Archive for the ‘Behaviour Change’ Category

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Using fun for behaviour change

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

Here are three resources which have recently crossed my path that involve using fun and games for social change.  Some of these work with groups and some work across social spaces – demographics, communities or organizations.  What I like about these games is that they provide a built in set of measureables that can be used to gauge progress and evaluate behaviour change.  Sesms like combining fun, visible change and simple yet powerful standards for noticing shift is the holy grail in this kind of work.

Games for Change: Games for Change (G4C) is a non-profit which seeks to harness the extraordinary power of video games to address the most pressing issues of our day, including poverty, education, human rights, global conflict and climate change. G4C acts as a voice for the transformative power of games, bringing together organizations and individuals from the nonprofit sector, government, journalism, academia, industry and the arts, to grow the sector and provide a platform for the exchange of ideas and resources.


The Fun Theory:  We’ve blogged this before, but The Fun Theory is “dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.”

The FreeChild Project: Lots of games and resources at this website dedictaed to youth engagement around social change.  FreeChild has been working for almost eight years to promote the idea that when engaged in meaningful ways throughout society, the knowledge, action and wisdom of children and youth can make the world more democratic, more non-violent and engaging for everyone. By working with adults as allies young people learn, teach and lead democracy throughout society!

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Action & change challenge

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

The US National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation has just released a report on democratic governance. The action and change challenge is of particular interest:

More and more people are coming to realize that addressing the major challenges of our time is dependent on our ability to collectively move to a new level of thinking about those challenges, and that dialogic and deliberative processes help people make this leap.  Yet we continually struggle with how best to link dialogue and deliberation with action and change, and with the misperception that dialogue and deliberation are “just talk.”

You can download the full report here, or download a 3-page overview here.

Sandy Heierbacher, author of the report, also highlights a couple of promising frameworks.

Maggie Herzig’s “Virtuous and Vicious Cycles” model is presented, which acknowledges the systemic and cyclical nature of dialogue and deliberation (as opposed to a linear progression of steps or stages).  And Philip Thomas’ integral theory of dialogue seeks to reconcile the seemingly incompatible views of dialogue he came across while working on the Handbook on Dialogue published by the United Nations Program on Development and its partners.  Thomas interviewed some practitioners who felt, for example, that personal transformation among dialogue participants was a critical outcome to emphasize in the Handbook, while others he interviewed wanted to de-emphasize and even eliminate such concepts from the book and focus primarily on political processes and outcomes.

Viv McWaters

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To evaluate or not to evaluate?

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

This is a question that we don’t really ask ourselves, as we are often made to evaluate (to account for the money we received and spent), and to is also in our nature to demonstrate success (and hide failure..??).

A recent post by by Chris Brogan,   that we should pursue the goal, not the method (also picked up by David Gurteen, made me think about how this applies to evaluation. Often, we consume ourselves on developing and implementing a methodology to evaluate change, as opposed to actually focussing on achieving the change itself.

This made me recall a conversation with Greg Bruce, from Townsville City Council, where he and his team are achieving some transformative change, across the community, but also throughout the Council and partnering organisations.

Greg wondered whether it was of any use to focus so much effort on evaluation, especially considering the short time frames in which traditional project evaluation is undertaken (that is, during and immediately post-project). Why spend so much time, effort and money, when you could re-direct the focus towards on-ground action and transformation. For Greg, evaluation “needs long timeframes to evaluate impact to effort – in system dynamics in order to show effect”. Greg proposed that equally good indicators of success would include the buy-in of other organisations (whether through official or unofficial partnerships), receiving further grants, as well as recognition from local, national and international delegations (in in Greg’s humorous ways, “they will come and go as equally mystified as when they arrived“).

So, how much effort should we put into evaluating something that will likely occur over a long time frame, way beyond the scope of the project, or interest of funding agencies? Let us know what you think? Post a response, ask the question amongst your colleagues and network partners, and share your conversations at Show me the Change.

Posted by Damien Sweeney

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Agility and Change

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Neil Perkin penned this terrific post Agile Planning.

