Tag: change

What I talk about when I talk about ‘user outcomes’ #4

Posted on April 24, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

I re-read Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting last week. It’s not a straightforward read but it’s certainly a challenging and rewarding one. Kundera describes it as “a novel in the form of variations” and “like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme”.

To my mind, that theme is the importance not only of History, but celebrating it in its multiple forms and from a variety of perspectives. In terms of user outcomes, therefore, I think that there’s a delicate line to be drawn between influence and obliteration:

The future is an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and it’s countenance is irritating, repellant, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past. We fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and history. (p.30-31)

“You begin to liquidate a people,” Hübl said, “by taking away it’s memory. You destroy it’s books, it’s culture, it’s history. And then others write other books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what it was. The world at large forgets it still faster.” (p.218)

History is a series of ephemeral changes, while eternal values are immutable, perpetuated outside history, and have no need of memory. (p.257)

During the last two hundred years the blackbird has abandoned the woods to become a city bird. First in Great Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, then several decades later in Paris and the Ruhr Valley. Throughout the nineteenth century it conquered the cities of Europe one after another. It settled in Vienna and Prague around 1900, then spread eatward to Budapest, Belgrade, Istanbul.

From the planet’s point of view, the blackbird’s invasion of the human world is certainly more important than the Spanish invasion of South America or the return to Palestine of the Jews. A shift in the relationship among the various kinds of creation (fish, birds, humans, plants) is a shift of a higher order than changes in relations among various groups of the same kind. Whether Celts or Slavs inhabit Bohemia, whether Romanians or Russians conquer Bessarabia, is more or less the same to the earth. But when the blackbird betrayed nature to follow humans into their artificial, unnatural world, something changed in the organic structure of the planet.” (p.267-8)

This idea of one of the most important changes from our planet’s point of view taking place without us noticing really made me sit up and think. But it was this last quotation which was the clincher for me writing this post:

The best possible progressive ideas are those that include a strong enough dose of provocation to make it’s supporters feel proud of being original, but at the same time attract so many adherents that the risk of being an isolated exception is immediately averted by the noisy approval of a triumphant crowd.” (p.273)

In other words, if you want to change things for the better and achieve improved user outcomes, you need to build a constituency. You need to make an idea powerful enough that people are attracted into its orbit.

Liminality and spare capacity

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

The time between finishing your degree and graduating.

The duration of an usual and lengthy method of transport.

The time between just before mother and baby come home for the first time.

These are all examples of liminality, “a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the “threshold” of or between two different existential planes.” Liminal spaces tend to promote both reflection and planning and I believe them to be profoundly important.

Spare capacity is exactly what you’d expect it to be: the ability of an individual or organization to do something due to ‘slack’ in schedules, workflows or projects. It’s unallocated time associated with an ability to make something happen.

Both of these are under attack. Liminal states can be all-too-easy to break by accessing virtual spaces, whilst spare capacity is often filled up with needless stuff by individuals and organizations alike.

Significant birthdays and new arrivals both force you to reflect on our lives; I’ve certainly inhabited a liminal space most of this past week. I’ve also been thinking recently about my own spare capacity (‘cognitive surplus‘?), something I never had the luxury of even considering whilst teaching.

There’s a lot of change that I can and should effect in the world. And seeking out liminal spaces and spare capacity are two ways I (and we all) can do just that.

Image CC BY-NC Pulpolox !!!

Why parents don’t engage with schools

Posted on September 24, 2010 by Doug Belshaw

This morning I dropped my son off at school nursery and then went for a run. As I ran past our local church I noticed there being more cars there than usual. This got me thinking about fluctuating church attendance over the last few hundred years and how, in times of crisis, people tend to start attending again.

When people who don’t usually attend church return – at times of crisis or for the major festivals like Christmas, Easter and Harvest Festival – they expect things to be the same. It’s much the same with parents and schools. Apart from dropping their children off when they’re younger, the only times they enter schools are for parents’ evening and school events. Parents expect schools to be much the same as when they went themselves.

People expect institutions with which they don’t engage much to remain the same.

So what are schools, churches and other institutions to do who face this problem? Wait until people engage with them to gain a mandate to change and stay relevant? Of course not, that would create a vicious circle.

What’s needed is strong leadership. A vision: a clear, decisive focus on what’s important. In our increasingly atomised society it takes a huge effort to create an engaged community. This is especially true in schools who, according to a figure I heard at the Scottish Learning Festival this week, have had to deal with 700 new initiatives since the dawn of the National Curriculum.

Parental engagement is like confidence. You can’t wait for it to happen; you have to make a decision and decide to change. It’s takes effort, but it’s got to be worth it in the long run!