Change – Page 2 – Change Strategy

Person-Centered Planning and Social Justice

By Norm DeLisle: For Entire Post, Go Here…

A few years ago, I created a short presentation as part of a grant to train LTSS Supports Coordinators in the Why and How of PCP. My presentation was part of the Why. I did the presentation is a Microsoft Tool called Sway, so I could see how the tool worked. Sway is a way of rapidly creating online presentations that is easier than PowerPoint.

I decided recently to redo the presentation using a Social Justice Framework instead of the more step-by-step version I did back then. Here it is, and I’d be interested in your view of the results…

A Social Justice Response to Disability-Based Oppression

I estimate that more human beings are enduring agony today than ever before; the number could be greater than the sum of sufferers throughout history. I speak of starvation and epidemic; war and terrorism; deprivation, exploitation, and physical torture. I repeat the word agony; I am not talking about “hard times”.
-Stafford Beer

All forms of oppression deny, distort, degrade or disrupt the exercise of agency by individuals, families, human communities (however they are defined by gender, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic of identity), race, ethnicity,or nationality. Because all these examples of targets for oppression have members who have disabilities, the oppression of the disabled embodies the deep richness of the meaning of intersectionality and its possibilities for real empowerment.

For most dimensions of identity, social justice progresses through large-scale activism, focused on community-level protest and policy advocacy. Successful activism creates “affordances”, tools in the environment that can be used by members of the community to resolve or correct some form of oppression. For People With Disabilities (PWD), while such activism is a core part of our progress in Social Justice, the level of oppression embedded in the infrastructure of every society in our world is so ubiquitous, that community level social justice progress is not enough. Each PWD needs a very local and granular set of affordances to experience and pursue the same freedom that other communities can explore through the modern advocacy of valued social justice outcomes.

(P7): Enabling and Managing the Ecosystem of Advocacy/Targets

An abstract view of how Community-Based Organizations participate and drive delivery system reform, as an example of an advocacy ecosystem. See link below image for text — Text Description of Image

Although we tend to focus on the advocacy task at hand, our work to support the personal agency and full life of individuals with disabilities does not occur in isolation. As advocates, we are a part of a larger complex adaptive system (CAS) that includes support and funding systems, policy and legislative systems, and communities of people with Lived Experience from the many communities of people with disabilities. Our focus on the current task assumes the ongoing operation of the larger ecosystem as a context for all our advocacy work. We make use of affordances (agencies, laws, rules, funding, expertise, etc.) that act within the larger advocacy context as ongoing processes which we can influence to achieve valued outcomes.

In the larger processes of this ecosystem, all subsystems change and adjust over time through advocacy activities (and many other activities as well). Our goals as advocates are to:

•Build our relationships with other parts of the ecosystem in order to carry on advocacy and the other kinds of communication necessary to maintain these relationships.

•Evaluate and adapt our advocacy planning and actions based on a constant debriefing of the impact of our actions and an equally constant monitoring of the ongoing changes in the rest of the ecosystem, that both enable and disrupt our advocacy strategy.

•Facilitating a more effective advocacy/target ecosystem, in the sense that it becomes easier over time to advance valued outcomes.

•Introduce New Values and Novel Expectations into the interacting parts of the ecosystem. Successful introduction triggers a cycle called Autocatalytic Mutualism which drives changes in the ecosystem. Effective advocacy is always creative in this sense.

This part of the project will explore why we need to keep the entire advocacy ecosystem in mind while we work toward our valued outcomes. We are a part of this ecosystem and never stand outside of it, though our focus shifts as our work and the context of our work evolve.

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(P6): Organizing for Emergent Strategy

A simple food web with the Sun and mineral nutrients feeding autotrophs (i.e., plants) and heterotrophs including interacting Carnivores, Herbivores, and decomposers leading to the regeneration of the Mineral Nutrient pool. — A Simple, but Surprisingly Rich Diagram of a Food Web

•Food web
•Emergence
•Emergence 3 Minute Video
•The remarkable simplicity of complexity
•UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

Once we develop our tactical advocacy skills through individual representation and traditional systems advocacy, we need to expand our vision and our skills to encompass a form of systems advocacy that supports the organizing of emergence as a way we implement our social justice agenda.

