On transformation/weeknotes that weren’t
From little things big things grow
It’s been a long time between ‘weeknotes’. The past year or so, I’ve been learning to forgive myself for the things not done, and part of that is reminding myself that I’m the only person I promise a weeknote to — the rest of the world is beastly careless, for the most part :)
All that said to suggest that if you’re reading this, cringing about a thing you’ve not done, now is a good time to take a deep breath and let that guilt go.
This little* note is centred around some complex things (surprise! ha) — called interstitial and symbiotic transformation, the slow joy to be found in taking the long view, as a gardener does in their garden, and in the gifts we give, as gardeners in each other’s lives.
First, the complexity and transformation
In government, we talk about ‘transformation’ a lot, but rarely define what it means. If we do, it might be a very off-in-the-distance, nebulous thing ‘promote equality between men and women and balance between work and family life’ (to use an example from my PhD studies), or a specific thing that might not really be considered transformational at all. What’s often missing, is the pathway to get there, and any understanding of what it might look like once we are ‘transformed’.
One of the reasons I’ve been quiet this year, is I completed (and passed!) my 2nd milestone of my PhD — this one being focused on the organisation I’m studying, and the many elements that added up to the fact that in 2016, they made a collective decision that they wanted to change the world. The chapter of my thesis questioned what elements came together to make that momentum happen, and then to ask, so what happened next?
To do that, I had to dive right into the decades of work by the researchers on the ‘real utopia’ project — one dedicated to creating a real utopia — one where ‘in a socially just society, all people would have broadly equal access to the social and material conditions necessary for living a flourishing life’. In particular, the ‘real’ aspect refers to the need for the utopia to be achievable, viable, desirable. To get there, there are four main tasks given to us: defining (1) and using (2) a set of moral principles for judging existing institutions, developing an account of viable alternatives (3), and proposing a theory of transformation for realising them (4). While the lead of the project, Erik Olin Wright never defined what transformation means, I think the fact that he encouraged us to state where we are now, where we are trying to get to, and how exactly we think we might get there, incredibly refreshing in academia!
It’s probably my operational brain at work there, but we all need pathways to redemption, as the wonderful Lisa Angela writes. Stuckness is a thing, when we are trying to do Sisyphean things, and the lack of a clear path forward can see us spinning our wheels, going nowhere.
I’m absolutely not advocating for making a pathway and sticking to it come hell or highwater, but transformation takes years (unless we’re talking ruptural transformation), and so having some lights along the path is a necessary thing. If we lack these, we can forget where we are headed, and why.
In our agile practices, we can find it challenging to lay out these pathways lest we accidentally create path dependency. What we need are signposts, and the end goal (that ‘North star’ we all hear about, but that means nothing to we antipodeans). This is doing fast, and slow. Doing fast, knowing that the way we’ve chosen to do the transformation (i.e. not ruptural) is actually a slow path.
Yes, let me take a moment (yes, Brigette’s inner child, yes, I see you), and acknowledge the incredible urgency for us to do more than just garden, more than move slowly! There’s an odd dichotomy that sits inside my soul to always be on the move, but to always be able to see all the potential paths — I’ll just be grateful for that fast/slow, because it is exactly what makes my heart sing about working in digital professions in government!
In general, my response to that sense of urgency to move towards change, is that we each have different capacities to move towards change — at different times in our life, and in different situations, and that these things can be done together.
Just because the task at hand is big and urgent and important, we can’t for one second, stop doing the slow work either.
So what exactly is interstitial and symbiotic transformation? In the literature, the former is done outside the state, and the latter within and with the state. Interstitial refers to interstices — the spaces and cracks within a complex system. To have ‘spaces and cracks’, you need two things intersecting (a little like the spaces between in Cynefin). Symbiotic refers to the enfolding of social empowerment into the system itself. If we look at public policy over the past 100 years or so, you can spot the times we’ve enabled significant transformation by ‘infecting’ the complex system itself with a set of values and norms that reflect change within society — those times when we made sure that human didn’t just mean white, male, middle class, and able bodied for example. There were things that had to come together to make that possible — institutional structures had to exert some pressure, or particular individuals, or perhaps society itself had to have changed. Then someone, many someone’s, had to make it happen, and that takes time.
