and brutally: “Every fighter has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

In a reflection on that quote years later, Tyson elaborated saying:

“Everybody has a plan until they get hit. Then, like a rat, they stop in fear and freeze.”

Tyson’s quote applies to much more than boxing and complements Wenger’s assertions around learning for capability. If you develop a plan knowing that it will fail the moment you get hit (and you know you’re going to get hit), then you learn for the capability to adapt. You build on another quote attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower, who said:

“I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.”

Better social, better learning

Plans don’t exist in a vacuum, which is why they don’t always turn out. While sometimes a failed plan is due to poor planning, it is more likely due to complexity when dealing with human systems. Complexity requires learning strategies that are different than those typically employed in so many educational settings: social connection.

When information is technical, it may be simple or complicated, but it has a degree of linearity to it where one can connect different pieces together through logic and persistence to arrive a particular set of knowledge outcomes. Thus, didactic classroom learning or many online course modules that require reading, viewing or listening to a lesson work well to this effect. However, human systems require attention to changing conditions that are created largely in social situations. Thus, learning itself requires some form of ‘social’ to fully integrate information and to know what information is worth attending to in the first place. This is the kind of capabilities that Wenger was talking about.

My capabilities within my context may look very much like that of my colleagues, but the kind of relationships I have with others, the experiences I bring and the way I scaffold what I’ve learned in the past with what I require in the present is going to be completely different. The better organizations can create the social contexts for people to explore this, learn together, verify what they learn and apply it the more likely they can reap far greater benefits from the investment of time and money they spend on education.

Design for learning, not just education

We need a means to support learning and support the intentional integration of what we learn into what we do: it fails in bad systems.

It also means getting serious about learning, meaning we need to invest in it from a social, leadership and financial standpoint. Most importantly, we need to emotionally invest in it. Emotional investment is the kind of attractor that motivates people to act. It’s why we often attend to the small, yet insignificant, ‘goals’ of every day like responding to email or attending meetings at the expense of larger, substantial, yet long-term goals.

As an organization, you need to set yourself up to support learning. This means creating and encouraging social connections, time to dialogue and explore ideas, the organizational space to integrate, share and test out lessons learned from things like conferences or workshops (even if they may not be as useful as first thought), and to structurally build moments of reflection and attention to ongoing data to serve as developmental lessons and feedback.

If learning is meant to take place at retreats, conferences or discrete events, you’re not learning for human systems. By designing systems that foster real learning focused on the needs and capabilities of those in that system, you’re more likely to reap the true benefit of education and grow accordingly. That is an enormous return on investment.

Learning requires a plan and one that recognizes you’re going to get punched in the mouth (and do just fine).

Can this be done for real? Yes, it can. For more information on how to create a true learning culture in your organization and what kind of data and strategy can support that, contact Cense and they’ll show you what’s possible. 

Image credit: Social by JD Hancock used under Creative Commons license.

behaviour changeeducation & learningsystems thinking

Learning fails in bad systems

on August 28, 2017

2348137226_2d6536745e_o_Edits.jpgEnormous energy is spent on developing strategies to accomplish things with comparatively little paid to the systems that they are being deployed in. A good strategy works by design and that means designing systems that improve the likelihood of their success rather than fight against them and this is no truer than in the effort to learn on the job.

 

A simple search of the literature — gray or academic — will find an enormous volume of resources on how to design, implement and support learning for action in organizations. At an individual level, there are countless* articles on personal change, self-improvement, and performance ‘hacks’ that individuals can do to better themselves and supposedly achieve more in what they do.

Psychology and related behavioural sciences have spent inordinate time learning how individuals and organizations change by emphasizing specific behaviours, decision processes, and data that can support action. A close inspection will find that relatively few strategies produce consistent results and this has to do less with execution, skill or topic and more with the system in which these strategies are introduced.

To illustrate this, consider the role of learning in the organization and how our strategies to promote it ultimately fail when our systems are not designed to support it.

Knowledge integration: A case study

Consider the example of attending a conference as a means of learning and integrating knowledge into practice.

