Writing my Fellowship Report. Or rather, not writing it.

I am back in New Mexico this week, rather unexpectedly. (The picture is the view of tonight's sunset from the house where I'm staying near Santa Fe. It also snowed this afternoon.) My close friend who lives in Santa Fe got some very sad news about her baby son a few weeks ago, so I have come back to the USA to support her.

There are some upsides to this trip, though. One is spending time with my friend so soon after I saw her in November. The other is that I’ve finally got some time to finish writing up my interviews from November, and to consider how to approach my report.

The report feels amorphous, vague, and therefore completely un-commence-able, at the moment. Which is probably why I have done very little on it in January, the month I had told myself I would commence.

I have a maximalist option and a minimalist option in mind. The minimalist option is a 10 page affair, mostly drawing on what I’ve written in the blog posts, plus any broader themes I want to draw out. It would be short, personal description of my journey in to realising that appointing people to ‘see from the whole’ is a critical step, as I detailed in a blog post in November. That would meet the requirements of my Fellowship. But it doesn’t feel entirely satisfying!

The maximalist option is more of a pamphlet. Maybe it would start by talking about collaboration and why it’s important. It would draw together some of the ideas on this that seem to be in the ether at the moment, like those around ‘wicked’ or ‘messy’ problems, and the leadership responses required of them, such as those articulated by Ron Heifetz in his book, Adaptive Leadership (which talks a lot about working in partnership and in alliance), or by Keith Grint when he talks about ‘clumsy solutions’. I would perhaps reflect a bit on the where we are in the UK given the current questioning of the role of the State, the role of society, and in particular the role of the local authority. (Sounds good, huh? Don't think that means I know what I'd say about those things!)

Then I would delve deep in to what I learnt from those I interviewed. I’d tell some stories about what I’d seen, and I’d draw out some key themes. The ones swilling round my head at the moment are:

• High volume, low complexity work is harder to collaborate on than low volume, high complexity work. The relationships are more manageable when it is low volume.
• All collaborations require good relationships.
• Collaborating is hard emotional work.
• Strong, directive leadership is often required, though this needs to be combined with flexibility and a willingness to see things from others’ points of view.
• Strong leadership is useless without good technical fixes to accommodate difference.
• Appointing someone and/or a body to ‘see from the whole’ embeds change more effectively than relying on strong leadership.
• The best way to start ‘seeing from the whole’ is to look through the eyes of the client or citizen.
• All efforts at collaboration end up addressing the issue of culture at the frontline. Working in collaboration therefore ends up being an exercise in culture change if it is truly to embed.

But I want to go through and review all of my notes thoroughly before fixing those, and think through a lot of whether what I’m saying is really true, and how widely these views were shared by my interviewees.

The last part I’m wondering about, is an appendix of practical tools. When I teach systems thinking I often feel stumped for a text to point people to that takes them a tiny bit further. Jake, who taught me systems thinking, has written a fair bit but some of the most practical stuff has not been published. I’m wondering about writing up some reflections on the systems tools I used in interviewing (rich pictures and cognitive maps) and putting a bit more detail in about systems tools that I use.

So my ruminations on the report get this far. But then my doubts creep in, ‘isn’t there a big theme about wholeness to explore? What do I really mean by it? Is it even possible to see the whole? Why is it relevant?’ And, “This is motherhood and apple pie. Everyone knows this already about collaboration. This is utterly unoriginal.” And, “No one’s going to read a long pamphlet, certainly not anyone who’s got a big collaboration to lead or participate in. No point in writing something if it’s not going to get read.”

Today I was able to add another doubt to my growing list. Over the past 24 hours, I’ve had a series of encounters with some really smart minds and my own now feels a bit pallid. So the new doubt is, am I smart enough to realise the real profundity of my subject? (Bear with me on the self-pity, here, I get myself out of it in the end!)

First of all I had dinner last night with E, my friend with the very ill son. Her blog has delighted and impressed me in its mixture of literary criticism, emotion, philosophy and beautiful writing. We were chatting about what she had written so far and she started listing off various posts she was planning. One on ‘how there isn’t a metaphor for pain’, one on ‘Biblical narratives of healing and wholeness’, and more. It seemed to me E was really good at spotting themes around her, drawing connections between otherwise disparate ideas and theories. I wished I could do more of that.

Then, this afternoon, I did some reflection on the systems thinking teaching that I do. I’ve taught for two days in the last month, mostly to middle manager civil servants. I offer them some simple tools. The days have gone reasonably well. But I picked up ‘Leadership Can Be Taught’ again last night. I found Sharon Parks’ description of how Ron Heifetz gets his Harvard MBA class to do their own work, by constantly challenging them to reassess their assumptions, really inspiring.

For example, she describes him in his first session with his MBA class, asking them what they are looking for in him, as their teacher and therefore their leader. After a long discussion, a woman speaks up suggesting he should allow people in the group to identify with him by revealing a more personal side of himself.

“So you would tend to trust me more if I were more self-revealing - perhaps particularly vulnerable. But you probably wouldn’t like it if I tell you how excited I am about the publication of my book and how proud I am of the endorsements and reviews. It would probably speak to you more if I told you about how worried I felt about the reviews, my sleepless nights, and how I’ve taken it out on my kids...”

‘The woman interrupts, “you can’t go too far, we don’t want you to...’

“Isn’t that interesting,” Heifetz interrupts. I need to be humble and vulnerable, but I need not to be pathetic. (Laughter).” (Ch. 2)

He does this over and over again, getting them to look at themselves rather than give them the answers. This made me realise that I’m still an amateur when it comes to teaching. The systems teaching I offer isn’t designed by me. Almost all of the credit goes to Professor Jake Chapman, I just share them, and my enthusiasm, with a keen audience. Pedagogy is not my expertise, and again, I wonder if I’d really know how best to help a reader of my report move on in his or her thinking about collaboration. How would I write a report that would encourage people to re-assess their own mindsets?

Lastly, tonight, I listened to a Royal Society of Arts podcast on The Big Society. It starts with Jesse Norman MP, author of the 2010 book called The Big Society, explaining the philosophical roots of this Conservative Party concept. I listened to his explanation that it wasn’t Hobbesian, but was Aristotelian and Burkeian, and that it challenged the neoliberal right and the Statist left. I was left feeling decidedly light on my philosophical history, and wondered if what I was doing in my Fellowship didn’t need more of this sort of theoretical underpinning.

So I’m not a pedagogical expert, a literary critic theologian, or well-read in the history of philosophy. Might as well pack up and go home?

No, that’s not acceptable either. I know that I’m pretty skilled at convincing myself I’m ‘not good enough’. Every time I do the ‘immunity to change’ exercise, it turns out that that’s my underlying assumption. I may be passionately committed to something (like writing my report), but I do activities that detract or prevent myself from realising that commitment (like not starting it, like proving to myself it won't be of interest anyway) because I am protecting myself from my underlying assumption. So, stepping on to the balcony for a second and observing myself, it’s obvious to me that I’m doing a pretty good effort at comparing myself to others and finding myself wanting. So what if I’m not a pedagogue, a literary critic, or a philosopher? That doesn’t mean I haven’t got something to say. But, sigh, I don’t half put a lot of obstacles in my way before I get round to saying it!

In the meantime, I'd welcome any thoughts you have on my very nascent ideas on content for the report, or for how to write it in a way that would get people reading and reacting to it.