Emergence means (among other things) the creation of a network with a core of strong process links and a periphery of weak process links. This mutually reinforcing network of strong and weak ongoing process links is the way that emergence occurs. This network is the governing constraint that creates a possibility space in which emergence can grow.

Remember that strong linked processes drive the local system, and weak linked processes buffer the local system and prevent it from “burning out”.

World Building is another way to talk about such networks and organizing for emergence. World building can be a very human tool for building a change ecosystem. While the detail of building a change ecosystem is the subject of the next Part (7) of this work, I hope this slide will introduce you to the idea of world building, something which we all embrace as a standard part of our social and personal lives., mostly in media, the arts, and social culture. For example, many entertainment vehicles (like Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, the Matrix trilogy) have been extended as highly detailed, multi-media, social community driven worlds far beyond what we used to accept as the boundaries of entertainment and fan culture.

World building can create possibility spaces that allow the enabling and disruption of affordances. Such worlds can be used to engage in the task of creating a new future for PWD. Building a World for social justice is an expansion of the possibility space that PWD created when we embraced the civil rights advocacy paradigm. It represents the possibilities we have learned from the strengths and weaknesses of civil rights advocacy.

Today, we tend to use change narratives only linearly to illustrate a value or a policy failure of the system, not to formulate an entirely new way to go forward.

But, if we are to remake this world in a way that supports personal autonomy, social inclusion, and freedom of choice, we will have to simultaneously make our own lives much larger than they’ve been before.

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(P6): Creating From the Bottom Up

Ground View of Summer Forest with many plants and trees.

•The Medium is the Message –Marshall McLuhan
•What Are the Benefits of the Bottom Up Approach?
• Bottom up Thinking
•Emergence: Complexity from the Bottom Up

One of the enduring problems in behavioral health systems reform and advocacy is to realize the vision of person-centered, and person-driven, living, within the machine/computer models of modern bureaucratic systems of service and supports delivery. The approaches to resolving the tension between these paths to realizing person centered and driven planning and living has drawn on two repeatedly used tactics:

•Iterative and incremental improvement in the macro-system while maintaining that current system’s underlying CAS logic
•Creation of novel frameworks in a micro-system from the bottom up with a view to advocating for them to be embraced by the macro-system.

These two approaches to change each have their own problems in their ability to move us effectively toward a scaled person centered and person driven planning and living reality. They also actively interfere with each other when advocates attempt to use the innovative micro-system to alter the logic of the macro-system. This can be seen in the endless arguments over the best method to advocate for change toward our valued outcomes.

The most obvious problem with building a model of supports consistent with social justice and trying to use it to leverage change in the macro-system is that the logic of the macro-system will largely, if not entirely, try to absorb the meaning of the social justice innovation and minimize its need to change. Yet, it always seems impractical to somehow replace the macro-system wholesale with a CAS that truly reflects valued social justice outcomes.

I would suggest that we look to the building of supports from the bottom up without any plan to integrate them into the macro-system of supports, specifically to avoid having the macro-system’s logic applied to these supports. In fact, I suggest that we build supports in a hundred different ways from the bottom up without integration of our innovations in the macro-system as the outcome. Further, I would suggest that our outcome be the creation of an advocacy and supports ecosystem that can compete in some arena with the current macro-system. The next Part of this series of posts will explore how we might approach such an outcome. But first we need to understand more concretely how emergence occurs in our potential advocacy ecosystem.

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(P6): Models as Practical Tools

A diverse set of plumbing tools in a kit.

