Some thoughts on Kevin Rudd's '1,000 Great Minds' initiative (Australia 2020 Summit) and what might need to happen to improve its chances of success
Because of the holistic nature of the approach being advocated, all of these areas overlap and are highly interactive and interrelated.
1. Getting the usual ‘experts' together, to then plan for a better future. This always leads to tinkering with existing (flawed) plans, and excludes those most affected by such plans.
Need: involve mostly ‘different' people and start by focusing not on plans, but on values, beliefs, worldviews, paradigms - then feelings and passions - then, emergent from these, hopes, dreams, visions, imaginings, and creative thoughts - only then can ‘design/redesign-based plans' (that can proactively enable systems [structures and processes] that meet long-term to short-term, and broad to specific, goals, AND that make systems as ‘problem-proof' as possible) be enabled to emerge; and then critically analyse, integrate, and flesh these out, etc - detailing participatory opportunities, responsibilities, time lines, resource and support needs, means for monitoring outcomes, tracking progress, and for ongoing redesigning and fine tuning.
2. Taking problem-solving (back-end, reactive/responsive, curative) approaches. These tend to focus on symptom management and neglect the need to address the underlying maldesign and mismanagement roots of the problems. They typically over-focus on measuring problems (a prime strategy for postponing action - by those who benefit from the status quo), and on efficiency and substitution strategies (eg, improved application of pesticide and on finding less disruptive [but still purchased] substitutes, such as biological controls and genetically modified organisms - same story in other areas, such as medicine and energy).
Need: to redesign existing systems (and design new systems) to make them as problem-proof as possible; and to enable effective change from these flawed/defective systems to significantly more improved ones.
3. Getting stuck in activities that are ‘pathologically' designed to postpone (feared) change. These include particularly measuring problems (‘monitoring our extinction'!), endless collection of data (often ‘justified' by cries of the need for ‘evidence-based approaches'), hearings, committee meetings, report-writing, etc - most of which have NO follow-through, and usually only lead to more of the same.
Need: postponing pathologies must be recognised, exposed for what they are, addressed and contradicted by taking responsible, timely, appropriate, collaborative action. Certainly access to relevant data are important for making responsible decisions. Often, however, adequate data are already available from other places, in other languages etc. Globally, billions of dollars are wasted annually unnecessarily repeating studies in new locations or with mischievous intentions (often related to perceived threats to existing commercial advantage), when the data for responsible decision-making are already available.
4. Trying to solve problems within the discipline or area responsible for creating them, or with multidisciplinary teams of selected experts/authorities from favoured disciplines, with others excluded.
Need: genuine transdisciplinary and trans-competency and trans-experience teams, able to access disciplinary and specialised knowledge as appropriate. Competencies relating to holistic approaches to design, sustainability, wellbeing, and effective change processes, in particular, need to be included in the teams.
5. Patriarchal (them doing things to/for us, and us doing things to/for them) and ‘driven' do-good approaches are rarely exactly what is needed. They are generally not sustained or embraced by those being ‘helped', and they often have some negative unexpected consequences.
Need: inclusion of those most affected by the proposed improvements as primary collaborators in the change process, from beginning to end. This enables ownership, relevance, achievability, ongoing improvement and openness to unforseen/surprise benefits.
6. Planning ‘Olympic/mega-scale', heroic initiatives (from hearings to projects) with no follow-through or provision for ongoing support (more than just funding).
Need: diverse, mutually supportive, do-able initiatives that have long-term support and consideration of opportunities for ongoing improvement and learning our ways forward collaboratively towards improved futures.
7. Over focus on knowledge and data, and neglect of wisdom and experience (much of which cannot be supported by data, and involves working with the ‘unknown' - the majority of what is - not just the limited ‘known'); often in ways that rely on intuition and gut feelings etc.
