Organisations as Human Learning Systems - A Conversation with Thea Snow and Toby Lowe

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Something that I constantly see in our work with public servants, that it's like, how do we minimise risk rather than how do we create the conditions for people to live great lives? And that's the tension that you're constantly dancing between. And I recognise the realness of that tension. It is there because people do behave badly. But how do we not overcorrect is the question.

Hi everyone, welcome back to the podcast. My name's Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. In a recent episode with Robert Barnett, Rob and I were discussing the real constraints and difficult conditions that teachers find themselves in as they try to prioritize the meaningful learning and growth of their young people. This week we're taking a broader look at the kinds of institutional structures that might actually help rather than hinder these more generative ways of living and learning. The kinds of institutions suited to the transformative adaptations and systems change that we desperately really need. I'm really happy to be speaking with Thea Snow and Toby Lowe about taking a human learning systems approach to management and governance of organisations. This is really exciting work and it feels much more authentically connected to the beautiful and complex realities that we know that we live and learn and work in, and that we want to prepare our young people to embrace. But we also know that we are being held accountable for outcomes in our work that often feels simplistic, naive, and entirely dissociated from these complex realities. Thea is the Regional Director for Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand at the Centre for Public Impact. Thea's experiences span the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors. She has worked as a commercial lawyer, a public servant, and prior to joining CPI, at the UK's innovation foundation, Nesta. Toby is Professor of Public Management at Manchester Metropolitan University and Action Researcher at Centre for Public Impact. He's also done policy work addressing poverty in neighborhoods for the Social Exclusion Unit, developed the Human Learning Systems approach and held the position of Chief Executive of a participatory arts charity in northeast England. You'll find links in the show notes to a lot of the documents and sources that we talk about in the conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time to have the conversation. Um, there are so many interesting connections to your work with Centre for Public Impact. While some people might wonder what the connection is with more educational conversations, I think they're very strong in terms of the way that you seem to be working around what you're calling human learning systems and how education is questioning the more traditional command and control way that it's done. Well, some people are questioning anyway, some people who hang out with me on the podcast, they're questioning. And so I feel like there'll be lots and lots of connection with your work for the listeners. So thank you so much firstly for taking the time to have the chat with me.

Pleasure.

Yeah, looking forward to it.

Thank you. So maybe like set the context for Centre for Public Impact, but other work I think you're involved in as well. Toby, maybe for you, the way that you've laid out the problematic, let's say, the way, well, how have we ended up here in this very strange position where we're kind of building and running organization based on control and pretending to have a grip, in inverted commas. I like, I heard you talking about this obsession that politicians have with having a grip on the issue, you know. Straining every sinew is a phrase they keep using in the UK. I mean, it's just, you know, they're so desperate to demonstrate that they have control over the issue that they're dealing with, whether it's migration or education or whatever it is, but it's just not how the world works. I mean, you know, that's how I feel deeply. There's a very different kind of reality of the way the world actually works. So maybe just that as a very broad invitation, but how would you start to chip away at how we've kind of ended up in this strange place.

One important thing to say, right, is that there are many different true stories for how we have ended up in this place. And maybe there are a couple that I, I think are important to tell. So firstly, the one I think you were alluding to, Tim, the difference between the reality of the complex way that the world works and the way that we are encouraged to think right now in terms of a desire for control over things. There's a weird kind of feedback loop here that people are feeling like their lives are out of control, so that they want— the message that resonates with people is anyone who can promise control feels like they are promising a kind of desirable thing for people. So it's not very surprising that politicians and others are promising the idea of control, but they are promising the impossible. And this is a story, for example, that Gene Bolton tells very well, the difference between understanding the complex nature of reality and the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works. So there's that as a story for how we have ended up in this place in, in an organizational sense. But the other story that I think it's important to tell is that how we have ended up here is we have ended up here on purpose. So it is not an accident that we have the public management dominant paradigm that we do. We are living in the world created by James Buchanan and his libertarian colleagues in the kind of '60s, '70s, '80s in the States. They purposely dreamt up this world and have been enacting a giant kind of global change project ever since, funded by the Koch brothers and others. So the world that we inhabit, a world where we assume that people need to be controlled in order to make them operate in the public good, That is a world that was purposefully created as a kind of ideological paradigm and enacted into our institutions through training programs and through funding academics and through funding think tanks. Well, like, it is important to understand that this was created on purpose.

Yeah. Can maybe— could you just say just very briefly for people who aren't aware of Buchanan and public choice theory, like, I know that could be a whole, you know, hour or— but yeah, what's the kind of 30-second elevator pitch for Buchanan?