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Image Source

This post resonated loudly with me because of the recent work I have been doing as a facilitator with Government agencies. Also, the upcoming Show Me The Change conference in Melbourne this May is also linked.

Here’s a snapshot of Neil’s Agile post:

We are all bombarded by change and it’s accelerating (and will not slow down) … the enterprise of the future will be hungry for change … but our current business/government are stuck in linear systems that are slow, top-down & inflexible …

“Our structures need to be more speedy. Speed used to kill now lack of speed kills. Lets have organizations that can iterate quickly and empower its folks to make decisions. Percolating decisions up and down an organization makes little sense” Rishad Tobaccowala

… being ‘agile’ is not a process or panacea – it’s a philosophy that you either have or you don’t … Agile is:

… welcoming of changing requirements, even late in development, because it is an opportunity to harness change for competitive advantage. Big business creates big projects that take a long time to confirm, implement, and complete. Projects are often stalled by hierarchical management processes.

… focused on frequent deliverables, with a preference for shippable product and shorter cycles, and implemented at a constant pace which is measured and transparent.

… centred around the belief that the best results come from self-organising teams. Teams that reflect regularly on how to become more effective, then adjust behaviours accordingly.

… projects are built around trusted, motivated individuals who are given the environment and support they need.

… documentation is kept to a minimum, with face-to-face communication preferred, and a focus on simplicity – maximising the amount of work not done.

And I really like this paragraph as it sums up my observations of the planning processes that so many of our large institutions are stuck in …

“I don’t claim here that agile development processes are some kind of cure-all. But I do think that business processes in many industries and organisations are woefully out-of-date and hopelessly rigid. Businesses increasingly operate in complex adaptive systems which, as Bud Caddell rightly says, are “characterized by perpetual novelty – talking of equilibrium is pointless, equilibrium in a complex adaptive system is essentially a dead system”. Inflexible, long-term strategic plans are increasingly irrelevant.” Neil Perkin

Show Me The Change

Show me the Change_eCard_Final

Ok, so what’s this conference got to do with Agility? Everything!!!!

Participants who are coming to Show Me The Change (deep down) know that our current approach to the design, staging and evaluation of behaviour change projects needs a re-think. We need to take stock and challenge our assumptions about behaviour change and the goals that we set. We have tinkered with ‘behaviour change’ tools and tactics for long enough. It’s time to go deeper.

In the context of ‘Behaviour Change projects’, agility is a mindset and NOT a set of processes, strategies and tools. It’s a philosophy that everyone involved adopts.

In practice, I think it involves these types of tangible features (some adapted from Dave Snowden’s post here):

  1. Do lots of little things rather than 1 big thing – Don’t put all your resources into 1 strategy … now matter how much ‘planning’ and research you have done
  2. Don’t be afraid to experiment and some things will fail – We often learn more from failure than success anyway
  3. Design projects that can be ‘monitored’ – By monitor I mean we can quickly notice if things are working or not. It’s no good if you need to wait 12 months for the data you need!
  4. Beware of ‘Best Practice’ and the success of others - Why? Because your context is different. Just becasue a series of home assessments lead to a reduction in household energy use in Town A, it doesn’t mean the same will apply in Town B
  5. Challenge the ‘Goals’ and ‘Evaluation Measures’ imposed on you by funders – Often we get asked to report a whole heap of indicators that are useless. At times, even the underlying goal of a project is unattainable … it’s aspirational at best. Don’t get sucked in to being ‘measured’ against such goals/aims. Have these conversations early.
  6. Challenge the direction and priorities of your project as it emerges – If you pay attention and monitor your project, new insights will emerge. Many will be unexpected and point to new priorities. Don’t be afraid to challenge your project plan and re work it along the way. Again, have these conersations early on.
  7. Collect and share Stories – Stories of failure and success are critical. Stories are memorable and they stick. Analysis of stories can uncover patterns that data analysis misses.
  8. Don’t be fearful of failure – Did I say that already?

