Resilience: often necessary, occasionally evil
Yesterday, straight from an energising discussion with our Projects team about future RSA approaches to public services issues, I rushed to deal with something more current and tangible. My twelve year daughter has a long term health condition, which means regular appointments and occasional bouts of hospitalisation. After twelve years navigating a Victorian monolith, we now have the airy complexity of a brand new PFI building. We’ve gone straight from Dickens to Huxley.
My daughter has always been intense and feisty – most people who spend a few hours with her need to come up for air at some point – but in her regular interactions with medical people and places, this is amplified. And adolescence is now adding to the mix. Yesterday, she refused to answer questions that weren’t using the correct medical terms on the piece of paper in front of the physiotherapist. She asked irritating questions, gave cryptic answers, and her body language was moody, sullen and horizontally sprawled – she looked like she was on our sofa watching something excruciatingly boring on TV.
Like any parent would, I often plead for her to be more polite to a group of people that definitely want her to be as well as possible. At the same time, I know that her assertive games are a form of resilience – a way of coping with loss, setbacks and change, and steeling herself for future battles and disappointments. She is an expert patient now, and her attitude in some ways ensures that the system treats her as such.
I remember Maria Balshaw, now Director of Manchester City Galleries, arguing that ‘arsiness’ was a key attribute of creativity, so should possibly be taught in schools. I doubt if this idea will catch on, but we do need to accept the need to develop qualities in our young people that aren’t always pleasant. Whether it’s the liberal perspective on social and emotional learning, or the more traditional approach through character education, both emphasise qualities and attitudes that, in essence, make children easier for us adults to deal with. Just be nice. Even our Opening Minds framework, which includes ‘coping with change’ as a key aspect of the ‘managing situations’ competency, might not be quite ready to develop and assess approaches which elicit and celebrate the nasty.
This links to an emerging idea for a broader RSA project: can we harness new insights into the teenage brain and other research to ask how can schools and society relish rather than fear the teenage years? What kinds of behaviour change do we need to promote, in both teenagers and the adults and institutions which deal with them, to ensure a happy, productive adolescence?
Reflecting on Reflexive Coppers
Being reflective means never having to say ‘sorry if these comments come a bit late’. So, after my recommended twenty minutes of reflection, here are some thoughts inspired by Monday’s excellent Reflexive Coppers report. The Social Brain team said reflexive, I’ll say reflective, even though I am sure that the difference matters to someone out there.
The report demonstrated a real appetite from the police to engage in new kinds of thinking and conversations, and also outlined the barriers, both cultural and institutional, that prevent reflectivity. These barriers are far from unique to the police force. Even the teaching profession, which by its nature you might expect to embrace reflection as a key pedagogy for pupil and adult learning, finds this difficult. It’s often a case of ’Teach first, ask questions later, if at all’.
In my previous job with Creative Partnerships, although the excitement came during the classroom projects themselves, most teachers and practitioners recognised that the most important, sustainable learning came through the reflective processes we built into the programme’s design and values – ‘question, connect, imagine, reflect’. This was often tough stuff , but ultimately it was the reflection that changed teachers’ practices when our circus left town.
My own experience of Action Learning as a powerful tool for solution-focused reflection was that it worked best with people who weren’t only outside your own workplace, but from different professions. Common Purpose‘s model is partly built on this cross-professional approach, but their operation can appear too evangelical and assertive to encourage genuine reflection. It is also expensive. Are there cheaper, more self-facilitated ways for professionals across different public services to reflect collaboratively, possibly based on the TeachMeet DIY approach, and possibly on particular themes (for instance, children and young people)?
When my sister was training to be a nurse, during one of her first lectures her class of sixty students was told that “half of you will end up marrying policemen”. She neither became a nurse or married a policeman; but if her lecturer was right then reflective, cross-professional pillow talk may already be happening, off -duty, in various rooms of various homes.
Mental health at work – everyone’s business
Whose responsibility is it to support people with mental health problems in/to employment? Later this month, the OECD will publish what looks like an important piece of work examining the myths and realities about mental health and work. The issue is a spectacular tangle of grey areas, discrepancies and imprecision.
