Welcome to our thinking and doing page. This is where you will find occasional posts with our reflections on what we have been reading and thinking about, and what we have been doing.
thinking and doing
Learning from the forests of British Columbia
Trees need to be near one another, to establish in receptive soil, to join together to build the ecosystem, mix with other species, relate in patterns that produce a wood-wide web, because the forest becomes resilient from this complexity. Scientists now are more willing to say that forests are complex adaptive systems that adjust and learn… and… interact in intricate dynamic networks, with information feedbacks and self-organisation. Systems level properties emerge from this that add up to more than the sum of the parts. The properties of an ecosystem breathe with health, productivity, beauty, spirit. Clean air, clean water, fertile soil. The forest is wired for healing in this way, and we can help if we follow her lead.
This is from a fascinating new book – Finding the Mother Tree – by Suzanne Simard. It tells of one woman’s quest to understand, and then to convince others of the complex connections and interdependencies that are essential to healthy trees and a healthy and diverse forest.
Working for forestry companies in the forests of British Columbia on the western edge of Canada in the early 1980’s she became increasingly critical of the corporate and government promoted approach to the harvesting of timber. This involved ‘clear-cutting’ – which removed not just the trees being harvested, but all other trees, undergrowth and wildlife in that part of the forest – and then ‘free to grow’, which planted new trees for future harvest in a regimented monoculture, using pesticides and land clearance to remove ‘competing’ trees and shrubs.
Over many years she and other researchers were able to prove that these policies not only damaged the wider ecosystem and longer-term health of the forest, but also failed to have the desired effect of producing more timber for harvest. Trees grown in an isolated monoculture were more prone to disease and vulnerable to climate extremes. Rather than competing with each other for water, light and other mineral resources, trees and other plants and shrubs are connected in complex networks below the forest floor, and co-operate to the benefit of individual trees and the forest as a whole.
Not surprisingly, the system pushed (and continues to push) back!
At the economic and political level, major financial vested interests with strong links to the government, from logging companies to the petrochemical industry – producers of chemical fertilisers and pesticides – saw an attack on their traditional ways of working and their markets and profits.
At the scientific and cultural level, this thinking challenged the dominant reductionist scientific paradigm. It also challenged the dominant ‘common sense’ view that nature and society work through competition rather than co-operation – the survival of the fittest: that there is a battle for limited resources that is a ‘zero sum game’ where one tree (or person, or group) can only thrive at the expense of others.
Reading this book made me think that elements of this story have a relevance way beyond the forests of British Columbia.
Some years back, we worked with parents and families in Nottingham at the start of the bid process for the National Lottery’s Better Start programme. We brought parents together to think about, become involved in and help to shape Nottingham’s bid – Small Steps Big Changes (SSBC). Our Travelling Playground was one part of this process.
More recently we were asked to work again with the parents who hade become involved with the Small Steps Big Changes programme as parent ambassadors and parent champions. Approaching the last four years of the programme, the focus is starting to shift to legacy and sustainability – our work was to engage parents in thinking about the programme, what they valued most and wanted to sustain, and how they might contribute to this.
One thing that a number of parents focussed on was the inclusive nature of the programme – it was open to all new parents in the four wards of Nottingham in which the programme operated. From the parents’ perspective this was really important to its success because it made it easier and more attractive to be involved, and meant that parents and families who were involved didn’t become stigmatised. Parents recognised this as being qualitatively different from similar programmes which ‘target’ the most ‘deprived’, ‘vulnerable’ or ‘challenging’ families. There was a real concern that as funding was cut back, it would become a ‘targeted’ programme.
Stigmatism and the consequent reluctance to engage with targeted services inevitably undermine their effectiveness – but perhaps the lessons from the forests of British Columbia suggest an even more fundamental limitation. A forest becomes healthy and thrives through biodiversity, connection and co-operation – if we want one tree to be healthy we need to help all trees to be healthy. Might the same apply in neighbourhoods and communities?
We generally approach the challenge of limited resources with a ‘zero sum’ mindset – and target the spend on the most ‘vulnerable’ or ‘needy’. SSBC, with generous support from the National Lottery programme, bucked this trend – and through this it is perhaps starting to grow a more diverse and resilient network of support across and within the communities and neighbourhoods within which all parents, families and young children can thrive.
A common expression within SSBC is it takes a village to raise a child. Learning from the forests of British Columbia suggest that raising a healthy and flourishing child requires us to keep our focus firmly on the health, connectedness and diversity of the whole ‘village’.