Geoff Brown

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Exploding cylinders, complexity and evaluating behaviour change

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Last July, and an oxygen cylinder aboard a Qantas plane suffered what could be considered a relatively rare “behaviour change” in that it exploded, ripping a large hole in the fuselage. Following a stringent follow-up investigation (or evaluation), the cause of the exploding cylinder still remains a mystery. The news item reported that investigators even pressure tested the remaining gas bottles and none failed.

What this shows is that no matter how much knowledge we have about something, or no matter how many tests we replicate, some things remain a mystery. The reason behind the exploding cylinder are complex, and understanding the reason cannot be through attempting to replicate the problem by studying other cylinders, but through understanding the emergent properties related to that particular exploding cylinder. If only cylinders could tell a story? Except for the fact that this one is lost somewhere in the ocean!

So, what does that have to do with evaluating behaviour change? Well, people, like oxygen cylinders, are often considered similar and predictable in that what works for one is considered to work for others. But in reality, we are more like the “exploding cylinder” in that we often react unpredictably, or in a complex and unique manners, when placed in different situations. As such, it is hard to know what parameters to evaluate in behaviour change programs, as we cannot necessarily predict the outcome.

In understanding the reason for a change, what is important is asking the “one that changed”. If only investigators could get the story from the most significant (or exploding) cylinder? In evaluating behaviour change programs, we need to be more open to emergent properties, some which may be instantaneous and highly observable (like the exploding cylinder) and others that may occur over a longer term, and less visible.

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What do we measure and Why?

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

Meg Wheatley on great questions to ask as we think about measurement, especially in complex living systems (like human communities):

Who gets to create the measures? Measures are meaningful and important only when generated by those doing the work. Any group can benefit from others’ experience and from experts, but the final measures need to be their creation. People only support what they create, and those closest to the work know a great deal about what is significant to measure.

How will we measure our measures? How can we keep measures useful and current? What will indicate that they are now obsolete? How will we keep abreast of changes in context that warrant new measures? Who will look for the unintended consequences that accompany any process and feed that information back to us?

Are we designing measures that are permeable rather than rigid? Are they open enough? Do they invite in newness and surprise? Do they encourage people to look in new places, or to see with new eyes?

Will these measures create information that increases our capacity to develop, to grow into the purpose of this organization? Will this particular information help individuals, teams, and the entire organization grow in the right direction? Will this information help us to deepen and expand the meaning of our work?

What measures will inform us about critical capacities: commitment, learning, teamwork, quality and innovation? How will we measure these essential behaviors without destroying them through the assessment process? Do these measures honor and support the relationships and meaning-rich environments that give rise to these behaviors?

via Margaret J. Wheatley: What Do We Measure and Why?.

These are great questions to consider at this Show Me The Change conference as we dive into questions on the implications for complexity on the measurements used to evaluate change in living and complex systems.

Chris Corrigan – SMTC Design Team

Cross posted from Chris’ Parking Lot here

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Taming the lizard brain

Monday, February 8th, 2010

I once worked with a young woman who wanted to know, at every turn, what she should do, how she should do it. She was smart, passionate and able – yet she was gripped by fear. Gripped by the fear of not doing it ‘right’. The problem was, and is, that there is no manual – there is no ‘right’ way. As Seth Godin would put it – she was in the grip of her lizard brain, that primitive part of our brain that is either hungry, scared, angry or horny. It’s the reason we are afraid. I heard that she’d recently had a baby. I hope she’s worked out how to tame that lizard brain because I’m pretty sure there’s no manual for raising a child either.

This is the premise of Seth Godin’s latest book, Linchpin. We have a choice to stay stuck, or we can embrace the fear and create some momentum. That’s the good news. The bad news is that our conditioning, and that damn lizard brain, might stop us. We’re conditioned to fit in, not stand out. We’re conditioned to deny our own genius, our art – whatever it is – because we might fail and then the lizard brain can say ‘told you so!’. We fear failure to the point where we don’t even try. Prototyping is all about trying and discarding. Accepting failure. Our lizard brain doesn’t like failure. It once meant we were probably dead, a tasty meal for some predator.

The predators today are no less fearful – it’s just that they are harder to recognise. Security, compensation for our labour, following the rules. These are the things that prevent us from embracing our art and sharing it with the world. Not because we want to get paid, but because there’s nothing else we CAN do, but share our art. Share our passion. We have to accept that it might not work and do it anyway.

