Weeknotes 16.11.2020
Having got into a good rhythm with weeknotes in early autumn, more recently I have stalled in this practice. And the more I leave something, the harder it can feel to pick it up. I was interested and encouraged to see this experience picked up in Cassie Robinson’s notes — she talks about the quiet times. This resonated with me, and quiet is emerging as a theme.
The most powerful thing I’ve read in the last month is an impassioned plea from Nancy Kline for more quiet. Or, more precisely, the power of not interrupting. Not others, not ourselves, in the struggle for attention.
[Attention] launches the dreams we have for ourselves, yes, but also the dreams for our world. We all have them. Even the most cynical of us. We’ve just grown wary and weary and willing to walk away from each other, and from ourselves.
This promise of no interruption, this sustaining of generative attention, can turn us towards each other.
A reflective practice requires attention. Attention is hard. But it’s also the superpower we all need to change the world. Practice is also just that — something we do, and repeat. Oliver often refers people — friends, trainees — to The Slight Edge as a strategy, or rather a mindset, for developing practice. Regular yoga practice, which I’ve been trying to resume following a four-month broken-elbow-broken-habit hiatus also sets us up for thinking this way. So these notes are not the notes I’ve written and rewritten in my head time and time again in the last month, but they are the thoughts I’m showing up with today.
Some things I’ve been working on
- The Power of Peer Groups
My current focus (this week and last) has been on developing a viable long-term model for #ownit, our peer-to-peer network for women to support them to take climate action with their personal finances. Listening to a couple of episodes of The Wallet has reminded me just how fascinating at topic this is: we talk about so much when we talk about money (and when we pay attention — that word again — to what we’re not talking about). The timing has been perfect too; last week we had the report in from our third cohort of women, an all online pilot launched in lockdown. It’s such a privilege to continue to work with Zahra and Enrol Yourself on this project, and the results are very encouraging.
This piece of testimony in particular blew me away:
“I feel genuinely more empowered! I feel calmer, more positive, and more in control, regarding aspects of my life which involve money but are also important to my wellbeing and happiness — home, work, family.” — Participant
The challenge now is to figure out how we bottle the magic, whilst also introducing enough of a commercial element to enable the programme to be self-sustaining. Most of next (this) week will be taken up with very rapid prototyping — putting pitches and ideas in front of people to see how they respond.
At the same time I’ve also been supporting the design process for a new /revived action-learning network for our activists. There’s been very valuable learning to bring across.
In this context, it was fascinating to learn, via a ‘Methods for Change’ webinar from the Aspect research consortium, that these ways of working that have emerged intuitively (and built on a background understanding of behaviour change theory) are theoretically validated, as forms of ‘social practice theory’ in action. I’m looking forward to reading this paper which explores the toolkit developed off the back of this understanding by Dr Ali Brown and others in more depth.
2. What if… your peer is a robot?
At the other end of the spectrum an area of work that I explored a couple of years ago has started to re-emerge: human-machine relations and the application of augmented intelligence. I spoke on a Nesta panel with Dark Matter labs and did manage to write a blog about this here. In the blog I referenced the work that I’ve been doing over the last month on traffic reduction on my own street.
On my street in Bristol I am involved in a campaign to reduce the through-traffic, possibly through a road closure. Many residents are worried about traffic displacement. But what if we were able to use predictive AI to model a range of possible scenarios — building in the learning from pioneer areas and possibly even the changes in travel-to-work behaviour that have come about in the pandemic — to support a more informed and collaborative conversation (without the need for a lengthy and expensive modelling survey)?
I was hopeful that a UWE webinar I attended as part of Bristol Tech Festival, with ClairCity and Possible might have provided ready answers for me, but sadly even AI driven affordable traffic monitoring (via Telraam, a nice bit of affordable citizen-powered tech) is still a long way off. The promise of ‘putting citizens in control of local mobility policy’ seems at best aspirational, for now. Great to hear that Rob Bryher is Possible’s new Car-Free Cities campaigner in Bristol. He’s going to have his work cut out, I think, but there’s no doubting his drive (ha!).
Back to the quiet. Another discovery from the Aspect webinar was Laura Pottinger’s work on ‘gentle research methodologies’. Interview here. Her call for a ‘gentle methodology’ that is ‘associated with a slow pace and low volume, handling with care, and being responsive and sensitive to small (particularly non‐verbal) details’ has strong parallels in critiques of design thinking (a fuller explanation here). Is gentle synonymous with attentive, I wonder? (And back to where we began). ‘Awe-walks’ are another gentle, attentive practice I’ve discovered recently (thanks to All in the Mind).
Lastly, this week marked the 25th anniversary of the execution of Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, along with eight other leaders of the Ogoni people. In June this year Friends of the Earth Europe published a report along with Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth Nigeria and Friends of the Earth Netherlands. It highlighted the continuing and systematic failure of oil companies and the government to clean up the oil pollution that has left hundreds of thousands of Ogoni people facing serious health risks, struggling to access safe drinking water, and unable to earn a living due to the contamination of waterways. (Thank you Elaine for drawing this to my attention). His daughter Noo continues to call for justice. For me, there is a small personal resonance too: in the autumn of 1995, in my role as co-ordinator of a school Amnesty International group, I organised my first (not very successful) campaign. I still have a folder full of newspaper clippings, hand-written posters (to be photocopied and stuck up) and the text of the school assembly I wrote. In hindsight what motivated the teenage me was the power of Amnesty’s call to action: the idea that even though I couldn’t vote, I could still write a letter and that, collectively, those letters could make a difference. At Diwali, the idea that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness still holds all its power.