There’s the matter of looking after the mental health needs of those currently in employment. There’s the challenge of supporting people with long term mental health conditions in getting off benefits and into work both sustainably and without exacerbating their illness. There’s a complex relationship between recovery (which in the case of mental illness is rarely a linear process), therapeutic occupation and the pressure of responsibility.
There are underlying problems around the hindering of aspiration and ambition as a result of the onset of mental illness. There’s the confusing business of common mental disorders, such as anxiety and depression, and severe mental disorders, all of which can be chronic, transitory and, very likely, fluctuating in degree of severity.
Dealing with these challenges falls neatly between health and social care provision, the welfare system, and the big bad world of the free market. The very idea of mental illness takes us to extremely uncomfortable places, and the fact that employers don’t really want to know and employees don’t really want to talk about their mental health is only one indication of the deep social stigma that still exists.
So even though we know that the costs of mental ill health are enormous (estimated at as much as 4% of GDP in the EU), it does not seem to be an issue that people outside the mental health sector are engaging with very seriously. Employers and corporations are, so far, not a real partner to the mental health care system.
The government is ploughing money into the Work Programme, which pays specialist providers to get people with long term conditions into work, but without any kind of systematic approach towards employers and the workplace. The fact is that employers do not like the idea of mentally ill staff (only four in ten employers say they would hire someone with a mental disorder) and we cannot simply sidestep or overlook this when trying to encourage people off benefits and into work.
And, although there is overwhelming evidence that employment is an important element of continuous, on-going recovery from mental illness, the mental health care system takes minimal responsibility for the employment status of its patients. Part of the problem here is that so much of the mental health care system is geared up towards severe mental disorders, and a long held lack of expectation of recovery. Once a person falls into the system of mental health care, the path towards becoming a career mental health patient is a lot easier to fall onto than any alternative paths.
The OECD’s report will argue that policy can and must respond more effectively to these challenges, but to do so will require a co-ordinated approach and a multi-level shift. This will require a level of integration that is hard to see emerging from what the coalition is up to.
For example, we know that prevention and early intervention are crucial, so we need to find ways to join up vocational support with first line health care response to mental distress. To make working life compatible with long term mental disorder, there is a need to stop trying to shoehorn people with mental health conditions into inflexible and conventional models of working and encourage employers to accept variations in people’s productivity, and a more diverse and creative view of what it means to get the job done.
Within all of this I’m sure there are real opportunities for social enterprises to play a role in bringing about shifts not only in attitudes to mental health at work, but also in terms of matchmaking people with employers and helping employers to respond proactively to the mental health needs of the workforce. The Social Brain and Enterprise teams at the RSA are currently interested in exploring this area, so if you’re working in this space or have ideas you’d care to share, do get in touch.
Networked facts are the new black
Facts are so last century. In the Internet-dominated world, networked facts have pretty much taken over. The old-fashioned view of the fact is that it is an irreducible atom of knowledge. The way information is organised on the Web means that everything is connected and it is only as a result of the links between elements of information that facts come into being.
This is one of the points that David Weinberger puts across in his new book, Too Big to Know, launched yesterday in the US (not out in the UK til 19th January). Weinberger calls these configurations of linked data, in which two ideas are connected by a relationship, ‘triples’. In an interview given to Thomas Rogers for Salon, Weinberger elaborates:
OK, so, if the triple is “Edmonton is in Canada,” ideally each of those should link to some other spot on the Web that explains exactly which Edmonton, because there’s probably more than one, along with which Canada (though there’s probably only one). And “is in” is a very ambiguous statement, so you would point to some vocabulary that defines it for geography. Each of these little facts is designed not only to be linked up by computers, but in itself consists of links. It’s a very different idea than that facts are bricks that lay a firm foundation. The old metaphor for knowledge was architectural and archaeological: foundations, bricks. Now we have clouds.
Now, I think I get this, and when we think about the ubiquity of the hyperlink, it’s pretty clear that Weinberger is absolutely right. But, even before the Internet, information was still linked, and it was still necessary to reference one idea in order to construct a basis for another. Aristotle, Darwin and Newton all did it. It was just a slower process. You had to have located and read the relevant source, be it a book, paper or article and access to these things was far more restricted than it is now. But, the basic principle was the same. I think it’s reasonable to say that Weinberger’s point about metaphors rings true not because of a fundamental shift in what facts are, but rather that the Internet age has speeded everything up and made access to data (almost) universally accessible.
