First, describe the situation

February 10, 2014 by Ross Colliver

After I finished my PhD, I was invited to a series of workshops for early career researchers, organised by Ray Ison of Monash and the Open Universities. These were wonderful events, that propelled me and others into what we were hoping for in becoming a researcher.

Amongst many other matters, Ray invited us to consider the difference between experiencing things as problems and as situations.

When you see things as problems, you’re already on the search for solutions, and headed toward implementation in programs of activity. That’s of course what most of us get paid for, and good solutions are indeed needed. But my ‘good’ may well not be yours, nor the good of those with quite a bit of say in what gets legitimated and funded. Political necessities pull policy solutions, as Kingdon observed.

The drive to solutions thrusts an instrumental logic through our governing, from policy to service delivery. We’re all working somewhere on the solution-finding/implementing spectrum, but we all provide a wider scope to our choices when we approach the way things are without a problem yet in sight, as situations.

Seeing things as situations brings an inquiring attitude to our understandings of what is happening, and why it’s happening, and a heightened sensitivity to what is being agreed is a problem (and what is being left out of the picture all together). It opens the frame.

Once the window is opened a little, it often becomes apparent that there are many invitations on offer: where you choose to pay attention shapes your trajectory and eventual end point. The forces with which you align yourself becomes the world you inhabit.

A focus on situations brings inquiry to the foreground and moves problem solving to the background. The latter will reassert itself soon enough; why not make the most of any chance to sit in the situation without a commitment to any particular problem, taking in the differing and distinctive views of those in the situation? I try for three different views, at least. Yours, mine, and someone with whom neither of us are familiar.

Producing our stories, with full voice, and listening to others’ stories, is one way to enter situations. Listening is an opportunity to perturb familiar framings. Attention to what surprises and disturbs is the start of rigour in inquiry. Openness to offers and invitations is the start of improvising solutions.

A question for Genevieve Bell, Intel

January 30, 2014 by Ross Colliver

Driving into town on Monday, end of January, I caught the Sunday Profile on Genevieve Bell, Intel’s anthropologist, on Radio National. It was great to hear the story of how she left of her trajectory in academia, and took another path. With Intel, she looks at how people live, and what role the tools in their life play, digital and otherwise. She described researching what people have in their cars – I have a clear image of my car with its contents laid out on black plastic, and me explaining how each item got there.

I looked around the web for an email address for Genevieve, without success.On the way, I found video with her at at Intel, with this marvellous observation: “Curiosity is not just about observing things, it’s about being changed by them.”

In the end, not finding an address for her, I sent a request to connect via LinkedIn, and I hope she will find her way to this question: Genevieve: what’s happening with hand-written lists?

I observe that I’m taking to written lists more, not less. My favoured format is an A4 piece of paper folded in four. I can keep several lists on the one piece of paper: things I have to buy next time I’m at the supermarket, and another list for hardware, my to-do list for current work, and my to-do list for around the property. This lasts me for about 5 days, and there’s even room for ideas that come to me when I’m working in the garden, or driving.

I’ve come to feel that my embrace of the written list is because when I write my list, consult my list, cross things off my list, I hold my life in my own hands.

I do this digitally, of course, moving my life around with my fingertips, clinging onto some sense of agency while battered by other people’s ways of organising what’s important. My file manager, my web browser, my email program. Hard work, all these hard logics.

As I take out my floppy piece of paper, crowded with notes, and add to it, or cross things off, or check what I remembered in the middle of the night I must do this morning, first thing, I hold my life in my own hands, and the organisation of my life evolves with great flexibility. Then I put my list in my pocket, and get on with it.

Let’s talk about methodology

January 30, 2014 by Ross Colliver

“Let’s talk about methodology” – this rhetorical flourish could be the sub-title of the ALARA conference I’m designing with Susie Goff of CultureShift.