Need: we need to be much better at recognising, valuing and involving the wisest and most experienced in our society, and not so obsessed with ‘cleverness'. Whereas the former have competencies that enable them to work with both the ‘unknown' and ‘know', the latter are largely limited to working with the miniscule ‘known'.
8. Over focus on ‘productivity', profit and quick dramatic results - this predictably leads to burn-out, only short-term, limited benefits, and often unexpected disbenefits (new problems).
Need: we need to focus much more on ‘maintenance', caring for one another (other species and the environment), including prioritising time and resources for this, celebration, venting feelings, and ‘healing' sessions, etc. These activities need to be ‘equally' the focus of the initiative. In some senses, the latter may be regarded as emergent from, and a product of, the former.
9. Homogenisation tendencies tend to result in the construction of favoured ‘norms' (for people, structures, processes, etc), failure to consider diversity, in-groups and out-groups, inclusion and exclusion, and failure to benefit from the creativity that resides at the margins and in the borderlands of society.
Need: openness to appreciation of the value of hererogeneity and ‘functional' diversity within all systems, with its opportunities for synergy, mutualism, lateral thinking, extension beyond the usual competencies, relevance to needs and possibilities, a sense of inclusion, ownership, and a sense of place, etc.
10. Neglect, or only token involvement, of the arts, and over focus on the sciences, technologies, business, politics, the professions, the media, and the other major institutions within our society. As a result, the arts are poorly supported, regarded as a luxury or optional extra, an afterthought, or even irrelevant.
Need: recognition of the arts, in its broadest sense, as being an essential part of both the foundation and means for implementation of all efforts to achieve genuine and sustainable improvement.
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Professor Stuart B. Hill is Foundation Chair of Social Ecology at the School of Education, University of Western Sydney.
RELATED LINKS
Australia 2020 Summit
http://www.pm.gov.au/media/release/2008/media_release_0054.cfm
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Comments
Spot on with point number 10
How about a stand-alone portfolio for Culture and the Arts?
Synergise this
In the spirit of satire which I can only presume the initial post exemplifies, there may be those more cynical than I who would consider any project dependent on finding a thousand great minds in Australia doomed from the outset but we must rise above such facile banter and consider the substantive issue. The problem is that those visionary souls who peer into the future and seek to shape it on our behalf always make the mistake of assuming tomorrow will be like today, only more so. Computers are important today so tomorrow they'll be, you know, everywhere! Oil is expensive at the moment so tomorrow it'll be, like, really expensive! Every futurologist has made this mistake. In the nineteen twenties every city of the future was a maze of huge airships and mighty biplanes. The truth is that the future is either exactly the same as today or completely different. If it's the same, it requires no planning and if it's completely different then planning is by definition impossible.
The only utility in such conferences therefore lies in getting all the self proclaimed experts, social policy wonks and well meaning but woolly headed academics into the same plush building at the same time. It can then be covered in a thick layer of fast drying concrete dumped from the air by hard working transport helicopters, in much the same way as Chernobyl was entombed by the Russians. One beauty of this scheme is that the participants will be so busy talking, or waiting for their turn to talk (as opposed to listening of course) that so long as the snacks keep coming they'll be happy in there till the end of time, allowing everyone else to actually build the future they're so busying pontificating about. The other is that a random aerial splurge of ill setting communist concrete would only improve the aesthetic appeal of most major public buildings completed since the end of the Second World War.
Imagine such a conference in 1970. Nobody would foresee the internet, they'd be too busy planning their shining cities in space and massive domes under the sea. Nobody would be thinking about SMS texting, they'd all be arguing about the precise shade of silver our jump suit uniforms would be. We've seen what happens to societies which try to plan their future, they call themselves the Soviet Union, mire themselves in misery and collapse into a heap of rust. Mao's Great Leap Forward cost fifty million lives while, more recently, the Millennium Dome cost a billion pounds sterling. The last people we should let plan our futures is those who are arrogant enough to think they can do so. Let us be frank, the thousand great minds summit is a complete and utter waste of time. If you want a thousand great minds then log onto the internet and do a spot of surfing. They're out there, amid myspace blogs and lolcat photos. Why discuss the future in the most outdated fashion imaginable by getting everyone together for a conference?