Of course, I may be missing the point, particularly given that I’ve not read Weinberger’s book, but am instead responding to some bits and pieces I’ve read about it online.
The title of the book, Too Big To Know, implies that the volume of information we now have access to could be leading to a kind of overload, and there is a genuinely important (and unanswered) question about the impact of this on our brains. Are we getting cleverer or stupider as a result? Our burgeoning taste for punchy, sound-bitten data is obvious – if you can’t express an important idea in 140 characters, you’ll struggle to be listened to in some circles. Indeed, this review of Weinberger’s book on Inc.com is designed to give you the top line messages in about the time it takes to write a tweet. And, this very blog post indicates that I’m clearly as much as sucker for this as anyone.
Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure that Weinberger expresses some important ideas, not least that it isn’t individual cleverness that really matters, but the collective cleverness of the networks in which we operate. In his interview for Salon he says:
With the new medium of knowledge — the Internet — knowledge not only takes on properties of that medium but also lives at the level of the network. So rather than simply trying to cultivate smart people, we also need to be looking above the level of the individual to the network in which he or she is embedded to see where knowledge lives.
Old habits die hard. What about new ones?
One of the core thematic strands of the Social Brain project is habits. Some great research from Phillipa Lally’s team at UCL demonstrated that it takes 66 days to form a habit.
Today is my 99th day of working at the RSA and I have just realised that a new habit seems to have formed in this time. Until now, I hadn’t thought of my lunchtime behaviour as either habitual or particularly routine. In my head, there’s all manner of lunching possibilities on my doorstep, and really I’m only temporarily buying lunch every day, as what I usually do is bring lunch from home. I tell myself I just haven’t got into the habit of it since I started this job and relocated to London but I’ll get back into the rhythm of it soon.
But, today, I have to admit that my old habit of bringing lunch from home may have had its day, having been usurped by a new one. When I went to get my lunch today, the woman behind the counter said two things which took me by surprise: “You’re a bit late today,” and “See you tomorrow”.
Ok, I’d already recognised that I tend to opt for that particular establishment, and the woman in question is a lovely, smiley person who at some point not long ago started recognising me and greeting me as a familiar customer. So, her talking to me was no surprise. What I had not realised that is that, from her perspective at least, I have a ‘normal time’ for going for lunch, which is sufficiently predictable for her notice and comment that I was ‘late’. And, although, like I say, I recognise that I go to the same place more often than not, I wouldn’t have thought it was regular enough for a member of staff to expect to see me every day.
Habits are behaviours which we perform automatically because they have been performed many times in the past. The repetition of a particular behaviour creates an association between a situation and an action. The situation acts as a cue which prompts a behaviour to be performed automatically. Doing something automatically means doing it without thinking.
Phillipa Lally and her colleagues at UCL found that breaking habits is very difficult. The easiest way of breaking a habit is to control your environment so that you don’t encounter the cue which triggers your habit. They also know that being highly motivated to change a habit doesn’t help much, although it is even harder if you are ambivalent.
What does this mean for my lunchtime behaviour? Well, I can’t really remove the cue from my environment, however you conceive of the cue – which could be my need to eat at lunchtime, my being at the office at lunchtime, or the specific food outlet that I habitually go to. I need to control the environment in a different way. Maybe if I consider the cue as the combined situation of my needing to eat, being at the office and not having brought anything with me, there is scope to change. Essentially what I need to do differently is to bring my lunch in from home.
However, Lally’s team point out that new habits don’t stop old habits from existing. Although new habits can trump old habits once they become stronger influences on behaviour, the old habit is still in place. So, for fear of getting lost in a habits hall of mirrors, my old habit of bringing lunch from home must be lurking somewhere, and although it has latterly been replaced by this new habit of buying lunch, it’s still the older habit, and therefore might stand a good chance of displacing the new one and getting back into pole position.
The season for making resolutions is almost upon us, so after Christmas I’ll have a go at reinstating my old lunchtime habit. We’re back in the office on 3rd January; 66 days after that takes us to 9th March by which time I’ll be able to say whether, in the case of what I have for lunch, new habits die as easily as old ones.
