(P5): Disruptive Innovation

Large ADAPT protest at the National Capitol with many participants with disabilities

Disruptive Innovation is a framework for replacing an existing part of a complex adaptive system with one that is:

  • Much less expensive or resource demanding
  • Easier to access and use
  • Easier to support, repair, and replace
  • Flexible in opening up adjacent possibilities for change

Imagine an MRI machine that only cost $50,000, instead of millions, and that could do a scan for $10.

Such disruption is not limited to products or technologies. It is a very useful concept for reimagining community living, social support, collaboration, mutual support, and other social “technologies” that are important to our disability community.

But disruptive innovation is not easy to do. You will need an understanding of where disruptive innovation starts and how it evolves.  Evolution is the right framework for thinking about successful disruption.

As an example of both the possibilities and difficulties of disruption, imagine the ways that real trust between people makes everything they do more effective and less expensive in both time and resources. Then imagine how easy it is to lose trust in our current context. What kind of context would support trust and make its continuation and expansion more resilient?

(P5): Recovery

A circular wheel entitled
Wellness Wheel

Recovery is a specific framework of mutual support that has general use in building our counterstroke and embracing the values of personalism as our framework for eliminating belittlement.

Recovery focuses on individuals building personal control over the parts of their life (variously called symptoms, barriers, or processes of oppression), using natural supports and mutual support networks to build these recovery skills.

There are many techniques and concepts for creating recovery skills, and some are included in the resources in the post. But at its base, Recovery is about creating a personally customized response to what prevents you from living a free life of choice, using your own knowledge of yourself, your creativity, and the experience of those who support you. The particular tools you embrace to support your recovery journey are less important than that those tools speak to you, and make it easier for you to go forward.

(P5): Mutual Support

Stylized diagram of people of different colors in huddle as metaphor of collaboration.
Huddle for Support

Mutual Support is the way we operationalize the values of personalism. It is the way we get the values of personalism to emerge in our communities. As opportunities arise, we support one another. We also organize ongoing mutual support around longer-term supports for specific targets (say various kinds of recovery support, food support, caregiving support). We organize local projects to build an alternate infrastructure and experiment with ways of building local alternatives to the dominant system structure.

Most of all, we use mutual support to get better at, and more comfortable with,  rapid change, and rapid response to change.

Mutual support isn’t about building permanent alternatives to replace the dominant system infrastructure. It is about getting better at short term support creation, and being more circumspect about committing resources to permanent solutions. The reason for this approach is because the dominant system will always be changing as it gradually and/or suddenly degrades.

Mutual Support builds values, and organizations that emerge from such support must be viewed as temporary. If we try to make them permanent, we will build in the flaws of the current infrastructure at the same time. Any time you integrate your new vision of support into the dominant CAS, the system imposes its logic and values on your novelty. Your change becomes part of, and subject to, the aging of the CAS.

(P5): Personalism

A woodcut of The Dorothy Day House of Hospitality complete with ramp.
Notice the Ramp in the Woodcut

As a value system, Personalism has arisen repeatedly over the millennia (probably the last 6,000 years at any rate) because large scale social organizations like states, and now corporations, eventually impose personal belittlement as an expected standard of behavior in social systems. Belittlement here is a general term for both social level stereotyping and devaluing and personal interactions that stereotype and devalue (like bullying).

Personalism, whether religiously based or not, focuses on the enlargement of life and its possibilities for each individual, and the social network of which they are a part. It is an excellent guide to what we might do right now for ourselves and those in our immediate vicinity.

You can see personalist values in the practices of disability accommodation, inclusion, and support methods like person-centered planning. But the values of personalism can and should affect every social interaction.

Personalism is viewed by the larger world as impossible, mostly because it can’t be created by laws, effectively funded by a government, or function as a profit center. Belittlement also can’t be eliminated by fiat, by punishment, or by shaming(?). The values of personalism can only emerge from a community that practices personalist social interaction.

Personalism is often embraced by people after an epiphany in which they see its value in their own and others lives. While such an epiphany can alter personal social behavior for a lifetime, this change doesn’t automatically translate into a common reduction or elimination of belittlement in larger social systems. These larger systems have power dynamics which reproduce belittlement at high frequency all the time.

Put bluntly, the values of large scale social systems and many local social systems are psychopathic and view humaneness only as an unfortunate necessity of power to prevent revolt and nothing more. But in our response to the degradation of human support the disability community is now facing, regardless of how we expand our resistance, the creation of a community that supports the enlargement of life and personal possibility has to be at the core of our counterstroke.

I think we should view personalism as our common experimental framework for building the basis of our future. It provides us with a framework of values for judging the long term usefulness of our various efforts to build community.

(P5): Prefigurative Politics

Early Picture of Bob Dylan playing an acoustic guitar and harmonica.

  • Prefigurative Politics
  • An anarchist is someone who doesn’t need a cop to make him behave.
    Ammon Hennacy
  • I want a change and a radical change. I want a change from an acquisitive society to a functional society, from a society of go-getters to a society of go-givers.
    Peter Maurin

Prefigurative Politics is an umbrella term for trying out changes in relationship, economic, and political practice within the current complex system to build the skills necessary to mount a successful counterstroke. Below are frameworks whose values can be used for these experiments.

Personalism: Personalism is a framework that puts the individual at the center of social justice work. It is an old philosophy, largely replaced by the view of social change as work on macro-political or economic improvement of whole societies. In my own life, the clearest example of personalism was the Catholic Worker movement.