Let’s talk about methodology. As we dive into the exciting business of designing responses to social problems, let’s talk about methodology, so that we can dive deeper and wider and with more curiosity. Before we commit to the hard slog of actually implementing what we design, with its burden of project management , let’s talk about methodology.

The conversation about methodology is high value at the innovating edges of any domain. In the loose network of policy makers, and in the milling market place of policy developers, talking about methodology is gold. Create the space for critical reflection on methodology, and hold it, and you generate designs that actually get into implementation, and that work.

Talk methodology at the start of projects and you have a good chance of sidestepping knee-jerk responses. You’ll get into much more interesting territory. And you’ll meet a lot of interesting people, on their own terms (here, kudos to Kate Auty).

This will all play out in our timetable for the conference, of which more soon. In the meantime, the invitation to the ALARA conference, August 2014, is an invitation to consider methodology for three days. This invitation goes out to policy developers, to those who design and facilitate participatory inquiry – action reseachers, facilitators of action learning, and on and on out to our qualitative research cousins – and to those peoples taking charge of their collective life.

We lean toward policy research and development, and program design, as collective self-determination, not just inquiry or rational fitting of means to ends. We are for agency, and recovery of agency is a recovery of community: the two intertwine.

On meeting people on their terms

January 30, 2014 by Ross Colliver

Kudos to Kate Auty, Commissoner for Environmental Sustainabilty, who travelled the State in conversation with community. She proposed a conversation about sustainability, and listened her way around the State. Returning, she observed (and I paraphrase): There’s a vibrant, informed and intelligent inventivenss at work in communities of place, that government just doesn’t get.

This terrible failure is one consequence of the methodological assumptions bought to policy development.

In holding a public discourse over 5 years, and sticking to her mandate, in less than favourable winds, Kate is for me an exemplar of public service. She made a place where the worlds of policy, science and people could speak, a place where the discourse was up for grabs and held open to other ways of speaking, and other ways of being.

See Kate’s lovely exposition of the unfolding of her methodology in her Many Publics report (see page 154, Appendix One). And read a chapter or two of the Many Public report, where people say ripping things like this (p 63):

a non Indigenous person, reflecting a comment made by a senior Indigenous man in the west of the state. said –

‘… Melbourne doesn’t know everything that is happening.’

Innovation comes from the edge

January 25, 2014 by Ross Colliver

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over; on the edge you find things you can’t see from the center.” Kurt Vonnegut.

“Innovation comes from the edge, almost never from the centre. Sometimes it’s cool to live on the edge but for the most part it’s hard work. Things keep breaking. The business models are not proven. The procedures aren’t fixed. The models and metaphors are not understood by everyone. It’s difficult to connect with the mainstream. This is life on the edges.” Harold Jarche www.jarche.com

Jarche thinks development of organisations requires a partnership between managers on the inside, workers at the edges, and consultants beyond the edge. Amongst those “workers at the edge”, I’m interested in those who have taken themselves to the edge of authority. They no longer believe that hierachy is the only or best form for organising action, and question these presumptions when they appear in organisational behaviour. Nor are they just building networks as a self-protective reaction to hierachy, but looking for the ways networks and hierachies can work together.

Grab the opportunity to talk about governance

November 3, 2013 by Ross Colliver

After two workshops with the Governance Project, we have agreed on 5 systems that need to be improved. We’re out recruiting more participants, and Peter Greig, President of Upper Barwon Landcare Network and one of the Project design team, suggested that we might need to offer some assurance that talking about governance can lead to landscape change. He pointed out that “landcare participants want action first, and talking second, and only if it leads to action.”

A preference for action and suspicion of “too much talk” is strong in landcare, as it is in other community-based groups. Landcare members have wasted much time talking in official venues about what ought to happen, and not seeing any result. They are justifiably cautious when invited to step up and talk (yet again) about stuff (like governance) that needs to be improved. Will talking make any difference?