So James Buchanan was an American libertarian economist in the 1960s. He came up with a version of the state and how people operate in it called public choice theory. Essentially, that says that public servants, like everyone else, he says, are rational, self-interested utility maximizers. So all public servants are selfish. And so if you want public servants to serve the public good rather than their own good, they need to be controlled. So you need to— in his framing, you need to subject them to the discipline of the market, make them do good things, or to control them via targets, preferably both, because that's the only way that you can make selfish people act in a kind of notional public good.

Yeah, amazing. And the thing I find, and I've just— it's just been feeling really strongly recently, is that it's so fundamentally based on a deficit view of of other people, right? And it's like this view that other people basically are not to be trusted. They're selfish. They're basic. It's just such a negative narrative.

Well, it's, it's the essence of the fascist worldview, right? And he was, uh, essentially his purpose was to break the welfare state because he, as a libertarian, thought that it was illegitimate for governments to tax one person and spend those resources on somebody else. So his expressed purpose was to break the welfare state. But he realized the best way to do that was to break the trust between those who govern and those who are governed. So his entire modus operandi is to create an ideological perspective that breaks trust between people. Hence this, you can't trust these people, you need to control them. And then the mechanisms of control that get created around all of that are mechanisms that continuously erode and decrease trust. So We are living in James Buchanan's world. This is, I think, is really, really important to understand the kind of intellectual and philosophical roots of this.

Yeah. Amazing. And yeah, even more so since January 20th and just looking around the world at, at what's happening, right? I mean, the resonances are just so clear, but maybe bringing it to an education audience, the audience listening to the podcast, if you are working in the public sector, in the education system as a public servant in that sense, What are the kinds of techniques and strategies that would've been wielded that they, you know, I know the listeners live every day around targets and performance management and what, like, how does it show up in actual public servants' lives? In fact, everybody's lives, right? In, in any organization in a way, right?

Exactly. So the, the core one being that you can't trust teachers to, to educate kids using their best judgment. About what's important for those kids. So we need to centrally control teachers, so we'll need things like a national curriculum to say this is what you must teach, right? And then we will micromanage teachers by making them create approved lesson plans that they have to teach to, or we will measure their performance by seeing how well their students perform in exams and force them to act in ways, otherwise they'll get disciplined, they won't get promoted, they won't get pay rises, they'll eventually get chucked out of school, right? All of these ideas of we will control public servants to operate in the way that we think is right, not the way that they think is right.

Yeah, I'm just going to jump in and offer something here because I hear all of those points and Toby and I agree on many things. What I will also say is that I think that the issue is the overcorrection. Because I worked as a public servant in Australia for almost a decade, and while I was in the public service, some bad things happened, like some public servants behaved really badly. So there was an instance when I was in the Department of Education of really bad corruption and people acting in the self-interest. I think what happens is when something bad happens in the public service, there's this massive overcorrection And instead of it being sort of a balance between having procedures and mechanisms and safeguards in place in recognition of the fact that not everyone always acts in good faith, that being balanced against also the need to trust people, the majority of people, the 99% of people who do act in good faith, who do sort of act in the public interest. And so the whole system becomes sort of oriented towards risk minimization. Rather than creating great outcomes. And that's something that I constantly see in our work with public servants, that it's like, how do we minimise risk rather than how do we create the conditions for people to live great lives? And that's the tension that you're constantly dancing between. And I recognise the realness of that tension. It is there because people do behave badly. And when public servants abscond with taxpayer money, like, that is on the front pages of all the papers. Terrible, but how do we not overcorrect is the question.

Yeah, I think that the balance is really important there. Absolutely. Because it can get hyperbolic, right, in different ways. But it's interesting how it's— I've heard Indi Johar talking about this, that sometimes the way we make policy or the way we enact policy is often based on this tiny percentage of, you know, the free rider principle, or that, you know, we, we make the policy based on the misdeeds of the worst in society. Even though, you know, they will have reasons for acting in the way they do, which needs to be understood. And, you know, yeah, I mean, and it's very real, right? And safeguarding, child protection kind of thing comes to mind for me in an educational space. Of course you don't mess with that, right? That is absolutely critical that we keep children safe. And how do we do that without, as you say, overcorrecting in such a way that we, that then kind of perpetuates this paradigm of control. I guess I would also say that that control is quite useful if you also have grand power plays that you want to play out on, you know, about profit maximization or whatever. So there's, it's quite useful as we're seeing that if we can perpetuate that fear of the small percentage of people that may make bad decisions, that can be quite useful. But yeah, I mean, anyway, I mean, you can feel it getting quite conspiracy theorist quite quickly, but so I really appreciate your, your balanced perspective there. Yeah.

