The Holding Pen

There's a first time for everything.

I now have a 'holding pen'.

I've finally created a workable structure for the thesis, via telling myself it isn't some kind of mystical intellectual thing into which I must squish everything I have learned; it's just a book for academics - and I've written books before.

I have an archive folder for past versions and things no longer needed for the thesis but that are worth preserving.

I have a folder for each section of the thesis. Most of the previous files have moved either into one of these sections or the archive or been deleted. In a couple of instances, I have emailed information to someone before deleting the file because it seems of value (just not to me) or I love it and can't let go but know I need to relinquish it in order to free my brain for completing the thesis. After all, finding a structure that works is often a case of rearranging the furniture and consigning some to the charity shop, some to the tip and gifting some things you love to someone who will appreciate them more than you. It's rarely a case of going to Ikea* and buying new furniture from scratch.
[*In the interests of balanced blogging, other places do exist for buying furniture - or so I'm told - but they don't have the meatball experience]

I have a new kind of folder which I am calling my holding pen.

This is a folder of things I have written or papers I have downloaded that don't have an obvious role in the new structure but as the writing of the thesis develops it may turn out that they hold useful, even vital, thoughts or citations or pieces of text. They are sat in a liminal space, neither part of the thesis nor ejected from the thesis.

I like the concept of a holding pen. It has a dynamic feel. I can imagine the sheep at market, jostling around, waiting to be moved to their destination, neither belonging to their previous owner nor their new owner but in that moment of suspense between the two.

I've used a Pending folder in the past. But that, to me, implies pressure to deal (and risks a visit from its demoralising sibling of 'failure to have dealt' when anything languishes in pending too long).  It's like the 'in tray' or 'to do list' that stares accusingly at you.

I'm excited for this new stage of thesis production. I'm excited and I confess sometimes intimidated by the scale of the task ahead. I think I'd be less intimidated if I could focus all my attention on the thesis - and if I had somewhere better than the crowded family breakfast table to work. But every doctoral student has their own sources of intimidation, and I will find my way through mine.

At least creating a holding pen has removed the intimidation of the pending folder.

The Venn diagram that maybe isn't

After this morning's joint supervision, I have three categories in my head:

• The story I want to weave for my examiners (ie what goes in the thesis)
• The things I want to write about academically
• Ideas I want to discuss with people* and ideas I want to tell people*

*people = a set of people in the policy world; a set of people in the inclusive research/disability studies/coproduced research world; my long-suffering Barod colleagues

In an ideal world, I can't help feeling that the three should overlap to form one perfect circle, possibly with artistically blurred edges as there are no beautifully neat all-sewn-up stories in the social world - or at least not ones that stand the test of exposure to everyday life.

In my anxious world, I fear that I have three things that do not overlap at all - and, worse, that I have no clarity about what is encompassed by any of these categories. It feels less like 'going down the rabbit hole' and more like 'rabbit caught in the headlights'.

If I think of these categories as distinct but overlapping, I have a Venn diagram.

If I think of them as appearing visually distinct but forming a single entity, I have something closer to an amoeba. 

And herein lies my problem.

Like the 'arms' (pseudopodia) of an amoeba, the three categories won't keep still! Ideas flow within the amoeba creating movement and changing which category any particular thought might be assigned. And any attempt to subdivide an amoeba into its constituent parts are doomed to failure as it is a single-celled organism. 

So...

Time to stick the amoeba under the microscope and take a photo. And then stick the photo at the front of my thesis, along with a photo that magnifies the part of the amoeba that I want to describe and write about within the thesis. 

Or maybe there is another analogy that will carry the weight of the challenge better. I do like the idea of storytelling, and it feels a bit as if I am grappling with constructing a Silmarillion when The Hobbit will do quite fine by itself. J R Tolkien needed to see his mythical world to be able to write his story, but the reader can make sense of The Hobbit without needing to have pre-read the Simarillion. 

And perhaps that is what has happened. Before I could settle to write the story for my examiners, I needed to have a clear picture of my own version of the mythical world I call 'the social world'. 

