What does autonomy support look like?
Kelly Doonan has introduced me to a great blogpost on Autonomy Support on the Squire to the Giants blog. I really like the concept — it might seem it’s made out of two words that mean completely different things, but Edward Deci’s work shows that they can be two parts of a whole:
“Autonomy fuels growth and health, because it allows people to experience themselves as themselves, as the initiator of their own actions. The person who feels competent and autonomous, who directs his or her own life, is immeasurably better off than a person who does not…. The key to whether people are living autonomously is whether they feel, deep within themselves, that their actions are their own choice”
In fact, Steve Schefer (the author of the post) says that the opposite of autonomy is control. This really appeals to me. If we cannot control everything in a complex environment (and we currently try to do that within public service), then does it follow that the opposite of our top down management approach is autonomy?
And if competency is key because we like to master challenges and feel like we’re good at things, can this be squared with the current decision making processes, where people have little direct say on how they work?
The importance of relatedness also rings true. If our current approach is based on decisions by people who have an overview of everything but who are removed from delivery, then we are by necessity distanced from the people who access services, and our connection to them is weak.
This all fits with Dan Pink’s work on motivation, which is very nicely captured in this RSA animation.
Peer to peer relationships
According to Deci, the real power lies in developing autonomy for others via the concept of One-up Management. It echoes the Ego State model, which moves a hierarchical relationship into an adult to adult relationship. We help people to work out what the best thing to do is, as opposed to forcing them to comply or defy. Neither of which are helpful if we want to get the best out of people.
Public services are still striving to get to a place where people are at the heart of what we do. Because we work in complex adaptive systems, there will never be an end point to our learning and implementation.
Most people are working in a bureaucratic system that is based on fear because it is built to mitigate failure. A better system would build hope and would help people to live the lives that they want.
The recent manifesto from Collaborate CIC is a good place to start — it offers an analysis of where we are, as well as offering options for the future:
“We underplay our responsibilities to each other in our communities, and our shared ownership of the challenges we face, from complex issues such as social isolation and knife crime, to everyday ones such as the cleanliness of our streets. Our education system places schools and universities in a performance-driven marketplace and teaches children to pass exams, not to work together to solve problems. Even our first-past-the-post political system embeds a reductionist ‘winners and losers’ model at the very core of our public discourse…. The mindset we need today is collaborative. It is based on the story of ‘us’.”
Given that public services exist to serve the public, I find it troubling that our current way of working diminishes people’s motivation and wellbeing. Too many of us are working against the system, instead of being supported by it. Our work needs to be derived from our pupose, which seems too often to be failure avoidance. If we could change our organisational models (which is actually a reflection of our thinking), then that would be a great place to start.