Tying the, your original point to this, Tim Logan, that it is important to remember that the control that people want is largely an illusion. So this is the point about complexity, right? The big control we can create in the world largely is, is control over ourselves. That's the control that's real. As soon as we try and control other people, that actually gets much more difficult to do. You have to have an enormous amount of power to try and successfully control people, and even then History shows that that's not a very stable situation for very long, right? That largely the control that people want is an illusion.

So maybe just as a practical example of that, I love the way you talk about obesity as an outcome. And just maybe, could you just— the question being, how are outcomes made? Because I think we're obsessed again in education, we're absolutely obsessed with outcomes. And this is a little pet peeve of mine. We're obsessed with engineering outcomes.

I think actually the focus on outcomes is actually quite a useful one because you— so the way that I express this with people is to ask people a question. Do we all agree that the purpose of public service, or whatever framing you want, the purpose of public service is to help people create good outcomes in their lives? You ask a room full of people that question, everyone goes, "Yeah, the purpose of public service is to help people create— of course, that's right." So then, brilliant, okay, now we're all on the same page. How is an outcome made? Because if we really care about outcomes, then everything we do, how we organize ourselves, should be in response to that question. How is an outcome made? And outcomes are incontrovertibly emergent properties of complex systems. So outcomes are made by hundreds of different factors, all operating interdependently. So take the example of obesity, like saying we know what contributes to the outcome of obesity because people have done the research. So they're made up of factors like how food production supply works, how the media represents body image, people's early life experiences, transport infrastructure in places, how the built environment operates for people, and healthcare and treatment options. So all of those factors operating interdependently create the outcome of obesity. Now, where people get outcomes wrong, and this is just provably wrong, right, is they think that outcomes are something that can be delivered. So let's take the organizations operating in that little bit of the system ecosystem we call healthcare and treatment options. So say you're running, I don't know, a healthy eating programs in neighborhoods, and the government funds you in a way that says, we want you to deliver on the outcome of obesity. So we'll only pay you if the children or the people that you are working with move from this measure of obesity, usually body mass index, from this BMI score to this BMI score. What's happening is people fund and let performance manage like that. Well, they're holding those organizations who are delivering that healthy eating program in neighborhoods, they're holding those people accountable for the behavior of how food production supply works, how transport works in that place, how the media represents body image. They're holding people accountable for a bunch of things they can't influence or control. So if we think that outcomes are deliverable by programs, we go wrong immediately, and provably wrong. And what it creates is a situation where the people who are delivering stuff have to game the numbers in order to get the funding for— to do the good work they're doing. Because it's not like healthy eating programs in neighborhoods is a wrong thing to do. Absolutely, it's the right thing to do, but it's just a small contribution to an overall outcome. So you can't performance manage on the basis of outcomes because that's nonsense and creates all sorts of kind of perverse incentives and messes around with the actual creation of outcomes. Yeah.

Yeah. Did you want to come in?

Because I'd love to ask you about it. So Toby and I, like, for the last 5 years have sort of been going back and forward on this because I agree completely with what he says. And also, how does it not lead you to a place of nihilism? Right, where you're like, well, outcomes are, you know, emergent properties of complex systems, so nothing we do actually really matters, so why do I bother doing anything at all kind of thing. Because that's how I felt when Toby sort of first introduced this thinking to me. And I think that part of the sort of the reframing requires a humility and a recognition that you're working as part of a system. And so what does a systems approach to this kind of intervention look like, and a more humble approach which recognises that you probably need a portfolio of interventions and some kind of, you know, steward of the portfolio. It requires a completely different mindset for how you intervene. What you also need, I think, and this is a sort of a concept that I came up with a few years ago, is certainty artefacts. And they are like things that we construct, so concepts and artefacts that we construct that help us navigate uncertainty because There is so much uncertainty in the world that you would become paralyzed if you didn't, to some extent, create fictions around what's controllable. So even, for example, like my diary, you know, I get up in the morning, my diary is a certainty artifact because if something happens, if one of my kids, hopefully not, but is sick at school, my whole diary goes out the window and I go and collect them. The problem is we create these artifacts and we forget that we've made them up. And we forget that they're fictions that we need to hold lightly and use to the extent that they're helpful and discard to the extent that they're unhelpful. And so we actually deceive ourselves into believing these certainty artefacts are truths rather than constructs that we create to help us navigate the uncertainty that would otherwise be completely overwhelming.

