To increase the success rate you have to increase the failure rate

I was at the Berry Charity Chook Auction on Sunday and found myself sitting in the shade next to a chook enthusiast from Woodhill Mountain named Julia. We were talking about the value of letting kids injure themselves in order to learn, and she suddenly said:
"To increase the success rate you have to increase the failure rate."
I said: "Did you think of that yourself?"
She said: "Yes."
I said: "Just then?"
She said: "Yes."
I said: "Can I use it?"
She said: "Yes."
To increase the success rate you have to increase the failure rate. Something to carve on the heads of politicians and bureaucrats who are terrified of risk.
Failure is good. It's how you learn. The only real failure is a failure to learn from experience.
Which reminds me of my friend Geoff Brown's comment on a previous post which read: 
Lately I have been communicating the need for a mindset shift to tackling these complex problems. Like you say in this post, we need to be trying lots of different things and be aware that most of them will fail. Dave Snowden (Google Cognitive Edge) talks about a shift away from Fail-Safe strategies (where control of outcomes is assumed) to Safe-Fail strategies (where failure won't end in disaster, but we quickly learn from them). I like Clay Shirky's quote on this when he talks about the complexity of getting stuff to spread on the internet ... "We need to learn to try lots and lots of new things and fail informatively so that you and others can find a skull on a pikestaff somewhere".

The problem with Social Marketing - why you can't sell change like soap

If you work in health promotion or sustainability, you’ll have heard of “Social Marketing” and “Community-based Social Marketing”.

Lately I’ve noticed how these communication methodologies are being treated with almost magical reverence, as if they are the long-awaited silver bullets for the complex social, health and environmental problems we all struggle with.

I believe many of the expectations being placed on Social Marketing and Community-based Social Marketing are seriously overblown and it’s time social change practitioners reassessed their attitude to these practices.

Here’s why:

Of course you can market brands. But behaviour change is not like buying a different brand of beer, it’s about getting people to DO THINGS THEY ARE UNCOMFORTABLE WITH, DON’T WANT TO DO OR CAN’T DO, or they would already be doing them. Like parents letting their kids walk to school, or smokers quitting, or drivers switching to public transport.

These kinds of social, health and environmental behaviours are intractable because they are part of complex, “wicked” or messy social problems. That’s why they are still with us. They are intractable for very good reasons: they are fixed firmly in place by a powerful matrix of institutional, technological and social factors. To be effective change programs must therefore do more than just communicate persuasive messages, they must aim to modify those factors.

Paul Stern of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education of the UK’s National Research Council explains that many behaviours are simply not amenable to voluntary change: [i]

“This pattern of [contextual] influences implies that effective laws and regulations, strong financial incentives or penalties, irresistible technology, powerful social norms, and the like can leave little room for personal factors to affect behavior…”

In other words, when people have very little choice how they act, structural changes (like regulation, pricing, infrastructure, service provision, governance reform, social innovation, and technological innovation) should be the preferred approaches.

He goes on to say that: “[however] when contextual influences are weak, personal factors…are likely to be the strongest influence on behavior.” However, if we are realistic, there are very few situations where contextual factors are weak. Every personal decision is thoroughly embedded on its context. Even a simple voluntary behaviour like “turning off the lights” is determined by technology and pricing.

The fact is, every effective social change effort has been predominantly structural. Improving the anti-social behaviour of drinkers, for instance, has required collaboration between police, community leaders and licensing authorities; physical re-design of venues; modified management practices; training for staff; advocacy; political leadership; and legislative change. Marketing has been the least important factor in the mix. Most solutions to “wicked” problems are like this. They involve multi-faceted strategies, and are very much about building relationships and re-designing practices, places and institutions, with marketing taking an important supportive role.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with good marketing. It’s a vital part of the mix. It spreads knowledge, creates interest, helps get people buzzing, and helps spark political action so that politicians get busy with the work of changing institutions and supporting technological innovation. It is an important handmaiden of change, but not the driver....

The rest of this paper is at www.enablingchange.com.au   It looks at the shape of successful interventions into "wicked problems", details weaknesses in the Social Marketing approach, and suggests an alternative approach.

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[i] Paul C. Stern (2005) Individuals’ Environmentally Significant Behaviour, Environmental Law Reporter News and Analysis 35 10785

The dream team to tackle obesity

A recent US National Research Council report, Local Government Actions to Prevent Obesity provides a nice summary of the kind of interventions that have the best potential to tackle childhood obesity. 

According to the press release: “Many of these steps focus on increasing access to healthy foods and opportunities for active play and exercise.  They include:

- providing incentives to lure grocery stores to underserved neighborhoods;

- eliminating outdoor ads for high-calorie, low-nutrient foods and drinks near schools; requiring calorie and other nutritional information on restaurant menus; 

- implementing local "Safe Routes to School" programs; 

- regulating minimum play space and time in child care programs; 

- rerouting buses or developing other transportation strategies that ensure people can get to grocery stores; and 

- using building codes to ensure facilities have working water fountains.”

So, here's the dream team you'd need for a comprehensive attack on obesity at the local government level:

- an incentive manager;

- a regulator; 

- a building code planner; 

- a nutritionist; 

- a transport planner; 

- an educator; 

- a courageous politician or two to drive these changes through; and

- a facilitator, to pull it all together.

