(Self) Reflections from practice - the great forgetting
Upon reading an article by newsroom about the baby unit at Arohata Prison being inaccessible and unused for hapū wāhine and māmā since 2014, the harm caused, and the lost outcomes and opportunity for intergenerational change; I’m reflecting on the nature of complex systems and needing to humanise our responses within them.
While there is much to unpack in this (and an article is a 2D story in a multidimensional world), some things stood out to me in terms of what people shared…“
“We could not ascertain by whom and how some of these barriers were identified. Historical decisions seem to have been perpetuated and reinforced, even when it is unclear who made the initial decision and why, and whether the decision still applies today.” Office of the Children’s Commission Report, 2021.
“Arohata has been really supportive of Mothers Project… and for wāhine to have access. Their social workers there actively reach out to us, so it just surprises me, some of this because from dealing with the staff they are really good… I’m perplexed a bit as to how this has happened.” Founder of Mothers Project Stacey Shortall.
It speaks to why Peter Senge in his 11 laws of system thinking includes ‘there is no blame’. There is no us and them, there aren’t really evil people sitting around thinking and doing evil things. Our systems are made up of us, normal humans doing normal things. And the harm experienced and the lost opportunities for uplifting people are often a product of the sh*t that no one actually thinks about, we don’t even realise contribute to outcomes or have any space in our practice or lives to think about deeply at all. It’s the stuff that just happens and is happening.
(NB: none of this abdicates any of us from the responsibility of our actions within people’s lives, nor am I implying that there wasn’t problematic sh*t to be addressed here which the article names).
This is the stuff that is often ignored when we are gearing up for the transformation or innovation or new programme because it’s not the shiny new stuff that feels exciting where we can ‘discovery’ and ‘ideate’ ourselves into feeling better about ‘solving problems’. Or even when we rinse and repeat the same things we are doing because they have ‘always been done that way’, where there is even less likelihood of challenging the status quo.
It also reminds me of the principle of historicity in complex systems thinking.
Historicity relates to complex systems having a collection of histories that influence people, interactions and systems, often in ways that we cannot see, interpreted in diverse and potentially conflicting ways (Eppel, 2009).
The sense that what is possible is a product of what we believe is true and what we can even see as real within our context and system. This is driven by many things, like world views and mental models as well as the simple things so often unseen that we simply do because ‘that is how we do things’.
Couple the importance of the histories (NB: plural) of a system with the consistent issue of institutional knowledge loss (turn over and churn, changing policy direction and settings, structural changes) and we have a recipe for a Great Forgetting*. Much is written by much smarter people than me about systemic drivers of information and knowledge management, a fair amount of complexity practitioners in fact work in this specific area e.g. The Cynefin Co, Dave Snowden. No surprises there.
This also leads us to become disconnected from the moral and social costs of things that do happen, let alone the things that are not happening. And when we do not have the space and structures in place to see the totality of things and the connection to what this actually means to people, it’s like the trolley problem on steroids - because we can’t even see the track, nor the people on it. We are simply doing what we do, trying our best in difficult situations without the knowledge that the lever we are pulling is making this decision. (NB: I have a soapbox rant on decision illiteracy that I often cart around with me).
Closer to home, I’m reminded of a saying my mother raised me with.
“When you are neck deep in the swamp, it’s really hard to remember that you came in to drain it” My Mother.
And now I am wondering about when all we have known is being in the swamp. And we weren’t even involved in the decision to get into the swamp. And we took over our job from the last person who had been flailing around madly in the swamp, just how easy it is for us to completely forget that swamp draining is even a thing.