That's fascinating. What I find interesting in, in an educational space is how many different kinds of ways of talking about the same kind of thing that we get. So you, you brought in the systems, you know, there's a lot of, there's a big kind of vogue around systems thinking. There's the complexity lens, which for some other people is too abstract and too academic, but for other people it's attractively academic as a discourse. And then there's, you know, there's the storytelling piece. There's all sorts of different ways of talking about what we're essentially saying is how something about how do we navigate deep uncertainty, like profound uncertainty with a sense of direction in relationship just to figure out, you know, just to, to bumble along, to get through, to kind of get towards those outcomes we might think are desirable for our own lives. So I, yeah, it's just an interesting observation that it's, it's showing up in lots of different kinds of discourses, I think. And I agree with you, it's important that people connect with it in a way that really does make sense, because it can feel very overwhelming. I mean, it's the nihilism pieces is a very real risk. You know, it's like from one extreme to the other, right? It's Buchanan and ultimate control, or it's complete nihilism. And neither of those things are in any way desirable. So there's something in, in this messy middle where people are just trying to figure out where they go. Toby, did you want to come in before I ask about the storytelling? Yeah.

Yes. I just wanted to to echo how great I think Pia's concept of certainty artefacts is, because that, as Steve was saying, they provide something that enables you to navigate uncertainty. And so this is why I come back to the way that we do public management is a structural condition that enables us to navigate uncertainty well or poorly. So take Pia's diary example. So if we performance manage public service on the basis of certainty artefacts, like the plans that we wrote. So we submit this plan, which is a classic example of a FEARs certainty aspect. So here's a plan for the year, the programme that we're going to do. We've worked out that we think that these are good things to do for this year, and we've got on past knowledge, we've had evidence about what we think is the right thing to do for this year. This is what we'll do for this year. If we performance manage that on the basis of how well you stick to this plan, so you will turn your plan into a bunch of milestones and performance indicators, and you will only get rewards if you stick to this plan, that's a really silly way to use that kind of certainty artifact, right? Because that's basically holding the certainty artifact as an absolute truth that must be adhered to. So that's not recognizing the intrinsic complexity of the world. Something will happen during the course of that year that means that we should absolutely deviate from the plan. We should do something different. We'll learn, we've learned as we go, that that's not the right thing to do anymore. But unless we have the flexibility within our, how we do public management to go, oh yeah, we shouldn't do that plan anymore, now we should go and do this. That's the difference between if we performance manage on the basis of that plan versus if we do governance and resource allocation for learning, which allows us to learn and adapt. So what our public management structure looks like, and particularly how we do governance and accountability, either enables us to flex and adapt and respond to the changing nature of the world, or it doesn't. And that is why we say doing public management differently is a crucial structural impediment or enabler to allowing us to respond to the complexity of the world well or not.

Yeah, that's fascinating. I love the idea of certainty artifacts, and it's almost absurd what you're describing there, Toby. In just, you know, my own experience in schools or, you know, with management, everybody kind of knows, like, there are some people that do hold on too tightly to the certainty fact of this 5-year strategy or the performance management rubric or whatever. Some people really hold on tight to that because they're so desperate for certainty. And most other people know that it doesn't work, but they go along with the charade because that's just how organizations roll. And it's kind of absurd, right?

I think COVID is a useful exemplar of this stuff, right? So imagine, or remember maybe, the performance appraisal conversations that we all had in, say, December 2019. Right, so if you had a conversation with your line manager in December 2019 about your performance the previous year and what your kind of targets and objectives were for the year 2020, right, from that conversation you'll have got a bunch of possibly smart targets about the things that you should be doing, right? How useful was that as a framing for your work during 2020? How many of those objectives that you set were the right things to do in that year? None of them. Because the world changed in an unexpected way meant that if you tried to follow those as your targets, that would have been a really stupid thing to do. That's just an example of how the world is complex all the time, but it's like a pure Platonic example that's right up in our faces and unignorable. The world is always like that.

Yeah, and the context is constantly shifting, but yeah, not so radical ways as COVID, you know, kind of exemplified. Yeah, no, absolutely. Thea, you want to jump in?

One more thing and then we can move on to storytelling. But, um, there's a really beautiful concept that John Alexander introduced me to actually by a family therapist called Barry Mason, which is safe uncertainty. And the idea that as a therapist, what you're trying to do is move people from a place of— so there's, there's 4 quadrants. There's safe certainty, safe uncertainty, unsafe uncertainty, and unsafe certainty. And the quadrant that people feel least comfortable in is safe uncertainty. Uncertainty. It's really hard for humans to sit comfortably with uncertainty, and the poet John Keats talks about it as negative capability. You know, that negative capability describes the capacity to be able to sit in safe uncertainty. But I feel like a huge part of what we do in our work at CPI is essentially coach people in government to sit in a place of safe uncertainty. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to help them work out methods and ways to feel safe in the reality of uncertainty and to move forward in that context.