The uncanny similarity between counterinsurgency warfare and social change

Just got my issue of Campaign Strategy eLetter. Chris Rose mentioned David Kilcullen's 28 Articles: Fundamentals of Company-level Counterinsurgency so I looked it up. (Kilcullen is a former Australian Army lieutenant colonel who served in Iraq as a senior counterinsurgency advisor and now works for the US State Department).

It's uncanny how closely these hard-edged lessons in counterinsurgency warfare resemble sensible lessons in running social change projects. Just have a look. I suppose we should have suspected that, after all think about Sun Tzu's "The Art of War".

I especially liked his "4 What-ifs". See if this resonates with your experience of trying to get things done in the real world.

Four What Ifs

The articles above describe what should happen, but we all know that things go wrong. Here are some "what ifs" to consider:

What if you get moved to a different area? You prepared for ar-Ramadi and studied Dulaim tribal structures and Sunni beliefs. Now you are going to Najaf and will be surrounded by al-Hassan and Unizzah tribes and Shiía communities. But that work was not wasted. In mastering your first area, you learned techniques you can apply: how to "case" an operational area, how to decide what matters in the local societal structure. Do the same again - and this time the process is easier and faster, since you have an existing mental structure, and can focus on what is different. The same applies if you get moved frequently within a battalion or brigade area.

What if higher headquarters doesn't get counterinsurgency? Higher headquarters is telling you the mission is to "kill terrorist", or pushing for high-speed armored patrols and a base-camp mentality. They just do not seem to understand counterinsurgency. This is not uncommon, since company-grade officers today often have more combat experience than senior officers. In this case, just do what you can. Try not to create expectations that higher headquarters will not let you meet. Apply the adage "first do no harm". Over time, you will find ways to do what you have to do. But never lie to higher headquarters about your locations or activities: they own the indirect fires.

What if you have no resources? Yours is a low-priority sector: you have no linguists, the aid agencies have no money for projects in your area, you have a low priority for funding. You can still get things done, but you need to focus on self-reliance, keep things small and sustainable, and ruthlessly prioritize effort. Local community leaders are your allies in this: they know what matters to them more than you do. Be honest with them, discuss possible projects and options with community leaders, get them to choose what their priority is. Often they will find the translators, building supplies or expertise that you need, and will only expect your support and protection in making their projects work. And the process of negotiation and consultation will help mobilize their support, and strengthen their social cohesion. If you set your sights on what is achievable, the situation can still work.

What if the theater situation shifts under your feet? It is your worst nightmare: everything has gone well in your sector, but the whole theater situation has changed and invalidates your efforts. Think of the first battle of Fallujah, the al-Askariya shrine bombing, or the Sadr uprising. What do you do? Here is where having a flexible, adaptive game plan comes in. Just as the insurgents drop down to a lower posture when things go wrong, now is the time to drop back a stage, consolidate, regain your balance and prepare to expand again when the situation allows. But see article 28: if you cede the initiative, you must regain it as soon as the situation allows, or you will eventually lose.

That all sounds like great advice!

A crib sheet for program planners

It's a hell of a job thinking outside the square. One thing I've noticed in strategic planning sessions is that educators often have trouble thinking beyond "awareness", PR types beyond "change attitudes", engineers beyond "building stuff", planners beyond "plans of management" and so on.

So here is a crib sheet for those participants who need a little help to think outside their professional bubbles.

It's at http://www.enablingchange.com.au/crib_sheet.pdf

I especially designed it for Step 3 in the Enabling Change process, where a diverse group of participants select intervention points in the "system of improvement" (a.k.a. "program objectives").

There are just so many ways to change the world!

A nice way to think about the choice between voluntary and structural approaches to changing people's behaviour

Paul Stern of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education at the UK’s National Research Council, proposes a sensible way to strategise the choice between involuntary and structural approaches to influencing peoples’ environmental behaviours.

He writes:

“The influences on environmentally significant behavior…can be roughly classified as shown in Table 1. Generally speaking, the stronger the contextual influences (those toward the top of the table), the less important are the personal factors toward the bottom.

“This pattern of influences implies that effective laws and regulations, strong financial incentives or penalties, irresistible technology, powerful social norms, and the like can leave little room for personal factors to affect behavior…

“The pattern of influences on behavior also implies that when contextual influences are weak, the personal factors at the bottom of the table are likely to be the strongest influence on behavior.

“Also, when the contextual factors cannot be changed, the personal factors may provide the only levers on behavior, even if they are weak or only apply in restricted situations.

“In most real-world contexts, both contextual and personal factors are involved in shaping environmental behavior, so a variety of factors are potentially available for bringing about behavior change. For example, the environmental impact of traveling to work is usually shaped largely by the location of home and of workplaces, the availability of public transportation, the fuel economy of an individual’s motor vehicles, and habit. But even with behavior that is as strongly context-determined as commuting, personal factors can matter, particularly at key decision times. These include the times when people obtain new vehicles, make choices about their maintenance, and, particularly when their homes or workplaces change, making it relatively easy to form new commuting habits."


TRANSLATION: When people don't really have much choice about their behaviours, focus on structural change.


He also suggests some principles for designing interventions:


“The complexities of person-situation interactions and a careful reading of the research lend support to a set of general principles for behavior change such as listed in Table 3.

Paul C. Stern (2005) Individuals’ Environmentally Significant Behaviour, Environmental Law Reporter News and Analysis 35 10785

http://www7.nationalacademies.org/dbasse/Environmental%20Law%20Review%20PDF.pdf