•Radical Uncertainty
•Small-world network
•AnyLogic simulation software
•Practical Planning Models
•Small World: Crafting an Inclusive Classroom (No Matter What You Teach)

Because it isn’t practical to fully model a CAS, we need to ask ourselves how we will make practical use of our understandings of the target systems and policies when we create and implement an advocacy initiative.

One common approach is to try to make our existing model of the system or policy more complete by iteratively making it more complex. Our assumption is that a model that is “more like” the target will provide us with a more usable base for an advocacy plan. Unfortunately, this isn’t true, and we need to understand why if we are to realistically use models as tools for change.

As the saying goes, “All models are wrong, some models are useful”. Even a very simple model can give us useful insights into the system or policy we are targeting, but we always need to remember that the model is not the target and that no amount of sophisticated design can ever make it the target. The model is an abstraction and can point us toward insights that will make our advocacy more effective, but it is never a true substitute for the target. And unfortunately, as we make the model more complex, it becomes increasingly useless as a guide to action.

We are so used to processing abstractions as a part of our thinking, planning, and change work, that it is easy to confuse those abstractions with the CAS.

A better approach is to use the frameworks of the practical sciences, like engineering, medicine, carpentry, plumbing, vehicle repair, and so on, as a guide to using our knowledge and experience in an organized way to increase the impact of our work.

These practical sciences are a mesh of theory, experience, training, and intuition that can be used to understand and change an issue in a CAS, even if that CAS is, say, your water, heating, and plumbing system. If water is accumulating in your house, it can be difficult to figure out why when the puddle might be a long distance from the source, and the source might be a long distance from the “cause”. We must diagnose, hypothesize, try small safe changes to see what happens, and apply different tools for different ways of changing the system.

All of this practical engineering becomes part of our long term learning about our target.

If we wish to approach the problem with a better tool, we improve an existing one. You want a better wrench, not a tool that eliminates the need for wrenches, screwdrivers, hammers, and so on. Such an omni-tool tool will only make diagnosis, testing hypotheses, and experimentation in general to solve the problem at hand more difficult, not easier.

Put another way, think Waze when you are trying to formulate a response to a travel problem, not the creation of the entire theory of human travel for the foreseeable future. A good model of traffic flow wouldn’t be based on a representative vehicle. Instead, it would be based on a small world model of typical travel outcomes in the larger travel space. Such a model allows for an interactive dynamic between different purposes to be formulated that reflects why people travel and not simply how they travel.

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(P6): Symbiogenesis

The origin of Eukaryotic Cells, showing a diagram of the ancestral host cell with aerobic bacterium and cyanobacterium separate but moving into the ancestral cell, and, after many generations, with mitochondrion and chloroplast full integrated into the modern cell — Our Real Ancestry

The term, “Symbiogenesis” was originally developed to frame how modern cells came to contain components that originated from other independently living organisms. An abstract description of this evolutionary process is in the slide image and in some of the resource links. More recently, there has been an effort to understand how any living entities can change their relationship from entirely separate and intensely adversarial to integrated and symbiotic. The most obvious thing from this theoretical and research-based exploration is that there are a lot of intermediate forms populating the evolutionary flow of these changing relationships.

There is nothing about this framework of “stable forms” that make movement along this “path” in one direction guaranteed. Instead Symbiogenesis is a process that depends only on the current evolutionary context and the specific path-dependent history of the relationship. The fact that the merged form of modern living cells is what allowed complex life to evolve is a happy result for us, but in no way guaranteed by evolution.

I believe it is useful to ask about the implications of this conceptual framework for the evolution in the dynamic between advocates and support systems as a heuristic for understanding a specific current relationship between some advocates and some target systems, and its implications for advocacy planning. Categories like parasite, adversary, negotiator, partner, collaborator, and symbiont can facilitate our understanding of how our relationship with a target impacts the effectiveness of our advocacy tactics and plans, and it can point us toward underlying problems in our strategy.