Amazing. And I mean, isn't that what we're trying to do with young people in school? Yeah, exactly that, isn't it? I mean, that feels so resonant with, yes, what most teachers would say they want for their young people. And then we, yeah, we overcorrect and we, you know, we take our ideological approaches to achieve that. But yeah, the other thing I think is so fundamental, which I wanted to bring in the storytelling piece, because you've, I mean, you and the team and with and other collaborators have written this amazing report on storytelling for systems change. And I wanted to bring that in cuz again, that's another set of language that I see people using. And as Tyson says, and you quote in the report, not every story's a good story. There are some wrong stories, but there's something about how, I don't know, would you say that stories are certainty artifacts? Because they feel very powerful as emotional kind of holders of relational understanding about the world or, or very deep kind of heart-mind, as Amanda might say, you know, connection with this is my reality, this is how I understand the world. It's, it's not explicit and propositional and academic and et cetera, but there's something very deep that connects with me about, yeah, this is just how my world works. This story says something to me about how the world works and that holds me safe in that uncertainty. I don't know. So I don't, yeah.

No, it's really in, yeah, that's really interesting and I haven't really thought that much, to be honest, before about the link between uncertainty and stories. And that's why it's great to have conversations like this, because it triggers new, new ideas. And so this is me thinking on my feet here, but I actually think that part of what stories are trying to do is disrupt the very rigid certainty artifact of quantitative data, because quant data is a certainty artifact, you know, all models are wrong, some are useful kind of thing. You know, so interesting in some of our work where we've been talking to lots of people in government and philanthropy who sort of fund different kinds of services, including education services and, you know, and other social interventions. And there is a perception that quantitative data is more objective and that stories are more subjective. And the reality of quant data is that it is absolutely shaped by the people who make choices about what data are we including, what data are we not including, how are we framing the questions that we're asking, what are we allowing people to say and not say? Are we using a survey? Are we using, you know, all of the choices that are made are reflective of the worldviews and the biases and the subjectivities of the researchers. But for some reason, because what spat out at the end is a number, it feels hard and true and certain. And what stories do is they hold much more grayness and they sort of make, I guess, in a way, the subjectivity more visible. And so in doing so, they become sort of this less credible or less reliable source of insight. I think what's important to acknowledge in stories is that there is danger in a single story, just like there is danger in a single number. And so what we've been sort of exploring as part of this work that we've been doing on storytelling is what does it mean to use stories as a way of generating insight about change that's happening in a community or through a particular intervention. And I think the answer is you do need to be pattern spotting. You need to be listening to lots of different stories and spotting patterns. But also the outliers can be really useful sources of insight because if there is an outlier, you know, what happens in quantitative data is it's just averaged out and you don't actually see it. If you hear a story that's an outlier, you can dig, you can actually examine the tension that sits between most of the stories that you've heard and that other one and it becomes a much richer source of insight than an outlier number becomes. So yeah, as I said, I haven't really thought about the relationship between those things, but I think part of what excites me about stories is that they ask people to do harder work in engaging with uncertainty and complexity in a way that numbers just don't.

Yeah, no, amazing. And your point, Toby, about context and holding— stories hold the context, right? And so I do some work with Nora Bateson and Bateson Institute with Warm Data and the idea of staying in story holds the complexity, it holds the context, because clearly a quantitative data point, there is no context. It's all been erased.

Yeah, exactly. The context is hidden from the kind of measurement stuff. But I love Thea's exploration of how and why stories are useful. So the work that Thea and her team have done around this is amazing. It's so good. And I love Brian Klass's treatment of some of this stuff in his recent book, Fluke. If we take the complexity stuff seriously, we realize that all of the measurements and the stories that we create about a situation are simplifications and abstractions. Because essentially causality in complexity is too difficult to find for, to unpick with any degree of certainty. Right? So the story that he gives that I think is really powerful is about the, um, why Hiroshima was chosen to be bombed in the Second World War by the Americans. So story tells is that the US military drew up a list of strategic targets to bomb, and Kyoto was top of that list because it's much more strategically significant than Hiroshima. It's got a bunch of industries, it's got a bunch of rail lines converging. You know, if you're going to bomb a place and you're in a war, then Kyoto's the place to bomb. But the person who was responsible for significantly making that that decision had been on holiday with his wife to Kyoto 20 years previously and had this amazing experience with the cherry blossoms there. It was like, no, you can't walk Kyoto, it's too pretty. So this decision that saved millions of people's lives on one hand and caused the deaths of millions of people on the other one was essentially created by a random happenchance 20 years earlier of where one person, a senior person in the US military, had chosen to go on holiday. He's like, that's how causality in the world actually works. It is almost beyond human comprehension for us to work this stuff out. So all of the measures we use, all the stories we tell, they're all simplifications of the complexity of reality. Yeah, but what stories do is they are less of abstractions and simplifications than the quantitative data.