I have got to stop circling and perfecting my mythical world to my satisfaction and get writing - or at least drawing. Whether it's a Venn diagram, amoeba or mythical world, I need to stop poking around trying to label it and START PRODUCING

Humpty Dumpty and the power of words

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll, chapter 6, page 205 in the 1934 edition

The answer to Alice’s question is “of course”. A chain of letters or symbols can stand for any meaning we choose. We can all choose any meaning we wish. If we choose something so novel that it amounts to a new language spoken only by ourselves and we cannot understand or refuse to understand other meanings, we will find ourselves unable to communicate and quite possibly at risk of being sectioned under the Mental Health Act. But the answer “of course” would not have helped poor Alice.

If Alice has said “The question is … whether we can communicate if you make words mean so many different things”, the answer would have been “of course not”. At the heart of communication is the belief that roughly the same meanings are being attached by whoever is using those words to communicate.

We see when this breaks down. I’m old enough that ‘woke’ just means ‘I was asleep and now I am not’. My teenager daughter has been trying to explain the meaning she attaches to the word. We fumbled around with her using her language and me using mine to find a point where we were both using words sufficiently similarly for her to communicate the meaning she attaches to ‘woke’. It took a lot of ‘Do you mean…?’ ‘Is it like…?’ ‘Well what would you say if you wanted to say…?’ and resorting to examples of TV scenes where ‘woke’ was being enacted.

Sometimes we don’t recognise that our belief that we are using words with roughly similar meanings is unfounded. Then we miscommunicate. We talk at cross-purposes, getting more and more frustrated because the other person or people seem to be being deliberately awkward. As an aside, I’ve found a great activity when this occurs in meetings is to go round the table asking what people are picturing when they use a word – that soon makes visible the different meanings being attached to that word.

Sometimes people create sub-cultures or establish language boundaries to sub-cultures by sharing a meaning for a word that is distinct from the meanings other people ascribe to the word. Crip has one set of meanings in the social world I spend most of my time inhabiting – it is negative, abusive, uncomfortable. It has a different set of meanings in one of the social worlds I visit – check out crip theory and crip culture.

The degree to which the meanings of the words overlap is about our culture. The more our cultures overlap, the more our meanings overlap. Where there feels a wide gulf between cultures, we are cautious about assuming that the meanings of our words are sufficiently similar for easy communication. Where we assume our cultures are similar, we are more likely to be caught out and miscommunicate.

And once we are talking culture, we get to Humpty Dumpty’s question. In a world where there are many overlapping but shared meanings within a given time and culture, and a world where meanings and usage of words change over time and across contexts and cultures, the significant question is not what does a word mean but “Which meaning is to be master – that’s all”.

The painful irony is that we can only discuss this using words, whose meanings are fluid and where we have no way to know for sure how your meaning relates to anyone else’s meanings, or to what extent that which is inside your head can ever be adequately configured and conveyed in words.  But in this word-focused world, try we must!

Talking coproduction - 2014 style

I wrote this in 2014. I didn't get round to posting it. 

I'm not sure what, if anything, has really changed in the last five years as it seems as relevant now as it did then.

Having said that, Barod is working on a more nuanced way to think about space - the Four Spaces. So watch this space for our new explanation later this year.

Coproduction is a buzz word. It gets used a lot. And it gets used to describe a lot of things.

We always start by thinking about power and control. I guess that's because we are used to not having either, despite being told we have been given them.

So, for us, coproduction is not a new type of engagement or involvement. Engagement and involvement always rely on someone else saying you can get involved. Usually the "someone else" is your service provider, local authority or government. As long as someone has the power to choose to involve you, they can choose to stop involving you as well. Same goes for empowerment, engagement and all these other buzz words for shifting how things work between the powerful and less powerful.

The hard reality is that the "someone else" really does hold the power and control. They have the money, the influence, the professional training, sometimes even the democratic right if they were elected. As long as "someone else" holds power and control, engagement and involvement are hugely important for improving the quality of services, policies and planning.

The problem for us comes when "someone else" holds the power but believes (or pretends) that we are all working as equals and we are coproducing.

We came up with a way of trying to explain the difference between involvement and coproduction. We call it "My space, Your space, Shared space".

Over the 18 months, the seed of an idea has grown into something we are ready to put out there as our contribution to the debate on the future relationship of public services and public.

Do watch the SlideShare show, and let us know what you think. https://www.slideshare.net/barodcic/shared-space-38530797

If it makes sense but leaves you wondering how to do it, you are welcome to talk to us about workshops, consultancy and action learning sets.

If you think it's a load of cobblers as a concept or completely impractical as a practice, we'd love to hear why. We love critical friends who help refine and challenge our thinking.

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.