There is no preordained path for our relationship with a target. We operate our advocacy in an evolutionary context, and it is the nature of these CAS that any part of one at any layer of that multiply granular CAS can trigger a change in the evolutionary context of our work. The biggest mistake we can make in such a world of radical uncertainty is to not notice that the context has materially changed. Our efforts, recently fruitful, suddenly undermine our purpose. The longer it takes to realize this, the more destructive to our advocacy effort. The most common reason for failing to notice is our focus on the advocacy plan we have articulated for our initiative. Our focus constrains our ability to notice something new.

This means that “noticing” the environment is not something we should drop when we have completed our plans and begun our change effort. Instead, we must continue to pay attention to changes in the context even if they don’t seem to be relevant to our work. There is no other way to remain sufficiently engaged with the target to be aware of important contextual shifts.

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(P6): Scaling Advocacy Initiatives

Scaled terrace agriculture in green and various shades of yellow

•Scaling Impact
•Demystifying Scaling: Part 1 (Other parts linked)
•Scaling Social Justice
•Building Advocacy at Scale
•Scaling external advocacy without losing your soul

Over time, any successful run of advocacy initiatives brings speculation on how these successes might be scaled.

Scaling Advocacy success can be done by expanding the scope or the time frame of advocacy. But scaling isn’t about making something you have successfully achieved bigger. No success survives deeply unchanged by being made bigger. CAS don’t scale like jigsaw puzzles (100 pieces to a 1,000), and the outcomes of intervening in them don’t either.

We usually take our success (say, in individual representational advocacy) and turn it into something very different (say policy advocacy with a goal of making the need for representational advocacy less acute). Sometimes we look to multiply the use of a successful advocacy tactic across the target ecosystem with which we interact. In both these cases, we are building a new advocacy initiative only tentatively connected to the success we are using as a model for our scaling.

We layer these separate initiatives rather than integrating them. In an advocacy organization, we make them, in one way or another, separate boxes in our organizational chart. Usually, they are subjected to entirely different planning processes. And, over time, they become more and more distant from one another. They are monitored in different ways, and the meaning of success in the separate boxes becomes progressively distinct, as the context of the target CAS continues on its own large-scale evolutionary journey. This loss of coherence of different initiatives in the advocacy strategy seems to those involved in planning and implementing the scaling of success as an unavoidable necessity.

But how does scaling work in ecosystems, in real world change, in our brains? Not like our standard scaling of advocacy success.

Processes in a CAS are integrated across all levels in the CAS. They are “fractal” at least in analogy if not mathematically. In practical terms, this means that whatever actually happens in a CAS requires all levels of the CAS to occur. Some levels may have little going on, though, and this activity at different levels shifts constantly. When we scale fractally, we are expanding our use of the possibility space we created with our advocacy initiative without giving up the work we do on the lower levels of the CAS.

There is not a “privileged” level in a CAS that we can use as a proxy for the entire event we are interested in if we want to scale an advocacy success, and there never is such a privileged level. Our sense that one level is privileged is no more than a result of the way abstraction works in our brains. We abstract a level and because we are focusing attention on it, we think it is privileged. This is very much like those videos where we focus on counting the number of passes by basketball players and miss the person in the bear costume running around without a ball.

When you simply ignore a level in the reality of a CAS, you trigger unintended consequences that you will only perceive once they have already occurred. In a CAS, levels are linked to one another, and can only be ignored to the detriment of our advocacy outcomes.

At the same time, we simply can’t fathom the entirety of a CAS as it evolves, not even for a moment. Again, we can’t use machine/computer models or logic model planning frameworks to scale an advocacy success, however necessary operational planning might be for our implementation. We must use a real strategy to guide our scaling of success. One thing that means is that the programs that represent our effort to scale must be integrated to produce coherence, not boxed off from one another, so they can be selectively ignored.

The point of the strategy we develop for building coherence across our various advocacy initiatives must be its use as a framework for making decisions when the future is uncertain and our resources are scarce.

In a CAS levels are not structures. They are defined by the enabling and disruptive links in their possibility space. Things that “happen” at one level cause emergent ripples throughout the CAS both up and down the levels.