People in landcare are not anti-talk, or anti-intellectual. They love to talk, and their talk is rich in story, in contestation, and in fine distinctions about what makes a difference. Talk is the juice of the landcare community. But as people living in and working with the land, they also know that action has to be taken. There are cows to be milked daily, feed to be sorted, spraying to be looked to at the right point in the season, paperwork to be done, a multi-stranded and shifting field of activities to be managed, whether your land is 1000 or 100 or 2.5 hectares. If a reasonable amount of talking doesn’t point the way to a course of action, then why waste energy on it? There are simply too many other vital things to be getting on with.

Digging out examples of change in governance changing landscapes is a good idea, but people interested in being constructively critical about governance will grab the opportunity for a vigorous conversation with others who want to improve governance. Once you’ve been through a couple of cycles of “bold new approaches”, you understand how deeply persistent assumptions and established arrangements undermine improvement in governance. You don’t need evidence of better landscapes or even better governance to get started talking. You start to look out for people to talk to.

What do they look like, these people who want to improve governance? Last Friday, I spoke with two of them. First, with Jane Ryan, in DEPI Regional Services, who is negotiating a planning process (and actual plans) for pieces of Victoria’s coast. She’s working with members of Coastal Boards, a small staff team and a host of stakeholders crying out for commitments on the use of coastal environments. She’s savvy and streetwise in NRM-inflected planning, and she’s really got her work cut out for her with this new task. We had a good discussion about how she’s bringing together the various people who can contribute to the design.

Then Moragh Mackay and I sat down with Mark Eigenraam, DEPI. One of Mark’s passions is measuring outcomes in NRM, and MM met him when the (former) ecoMarkets team came in as a partner in the Westernport Targeted Land Stewardship Project around 2009. We were there to tell him about the Governance Project and about one issue in particular, that of creating a better system to measure outcomes. We thought he’d be interested: he was, but we talked about much more besides.

We talked about the way big ‘P’ policy issues (clean water, healthy soil) get lost as planning moves to the little ‘p’ policy work of constructing or assessing options and setting up programs. We talked about the silos in little ‘p’ policy development that stop people seeing how the big ‘P’ matters are woven together in the actual landscape, and howplanners with a strong commitment to one aspect of landcapes, biodiversity for example, can end up planning as if the landscape didn’t have anything else in it, like people. We talked about the peopled landscape as the one that landcare groups and networks work in.

In these conversations, there was never any doubt that talking about governance was necessary and useful – that we need ways to set goals and priorities that take account of differing stakeholders, that we need policy that integrates with action on the ground as informed by it, not wilfully ignorant of it, that we need planning in government that integrates with planning in communities.

But these are people who work in the governance system, who feel its effects each day on themselves personally and on the effectiveness of work areas around them. What about people in landcare, who don’t live and breath governance? What leads them to see governance as something that needs to and can be redesigned. Perhaps there are two transition points. The first is seeing the rhetoric of new policies in NRM end up with the same practice, even when well-intentioned people and thoughtful people are enacting the new rhetoric. The rhetoric-practice gap shows not that they are duplicitous, but that there are other and stronger forces at work than good intentions, keeping ineffective ways of governing in place.

The second is having a local initiative syymied by the command-and-control paradigm. That either makes you want to give up, fight the bastards, or reinvent the system in which we all operate. Fighting is tiring; redesign with others who see the need for change is demanding but more sustainable. Once you reach that point, then you start look around for people who have reached the same point – and set yourself up for deeper, more demanding and more satisfying conversations than the shallow and debilitating litany of complaint that landcarers can get sucked into.

So yes, there are case studies of shifts in governance that have led to better management of landscapes, and those can inspire and inform your own inquiry into governance. But if you need that evidence before you start talking about governance in NRM, then your missing out on a grand conversation.

Conversations for innovation in governance

October 19, 2013 by Ross Colliver

I recently missed out on getting a Corangamite Catchment Management Authority (CCMA) contract to develop a Community Engagement Strategy. Gareth Smith, the CEO, rang me Friday afternoon to give me the news. It was good to hear I was in the mix, but deeply disappointing nonetheless to miss the job. It took me a while to get over my disappointment, but when I did, I could see why Engagement Plus got the job and not me. They do one thing, and that’s engagement.