The Haircut Index
Following from my previous post on the Grandparent index, an attempt to add some fresh perspective on the key indicators of wellbeing, I would now like to add another: The haircut index.
A key indicator of wellbeing, I believe, is the temporal gap between deciding you need/want a haircut and actually getting round to having one. The longer this gap, the less perceived control you have over your own circumstances, which is key predictor of wellbeing.
I’m having a haircut on Friday, and I feel well because of that fact- it is some sort of breakthrough after a month of putting it off due to perpetually imminent deadlines at home and work.
You might think this is a trivial matter of personal tidiness, but I suspect it goes much deeper. Haircuts are a modern ritual in which we suspend our role as productive agents, and surrender ourselves to the tender care of a skilled stranger – a kind of secular shaman – who treats us as much with their benign attention as their manual dexterity.
And if that doesn’t convince you, here is the ‘blind them with science’ bit from our new secular oracle, Wikipedia:
“Hair is a filamentous biomaterial, that grows from follicles found in the dermis. Found exclusively inmammals, hair is one of the defining characteristics of the mammalian class. The human body, apart from its glabrous skin, is covered in follicles which produce thick terminal and finevellus hair. Most common interest in hair is focused on hair growth, hair types and hair care, but hair is also an important biomaterial primarily composed of protein, notably keratin.”
So if that’s what hair is(I particularly like the ‘notably’) surely cutting it off must be some sort of symbolic act?
So I propose the ONS should ask people about their capacity to follow through on their desire to have a haircut as a proxy for their wellbeing, and I am beginning to wonder if we could establish a whole new wellbeing index based on similar factors.
Proximity of grandparents, capacity to achieve haircut…what next?
Neoteny, the noosphere and being a neophyte
I’ve had some interesting material land in my inbox today, including two emails containing words I’ve never seen before. Perhaps I ought not to admit such ignorance, but the meanings of both words have turned out to be pretty fascinating and I wouldn’t want to pass up the opportunity to share them here out of some kind of intellectual vanity.
So, the first was ‘neoteny’. Neoteny refers to the retention by adults in a species of characteristics previously only seen in juveniles. I think the term is used in developmental biology to describe abnormal processes in which physical maturation doesn’t come about properly. In the context of the email I received, it was being used obliquely to describe the positive way in which adults can conserve sufficient youthfulness to retain a capacity for playfulness. This, in the context of play being a potentially important vehicle for the kind of transformational learning we are interested in on the Social Brain project.
And the second new word was ‘noosphere’. The noosphere is strongly associated with the work of the French philosopher, palaeontologist, geologist and mystic, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It is seen as the third in a series of phases of the development of the earth, coming after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). It denotes the sphere of human thought and according to Teilhard de Chardin, emerges through and is constituted by the interaction of human minds. As people organise themselves in more complex social networks, the more developed the noosphere becomes. The noosphere seems to refer to a kind of collective consciousness, a profound ‘oneness’ of humanity, a globally interdependent web of interaction and interthinking.
I have to say I’m glad to have added both of these words to my vocabulary, not least because of their obvious relevance to my work. Stumbling into such unfamiliar lexicon can have the effect of yanking you out of your comfort zone. It’s much easier and less disempowering when concepts are expressed in words you already understand. I guess the danger of this is that you might end up dismissing something potentially important and useful just because it doesn’t make immediate sense. But, the richness of understanding that new, sometimes abstruse words can represent is worth chasing, even if does involve a bit of awkward fumbling (and time spent on Wikipedia) along the way…
Thinking, fast and slow
This evening, a lucky audience will have the privilege of listening to Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman in conversation with Richard Layard at an event hosted by LSE. They will be discussing Kahneman’s new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, which distils the author’s lifetime of work on the triumphs and pitfalls of conscious and unconscious thinking.
Kahneman is widely regarded as one of the world’s most influential psychologists, and his ideas have shaped the work of many other important thinkers, including experimental psychologist Steven Pinker and behavioural economist Dan Ariely. In his new book, Kahneman explains the two systems that drive the way we think and make decisions – on the one hand what he calls System One, the fast, intuitive and emotional system, and on the other System Two, a slower, more deliberative and logical system. I’m looking forward to reading it, but until I have, I can’t offer my own appraisal.