There will be more about integrating advocacy scaling efforts in the next section on the Advocacy and Target ecosystem.

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(P6): Obfuscation

Four stages of assuming background camouflage by a living creature. — Getting Hidden

Obfuscation is a general term for making it harder to understand what is going on. The resources above show the extremely common nature of obfuscation and its role in much of our social and intellectual life. It is also important in advocacy.

As I discussed earlier, outright lying has many downsides:It destroys the possibility of using authentic honesty in the negotiation of a valued outcome

It increases conflict, creating barriers to creating valued outcomes

It tells your target that it is acceptable to use deceit in countering your advocacy. It also allows the target to justify an escalation of deceit from the standard level that the target normally uses.

Obfuscation is a better heuristic than deceit for muddling your target’s understanding of your tactics as you design, create, and implement them.

Examples include:

Chaff: Using distractions to partially hide your real purpose. Chaff has been used to make it harder for missiles to find targets by flooding the space of the hunt with false positives.
Noise: triggering additional messages in your target’s information space to confuse, like twitter bots.
Using patterns of behavior that subtly communicate intent like a tell in poker.
Using proxies to cloud decisions
Big noise, no substance: Pretending to begin an initiative with fanfare, but no real intent.

There are many more patterns of Obfuscation in the linked resources.

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A Birthday Bounty of Beautiful Brain Bonbons

head full of ideas

My idea of the perfect birthday present is an gift card for books. My wife thinks that is boring, and I guess I understand that. But she is willing to indulge my tedious nature out of love, and my 73rd birthday this last month has already brought a bunch of new ideas which I am just beginning to explore.

Radical Uncertainty:

Two economists wrote this book to try to explain the very large number of unanticipated globally important awful events that have occurred in the last few decades. Their point is that we use risk assessment for decisions where risk can’t actually be assessed, because real uncertainty is not the same as risk.

Early in the work, they describe an anecdote from Pesident Obama’s term of office in which he and his advisors were trying to decide whether to go ahead with the SEAL raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. The discussion was around the probability that Osama was actually in the compound. The advisor assessments ranged from roughly 40 to 80%.

Now, Osama was either in the compound or he wasn’t. And there was no way for any of them to know which was true.

President Obama recognized that the discussion of probabilities couldn’t provide an answer to this basic question. He also recognized that the probabilities he was hearing actually represented the fear that his advisors had over the political consequences of a wrong decision, not whether Bin Laden was in the compound. He understood that the real question that needed answering is, “What is going on here?”.

This is the right question because it is a always a strategic error to use a risk assessment as a cover to hide the realities of a truly uncertain situation.

This confusion of risk and uncertainty happens all the time and in every part of human life. We all try to use a meaningless assessment to reduce our fear about the consequences of our decisions. And we all suffer as a result.

Obfuscation:

I had read this book when it was only available in paperback. Now I can use the highlighting and note capabilities of Kindle to reinforce and deepen my understanding of the idea of Obfuscation.

Obfuscation is like the techniques that magicians use to get one over on us. Our brain is distracted by something “so important” that we must pay attention to it, and the performer slips something through of which we are simply unaware.

Obfuscation is a very useful advocacy technique, much more useful than deceit. Ambiguity and misdirection can dramatically increase the seriousness with which the advocacy target takes your actions. It does so by forcing them to pay attention to what you are doing.

But what they see when they do pay attention is the ambiguity and misdirection of your obfuscation.

The book focuses on digital obfuscation, but the parallels with advocacy are obvious and immediately useful.

Design Justice:

This book is an unexpected orchid for my mental greenhouse. It is a real gem, and has the added value of discussing organizations and social justice initiatives in Southeast Michigan, especially in Detroit. It focuses on the actual way that technology produces structural oppression of devalued communities, including the disability community.

Oppression at root is the denial of agency to people because of their personal characteristics, their gender identification, their membership in a culture, community, or other social group, or their systematic devaluing by the oppressive construction of “universal” social institutions that are supposed to support all of us.