But personalism need not be religious. In my view, personalism fits the vision of building the counterstroke through the local instead of the universal. What we build needs to fit all who are or would be members of our community.

I see parallels in personalism with the idea of accommodation as a tool of community inclusion in our disability community. Inclusion is not really accomplished by law or dictate, although such law can enable it. Inclusion is always accomplished by respect for the uniqueness of each person, and direct support for choice and possibility.

Mutual Support: Mutual Support is the collaborative enabling of each by all, in a context of mutual respect.

The Recovery Framework: In communities of Severe Mental Illness (SMI) and Substance Use Disorder (SUD), there is a framework called Recovery which allows individuals and their support networks to collaborate in managing those symptoms or personal characteristics which cost the person control over their immediate life and their hopes and dreams for a larger life.

The Recovery Framework is a surprisingly versatile tool kit and can be applied to a wide range of issues in the implementation of a counterstroke, because of the focus on core empowerment of each individual and their personal support network.

(P5): Ways to Think About Such a Strategy

Slide says 'Prefigurative Politics'
Making the New Within the Shell of the Old
Innovation Word Cloud. Includes many words related to openness and collaboration
The Many Memes of Innovation

Today, the most common way we think about alternatives to the current system is to use a procedural ideology as a template. If we do such and such, we will have an effective society.

There are many such procedural ideologies.  These procedural ideologies occupy a very complex space of competition we call politics. There is no real expectation that any one of the ideologies will actually “win”. The struggle seems eternal, and it is. Getting rid of an ideology is a lot like getting rid of a phylum. It is very difficult and in the time frames of our extended lives, it is impossible.

Through the earlier part of these posts, I have tried to convince you that such an approach won’t work with a complex, adaptive system.  Instead, I believe we will have to create something that can survive the decline of what we live in now. What we create will have to be local for a very long time, and it will have to make use of the existing system as much as possible as the new (whatever it is) is realized.

There is no procedural template for doing this. The process of building these local versions of a future will be murky and experimental and will require from us an honesty about what works and what doesn’t that is not possible when using a procedural ideology. Procedural ideologies dictate what works and what doesn’t, and have no tolerance for dissent. They are fundamentally dishonest.

But, there are some frameworks that can guide our local designs, as long as they are subject to this clear and reflective honesty about what we are accomplishing and what we aren’t.

P5: Getting Good at Change

Times of crisis, of disruption or constructive change, are not only predictable but desirable. They mean growth. Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

-Fyodor Dostoevsky

Because change requires us to move out of our comfort zone, we are “uncomfortable” with it. This is true even when we want the change.

Sometimes we just want change without wanting anything in particular, beyond not wanting our current situation.  This kind of desire for change is equally as useless as our discomfort with change we can’t control. Neither of these states of mind actually give us any control over the uncertainty of change that triggers our anxiety. But, they actively interfere with our ability to create an effective strategy of change.

The good news is that we can become less fearful of change, by the old human standby of practice. We can practice small changes, and gradually expand our tolerance for change. Even though we will never be entirely comfortable with change (even change that we want), we can reduce our natural anxiety with change enough to enable a more thoughtful and flexible approach to it.

For the purposes of our advocacy, we should focus on practicing small change around local advocacy strategies and the skills necessary to attempt them. What we learn from such practice will be clearer to us and more useful for our future efforts. If we wait until the necessity of our circumstances forces us to try something so complex that our anxiety about change will make it very difficult to implement, we will not only increase our likelihood of failure, but will lose a genuine opportunity for change for ourselves because, at least partially, we refused to take our personal anxiety over change seriously enough to focus on reducing it.

There is a tendency in advocacy organizations to become less willing to embrace risk over time. This process starts with a willingness to take risks in acquiring the skills of advocacy, and a follow-up process of using the skills more and more as techniques, more and more automatically, as the skills themselves become more practiced. Many times the needs and possibilities in the actual circumstances of rights violation gradually become subordinated to the techniques.  The use of the techniques becomes a defense against risk and liability.

The problem with this approach is that it turns the universe of advocacy possibility into a machine, i.e., there is a specific technique for changing oil and you always use that technique, even when there is something new in the situation that the technique for changing oil will not accommodate.  In the universe of advocacy, there are always new demands on the creativity of disability rights and supports, and technique (no matter how well practiced and refined) will not always be able to embrace the novelty of the current situation. Thus it is that increasing competence becomes less and less capable of dealing with real novelty. This is true of both organizations as and individuals.

We need to embrace what is called “beginner’s mind” as we approach each new advocacy possibility. We need to not impose the limitations of our competence on the novelty of the current situation.

P5: The Commanding Beliefs of the American People

  • Everything is Possible

  • Vast problems can be solved if broken up into pieces and addressed one by one

  • Ordinary men and women contain within themselves, individually and collectively, the constructive genius with which to craft such solutions

I would ask you to entertain some new ideas about the possibility of change. These ideas won’t work in the current system because of its unavoidable aging and decline, but they can be useful in creating our counterstroke.

I have quoted these  “Commanding Beliefs” from Roberto Unger, a surprisingly hopeful Brazilian visionary who has great admiration for the American social experiment, if not the current version.

These beliefs still resonate with all Americans, even if we have come to see them as too innocent to be useful.

Do these beliefs seem naive to you?

I think we have become trapped by our sense that the possibilities for change are either trivial or out of the question. This trap is conditioning from the oppression that has been built by the complex adaptive system within which we live.

Stop looking at the skyscrapers of power and money and politics-as-usual, and start looking at what is immediately around you.

Keep these beliefs in mind as we go through the rest of these posts.