Then I started asking myself what it is I do have to offer at this point in a long and diverse career. Research and design for innovation in governance is what I got to, and the business of making engagement work has deep opportunities for innovation. In this post, I consider one aspect of the Corangamite CMA’s situation in relation to engagement – the place of community profiles.

Through 2013, the CCMA have had a consulting firm, RMCG, profile their community segments; the Community Engagement Strategy will move that through to commitments to specific engagement. I was around in 2003 when the first of such profiles was done for the CCMA, and I know that the profiling study was not well-integrated into the consciousness or decision making of staff at the time. Then in 2005-06, I myself differentiated and interviesed community segments in Corangamite (in a project with regrettably little internal support at the CMA of the time – see Indicators and measures for social capacity in NRM).

As a result, I have a standing question of how such profiles of stakeholders/types of landholder/community segments can be brought into a dynamic relationship with the work of engagement that goes on day-by-day in a program team.

In my bid to the CCMA, I’d suggested some ways to do this. Strategic plans are only as good as the smarts of the teams enacting them, so getting staff wired into development of a strategy is essential. Once you have defined path, things change as soon as you take your next step. Action brings all sorts of new information about the people in the community with whom you are working. The situation itself changes. As this happens, the coarse generalisations of a profiling study, and of the strategy itself, are drawn into a more nuanced understanding of what people think, what they do, and what enables and constrains the trajectories of change you want to encourage.

How can that new experience be brought back into a profile? How do that be done across say, 20 staff, each of whom has their own program-defined brief, each of whom will encounter members of those segments each day as they work? How each staff member’s separate experience of stakeholders be brought back to a conversation between staff.

Are there examples, I wonder, of organisations which have trained their staff to ask salient questions of people/customers as they work with them, and bring this back into some holding and shared understanding of the organisation’s stakeholders, something that refreshes the profile? To begin with, staff would need to have some focus questions around which to draw in the impressions and expression they encounter while interacting with communities and agencies.

Reading Kate Legge’s Yes She Can in this morning’s Weekend Australian Magazine, I was impressed with the power of the kitchen table conversations that underpinned the community inquiry that began the change in the seat of Indi in NE Victoria, and that led to Cathy McGowan’s nomination and election. People were invited to speak to three themes: living in Indi; issues that matter; political representation. They did that locally, in their own homes and meeting places.

: Cathy McGowan with her siblings (and a few nieces) in Albury last month. Picture: Jake Nowakowski Source: TheAustralian

Could we invent a focused inquiry in NRM into the matters that most concern people? I can imagine the conversations, and the questions that would open these up, but the stumbling block I see is maintaining the focus of staff on the landholders they are working with, as distinct from the managers they are working for, at several levels (regional, State, national) above the grassroots. Productivist culture, that awful and mindless obsession with reportable outputs, erases attention to what the end user thinks, does, wants, can contribute, is creatively involved in.

Reading Legge’s article on what has happened in NE Victoria, I think the only way knowledge about the community can stay fresh is to shift the whole notion of a profile on its axis, and turn it, as they have in Indi, into a conversation that the community itself owns. No profiles tucked away on agency hard drives: we need a web-based record of what people think on matters of consequence.

Mary Crooks, of The Victorian Women’s Trust, was noted as one of the people who designed the kitchen table conversations behind the Indi shift. Cambell Klose contributed to the digital facilities that supported that groundswell in NE Victoria. I’d be interested in what their experience might bring the NRM field. How might their designs inform the work of a Catchment Management Authority, charged as these authorities are with facilitating action across public and private stakeholders, in pursuit of sustainable landscapes? How might these designs be adapted by the landcare movement, where there is local action, but little linkage across the local?

Starting points for innovation in governance are invariably conversations between people who care about our collective life.