Early in the book, there is a masterful description of the way that the ordinary operation of scanning by TSA agents results in the public shaming of a person because of life choices. I won’t ruin the depth of the example by trying to describe it here.

I know that over the last half-century, the examples of such devaluing that have taught me the deepest lessons about the oppression of my community have been those where the ableist denial of agency to a person with a disability was entirely personal in its impact, entirely thoughtless in the mind of the perpetrator. Deliberate ableism is a true horror, but it is also more obvious, and the day-to-day chipping away at a person’s life possibilities is the much harder and darker oppression to eliminate.

Design Justice makes a real effort to reflect what we have learned from the embracing of intersectionality, not at the abstract or academic level, but in the way it suffuses every level and every part of our lives and the lives of all of us together. The personal is never separate from the universal and everything in between inside the Complex Adaptive System in which we all swim.

So-there are my first forays into the marvelous worlds that my wife’s present has given me. I look forward to many more insights on this conceptual adventure. I may even share them!

(P6): The Art of Conflict

Danger: Authorized Personnel Only; This area may have unexploded ordnance (UXO); Do not leave the road or disturbe the soil without 30 SW safety approval; If you detect unexploded ordnance, record the location, retreat from the area, and report to law enforcement at 606-3911

At its best, advocacy is a strategic art for managing the movement toward deeply valued human outcomes. This art always involves some level of conflict. After all, real change inevitably produces conflict. Conflict gives the energy to change efforts, not only for those who want change but also to those who resist change. It is this energy that helps define the possibility space for change and managing the possibility space for change makes your advocacy strategy real and productive.

Any call for eliminating conflict is simultaneously a call for reduced energy in the advocacy possibility space. Judgement of the value of reducing conflict can be part of managing an advocacy strategy and involves assessing the impact of this on the valued outcomes that are the purpose of the advocacy. Eliminating conflict eliminates vast possibilities of change.

Advocacy conflict is never relentless or total. Part of managing an advocacy strategy is understanding the limits of conflict as an effective source of energy for change.

For example, it is common for advocates that meet substantial resistance to become angry and escalate the conflict, adding energy to the advocacy possibility space to overcome resistance. But adding energy by way of anger-driven action also increases the energy of the resistance to change and undermines the ability to strategically manage the outcomes sought.

Adding energy to a possibility space through anger doesn’t magically increase the likelihood of valued outcomes. However necessary some anger is to motivating an advocacy initiative, anger should never dictate the advocacy strategy.

Anger that motivates the initiation of advocacy is generally caused by the elimination of life possibilities for real human beings. Anger that arises from the ongoing dnamic of implementing advocacy is about frustrated advocates being blocked and has nothing to do with the valued outcomes that were the driving force for the initiation of advocacy.

Any meaningful advocacy strategy always presumes some boundary on the level and type of conflict. I have always thought of this boundary as a kind of, “Below this threshold, we negotiate collaboratively, beyond this threshold, we escalate the conflict.”, a kind of bounded agreement between parties as to how the possibility space of this advocacy engagement will be managed.

Negotiating collaboratively doesn’t mean that you agree with the target system. It means that you negotiate for your valued outcomes using an advocacy framework that both parties agree is valid (like some system of statutes and rules that already exists). You can be tricky and devious in the negotiation if you don’t move outside the framework.

As a general principle, the most “strategic” way to initiate an advocacy initiative is to introduce a novel insurgency into the target. Once introduced, the target must either ignore the intrusion or respond to it. If it is ignored, advocates can always escalate the insurgency. When the target responds, a possibility space will be created for advocacy actions that enable and destabilize relationships.

The only advocacy activities that can undermine this dynamic are those that trigger a failure of commitment or creativity, our two general advantages over target systems. Being stalled or having a specific advocacy initiative defeated is simply the reality of trying to change a target CAS. We can only defeat ourselves. No target can do that.

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