Yeah. I mean, absolutely. I would take that point, but I would also say if we're thinking in destinations, then fine, but actually we're never arriving anywhere. We're just fumbling on through trying to learn to be human together. So therefore we're constantly exploring, looking at data points as we go. And yeah, I think there's a kind of a hierarchy of evidence as to, obviously there's certain points where we need to make decisions. But I— this is actually why I think the idea of learning as the thing that we hold people accountable to is the most important thing and why the human learning systems approach is so exciting to me, because it's about constantly journeying and exploring and understanding and gaining new insights, of course, but it's a constant process.

Exactly. And the nice thing about, again, going back to the complexity stuff and saying are we going to take complexity seriously here? Then the reason that learning is important is because if we want the complex systems that actually produce outcomes in the world to produce desirable outcomes more frequently. So we're dealing with stuff that complex systems are massively unpredictable and can't be governed. They're ungovernable from our perspective because key bits of them can't be controlled or influenced. They might not be able to be recognized that bits are part of a complex system. How do we make those things produce desirable outcomes more more often. But that's the challenge that public service faces. And so what we have learned is that the way that a complex system creates desirable outcomes more often is to turn that into a learning system, to enable the actors in the system to be visible to one another, to have communications, to have relationships, to have trust, and to learn together, to experiment together, to see what different patterns of results they can create together as complexes. So learning becomes the way that a complex system can produce desirable outcomes more often. So organizing that system for learning becomes the thing that we can do if we really, really care about outcomes.

And if we're calling it Human Learning Systems with capital letters as an approach, could you say maybe a little bit more about that in terms of what it looks like when you start working with this approach with people in, in real context, in public service or wherever?

Yeah, I think the beauty of human learning systems is that it can look very different depending on the context. It's sort of like, you know, it's a philosophy and an approach and sort of rather than a set of rules. And what's interesting is that lots of people have said to Toby over the years, write me a, you know, a handbook. And so Toby and colleagues did that. They wrote A Guide for the Curious, which is essentially like, you know, stepping it out. And that's helpful, and it's probably a certainty artifact, right? Because what it's doing is it's giving people what they want, which is like step 1, an algorithm. And there is no algorithm for this work because it is about a learning mindset. We've experimented with human learning system-esque approaches with different partners, and they always look different. And so one of the pieces of work that we've done recently, which Toby's been a really fantastic supporter of is with a group of public servants in Queensland who are implementing a new regional governance model. So the way Queensland— in Australia is a huge state with sort of a couple of big cities but lots and lots of little cities spanning, you know, enormous landmass. And what's happened traditionally is the central government in Brisbane has dictated what the regions need to be doing and have sort of attempted to coordinate the regions and, you know, support them to communicate with each other. But it's been a very top-down approach. And what this regional collaborative governance model is asking central government to do, and it's been initiated by central government, is to stop controlling and dictating from the centre and to instead create a learning infrastructure for the regions who will define for themselves themselves what they need and how they need to do it. And so that's been a really fascinating project to be involved with where we've been working with the core implementation team, not just to sort of set up the governance structures and the, you know, the functional elements of that model, but to actually do the shift on the mental models that exist within all of the people who need to participate to flip the orientation of the regions, which is, are those people in the centre just tell us what to do and bugger them kind of thing. And the people in the centre having this slightly arrogant approach, which is the people in the regions need us to tell them what to do and to actually work in entirely new ways which centre, you know, a mutual respect and a recognition that people on the ground, in this case the regions, know what's better for them. So you can see the way that, you know, the central government becomes the sort of the steward of the learning the humanness of it. In this instance, it's not social workers working directly with people to say, what do you need in your life? It's central government working with the regions to say, what do you need in your life? And it's a systemic approach again because it's thinking about the whole rather than the atomised parts.

Yeah, well, I have to say I'm disappointed. Yeah, I thought I was going to get an algorithm for how this works. Sorry.

No, you weren't. No, you weren't.

Damn it. Well, but, but I, I joke, but I think that's quite a profound thing that there is, particularly with artificial intelligence and like, you know, just up the road from me today in Paris, there's a, the big AI action summit happening. And I mean, there's this constant strive to find the algorithm that's gonna basically solve our problems, solve human productivity, solve whatever. And I think this is a fundamentally qualitatively different approach to that. So for example, Toby, one of your questions I heard you pose was, what is the shared contextual understanding that people create about what is going on around here? In a way, that's such a kind of basic everyday question, but it's like, it's so human about how do the people in this space school, regional government, whatever, how do they understand the context they're in and how do they create a shared understanding through learning relationships and trust about what's going on around here? And what do we do together to make it a bit better to get towards some better outcomes? I mean, in a way it sounds so prosaic and so kind of basic. It doesn't sound shiny on a, you know, on a, but it's so fundamentally nuanced and important as it what it means to be human in connection to the land, the relationship, et cetera.