Lastly, and with all due respect, I do not think that man invented agriculture, smelted iron, developed the chariot and the jet fighter and found cures for most of the world's major diseases by sitting around trading empty cliches about 'synergy', taking a 'holistic approach' to everything or indulging in mutually supportive 'healing sessions', whatever they may be. We have a political system called democracy, an economic system called the free market and a scientific structure of thought based in the enlightenment. They have seen us progress from cart horses to space shuttles in three hundred years without, amazingly enough, the wise and guiding hand of all that many social ecologists at the wheel. A reliance on a random but repetitive set of trendy, feel good buzz words butters, as John Major would have said, no parsnips at all. Nothing whatsoever has ever been achieved by 'genuine transdisciplinary and trans-competency and trans-experience teams'. How about we let free individuals choose what they want to buy and sell and see how that works out instead? When Napoleon called England a nation of shopkeepers he unwittingly identified the reason why he'd end up with an empire of a bedroom on St. Helena.
I also wonder, just in passing, what Shelley's poetry would have been like had he spent most of his time applying for government grants or whether Rimbaud would have revolutionised the genre after dutifully attending half a dozen council funded poetry workshops? The only good art is produced by absinthe crazed obsessives starving in a garret and if what they produce is any good in the end then people will buy it of their own free will. The complete collapse of artistic merit in recent decades is due to far too much government support, not too little. Exactly how many great painters or composers have been produced by the heavily subsidised arts industry of the west in the last fifty years?
....Exactly.
This should be required reading
My first thought when I read Stuart's 10 do's and don'ts was that it set out a counsel of perfection that my experience suggests the public policy process would find extremely difficult to operationalise, as the consultants would have it. I'm a little less scpetical than the very sceptical, although compelling, critique from Nick Mallory and can see value in some of the "what we need" prescriptions. The challenge with the social ecology prescription is the risk that it floats free from the need for purposeful and pragmatic action, including pesky things like setting some goals and generating momentum and measurable progress. But I thought as a prediction of the 10 things that may well be major traps for the Summiteers Stuart's analysis was almost eerily prescient.
I'm not sure I would discard entirely the value of getting some people together in a room to talk for a while in a structured and systematic way. Nor am I as pessmistic that nothing valuable will be generated by that process. But it will definitely be limited; it's unlikely that we will look back at the 2020 Summit and recognise the birth of the next Internet or SMS or penicillin. In that sense, Nick is absolutely correct. We should not expect too much from a process that carries some risks of adopting an institutional, structured and 'same old suspects' approach to what is meant to be a new way of thinking - "out of the box" no doubt. We do need a new way to think and collaborate around these challenges, one that is altogether looser and more organic, more conversational and more open to the instincts and reflexes of messy networks of people, interests and resources. The market, in that sense, is clearly going to be part of the mix. But what other similarly loose, but connected ways of thinking and innovating do we actually have, apart from these kinds of gatherings? Very few, it seems to me.
What the internet and the wonderful world of "everything 2.0" or the participative web - the thing I'm using right now to engage in this loose, but connected conversation - is showing us the early signs of some new ways to approach this challenge. These are tools that, it seems to me, slip the constraints of an increasingly narrow and suffocating institutionalism and hold out the prospect of a much smarter way of tapping into our collective intelligence in ways that recognise that almost all innovation, including especially the Internet, is a function of amazing individuals and powerful communities.
So I took some comfort in the powerful insights that came from both Stuart and Nick, despite what I sense might be some considerable differences in starting points from each. Even if you don't swallow either of their prescrptions whole, you can agree that each contribution might make a great start to the pre-reading folders of all Summit delegates.
Martin Stewart-Weeks
msweeks@cisco.com