On a busy San Francisco street, in the middle of the Mission, there’s a swing. Not just any swing. A swing fashioned from a bit of painted wood and a thick rope. Attached to a tree. I watch as a stream of people – kids on school holidays, adults in work clothes, hipsters in skinny jeans, and seniors with white hair – stop and marvel. Some get on and have a go. Others merely snap a pic. It’s San Francisco where random is normal, yet a simple outdoor swing has changed the routine.
I’ve stepped off a 17-hour plane ride and into the Mission district, and I’m struck by how such a small thing can displace the ordinary. Displacement is the theme I keep coming back to as I reflect on 2011. 2012 is just a day old, and I’m left with the question: can you make displacement part of the routine?
From Libya to Egypt, we’ve seen major displacement. But whilst power has been dislodged, routine has proven much more stubborn. A change in leadership hasn’t always equated to a change in behaviour. Shifting who makes decisions isn’t the same as shifting how decisions are made. To do that, you have to discard ingrained templates, and continuously rewrite them. Transformative events don’t necessarily equate to transformative practice.
That’s certainly what we’re learning, in a very different context: Australia. There we’ve been building interdisciplinary teams, inside and outside of government, to Work Backwards. To take social challenges (e.g family crisis, carer stress) and develop solutions from the bottom-up. Solutions that prompt behaviour change with and for people and the systems around them.
Over the past year, we’ve been trying to move from a ‘transformative event’ headset to a ‘transformative practice’ headset. In our first few years of working together, Chris and I organised our work as a series of intense, experiential events – from recruitment stalls at shopping centres to ethnographies at people’s houses to co-design workshops to stakeholder workshops to 6 weeks of prototyping. The events were all strung together with a narrative and a theory about how change happens – but we were the ones that did the stringing together. Everyone else was an actor, but not necessarily a director.
Not surprisingly, we often found ourselves burnt out at the end of projects and without a team ready to take the solution to scale, or to further spread Working Backwards.
A ‘transformative practice’ approach is all about enabling people to organise the work, not just participate in the solutions. It’s about teaching a group of individuals to blend their skills, challenge what they think they know, and develop a new intuition. In other words, it’s about changing individual and group behaviour. Indeed, what we’ve come to realise is that in order to co-design solutions that change peoples’ behaviours, we first have to challenge and change our work behaviours.
We’ve had a first go at articulating those work behaviours, and assembling them into a loose curriculum. You can read draft 1 here. We’ve also been prototyping the curriculum with three different teams: the new Family by Family Team, TACSI’s expanded Radical Redesign Team, and the Department of Human Services’ Team.
Whilst the Family by Family team is learning and spreading a defined solution, TACSI’s Radical Redesign Team and the Department of Human Services’ Team are learning and applying a more open-ended methodology. TACSI’s Radical Redesign Team is doing so from inside a small, nimble organisation. The Department of Human Services’ Team is doing so from inside a huge, bureaucratic organisation. Despite the obvious differences, three things have struck me. Three things I hope we can find new ways to address in 2012.
1 Down
Central to Working Backwards is starting with the people experiencing a social challenge. All three of the teams get this – and are passionate about the concept. But, they are still ingrained to look ‘up’ rather than ‘down’ for approval. How can we enable a team’s first instinct be: how will people respond to this idea, rather than how will my boss respond to this idea? And how can we ensure people are confident to just get out of the office and start talking to people as a way of developing their ideas? The Radical Redesign Team spent a couple of weeks in the studio crafting recruitment messages, but after a morning trying them out in the street came back with loads of better ideas they could present back to us. It’s not that we’ve completely done away with vertical accountability and hierarchy, but that the best ideas don’t often come from there.
2 Behind
Most work is task focused – there’s a long litany of things to just ‘get done.’ That’s probably why we’ve found it challenging to train teams not to implement tasks, but to identify & bring to life the premise behind the task. So for example, every week the Family by Family team runs a Yarn Over Dinner for families to swap stories and skills. One of the premises of the dinner is to expand family’s natural capabilities. Of course, on the surface, it looks like a dinner with some fun activities. It’s easy to get swept up in the organisation of that dinner and the planning of those activities. But, it’s also easy to miss the point behind the dinner and the activities. You see, rather than train the FbyF team to run a dinner, we’ve tried to train them to create experiences that build family’s natural capabilities. The goal, across the three teams, is to be able to identify, and re-design, both the intent behind and the execution of tasks.
3 So What
Ultimately, we do work to try and prompt change with and for people, practitioners, and policymakers. That means our measure of success isn’t about how much we’ve done, but about what our activities have enabled. To know that means asking the ‘so what?’ question a lot. Sometimes we’ve done a poor job of encouraging teams to ask that question amongst themselves. And we haven’t always helped team’s learn how to gauge whether their activities are contributing to change. For example, the Department of Human Services’ Team often has to report their activities up the chain of command. It’s much easier to talk about the number of workshops held, or the number of families recruited. Helping team’s find out and tell the ‘so what’ story isn’t just an exercise in better communication, but an opportunity to identify ways to create more change.
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