Surajit Bhattacharya published a primer for how to get value from conferences in medicine, pointing to tips and strategies that a medical practitioner can take such as arriving a day early (so you’re not groggy), planning out your day, and be social. These are all practical, logical suggestions, yet they are premised upon a number of things that we might call system variables. These include:

  • The amount of control you have over your schedule week-to-week.
  • The availability of transportation and accommodation options that suit your schedule, budget, and preferences.
  • The nature and type of work you do, including the amount of hours and intensity of the work you perform in a typical week. This will determine the amount of energy you have and the readiness to be attentive.
  • The volume of email and other digital communications (e.g., messages and updates via social media, chat, project management platforms) you receive on a daily basis and the nature of those kinds of messages (e.g.urgency and importance).
  • The amount and nature of travel required to both attend the event and the amount you had prior to attending the event.
  • The level of rest you’ve had. Sleep amount, timing, and quality all factor into how much rest you get. Add in the opportunity to engage in an activity like walking, exercise or stretching that one might do and we see a number of factors that could influence learning performance.
  • The setting. The lighting, air quality and air flow, seat arrangement, room acoustics, and access to some natural light are all factors in our ability to attend to and engage with a learning event.
  • The quality and format of the content and its delivery. Speaker quality, preparation, content and overall performance will all contribute to the ability to convey information and engage the audience.
  • Food and drink. Are you eating the kinds of foods and beverages that enable your body’s performance? Do you have access to these foods and drinks? Are they served at times that suit your body?
  • Your level of comfort and skill at engaging strangers. This matters if you’re more introverted, dislike small talk, or are not energized by others.

These are all platform issues: those in which motivation and energy can be channeled to focus on and engage with learning content. The fewer of these factors present the greater the energy expenditure needed on the part of the learner.

Learning within systems

W. Edwards Deming noted that most of the issues of performance in any organization were due to processes and systems (estimated to be up to 85% or more) rather than individual employees. While Deming was referring largely to manufacturing contexts, the same might be said for learning.

Consider our example from earlier about the conference. We’ve already outlined the factors that could contribute to learning at the conference itself, but let’s extend the case further to what happens after the conference. After all, a surgeon, engineer, computer programmer, law clerk, or carpenter isn’t going to practice her or his craft at the conference; they’ll do it when they return to regular work.

Now consider what our attendee encounters after they have made the trip home to apply this newfound learning:

  • A backlog of emails, phone messages and other correspondence that has either been left untouched, scantly attended to, or fully managed. In the first case, the backlog might be high and requires a considerable amount of time and energy to ‘catch up’ on upon return, however at least the learner was fully present to perform the many activities suggested byBhattacharya in the earlier article. In the second case, there is a higher than usual amount to attend to and the learner might have been selectively disengaged from the learning event. In the third, the learner returns to usual life without a backlog but may have sacrificed considerable attention toward the usual correspondence than actually learning.
  • A backlog of meetings. Scheduled meetings, calls or other events that require a co-presence (virtual or physical) that were put off due to travel are now picked up.
  • A backlog of administrative tasks. Submitting receipts and conference expenses, regular accounting or administrative tasks are all things that either was left untouched or, in the case of submitting expenses, unlikely or impossible to do until the trip has returned.
  • Fatigue. Sitting in a conference can be exhausting, particularly because of the conditions of the rooms, the volume of content and the break in the routine of every day (which can be energizing, too). Add in any travel issues that might arise and there is a reasonable chance that a person is not in an optimal state to take what they have been exposed to and apply it.
  • The usual organization processes and structures. Are there are opportunities to reflect upon, discuss, and process what has been learned with others and spaces to apply those lessons directly with appropriate feedback? How often have we been exposed to inspiring or practical content only to find few opportunities to apply it in practice upon our return in enough time before the details of the lessons fade?

It’s not reasonable to expect to have optimal conditions in our work much of the time, if ever. However, as you can see there are a lot of factors that contribute to our capacity to learn and the required energy needed to take what we’ve been exposed to and integrate it into our work. The fewer of these situations in place, the greater the likelihood that the investment in the learning experience will be lost.

An organization or individual requires a platform for learning that includes systems that allow for learners to be at their best and to provide a means for them to take what they learn and apply it — if it’s valuable. Otherwise, why invest in it?

