A Solution Focus in Transition Design: Why it needs to be different.
This initial posting is one in a series that will capture reflections into the emerging discourse of transition design. I’m primarily interested in mindsets, postures and temperaments (MPT’s) required to sustain systems level change and MPT’s that effectively disguise changes in thinking, acting and behaving so that system wide changes can gain momentum and establish regime to landscape level roots.
My focus in this post will be on a solution focused theory that emerged in the late 50’s in the therapeutic domain (Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch, 1974). The conceptual framework underpinning this work I regard as the basis for my own theories of change and see this framework as effective at multiple scales; individual, system and cultural. Bateson’s work on theory of types and theory of groups highly influenced this work and an alertness to surprise, novelty and discontinuity and disequilibrium pervades the strategies. The originators of what I’ve come to call relational systems thinking seemed to anticipate the notion of “wicked problems” but lacking the tools of design [thinking] they had to consider human problems without the blinders of a strong conceptual framework but rather adopted strategies of indirectness that have retained their essential character in current concepts such as nudge theory and brief therapy. In northern Germany they say; the situation is serious but not hopeless, in southern Germany they say; the situation is hopeless but not serious.
Later postings will address mindset, posture and temperament “requirements” in the transition space; negative capability, differentiation of self, humility, etc.
Solution Focused Change: A bit of history and such
“Unsustainability is structurally designed into our everyday life; it is the result of concrete design practices, hence the crucial importance of the reconfiguration of design. Whether couched in terms of radical sustainability innovation (Tonkinwise 2013), sustainability as flourishing (Ehrenfeld 2008), Sustainment (Fry 2012), environmental complexity (Leff 1998), or going beyond reason-centered culture (Plumwood 2002), at stake is a decentering of design from its anthropocentric and rationalistic basis and its recreation as a tool against the unsustainability that has become entrenched with the modern world. Succinctly, if we are at risk of self-destruction, we need to reinvent ourselves ontologically (Fry 2012) (Willis, 2006)
Several considerations flow from this quote that have implications for the ways in which designers and other change practitioners (organizational behavior, behavioral science for example) approach systems level “problems” and the frames through which they evaluate progress and success.
Words and phrases such as; structurally designed into everyday life, concrete design practices, decenter design from its anthropocentric and rationalistic basis, “a tool against”, entrenched, reinvention frame up both the problem and the solution in a particular theory of change and may reveal underlying assumptions regarding determinism and willfulness that are common in failed attempts to affect change.
Through a solution focused lens that approaches problems through and action-oriented vs origin oriented frame the Fry/Willis theory of change operates through a deterministic lens that says, if I apply x amount of smart design thinking plus well-developed powers of persuasion and influence to x problem the problem will eventually succumb to the obvious necessity of the new world view. Failure of this strategy beyond application to simple, highly bounded systems (making one’s bed, building a house) is well documented.
Prigogine, for one, disputes the implications of determinism and its denial of instability and irreversibility. As Prigogine explains, determinism is fundamentally a denial of the arrow of time. With no arrow of time, there is no longer a privileged moment known as the “present,” which follows a determined “past” and precedes an undetermined “future.” All of time is simply given, with the future as determined or undetermined as the past. With irreversibility, the arrow of time is reintroduced to physics. Instability resists standard deterministic explanations. Instead, due to sensitivity to initial conditions, unstable systems (wicked problems) functioning close to equilibrium can only be explained statistically, that is, in terms of probability.
With unanticipated systemic responses such as rebound affects and power law factors introducing instability and indeterminism into efforts to transition to a more sustainable future many in the sustainability movement are rethinking assumptions about how transition from a current to preferred future state is designed and executed to sustain results — in effect reassessing their theory of change. With the impacts of climate change escalating along predicted amplification pathways the social innovation has had to pause and reflect on incrementalism (reuse, reduce, recycle) and rational arguments to change behavior. At the niche level many innovations have shown incredible outcomes (alternative energy solutions of all kinds) but the landscape level remains marginally affected (1.2 billion cars on the road today, 2 billion by 2035 with just 2.5 percent of those will be battery electric, plug-in hybrid, or fuel-cell vehicles — the rest will run on gasoline or diesel fuel).
In conservation and energy economics, the rebound effect (or take-back effect) is the reduction in expected gains from new technologies that increase the efficiency of resource use, because of behavioral or other systemic responses. Forrester, Senge and other systems dynamics / causal loop practitioners would interpret this outcome through a fixes that fail or shifting the burden model. In this models, limited though they can be in capturing living systems behavior, show that rebound effects can be easily predicted to occur in any relatively complicated or complex system where the fundamental underlying structure, design parameters and social practices are left unchanged by the change.
However, this often comes as a surprise to designers in all professional fields who express dismay at wonderfully designed fixes that treat symptoms as the problem rather than symptoms as a clue to the problem. Though designers are skilled at bringing knowledge to bear from outside the problem, with profound creative spins, they are typically reordering existing structures and regimes rather than redefining the rules of existing structures and regimes.
The rebound effect is perfect metaphor through which to explore solution focused practice.
