I love silos but I can't live in one

Academic disciplines tend to work in silos.  

The services involved in the lives of people who use care and support services tend to work in silos too.

There are good reasons for working in silos, as Paul Taylor/BromfordLab make clear. There are also dangers to working in silos, particularly if you are on the receiving end of ‘stuff’ from different silos.

My doctorate cuts across silos. This diagram was created to show how I picture my doctoral research in relation to different academic disciplines.

I can see the benefits of doing what I am doing. But I don’t have the benefits of working in a silo (if you want to know the benefits, you'll need to follow the link above to Paul Taylor's blog). I haven't gone deep enough into any particular discipline to become expert in it. And we do need experts, as long as they are still open to learning and changing and growing and don't see achieving 'expert status' as an end point.

So where does that leave me? Am I just spreading myself too thinly, a jack of all trades with nothing to contribute? That's one way that people within academic silos may see me. But I'd challenge that. What I bring is the ability to speak the language of multiple disciplines well enough to try to synthesise their different ways of thinking about a topic – and the topic of interest to me is the relationship between public services and members of the public (and its twin, the relationship between academic research and members of the public).

One of the languages I have learned to speak is the language of social capital. In the world of social capital, people and what they bring to the social world can build cohesion within a group (bonders) or build wider cohesion by having a foothold within many groups (bridgers).

I am one of life’s bridgers. In a previous job, I had to visit the London office every six weeks or so. I’d go and say hello to people on each of the five floors. Each team was on a different floor. Some floors had more than one team. I’d start at the top and work my way down, and then I’d usually need to work my way back up again passing on the ‘Did you know so-and-so is working on this, which might be relevant to your work?’ It makes sense that I am a ‘bridger’ in academic life too.

If everyone in London had been a bridger, it would have been an inefficient waste of time; a recipe for constant talking about work rather than doing work. When I left, the organisation became more inefficient because the synergy between teams and ideas was lost.

Maybe what we need in order to get the best of both worlds is to honour our organisational bridgers, and allow them the time and space to have those informal conversations. Let them have longer coffee breaks. Let them pop into another public service’s building without needing any reason other than saying ‘hi’ to different teams in that building.

It’s how Indycube works for me. Except in Indycube, so many people are bridgers that I have the joyful experience of chatting to someone over the coffee machine, and they’ll be doing the ‘Do you know so-and-so? What they are doing might be relevant to your work’.

Conclusion?

I love silos. Without silos, I’d have to learn more than any single human can learn in order to do my job. With silos, I can go ‘This is the problem, where should I go looking for a solution?’ and they can tell me where to look within their in-depth knowledge of their silo.

So in the search for the Holy Grail of seamless public services, please don’t get rid of silos. Rather, find ways to support your bridgers so they can do their thing. And maybe for you, that could mean starting to learn about bridging capital. 

“Kids can be so cruel”

Don't blame the kids

The sneer of 'it's so simple, just do it' as you struggle struggle and struggle again. 

The yell of 'Clear off, scabbyass, we don't want you'

The games of dare - who dares get closest to the leper - but don't let her touch you or you'll catch it.

The blanking, the turned backs.

'Kids can be so cruel'. It's used to sympathise, to explain playground cruelty. I have said it to myself and said it to others. But I have come to reject it.

Very few children are cruel. Many more haven't learned that what they are doing is cruel because they haven't yet developed the skills needed to put themselves in the other child's position. 

What of adult cruelty? Some adults are cruel. Many others are too wrapped in their own world to put themselves in the other person's position. Many others fail to see their shared humanity with 'the Other'. 

Just like the playground, the marriage and the boardroom can be sites of cruelty, shaming, bullying, taunting.  The cruelty doesn't change. The visibility of it does. Cruel adults have learned to gas light. They are better at cloaking what they are doing than cruel children. It is rarely as publicly visible as the cruelty of the playground. In cloaking the cruelty, they maximise the damage to the person targeted. 

Of playgrounds, rather than saying 'kids can be so cruel' maybe we need to say 'adults can be so bad at addressing cruelty and helping children learn empathy.'

Of boardrooms and bedrooms, let's  be alert for the cloaked cruelty and make it publicly visible. Adults can be so cruel.

Thinker’s block

I’ve heard of Writer’s Block and I have a few strategies for that. If you search online, you will find great tips. For PhD writer's block, try Professor Patrick Dunleavy, or Dr Inger Mewburn, aka The Thesis Whisperer for a good selection of ideas.

I’d not heard of Thinker’s Block. But that’s the best description of where I am with my PhD. Having named it as this, I went back and did a search online and I'm not alone in using that phrase.

For the last month or two I’ve been scan-reading loads of papers, doing lots of thinking and disappearing down plenty of rabbit holes. Quite frankly, I lost the plot and entered 'rabbit in the headlights' territory. I lost any sense of how my thesis fits together, or what it is about - and definitely couldn’t face the idea of synthesising everything my mind is grappling with. I had got to the point that if I tried to think, I felt like crying, discovered a burning need to tidy my desk or spent 10 minutes looking blankly at a screen trying to control my panicky breathing and decide how to get started - before crying or tidying my desk.