I love it when people describe human learning systems back to me in language that is much more simple than I could find myself. I would say, so yeah, because essentially that is the start of a kind of human learning system process, right? It's essentially a bunch of people going, what is happening around here? Oh, what do you think's happening? What do you think? What are you getting multiple perspectives on what is happening around here? And creating a shared perspective out of those different conversations and then going, okay, that's what's happening around here. What should we try to make things different? Right. And let's try stuff in a vaguely rigorous kind of research, like action research kind of way. So, so when we try stuff, let's write down what happens when we try stuff and talk about that together. Yeah, that's exactly it.

Love it. And that was actually the second point I was going to make about the stories, just going back a couple of steps. Dave Snowden and Kenevin and their work, they talk about wanting more stories like this and less stories like that. So they're gathering the stories that people are using to make meaning of their reality. They're aggregating those and then they're saying, well, how can we get more stories like this and less stories like that? And so there's some really interesting, again, just a way of using stories as part of that sensemaking process to get that shared understanding of, yeah, what's going on around here. How do we nudge and do a bit more of what we— yeah. So, I mean, how does that then translate into things like— so we go back a few steps to Buchanan and public choice theory and the mechanisms that get made to control people, like accountability structures, performance management structures, et cetera. Let's take in a school, for example, in a district of education, how would that look differently? Because, you know, that's often the point of resistance for people is that, yeah, but we still need accountability. So we can't just all be like, fumbling around and figuring things out together. So where does the accountability for the way the public money is being used, what do the accountability structures look like in a human learning systems type approach?

I love the question about accountability because it enables me to use the line, accountability is great, we should have some because we don't have accountability right now.

We think we do.

Yeah, yeah. We have accountability theater. Again, the evidence is 100% clear on this, right? So when we use targets to performance manage public service, to create accountability, then what we get is gaming. Evidence 100% clear on this. All of the research studies say this. When you try and hold people accountable by the use of targets— you said you were going to deliver 7 of these, you only did 5— then what people do is they very quickly learn that their job is to produce good-looking data that says they've done 7. Doesn't matter whether that 7 was the right thing to do or not. Or it doesn't matter whether they actually did 7 or not, and they've just done 5 and counted 2 other things. That's what actually happens when you try and hold people accountable using those mechanisms. Accountability is great. We should have some. So first thing we absolutely need to be clear on right out, we do not have accountability in public service using the kind of mechanisms of New Public Management. It's not true and provably not true. So in a complex system, how can we hold people accountable? The nice thing about this is we don't have to kind of just theorize about this stuff. We can look at the experiments that people have created around accountability and governance to work out how to make governance accountability in a human learning systems approach real. And what people do is they hold people accountable for how they have learned together. So the governance questions become essentially, what have you learned and how have you learned it? Questions like, for all the necessary people, people involved in your learning processes? Did you hear all the voices that were important as part of that experiment? When in your original framing of the system where you included a bunch of people and excluded a bunch of people, did you draw that boundary correctly, right? Were the right people in and the right people out? Those become the governance and accountability questions that enable the work to work better and for us to embrace the complex reality of the context and everything else, right? We know how to do this stuff well. So the accountability question is a brilliant one. Let's actually create some accountability. And the way we do that is by enabling people who have, like, governance responsibility to say, you can understand that the work will be better by liberating it and letting citizens and workers learn together more effectively. Yeah, brilliant, we can show all of that. That's the way to work, that produces the best outcomes. Now your job, people with governance roles, is to experiment with how to govern that work well. What will give you assurance that that work's happening well? That's the learning cycle that you need to run. That's your job. Let's go. And this is partly a way to understand the work that Thea was describing with the folks in Queensland. What they did was they did a giant experiment on how to govern the work at a regional, the state level more effectively.