This isn’t to say that no good can come from a conference, but if the main focus is on actual learning and the application of knowledge to the betterment of an organization and individual why would we not invest in the platform to make use of that rather than discarding it.

Rethinking our systems

When I was doing evaluation work in continuing medical education I was amazed to see how often learning events were held at 7 or 8 am. The rationale was that this was often tied to shift changes at hospitals and were the one time of day when most physicians were least likely to have other appointments. This was also the time when physicians were either highly fatigued from a night shift or having battled traffic on their commute to work or were planning the rest of their day ahead — all circumstances when they might be least focused on actually learning.

This choice of time was done for scheduling purposes, not for learning purposes. Yet, the stated purpose of continuing education was to promote learning and its various outcomes. Here, the strategy was to expose medical professionals to necessary, quality content to keep them informed and skilled and doing it at a time that appeared most convenient for all is an example of an idea that had logic to it, but ultimately failed in most regards.

How? If one looked at the evaluation data, typically the results suggested this strategy wasn’t so bad. Most often post-event surveys suggested that the overall ratings were consistently high. Yet a closer look at the data yields some questions.

For example, the questions asked to assess impact were things like: did the presenter speak clearly? or did the presenter provide the content they said they would? In most cases, participants were asked if the speaker arrived on time, presented what they said they would, were intelligible and whether there was a chance the learner might find useful what was presented. It had little to no bearing on whether the content was appropriate, impactful or applied in practice. This is because the system for evaluation was based on a model of knowledge transmission: content is delivered to a person and, assuming the content is good, the lesson is learned.

We know this to be among the weakest forms of moving knowledge to action and certainly not something suited to more complex situations or conditions, particularly in health systems. This is still what prevails.

Design for learning

If you’re seeking to promote learning and create a culture where individuals across an organization can adapt, develop, and grow learning requires much more than simply sending people to conferences, hosting seminars, providing books and other materials or watching some instructional videos. Without a means to integrate and promote that new knowledge as part of a praxis, organizations and individuals alike will continue to get frustrated, lag in their efforts to anticipate and respond to changing conditions and will ultimately fail to achieve anything close to their potential.

Designing for learning is as much about a curriculum as the context for how that curriculum is delivered and how learners are set up to engage with it all in their organizations and everyday lives.

*This is literally the case because the volume of new articles being published daily is so high.

If you’re looking to create learning systems in your organization, visit Cense to explore what it can do for you in shaping your strategy and evaluation to support sustainable, impactful learning for complex conditions. 

Image credit: “Platform” by Martin L is licensed under CC BY 2.0

 

innovation

Acting on Failure or Failure to Act?

on April 8, 2014

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Who would have thought that failure would be held up as something to be desired just a few years ago? Yet, it is one thing to extol the virtues of failure in words, it is quite another to create systems that support failure in action and if the latter doesn’t follow the former, failure will truly live up to its name among the innovation trends of the 21st century. 

Ten years ago if someone would have said that failure would be a hot term in 2014 I would have thought that person wasn’t in their right mind, but here we are seeing failure held up as an almost noble act with conferences, books and praise being heaped on those who fail. Failure is now the innovator’s not-so-secret tool for success. As I’ve written before, failure is being treated in a fetishistic manner as this new way to unlock creativity and innovation when what it might be is simply a means reducing people’s anxieties.

Saying it’s OK to fail and actually creating an environment where failure is accepted as a reasonable — maybe even expected — outcome is something altogether different. Take strategic planning. Ever see a strategic plan that includes failure in it? Have you ever seen an organization claim that it will do less of things, fail more often, and learn more through “not-achieving” rather than succeeding?? Probably not.

How often has a performance review for an individual or organization included learning (which is often related to failure) as a meaningful outcome? By this I refer to the kind of learning that comes from experience, from reflective practice, from the journey back and forth through confusion and clarity and from the experimentation of trying and both failing and succeeding. It’s been very rare that I’ve seen that in either corporate or non-profit spaces, at least in any codified form.

But as Peter Drucker once argued: what gets measured, get’s managed.

If we don’t measure failure, we don’t manage for it and nor do our teams include failure as part of their core sets of expectations, activities and outcomes and our plans or aspirations.

