Recipes for Efficacy
A few weeks back, I celebrated the 20th episode of The Working Together Podcast with a compilation of clips from previous episodes–all centered on the concept of efficacy, which is like a red thread running through my Minotaur’s labyrinth of conversations with thinkers makers and doers.
Have a listen to the episode on Google Play, or through any other podcast directories by searching for The Working Together Podcast:
In the episode I explore the concept of efficacy in personal, political and technical modes (in that order).
Efficacy is like a motif behind all good social innovations, community engagement efforts, co-design efforts, barn raisers and work parties. It’s also behind smaller, more personal endeavors like tinkering in your basement or starting a small business.
And, I think that efficacy is less bombastic than “impact” — and certainly less bombastic than “disruptive” — which are two terms that get bandied about quite a bit in the social-innovator-change-maker crowds.
Let me explain…
To me, efficacy is much more about the day-to-day and the quotidian. But it is also about the messy problem(s) that nobody wants to be responsible for dealing with (but that we all are responsible for). You know, things that are public or “common pool” in nature.
In this sense, efficacy feels like a somewhat truer expression of a latent zeitgeist that has yet to fully emerge: expressed best in the desire that many of us have to contribute something–to our lives, to our families, neighbourhoods, communities and heck, to the world. We’ve all caught glimpses of this in our lives, and “impact” and “disruptive” aren’t very accurate terms to describe it.
We all know the other, more pronounced zeitgeist. The one driven by dominance, superiority, victim-hood, cynicism, fear, etc. This zeitgeist is characterized by a feeling of paralysis, as if you are lockstep with a dark movement that is “entrained” towards inevitable catastrophe (thanks Trump). Sadly, in this context, I feel that the discourses of “impact” and “disruptive” are more at home. And on top of that, they express less of a joyful smashing, bashing and mixing of the status quo, and more of an amplification of its underlying logic: innovation for innovation’s sake; sleeker, better service delivery; better product; more efficiency; more value for money; “fitter, happier, more productive…”
Efficacy, on the other hand, isn’t afraid of messy problems, conflict, catastrophe, and so on. Efficacy is not overly concerned with scaling, system-wide impact — it knows that those things are necessary and important, but it doesn’t obsess over them. Efficacy obsesses about how to build capacity and competency amongst a ragtag group of experts and average Joes and Jills. Efficacy knows that this process takes time, requires diligence, a sense of safety, a sense of sharing, and of course a sense of messing around and messing up (embarrassingly so). Efficacy has faith in “rolling up the sleeves”, “making fast friends”, “messing around” and, most importantly, working together.
On your own, regaining a sense of personal efficacy can be a fun challenge. You learn how to tinker with things, grow your own food, start your own business, and so on.
Giving a group of folks or a community a sense of efficacy, on the other hand, is a damn hard thing to pull off.
It requires careful preparation. It requires knowing a thing or two about your ingredients and how they will interact. It requires observation during the encounter–to help facilitate constructive work, and to learn how to design better the next time.
In short, it requires some carefully thought-out recipes and a good chef.
So that’s what I wanted to share in this episode: a series of recipes for efficacy conjured up by some amazing chefs.
Some recipes are loosely defined, and easier to incorporate into your life, because, well, it’s just about “you and your thing”. There’s less at stake when you are trying out a new dish by yourself. This is all about personal efficacy and I use clips from my interviews with Mark Frauenfelder and Kevin Kelly to explore that angle.
Others require a lot of work designing and facilitating–in short, a lot of meal prep and planning, and at least one good chef (if not a kitchen full of ’em!). These practitioners are always cooking up new ways to combine ingredients, always reflecting on what could be done better the next time and making edits to the recipe until it works. In short, they are always strategically designing. My interviews with Patrick Condon, Peter MacLeod and Gui Seiz are an exploration of some working recipes for helping groups of people achieve political and technical efficacy.
Have a listen to this episode of The Working Together Podcast to learn more. It will inspire you to take whatever good work you are trying to do in your world, to the next level.
And of course… you can listen and subscribe to the Podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play and yer other fave podcast directories!
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(think of how efficacious you’ll feel! 😉)
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