Both interstitial and symbiotic transformation work by expanding and defending those spaces by ‘changing the rules of the game’. People have ‘capabilities and motivations in managing obstacles to removing those harms’ (same link). In interstitial transformation, those spaces and cracks can be seen as the personal, social, institutional, and environmental spaces where individuals and groups utilise their perceived agency, authority, and autonomy, and navigate interstitial boundaries that generate inertia or momentum to change. Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and Hobson all have actor centric models that consider people’s capabilities and agency in navigating those spaces and cracks. This is the bit that matters — how we feel we can act, when the right things converge — that’s what matters in the short term. For it to matter long term, we need gardeners.
The garden and the work
So that was all very academic…if you got this far, well done, and sorry for the ramble!
I promised we’d talk about the garden and the gardening. This past year really, has been all about harvesting some fruits from the past few years, and seeing it put to use. A few months ago, I did some work in creating a small library of user research for a cross government group. If you know me, you’ll know this has been something I’ve been wanting to do for the past 5 years, and that I’d set up a cross gov community to look at how this might work way back in 2017. Back then, it is fair to say I had next to none of the skills required for the job. I had a firm belief, and just enough knowledge to know it ought to be possible, and not enough knowledge to see just what the thorns and barbs on the road might be. While setting out a handful of terms to catalogue the work, I re-discovered the user research vocabulary sitting there, waiting for me to use. It was just a shell waiting to be populated (sadly!), and has been waiting since 2017. It was bittersweet to be sure, reminding me of all the effort that went into it, the work done by the ever brilliant John Pearson, who I was lucky enough to work with, and learn from from 2017–20, and by the whole APS community who wanted it to happen, who spent time and energy on it. It is easy to look at work lying fallow and see only the disappointment of the times we tried, and failed.
But I see so much more than that.
There were plenty of failures along the way, but life is trying and failing and learning and trying and….
Each step we learn. Each movement we make changes the world. Each moment is a layer of all that came before it, and eventually you turn, and look behind you, and realise flowers were emerging from the ground — maybe not the ones you thought, but flowers all the same.
To work in government is one of the most addictive things one can do — that capacity you have to undertake the Sisyphean task to help one person, or to help millions at once — there isn’t much else that’s as hard, or rewarding. My mother instilled in me that you will use up the world’s resources, you will contribute to pollution, to climate change, you will have an effect.
You will change the world, whether you try or not. You cannot know where, when, or how you will have an impact. You do not generally get to choose how the transformation happens, or what the parts of it look like. But you may as well try, and try to do good, because the other choice (to not), is the opposite of hope.
Aside from us all eventually making the ripples that created vast changes within government departments — research operations is a ‘thing’ in government these days, and the value of using and making sense of all that research we do seems to have gathered some traction — I see all the gifts generously given to each other — seeds planted that grant us the capabilities and capacities to step forward on the path.
I get that a user research library is not a transformation in itself, but it is a small lever to use on those interstices — where policy and social norms meet for example, having a human centred set of stories can be enough of a lever to initiate change. At least, that’s the theory.
But if a real utopia requires change, it is fair to say, it will require a different us, people with the skills and capabilities to be the change. We need to be able to grow inside ourselves in order to grow the stuff on the outside. Growth rarely happens without guidance and love from others. While that internal work is something one does in solitude, the capacities and capabilities come from those we learn from. The people who believe in us.
That’s the bit that struck me this week. It is a form of love, this seeing where a person is headed, and quietly guiding each other, doing the work to help each of us to be the people we need to be with the skills and capabilities we need to be able to build that future. I feel so grateful for the many guiding hands in my life. My one hope is to honour that by doing the same.
I read Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness this year, and she writes: ‘Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.’
It is a layering, and a labour of love, this transformation work. And if you’re not careful, you’ll miss spotting the signs along the way that it is even happening.
This post then, is a reflection that while driving along my road, I spotted a signpost or two recently, and the only thing on my mind, in my heart, was how to honour and cherish the labours of love we put into each other? If I only look at myself, and don’t even consider all the community work that people do with and for each other, it is still an impossible and beautiful task.
How do I say thank you to all the people who never treated me as less than because I didn’t know enough about what needed to be done, and instead showed me the way with patience and grace? How to say thank you for every little action I take every day that is made easy for the many thousands of people who planted the seeds that grew inside me?
Surely the answer lies in using that gratitude to be a gardener myself, to plant seeds for others. To keep turning the sod, watering the soil, and most importantly stepping back to make sure the sun shines down where it needs to shine.
*I guess by now you’ve realised I don’t do ‘little’ notes, so instead of apologising for luring you with the idea of a ‘weeknote’, I’ll say thank you for getting to the end ❤