Syrian resettlement learning history
We worked on two learning histories in 2017 and 2018 to explore the learning from the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement scheme in Nottingham.
The first, commissioned by the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Refugee Forum looked at the challenges and learning from the programme from the perspective of the staff and agencies working with the families.
The second, commissioned by Nottingham City Council, followed this up by working with the Syrian families themselves to understand their stories and experiences.
It was fascinating to hear the stories from these two different perspectives and to look at how, by sharing these different perspectives, we might make sense of what is going on, and better understand how to improve outcomes in the future.
The learning histories identified the many positives from the programme, and also the areas where improvements might be made.
The key area of learning from the work with the families themselves was that to support people towards integration, the main focus should be connection and relationships. This involves moving from a more transactional approach that delivers language and employment programmes, to a relational approach which is all about increasing the breadth and depth of the connections between the families and the communities within which they are settling.
Working with communities and Public Health in Northumberland
This project started as the Big Inquiry, working with the Public Health Team in Northumberland to explore important questions around the direction and focus of their work. One of the key questions that emerged was – how do we work differently and effectively with our communities?
Early conversations led to an enthusiastic invitation to come to listen to people in the North of the County. Together with the team, we facilitated the Berwick Being Well world cafe in September 2015. Light touch micro grants to energise and encourage people and groups to initiate activities to support their own health and wellbeing was an idea suggested by members of the community at the Cafe and in subsequent conversations. The Public Health team responded to this idea, and working with Seahouses Development Trust, Glendale Gateway Trust and Berwick Community Trust, the micro grant scheme was started in early 2016, and proved to be a great success.
We worked with the team to understand and learn from the success of this project, and created a learning history to make sense of why it had worked and inform a grounded theory around how to do this work.
The project has changed the way that Public Health work with their communities in Northumberland, and has been written up as a Public Health England case study.
Our Neighbourhood Learning Ground and the adjacent possible
BACKGROUND
A little under two years ago we were working with a couple of people leading organisations in Nottingham – one in the public sector, and the other in the voluntary sector – that in different ways were trying to support their communities and improve their neighbourhoods. Both were grappling with the challenges of diminishing resources and increasing needs, and the necessity to rethink how we work with and engage our communities.
We brought these people together, and conversations and developing trust led to a study tour to seek out wider experiences and share and learn from people in different places.
This in turn led to new ideas being explored and to previously unimagined collaborative working, underpinned by deepening trust and relationships.
We were then asked to imagine, shape and bring into being something that could help to continue these conversations, connections and fresh thinking – and extend and grow this across Nottingham. Our Neighbourhood Learning Ground was born.
THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE
Stuart Kauffman is a theoretical biologist who studies the origin of life and the origins of molecular organisation – and one of the concepts he has introduced and explored to try to understand and make sense of how simple organisms have evolved into complex adaptive systems is the ‘adjacent possible’. This is the space where small and incremental changes can happen, and each move into the adjacent possible opens up more adjacent possibles and increases the diversity of what can happen next.
Steven Johnson, in his book Where Good Ideas Come From has taken this idea and explored how it might also apply to the complex adaptive social systems of human society. Through telling the stories of many new inventions and ideas, he shows that change usually happens in small steps as we embrace ideas or try out new things in the adjacent possible – but each small step creates many new and more diverse opportunities – new adjacent possibles that were previously unthinkable or undoable.
‘The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations.’
One way of looking at Our Neighbourhood Learning Ground, and how we have approached its early and first steps, is through the lens of the adjacent possible.
In this light, our role can be seen as helping people to explore existing, and then co-create new adjacent possibles. We are hoping to do this by:
- Bringing together people, growing relationships and trust, and creating the climate for exploring new ideas – creating a space and a culture that is open to fresh ideas and challenge
- Sharing ideas and practice from diverse perspectives and places – sparking the curiosity that might enable people to see potential adjacent possibles that were previously hidden
- Giving the support and encouragement that might make it possible for people and organisations to venture into the adjacent possible
- Sparking collaborations that might co-create new adjacent possibles
- Helping to nurture a wider ecology of adjacent possibles across the city
Our work with Our Neighbourhood Learning Ground is grounded in our understanding of complex adaptive living systems, and the processes that support and nurture their healthy growth. The first steps are exploring the current adjacent possible – who knows what new opportunities might emerge through this process in the future?