There’s been a flurry of recent reviews, all of which suggest that I’m in for a treat. William Easterly’s review in the Financial Times pronounces the book a masterpiece. Easterly is ebullient about Kahneman’s choice to be upfront about the fact that ‘experts’ are as prone to making mistakes as anyone else, including him. Knowing that we are irrational in our decision making doesn’t in itself free us from falling into the same traps as everyone else. Easterly describes having to fight off the preying hands of friends and family members in order to get the book read, and says that it is ‘compulsively readable’.
Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian, is also clearly impressed. In his interview with Burkeman, Kahneman is keen to make clear that this is not a self-help book; reading it will not change the way you think. However, having a deeper awareness of how our minds work can only be a good thing, and with attention, it seems we may be able to learn when to trust our intuition and how to harness the benefits of slow thinking.
So, which system of thinking will drive my decision as to whether to buy it now, or wait for the paperback?
Recovery and the Social Brain
In the remarkable paper Transforming Behaviour Change there are many parallels to recovery from, for the purposes of my blog, addictions. The author, Jonathan Rowson opens with a request for a deeper discussion about the increasingly important relationship between neuroscience, behaviour and society. Possible fears about governmental use of new techniques to control society, with science and pharmacological are set aside early on, although I would state my belief that a vast proportion of Western society is legally medicated, anesthetised with alcohol, nicotine, antidepressants, caffeine and other drugs on a daily basis.
If addictions are the long, dark tunnel of isolation and oblivion, then recovery is stepping into the light of transformative behavioural change via social interaction, and by exploring the concepts of the (RSA) Social Brain project. In my view, addictions can be seen as fault attachment being acted out using mind and mood altering substances to self-sooth emotional problems. For many, the substance such as alcohol or other drugs is used to medicate or anesthetise the unbearable feelings of loss and becomes a surrogate soother replacing the human contact. The consumption of many of these toxic chemicals can eventually create a neurological problem and physical dependency – addiction.
The social brain can problematise this process as we copy what we see others doing in our social setting whether at home or our community. If using alcohol is the norm at home we will almost certainly continue that behaviour or feel ambivalent to the inherent dangers. If our social group smoke or use cannabis or other drugs, surely the same can happen?
This is perhaps a little over simplistic, but so much happens out of our conscious awareness. The ideas proposed in the report are that we can grow and evolve a greater awareness. However, it can be all too easy to sit back and say we have no control because we act in the context of the effects others have on us and us on them. In a way this may be true to some degree in the context of addictions where compulsive behaviour can form over time and can become very hard to stop even in the face or increasingly problematic consequences. From a Social Brain perspective, by offering salient information to people who want to stop destructive behaviours and want to change themselves on their terms, will create the possibility of new health behaviours and lifestyles.
Recovery starts first with stopping self-medication. To us a metaphor of a shaken fish tank, when the shaking the sediment settles. The water clears and vision, the ability to see clearly is restored. This can be the emergence of a key part of the Social Brain theory reflexivity which is not a term in daily use but describes self-awareness in action.
Recovery is both an outward and inward looking process. The outer process is to start to see what other do to get through life more smoothly. Addiction is often seen by society as anti-social behaviour from the perspective of the socially constructed set of norms of pro-social behaviour. Those who are addicted to substances generally get bad press, though these tend be the financially disadvantaged, or wayward high profile people. Extremely negative slang and derogatory language exists for those who we see out of control, from the use of whatever substance we make sense of via the situation we see the person in. The person we look upon inevitably feels worthless without our gaze. However difficult it may be to make the connection from a degrading “it”, to a human being doing the best they can in that moment, the life before us has engaged, as the paper suggests we all do, with mirroring the social system we are part of. A growing body of evidence shows that we have mirror neurons which explain empathy and our automatic response to the actions and experiences of others as though they were our own. Someone with an addiction to a particular substance will tend to mix within that group, to normalise their behaviour and to be able to deny a problem; ‘they all do it, so what’s wrong with me doing it?’