Yeah. It's interesting because the thing that comes to me there is this word experiment. It sounds inherently temporary and not quite there. We haven't quite arrived. And it's Thea, your amazing article about embracing ensembles, I think speaks to this a little bit about how do we also encourage people to embrace— I mean, it's coming in a way back to the safe uncertainty stuff, but how do we enable or create conditions for people to get a bit more comfortable with some of those paradoxes. And that, like this idea of bringing things together, disciplines, interventions, et cetera, that don't necessarily agree. How do we hold them somehow in tension as we are thinking about what's the move we make, what's the experiment we make? So I don't know, all of that together feels like it's, it puts a real emphasis on the people, the individuals, the groups, organizational cultures that say we value this kind of way of approaching the world, but it's not, it's not comfortable for everyone, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's something I think, well, I'm certainly thinking about, and I'm talking to lots of people who are thinking about it a lot at the moment, because identity politics and the tendency towards, you know, duality, like it's this or it's that, or, you know, that binary polarized sort viewpoint is feeling more and more pronounced than ever. And so this question of how do we embrace ensembles and the tension generated by ensembles feels like the question of our times, to be honest with you. And, you know, part of the question that I'm asking myself is, because to understand how to create the conditions for people to embrace ensembles, you need to understand what are the conditions that are pushing people towards the binary oppositional view instead. And I think there are many, many factors. The way that we interact on social media is clearly one of them. But again, John Alexander is getting lots of shoutouts in this, in this conversation. But when I was speaking to John a while ago, he said something really interesting. So in his work on citizens, he got really deep into QAnon for a while and was sort of trying to understand what is going on there. And his conclusion, which I think has really resonated quite strongly, was about belonging. And it actually is not about these predominantly young men being enamored by the QAnon, Pizzagate, that stuff, you know, that they're actually— that's not the thing. The thing is, they find somewhere where they belong, where their voice matters, where they have— they are able to form an identity in a tribe. And I think that, you know, as we've become more secular as a society, as we've lost ritual, as we've lost a connection to place and community, that sense of belonging that we used to feel when we went to the mosque or synagogue or church or participated in community events has become harder and harder to access. And I think that what's happening is people are trying to find a sense of belonging through these very strong opinions. And so part of addressing that and creating an environment where people are happy to sit with uncertainty and to embrace ensembles and other viewpoints and other worldviews is creating places where people feel like they can belong.

Yeah, no, that's— I mean, it's beautiful, and I completely agree with you. Fundamentally important. I've been doing lots of exploration on the podcast about, you know, the ensembles of knowledge systems. You know, what does that do in an education system that absolutely prioritizes one way of knowing the world? How do we create an ensemble of knowledge systems?

Yeah, to offer a really beautiful example of that, when I learned the history of Australia when I was at school, however many years ago, I learned the white version of that history. Captain Cook arrived on this land, Terra Nullius, you know, all of that stuff. When my son, who's 14, learned that quite a few years ago now, I think they learn it in grade 2 or something, I was absolutely delighted but also stunned because he had to write an essay from different perspectives, right? This is Captain Cook's version of the story. This is the Indigenous population's version of the story. This is Captain Cook's wife's version of the story. And we're really encouraged to take to step into the shoes of different people and realize that there is no objective history of Australia. It depends who you ask, which is what I learned when I studied history much later on, but certainly not what I was taught when I was in grade 2 and learning about the sort of the objective history of this country.

Yeah, no, completely. So maybe, maybe just to finish off, just very practically, I will share lots of resources in the show notes about Human Learning Systems and all of your amazing work and the storytelling report, but Yeah, where would you encourage people to go or connect if they wanted to, just bearing in mind the educational audience and yeah, what could be useful as a next step if they're curious and interested to find out more?

Well, we've just launched a new set of insights reports from the latest round of examples of practice that people from around the world have created. If you can link people to the Human Learning Systems Insights series from November last year, that's, that's probably a good place to start. Probably a good place to start. We created a new summary of what we think human learning systems thinking and practice is called Radical Pragmatism. And if people want to kind of connect with other folks who are thinking and talking about this stuff, there's a Human Learning Systems LinkedIn group that anyone can join if they want to just kind of join in with us, have conversations. There's nearly 400 people part of that from all sorts of different places. And then there are also national networks of human learning systems practitioners and people who are curious in all sorts of different parts of the world. I'll let Thea talk about a kind of Australian version of that.

Amazing.

Yeah, so I've just dropped a link to this wonderful conference that's held in Victoria at a school called the Woodleigh School, and this is precisely the conversations that they're having in an education context. So I think all of this stuff around complexity, outcomes, safe uncertainty, ensembles, like systems thinking, it all feels very relevant and I think is held really beautifully in the context of that conference. So for people who are in this part of the world, I'd recommend checking that out. And if you're not in this part of the world, and the other thing is we're always looking for partners who are keen to explore what does this mean in, in my context and who sort of feel like they need a partner to walk alongside them as they work out how to embrace what is quite fundamentally a countercultural approach to doing the work of public service. So I'd be always happy to have conversations and to explore opportunities in the education context and beyond to work together to translate these ideas into practice.

Thank you so much. And yeah, just the anti-algorithm approach, right? Learning through the examples of others and the stories of others. And I think, yeah, the Insights Reports is amazing just to see how other people are putting this in place. And no, thank you so much for everything you're doing. It's so exciting and vitally important work, I think. So yeah, amazing.

Thanks, Tim Logan. And same to you for hosting us and yeah, for such fantastic questions. Really appreciate it.

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