Failure, mindfulness and judgement

In 2010 post in Harvard Business Review, Larry Prusak commented on the phenomenon of measurement and noted that judgement — something that comes from experience that includes failure — is commonly missing from our assessments of performance of individuals and organizations alike. Judgement is made based on good information and knowledge, but also experience in using it in practice, reminding me of a quote a wise elder told me:

Good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgment.

One of the persistent Gladwellian myths* out there is that of the 10,000 hours rule that suggests if we put that amount of time into something we’re likely to achieve a high level of expertise. This is true only if most of those 10,000 hours were mindful, deliberate ones devoted to the task at hand and involve learning from the successes, failures, processes and outcomes associated with those tasks. That last part about mindful, reflective attention or deliberate practice as the original research calls it (as so many Gladwellian myths suffer from) is left off of most discussions on the subject.

To learn from experience one has to pay attention to what one is doing, what one is thinking while doing it, and assessing the impact (evaluation) of that action once whatever is done is done. For organizations, this requires alignment between what people do and what they intend to do, requiring that mindful evaluation and monitoring be linked to strategy.

If we follow this lead where it takes us is placing failure near the centre of our strategy. How comfortable are you with doing that in your organization?

A failure of failure

Failure is among the most emotionally loaded words in the English language. While I often joke that the term evaluation is the longest four-letter word in the dictionary, failure is not far off. The problem with failure, as noted in an earlier post, is that we’ve been taught that failure is to be avoided and the opposite of success, which is viewed in positive terms.

Yet, there is another reason to question the utility of failure and that is also related to the term success. In the innovation space, what does success mean? This is not a trivial question because if one asks bold questions to seek novel solutions it is very likely that we don’t know what success actually looks like except in its most general sense.

A reading of case studies from Amazon to Apple and Acumen to Ashoka finds that their success looks different than the originators intended. Sometimes this success is far better and more powerful and sometimes its just different, but in all cases the path was littered with lessons and few failures. They succeeded because they learned, not because they failed.

Why? Because those involved in creating these ‘failures’ were paying attention, used the experience as feedback and integrated that into the next stage of development. With each stage comes more lessons and new challenges and thus, failure is only so if there is no learning and reflection. This is not something that can be wished for; it must be built into the organization.

So what to do?

  • Build in the learning capacity for your organization by making learning a priority and creating the time, space and organizational support for getting feedback to support learning. Devoting a small chunk of time to every major meeting to reflecting back what you’re learning is a great way to start.
  • Get the right feedback. Developmental evaluation is an approach that can aid organizations working in the innovation space to be mindful.
  • Ask lots of questions of yourself, your stakeholders, what you do and the systems you’re in.
  • Learn how to design for your particular program context based on feedback coming from the question asking and answering. Design is about experimenting without the expectation of immediate success.
  • Develop safe-fail experiments that allow you to try novel approaches in a context that is of relatively low risk to the entire organization.

There are many ways to do this and systems that can support you in truly building the learning capacity of your organization to be better at innovating while changing the relationship you have with ‘failure’.

For more information about how to do this, CENSE Research + Design offers consultation and training to get organizations up to speed on designing for social innovation.

 

* Refers to ideas popularized by journalist and essayist Malcolm Gladwell that are based on the scientific research of professionals and distilled into accessible forms for mass market reading that become popular and well-known through further social discussion in forms that over-simplify and even distort the original scientific findings. It’s a social version of the “telephone game“. The 10,000 hour ‘rule’ was taken from original research by K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues on deliberate practice and is often discussed in the context of professional (often medical) training, where the original research was focused. This distortion is not something Gladwell intends, rather becomes an artifact of having ideas told over and again between people who may have never seen the original work or even Gladwell’s, but take ideas that become rooted in popular culture. A look at citations on failure and innovation finds that the term deliberate practice is rarely, if ever, used in the discussion of the “10,000 rule”.

 

Photo Credit: Project365Fail by Mark Ordonez used under Creative Commons license via Flickr. Thanks for sharing, Mark!