In recovery, this process can be turned around into something very positive. As the report says “the contagious effects of the experience and actions of others align us with the group, and primary group, rather than selfish interests.” For me, this is what Recovery Champions are about; carrying a physically evidenced efficacy of the recovery experience that can create contagious recovery within groups and communities. Engaging in a reflexive lifestyle people can become aware, through the engagement with others who have been there before them, with the general principles that underlie their behaviour. Pro-social behaviour can emerge demanding a shift in the way we know ourselves and others.
This new found self-knowledge includes a growing emotional literacy, having a positive relationship with feelings. Alcohol and other drugs are often used to supress, or as an antidote to a whole range of feelings; sad, bad, alone, angry, happy, etcetera. Recovery requires a changed perspective about this emotional world that all humans have, and an understanding that drug use just deadens the constant flow of feelings, that they will pass, won’t kill us or destroy our lives where drug use might.
The process of recovery and living with others we are socially engaged with requires mindfulness. The social brain paper talks about mediation and mindfulness as necessary to remain in a change process. We live with a varied amount of lives out of awareness, and in a state of perpetual anxiety and denial. Freud might talk about death anxiety, perhaps. How often do we go to a restaurant and wonder whether the staff serving us have washed their hands after using the toilet, before resuming working with food? Not often, I would suggest, but this and many other unconscious fears prevail every moment of every day. It would be too much to bear for anyone, so we either suppress the feelings or we can suffer from cognitive dissonance, which may become stressful, uncomfortable to be with. In recovery these feelings need to be brought into awareness. Mindfulness can assist this, a reflexive practice of what the day held, who, what, where, when, and feeling attached to this contact. It is not a place of judgement, just to look, see, feel, let go, and remain present.
The Social Brain paper may not have been designed or focussed on recovery or addiction, but it overlaps just as so many of the RSA projects do, with all walks of life. Addiction, just as the common cold, is a very human response to something we cannot always see, the social brain project, and its next steps can assist in engaging all with a life transforming process. I encourage you all to read its’ offerings.
Pinker: “The Moral Sense has done more harm than good”
A quick reflection on the Steven Pinker event that just finished.
He looked great. Sharp pinstripe suit, impressive mane of curly silver hair, and a poppy, as if his message that the world has become more peaceful wasn’t enough.
I was glad to see he struggled ever so slightly with his power point slides, which tempered the ambient envy in the room.
Highlights for me were being reminded of the great Voltaire quote: ”Those who can be made to believe absurdities can be made to commit atrocities.”
I also enjoyed the idea that “violence is now a problem to be solved, not a conquest to be won.”
And I liked the reference to Kant’s essay on Perpetual peace, where he argued that three things would reduce violence: trade, democracy and international community.
Perhaps the best point was his claim – in response to a question about morality not being the cause of reduced violence – that the moral sense has done more harm than good. He backed this by saying that most homicides are justified on moral grounds, and that most aggressors think of their cause as morally justified.
I asked a question, which amounted to: If you define violence as human on human activity, then the argument flows beautifully and your data seems to back it. But if you give a broader definition of violence, including forms of ‘structural violence‘ in social and economic systems, violence against other species in the form of factory farming and violence against nature in the form of environmental degradation, it is not so clear that we have become less violent.
His answer was basically that these things are not really violence as such, and he slightly ridiculed the environmental point by comparing killing somebody to polluting a stream, which is rather different from entire islands disappearing and their population being displaced, or Darfur being the first of many climate change wars.
Had Matthew not asked for questions to be brief, I would have linked my question back to Kant. If you reframe violence not as direct human on human contact, but on the way our exploitative instincts manifest in the economy, towards other species and towards the planet, is it not the case that democracy, trade and international community may be responsible for the increase in violence, of a form that threatens our way of life? This idea of the world as a ‘resource to be used’ rather than something to stand in reciprocal relation toresonates with McGilchrist’s argument about the increasing dominance of a left hemisphere perspective on the world.
But then I listen to myself, and wonder if I am one of those people Pinker was talking about when he said that, for social critics, good news is bad news.
Maybe I am, but if the decline of violence is to be a measure of the success of modernity, as Pinker wants, then surely we need to give it its broadest possible definition?
Is it even possible that our violent impulses are being projected away from each other, and towards impersonal systems and structures that cannot retaliate?
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