by Toby Lowe, Professor of Public Management at Manchester Metropolitan University and REALITIES Consortium member
I’ve been advising the REALITIES project since its very initial stages, meaning that Project Lead Marisa and I have probably had more conversations about “learning” than either of us cares to think about.
One of the brilliant aspects of the way that REALITIES is structured is that the Community Embedded Researchers (CERs) are people who are doing the work on the ground, in their contexts. As Shona Ulrichsen highlighted in a previous blog, this means that learning (or more formally, “research” ) isn’t separate from the day job, it is the day job.
Creating this shift – that learning isn’t separate from the work, learning is the work – is one of the key pillars of the Human Learning Systems approach. This is a different approach to how public service is organised, funded and governed which requires us to organise for learning rather than control. It says that every of public service is an act of shared learning between residents and public servants. And so public service should be organised, funded and governed as acts of shared learning.
As you might imagine, the change that is required to enact this way of organising, funding and governing public service is extensive. If we view the public facing work as shared learning, we must manage people differently. Team meetings become places where people share what they’ve learnt from the collaborative action research they’ve been undertaking with residents, so that the team can do sense making and pattern spotting from that.
The role of leaders changes – they are responsible for creating the conditions under which diverse people can learn together well, and inspiring people to do so. Funding changes, so that what is funded are processes of shared action research, not the “delivery” of activity to people. Governance and accountability changes, so that people are asked to account for what they have learnt, how they have learnt it, and how they have adapted as a result.
We’ve seen places and organisations across the world experiment with making exactly these kind of changes.
What we haven’t yet seen people experiment with is creating the information and communication systems required to make learning easy, every day. This is one of REALITIES’ next key areas of exploration.
If you don’t work in mainstream public service it can be difficult to comprehend quite how much people’s practice is constrained and shaped by the information systems they have to work within. Your information system can determine the questions that you ask people, and what information gets recorded from the conversations you have with people. It is the design of the information system which literally decides what is important, and what is not. It decides who gets to see what kinds of information, and makes sharing knowledge outside of organisational boundaries a nightmare. And what our current information systems almost never do is make it easy for people to capture and share what they are learning. Our information and communication systems make learning invisible and valueless.
In the next phase of REALITIES we will be exploring creating new digital platforms which enable residents to own their own information, and decide who gets to see what. We will be exploring what it means to capture and share learning routinely, across organisations, so that all who need (and who are allowed) to see it, can do so. We will explore how sense making practices of one set of people become data for others to see and learn from, and how shared sense making enables genuinely collaborative action. And we will enable any forms of data that a person themselves considers relevant to be part of those learning processes – whether that data is in the form of images they have created, stories that they have told or written, or music that inspires them.
If learning is genuinely going to be the work, we need to make it easy. REALITIES will help to show us what that can mean in practice.
REALITIES phase 3 is supported by UKRI funding with Grant Ref: AH/Z505456/1. The Project Lead is Marisa de Andrade at The University of Edinburgh. Other Co-Investigators include the University of St Andrews, Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Dundee, Glasgow School of Art, North Lanarkshire Council, Bethany Christian Trust, Flip of the Coin, Artlink Edinburgh and the Lothians, Ochil Youths Community Improvement, and Ninewells Community Garden.
Funding for this research came from three interconnected sources. Firstly, the project called Active Communities Arts Development: Social Prescribing, Sustainable Strategic Planning and Breaking Down Barriers Across Sectors In North Lanarkshire (reference AH/W008912/1) funded through UKRI’s AHRC place-based programme. Secondly, REALITIES phase 2 was funded by the UKRI’s AHRC-led programme to build community research consortia to address health disparities (grant number AH/X006131/1). The research continues into REALITIES phase 3 funded by a UKRI mobilising community assets to tackle health inequalities Research Grant for the project titled: REALITIES in Health Disparities: Researching Evidence-Based Alternatives in Living, Imaginative, Traumatised, Integrated, Embodied Systems, (Grant Ref: AH/Z505456/1).