 

 

Uncategorized

Indispensibility and Organizational Change

on February 26, 2010

Seth Godin‘s recent book throws out the challenge to its readers to be indispensable in the jobs that they do. This is a tall order for most, but Godin points to ways of thinking, approaching problems and examples of how even the most mundane, mechanical jobs can be more when we bring the best of ourselves to what we do each day — no matter what the job is. He wants us all to reclaim our genius. The message is an unusual one in that it applies very well to individuals — you and me — but is a lot harder to apply at the organizational level. This is an important issue for those wanting to create better, healthier systems and it is here that the role of individual and system can get confounded.

Mike Myatt, from Blogging Innovation, wrote a critique of the indispensibility position in terms of its implications for organizations. His post, a fair and appreciative one regarding Seth’s position in many areas, is nonetheless critical of the idea of fostering indispensibility in firms:

A well managed company does not allow itself to become dependent upon the performance of any single individual. Those individuals who attempt to hoard knowledge, relationships, or resources to attain job security should not to be valued or viewed as indispensable, but should be admonished as ineffective and deemed a liability. Corporate talent that cannot be shared, duplicated, distributed, or leveraged is not nearly as valuable as talent that can.

It is here that I first disagree. Godin is not advocating for valuing the hoarder, rather he is suggesting the opposite: unparalleled sharing and generosity. Someone who hoards will not advance system change: period. Systems rely on exchange of information and intense conservation of knowledge or information reduces the response capacity of a system (which could be an organization). An organization that relies on a hoarder for survival hasn’t been paying attention or created processes of openness that allow information to move through the system. If you have a hoarder, one needs to ask: how did we create an organization that enabled that person to become so important? How can we transform it so that person’s unique talents can come out and that knowledge that is sharable and distributed gets to whomever it needs to when its needed?

I would like to address two of Myatt’s issues:

Myatt goes on:

In fact, I would go so far as to say that anyone who sets out to make themselves indispensable would be the one committing career suicide for two reasons:

  1. Anyone who is “perceived” as indispensable in their current role completely eliminates any possibility of promotion
  2. Any good leadership team who finds themselves dependant upon a linchpin will immediately move to mitigate the risk of finding themselves in such an untenable position

Regarding point 1: What would one promote themselves to? This pokes a hole at the dominant model of organizational development that suggests that promotions work vertically (including the entire thinking about why we need directions to move, embedded in the term “promotion”). When you’re the best salesperson on a team doing something you love and are good at and you get a “promotion” does it mean pulling you off the sales team into a management position, which may rely on a completely different skill and mindset? Does this really make sense?

Regarding point 2: If you have a real linchpin, your task is creating a dynamic, exciting environment to let them do their thing well. After all, they are linchpins precisely because they are good at what they do. You’re always in an “untenable position” of not being able to replace them because they are, by definition, unreplaceable. Do you have a work culture that brings in unique talent and nurtures it to allow it to succeed or do you try to create positions that are defined by a set of duties that can be done by anyone?

Myatt’s argument is counter to what Linchpin is all about in its approach. If you create standards and clearly defined roles and evaluate solely based on those standards, which is the position that is being argued from, you will suffer under a linchpin promotion strategy.

Maybe. At least, your business model will suffer.

But that misses the bigger point: Why build an organization around such a model to begin with? Maybe the system needs to change as much as the individuals within it. Maybe then, a linchpin promotion strategy doesn’t look so strange or problematic.

behaviour changeeHealthpublic health

eHealth and the Means-Ends Problem

on September 19, 2009

Prescribing ChangeIt’s been a busy week and one that has focused on means and ends and provided me with many examples of how those two things get confused and become de-linked.

I started the week off in Vancouver with meetings focused on my ongoing research looking at collaboration and outcomes associated with the study and evaluation of the Life Sciences Institute at the University of British Colombia. Our research is trying to ascertain the means from the ends — and even what those ends are or should be. Does increasing interaction between scientists of different disciplines produce more research? better research? different research? and if so, is this a factor of the people?, the setting?, facilitators within the LSI and outside?, something else? or some combination? It’s the kind of problem that makes researchers squirm or jump (thankfully, I’m in the latter).

These kinds of means and ends are important for not only research, but understanding innovation in practice and creating better strategies to facilitate that. Nowhere was that more clear than in the two days of presentations and discussion at Medicine 2.0, perhaps the most important gathering of people — researchers, clinicians, decision makers, patients and advocates — interested in learning more about how collaborative e-tools brings about change. Events like these are dangerous; for those in eHealth and those outside it.