And that, in my head, is a very close relative of writer's block.

Today I had supervision with the awesome Gideon Calder (seriously, if you get the chance to have him as a supervisor, jump at it!). Less than an hour later, I walked away with a much better sense of perspective, calmer emotions and a set of strategies that I'm going to try.

In case anyone else gets Thinker's Block [note: it's not just the prerogative of PhD students], here are some strategies that I'm intending to test out.

Good luck to us all!

Tackling Thinker's Block

• Create time and space to immerse myself in literature and thinking.
• Be patient with myself.  
• Synthesis is hard work - no way to avoid that - and whatever I pick up will feel painful but just persevere.
• Distraction is not always bad; it’s in the distraction that lightbulbs go off and pennies drop.
• Be aware of how much time and mental space I have, and tailor what I try to do in a session to the resources I have available to myself. 
• Create some small tasks (some 'ants') so I get the sense of completing some tasks.

Thinking involves getting thoughts on paper, so for the writing bit:

• Try shifting who I imagine I am writing for - repeatedly if needed.
• Splurge. If it’s 40,000 words and a complete mess, so what? 
• Don’t filter, tidy or structure, and don't worry whether it is (or more likely if it isn’t but feels) rubbish.

Real life + organisational categories = headache

Life and organisational categories do not mix.

With policy making as with public services, you can either start with the boundaries and categories of the bureaucracy, or you can start with the lives of members of the public. There is no neat mapping of one onto the other.

In Wales, policy increasingly calls for starting with the lives of members of the public; any method of organisation of services continually frustrates this call. The significance of the call is that any policy making or public service that begins within an administrative category (eg ‘health’ or ‘social care’) is going to interpret people’s lived experience in the light of that category’s values and ways of operating. Reorganisation can never result in complete and seamless joining up of the different categories.

I do not know the solution for Wales as a whole, although having a single key worker or service coordinator as a buffer between your life and public services seems a helpful start.

In research, academic disciplines are the equivalent of organisational categories of public services and public policy-making.

If one starts with the lived experience of members of the public, there are challenges in mapping the research to an academic discipline. This is problematic if part of being an academic is to know one’s field. The researcher who begins with lived experience is forced to achieve at least entry level understanding of multiple academic fields (and be viewed as only having entry level status within that field), or gain greater depth of knowledge and understanding of fragments drawn from multiple academic fields. The alternative, as with public services, would be to challenge the premise that social life should be understood through the trammelled vision of professional, organisational or bureaucratic categories.

As a not-yet-academic, my personal challenge is this: How do I write a thesis that begins with lived experience? How do I construct and mark the boundaries of what I want to claim as my academic field? What is adequate academic knowledge for the field I am constructing? 

As a member of the public, my personal challenge is this: How do I support public services and policy making to find a way to implement their desire to make services and policies revolve around my life, rather than make my life fit into their pre-existing categories?

Of elephants and ants (Part 2)

My elephant (PhD thesis) is breaking down nicely into its parts.

I have a structure for the thesis, and a narrative thread that is probably strong enough to hold the weight of the thesis. I've done first drafts of parts of it. I'm knuckling under this week to tackle my first full scale chapter - The Ethics Divide - which means rounding of a chunk of data analysis, deciding where to draw the line on the literature work (and naturally doing more reading because more has been published since I did my last search), then creating a coherent chapter.

My current problem is that the ants keep crawling everywhere.

Give yourself a whole 14 days to work on Chapter 9, I said.
Clear the decks from family and work responsibilities, I said.
Start early in the morning and remain focused, I said.

When will I learn????

• Two non-negotiable, non-Chapter 9 deadlines have landed for this Friday.
• I've got decisions to make about family matters.
• My character means when I panic easily when I can't work out how the elephant fits together - which means I end up blogging, or tweeting, or on Facebook to distract myself [progress though, I'm not also compulsively eating sweet food]
• And the influx of emails, oh the emails.

The reality of life, especially as a mature student, is that there will never be a whole 14 days to focus on one thing. I don't even get that on holiday.

What I can do is set up barriers for the ants to shield the elephant while the ants accumulate and then go eat the lot of them - at a prearranged time each day.

And I can try to discourage the ants from crawling towards my elephant in the first place (things like telling everyone in my life that I won't be playing my usual roles for 14 days then negotiate with them what roles they will pick up and what will be left undone).

I can give myself procrastination time-limits when stuck. [five minutes and I'm off twitter and blogger and back to the grindstone]

I can use the range of techniques I've got for de-panicking so I can restart focused work on Chapter 9. And today that means ignoring the elephant and enjoying the simple, effective elegance of Quirkos to re-analyse the data before tomorrow tackling the literature.

Decision made = focus restored - for now.

Co-creating and debating knowledge: Citing literature, citing people

I wrote this in 2015 the first time I tried to unpick my difficulties with the concept of doing a literature review before doing the research, and privileging published academic work over conversations when thinking about theory and meaning. I rediscovered it as I trawled through past fragments and notes as I start writing my thesis. This won't make it into my thesis, but I'd like to put it 'out there' in the public domain. So here it is.