Solution focused change practices have as their inspiration the French proverb; plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose — the more things change, the more they stay the same. It concerns itself with the reality that many of our most rational and well- intended efforts to change undesirable situations fail [or the undesirable condition reemerges after some time delay, see drug/alcohol use] while other problems seem to dissolve magically through spontaneous un-orchestrated actions or bizarre reversals of behavior. Sometimes these spontaneous changes are premeditated but most often the solution comes not from an analysis of the problem, or clever design, but through accidental insight that generate persistence in thinking, action and behavior over time. I had a client in a design studio who could not understand why three members of the team “hated” another member of the team. I observed that the “hated one” ocuoccupiend a de
occupied a desk with his back to the three “haters” in an open concept space. He rarely turned his back to the other 3 and they primarily stared at his back all day. Adjacent to him another designer often turned his chair to engage in conversation with the other three and was not “hated”. One day the “hated one” needed to sit on the opposite side of his desk to complete a task. Conversations commenced and he smiled all day. Without a decision articulated he decided to stay on that side and became a well-liked member of the team. Post script; the “hated one” ended up marrying one of the “haters”. The point here is no one “intervened” with a solution or analyzed potential options, the problem evaporated with a slight variation in position.
From its earliest days solution focused approaches challenged the existing paradigms in psychology, psychoanalysis and the emerging field of organizational behavior. Whereas the latter fields aligned with the scientific method and rational / analytical approaches to problems resoluton, the solution approach borrowed from systems thinking and turned for a theory (explanation) of change outside individualistic models to interdependencies among social and emotional units and the kinds of symbiotic outcomes that flow from seeing the unit having greater “power” than the individuals. Solution focused practitioners formed a deeper appreciation for the paradoxes inherent in open, complex, dynamic and networked (Dorst, 2015) systems that carry enormous homeostatic weigh but seem vulnerable to the detection of leverage points (Senge, 1990) that, if adjusted, generate a cascade of irreversible change. Buckminister Fuller called these trim-tabs, where small adjustments to a structure have cascading effects on outcome. Note: the next time you are having conflict with a colleague, sit next to them whenever possible in meetings or elsewhere. Just sit next to them, and do everything else as you normally would.
Applying this to design, “It is also now widely recognized that design problems are ill-defined, ill-structured, or ‘wicked’ (Rittel and Webber, 1973). They are not the same as the ‘puzzles’ that scientists, mathematicians and other scholars set themselves. They are not problems for which all the necessary information is, or ever can be, available to the problem-solver. They are therefore not susceptible to exhaustive analysis, and there can never be a guarantee that ‘correct’ solutions can be found for them. In this context a solution-focused strategy is clearly preferable to a problem-focused one as it will always be possible to go on analyzing ‘the problem’, but the designer’s task is to produce ‘the solution’. (Karjalainen, n.d.)
However, the solution focused strategies that Cross and others describe differ in important ways from those of Watzlawick and other action oriented practitioners that can be of great value to transition designers who aim for social technical regime transformations that reformat entire landscapes of social practice and behavior.
As Cross describes in Designerly ways of knowing, designing is a process of pattern synthesis, rather than pattern recognition. The solution is not simply lying there among the data, like the dog among the spots in the well-known perceptual puzzle; it has to be actively constructed by the designer’s own efforts (224)
Moreover, reflecting on his observations of urban designers, Levin commented that:
The designer knows (consciously or unconsciously) that some ingredient must be added to the information that he already has in order that he may arrive at an unique solution. This knowledge is in itself not enough in design problems, of course. He has to look for the extra ingredient, and he uses his powers of conjecture and original thought to do so. What then is this extra ingredient? In many if not most cases it is an ‘ordering principle’. The preoccupation with geometrical patterns that is revealed in many town plans and many writings on the subject demonstrated this very clearly.
And of course it is not only in town planning, but in all fields of design, that one finds this preoccupation with geometrical patterns; a pattern (or some other ordering principle) seemingly has to be imposed in order to make a solution possible. (224)
However, as Frans Berkhout, Adrian Smith and Andy Stirling point out in their paper, Socio-technological regimes and transition contexts, there may be a greater plurality of possible transformation pathways that are left unexplored by designers (3) who grapple with perpetuation of problems particularly in large scale domains (societal level) where homeostasis ensures persistence of artefacts, institutions, rules and norms assembled and maintained to perform economic and social activities.
Whereas the designer is a pattern synthesizer (as opposed to a pattern recognizer) the solution focused practitioner described here sees pattern synthesizing as simply taking an existing recipe, creatively reordering (adding the “extra ingredient” described above by Levin) the elements based on an ordering principle or primary generator and recapitulating existing landscapes with little penetration of niche transformations long hoped for in the sustainability arena.
Transition design is calling for “sweeping changes at every level of society” (Irwin, 2015) The theories of change from which transition design bases its choices for engagement and interaction must reshape designer’s temperaments, mindsets, postures and perhaps their entire set assumptions with respect to dynamics of change and about change itself. Solution focused strategies like those practiced by Watzlawick may give clues to how a mindset, posture and temperament absent of initial assumptions may give advantages in the effort towards sweeping changes.
In the next post I will discuss negative capability as a mindset and posture that may give additional clues.