For those outside, the danger comes from having a group of innovators share with the world how ‘Web 2.0’ tools can facilitate self-organization, community engagement, and patient involvement in ways that challenge the status quo quickly and with tremendous force. As I tell my students in my Health Behaviour Change course at the U of T : the only people who truly welcome change are wet babies.

Take the eHealth Ontario debacle, which continues to roll along. It now has come to the attention of the public that Ontario already has an eHealth record system linking close to 100 facilities only it is focused solely on child health (i.e., those under the age of 19), when its spent millions on developing a completely new one, presumably for the other part of the population (?). What is required here is changing the tools to address a larger population, but more importantly, changing a mindset that there needs to be new tools, rather than adapting existing ones. The means (a centralized database for health records in this case) is confused with the end (a healthier province & a more efficient and effective health care system). A quest for getting the ‘right’ means or getting a particular ‘means’ is delaying our ability to move towards the healthy end.

From the inside eHealth, these kinds of events are dangerous for reasons that are not that different than those of outsiders. In this case, there is a tendency to focus on the means without consideration of the environment in which those methods are deployed. At Medicine 2.0 there were talks ranging from a focus on patient support needs and portals, public health support strategies, wiki-based clinical practice guidelines, and a variety of ways to engage various audiences with tools like Facebook and Twitter. In nearly every presentation the focus was on the novel ways in which technology could facilitating change. Yet in the audience and at the breaks these presenters (myself included) found ourselves talking less about the tools, but the organizational cultures and shifts that need to take place to make these tools work. Indeed, the tools can do a lot, but without an organizational mindshift within our health and public health systems, even the most innovative, responsive and affordable tools will not truly make the change that is espoused.

We are clear on our end, now its time to reconsider our means in light of the tools and the culture that exists around them.

education & learningsystems science

Doing important things

on July 30, 2009

Last night I attended the closing session of the 27th annual Systems Dynamics Society conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico featuring organizational change leader Peter Senge. Although I had planned to go to the talk originally, I was getting a little drained from all the learning and non-stop activity since arriving on Saturday and thought I’d go to Santa Fe for the day. Santa Fe is beautiful and has more art galleries than any city in the U.S. (so I am told) and is also the home of the world’s premiere think tank on complexity science, the Santa Fe Institute.

However, ‘fate intervened’ and every single car was rented in the city. We also got a wicked thunderstorm in the afternoon. Somehow, things worked out to keep me in town and I am so glad I was here. The talk — a conversation really — was truly inspiring. It wasn’t because of any particular oratory that Peter or the other conversants delivered or its brilliance in delivery (although it was enjoyable to be a part of). It was how it tapped into what I might call the soul of systems thinking and modeling. Systems dynamics modeling is a pretty esoteric field to those not familiar with it. Few people jump up and down at the thought of a model being created. It feels academic, perhaps because it sometimes is.

Yet, they offer us a powerful way to converse, particularly when they are developed in a participatory way. They provide a means to help people see the bigger picture and collaborate on some of the big problems in life, the problems that we NEED to work on if our species is to survive and indeed, if many of the other species on the planet will survive. Climate change was indeed one of the big issues under discussion, not only because it is something that systems dynamics is actively involved in, but because it is one of the grand challenges that we as a society need to bring systems science to so desperately.

The bottom line is that we need to create the space to reflect in our work. That’s what I hoped this blog would achieve for me. But its something we don’t do much of, and for the young professors and students in the audience there was some real concern about how to do this when it is so rarely valued by our environments, yet ironically is one of the tools that creates more value in our work than anything.

It was a special evening and I came away with some wonderful quotes that I scribbled in my notebook that I wanted to share:

“You only have so much time on this earth. Why would you spend your days doing anything but the most important thing you can do?” — Jay Forrester

“Climate change is a symptom; how we live is the problem. If want change, we need to focus on the problem” – Peter Senge

” The gift of climate change is that we all have to work together, otherwise it is unsolvable” — Peter Senge

“It is only through reflection that we escape our history”

Indeed, some words to reflect upon.