I like thinking and I like my thoughts. I learn by debating and discussing, especially with people who disagree or who approach to topic from a radically different perspective. I want to be able to order and lay out my thoughts to encourage further debate.

I don’t want to cite experts to justify my thinking, as if my thoughts have no value because I am not eminent. I do not want to hide behind experts in an attempt to abdicate personal responsibility for what I’ve written.

I do have to be careful in case the above is an excuse for trying to avoid citing because I find it difficult to develop the discipline of knowing where ideas have come from. I’m pretty eclectic and I’m getting old. I usually couldn’t tell you where I picked up an idea – it might have been a newspaper article, tweet, book I read in 1983, something overheard at a conference, a conversation, a lecture or something I scan-read when looking to see what others have read. And I’m not just eclectic, I also struggle to separate my immediate interaction with someone’s words and the words themselves.

But I digress. Whatever my beliefs and (limited) capability for citing, my thoughts are not my thoughts. They are a constantly evolving product of interaction with other thinkers. I need to keep notes so I can cite others in order to:

• give credit to those co-creators (at all stages of research)
• provide pointers to how my thinking evolved (when I get to the point of fixing my thinking in a thesis)
• signpost people to things I think worth reading (at all stages of research)

We have an established route for citation when we interact with texts, with rules for how to cite within the writing and how to reference that citation in the bibliography. That’s fine if the knowing or unknowing co-creators of your thinking are written, disembodied texts. And once I’ve learned the discipline of keeping accurate records…

There are newer rules for citing television programmes, videos, websites – almost anything can be cited as long as what we are citing could be accessed by others in the same way that we accessed it.

But how do we cite when our co-creators are encountered not as written texts but as conversations, debates, email exchanges, tweets? My reasons for wishing to cite are as valid for now as any encounter with a written text.

Back in the 1980s when I wrote a science dissertation, it was permitted to cite the odd 'pers comm' if it were from a respected authority. It was viewed as needing a strong argument for including a personal communication as, although it credited the person and directed you to someone of interest, it did not let other people reflect independently on that communication. In other words, how could others access the information, the data, that I cited?

It’s at this point that my thoughts moved to the concept and language of Open Data. After all, what is a citation but a way to access data? And in Open Data Institute terms, data (in my case, things needing citation) come as open, shared and closed.

Open is available to all on the same basis.

Shared is available to some (like publications behind a pay wall or personal communications).

Closed is private communication so shouldn’t be cited at all.

Some within the Open Data world argue that as much data as possible should be shifted to ‘open’ or ‘closed’, as ‘shared’ is where privilege is maintained. (As I said, I’m ill-disciplined in documenting where I hear things; all I can say is I believe this comes from articles I’ve clicked through to from Twitter that were written by proponents of Open Data, and conversations over dinner before a Gov Camp with someone from an Open Data Institute. If anyone reading this wants to direct me to something I can cite, that would be amazing)

If the language of Open Data applies to things a researcher might want to cite, does Open Data thinking show us a way to move personal communications out of ‘shared’ and into ‘open’? Possibly. One route is to shorten the time between finding something out or developing a new idea and publishing about it. It might be interesting if academics could add a ‘please publish’ button to their blogs to help work out which blogs need refining from a work-in-progress into a publication. Or perhaps we need to revisit the status and purpose of blogs.

Maybe, in this world of DOI (Digital Object Identifier; a code that means your information can be found even if the web address changes), there is scope for preparing a mutually acceptable version of a personal communication and deliberately moving it out of the shadows into the ‘open’ by uploading it digitally in a way that complies with guidance on what makes ‘good open data’ (http://theodi.org/guides/what-open-data).

This might make both parties think twice about how transparent they wish their communication to be. But if transparency is a problem, the communication probably needs to be shifted to the ‘closed’ category and therefore not cited at all.

Of elephants and ants (Part 1)

Last night I panicked. I worked on an abstract and the structure of my PhD thesis. By the time I finished I felt overwhelmed. Catastrophe thinking kicked in and within an hour I was ready to give up, doubting my ability to even start writing, doubting my ability to create a suitable structure, double-guessing versions of a dismal future.

I had looked at the elephant, and I was scared.

For those who haven't heard of elephants and ants, it's a handy way to categorise any undertaking.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

How do you eat ants? You wait until you've gathered enough to make a decent mouthful.

My emails are ants.

My thesis is an elephant.

Now I've realised it's an elephant I have stopped panicking and started analysing. I know I've eaten an elephant before. 

In Crossfit language, producing my thesis is just like doing a year-long chipper WOD [WOD = Workout Of the Day; chipper = keep chipping away because it's long and usually looks impossible]. Pretty terrifying unless you have a strategy together with focus, determination and enough common sense to set a sustainable pace. But with those ingredients, it's not easy but it's doable.

I have an abstract. I have a narrative flow. I even have a sketch of the mosaic I plan to make to illustrate both the journey and the destination of my PhD.

Tomorrow I revisit my work plan. I buckle up and knuckle down. I can visualise handing in my thesis on the last working day of 2019. It's going to be an awesome 15 months.