Generosity is at the heart of Linchpin, gifting our art to others, not for something in return, not for a later transaction, but for the human to human connection. And for movement. If you’re stuck there’s no movement. It’s hard to be generous if you’re stuck.

There’s no ‘how to’ in this book. It’s a description of what the world needs, and Godin suggests each of us needs to find our own way, create our own map, forge our own future, share our own art, find others who will share the passion and momentum rather than hold us back with the threat of ‘not safe, not secure, not wise’. It’s not  a bad description of how to navigate a complex world where even if there was a manual, it would be out of date before you finished reading it.

Discomfort brings engagement and change. Discomfort means you’re doing something that others were unlikely to do, because they’re busy hiding out in the comfortable zone. When your uncomfortable actions lead to success, the organisation rewards you and brings you back for more.

What generosity can you bring to the Show Me The Change conference? What are you doing around behaviour change that is uncomfortable, untried and hard to measure? What do you fear?

Viv

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Where are our big blindspots?

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Mark Earls’ post called ‘Memories of the future (5) Things or people?‘ got me thinking about our blindspots when it comes to change and how stuff spreads through populations. It also has an impact on our approach to the evaluation of individual/mass behaviour change.

Mark starts by saying …

“it’s all to easy for us to get distracted by character of the things we make - by their stickiness and the contagiousness – and imagine that it’s these kind of qualities (and thus ultimately our efforts) that determines the success of the things (i.e. how far and fast they spread through a given population).

For me, the things we make include our behaviour change projects/programs and our efforts will make a big difference on the success of ‘our thing’. Mark suggests that this ‘default setting’ (or worldview) blinds us to the “underlying mechanism by which things spread: that is – through people.”

tech changes

Mark points to a few reasons why these blind spots exist …

“1. it plays to what we want to believe about ourselves as masters of persuasion and manipulation of the masses

2. it helps us avoid all that messy human stuff that can so bog brilliance down & (last but not least)

3. because everyone else does it, too.

Mark hen ends with a question …

“The future of marketing and related disciplines is really about getting better at the people stuff and embracing the messiness of it and our lack of real control over the outcomes.”

And to sum up, what does all this mean for the approach we take to designing, staging and evaluating change programs? If we truly take a ‘people focused’ approach in our work together … start embracing the ‘messiness’ and our lack of control over our project’s outcomes, what would change? What does our evaluation approach to behaviour change start to look like? What indicators become important? Which ones do we drop off? What are the new tools we need in our evaluation toolkit? And beyond the need for change, what do we need to pay more attention to?

Geoff Brown

Cartoon shown by Hugh McLeod over at Gaping Void

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Collective Change Cycle for Wicked Problems

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

http___innotecture.files.wordpress.com_2010_01_wickedv1.pdfMatt Moore writes about wicked problems. Here’s some of what he says:

“Wicked problems do not yield to best practice or by-the-book solutions. Wicked problems cannot be solved by a small group of clever people. Wicked problems can only be successfully tackled using collective, iterative and evolutionary methods.”

There’s an interesting exploration of a Collective Change Cycle. Read about it here and see what you think.

Cheers, Viv

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Linchpin by Seth Godin

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

2MASTERLinchpinA1Seth Godin has a new book out called Linchpin – Are You Indispensible?

Hugh MacLeod does a great interview with Seth about the book – in 10 questions. Here’s a taster:

“It’s so tempting to start dra wing maps for people. It makes them happy and it makes me feel smart. But resisting that temptation is the right thing to do, because once someone does it on their own a few times, they become unstoppable. Watching that change occur is one of the high lights of my professional life. And in fact, every great teacher I’ve ever known seeks the same outcome.”

And Hugh commented that the style of the book appeared angry. Seth replied:

“It’s not angry, Hugh. It’s urgent. I don’t think most people realize the precarious nature of our current situation, how close we are to the edge, and how little time we have to get our act together.”

I wonder what this book can contribute to our understanding of behaviour change?

There’s more information and links here.

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