blog

One is not born, but rather becomes, a parent

Wed, 16 May 2012 11:40:21 +1000

Hi! I’m Doris, from France. I have been an intern at Family by Family for three months. I have found it much more confronting than the two other internships that I have done before in France and in Morocco. I have learnt very much and have changed my mindsets. This blog is about how Family by Family made me realise how someone can try hard to be a good parent but not achieve this because of their circumstances.

I don’t know where this weird idea came into my mind from but before my internship at Family by Family, I thought that parents who behaved inappropriately with their kids were “bad people” who didn’t like their kids, and above all didn’t even try to be “good parents”. When I saw someone slap their kids for nothing, say mean things to them or put a “dog harness” around their kids’ neck, I couldn’t stand it. Although I thought I was empathetic, including having studied social work, I couldn’t help judging those parents. I am now quite ashamed to confess that the only thing I thought was that they were bad parents, they were destroying their kids’ lives and the best thing that I could hope is that they had their children removed.

It is true that parents experiencing tough times don’t provide their kids with the best environment ever. However, after absorbing people’s personal and family stories, I have figured out that there is always an explanation for people’s behaviour with their kids, either past or current. I have learnt that there are usually two elements that can prevent someone from looking after their kids as well as they would like. Either their current stressful situation or the way they were parented, often it is both.

First of all, living in a stressful situation makes it harder to look after your kids. Before this internship, I knew that the environment in which someone lives impacts on their way to parent their kids of course. However, I didn’t realise the extent of it. I was not aware of the amount of deterrents that living in a stressful situation generates. Tough times put parents in a situation of multiple incapacities where daily life things, that can appear as easy for other people, become unreachable because of time, stress, money, energy or patience. Unless you have experienced this first hand, it is hard to guess. I have come across plenty of family situations and have asked myself multiple questions. If I were a single Mum, would I take time to play with my child when I come back exhausted from my third part-time job? If I were depressed, would I be able to think about how my kids can get more positive stuff in their lives? As someone on a tight budget, would I make eating dinner together a priority if I relied on community services to feed my kids? Probably not. I just wouldn’t have the possibility, the energy or the patience to do so. Yet, it’s what is crucial as a family. When families experience tough times, they are actually too busy with matters that stress them out to be able to care for their kids as they would like.

The second thing that I have learnt is that not having been raised with positive routines can prevent someone from setting them up for their own family. In fact, struggling parents usually don’t realise how important settled routines are for making a happy family. Parents experiencing hardship in raising their kids actually often didn’t have settled routines when they were kids themselves. Then, basic little things that I think of as normal, like having dinner together, taking time to show interest in your kid, playing with them, reading them a bedtime story are not something natural for them. Additionally, realising how important routines are is not enough. One thing that has really struck me is how some people are really willing to be good parents but just don’t know how. For instance, one of our seeking family’s goal is to work on kids’ behaviour, notably through finding new ways to communicate within their own family. This single Mum attended heaps of parenting classes and is obviously trying her hardest to set up good routines. At night, she gets her kids to sit around the table for dinner, as what professionals and social workers advised her to do. Yet, she is unable to connect with her kids: her family don’t know what to talk about because they haven’t been taught how to do so.

My experience at Family by Family has allowed me to have a deeper look at the struggling families’ daily life. It has entailed a big change in my mindsets, one that I am really happy to have made. I have met several parents who do love their kids and want to be good carers but just do not know how. Then, being a good parent is not only a love or a will matter. Parenting is not always that natural. One needs to have been shown how to set up good routines and behaviours either by their own parents or by an organisation which can provide them with a bit of support, like Family by Family. Similar to what Simone de Beauvoir said, one is not born, but rather becomes, a parent.

We've moved!

Fri, 11 May 2012 15:00:00 +1000

After months of planning and negotiating, we're pleased to announce that we've packed our bags and moved east! Monday, 12th May 2012 marks a key milestone as we open shop in the new TACSI HQ at:

Level 1,
279 Flinders Street
ADELAIDE SA 5000

Our new telephone number is +61 8 7325 4999.

The new TACSI HQ includes a range of exciting features including offices, a design studio, meeting rooms, a dedicated events space, a co-working facility and more!

The events space will be available for hire from June 2012, and can accommodate up to 80 people. Enquiries can be made by emailing info@tacsi.org.au

Keep an eye on the website for photos and information on the all important office-warming party!

TACSI HQ / Level 1, 279 Flinders Street Adelaide SA 5000

5th Annual SIX Summer School in Adelaide - Save the Date!

Wed, 02 May 2012 20:40:00 +1000

The field of social innovation is rapidly expanding - and the Social Innovation Exchange (SIX) is keeping pace and becoming ever more global. This year, TACSI is very excited to be partnering with SIX to host the 5th annual global gathering in Adelaide.

This year’s Summer School will shine a light on growing pains. How are we growing and sustaining our innovations...our organisations...and the social innovation field?

We’re interested in exploring the SIX community's collective wisdom around issues of finance, talent, methods and partnerships to name a few, so pack your ideas, stories and practical examples!

As with other SIX events, the Summer School will bring together a unique mix of inspiring people from all over the world and from a wide range of sectors. Policy makers will join with leading thinkers, practitioners, academics and funders of social innovation.

We look forward to seeing many of you again, and meeting many of you for the first time in Adelaide.

SAVE THE DATE

5th Annual SIX Summer School

26-28th November 2012

Adelaide, Australia

New Co-Working Space in Adelaide - Express Your Interest!

Wed, 02 May 2012 14:00:00 +1000

TACSI's new HQ boasts a magnificent co-working space for organisations and small businesses from innovative and creative industries.

Tenants will have access to features such as WIFI and photocopying, not to mention very competitive rates.

We're currently seeking expressions of interest from prospective tenants, so if you're interested in finding out more, please contact David Kelly on david.kelly@tacsi.org.au

What is Co-Working?

Co-working is a style of work which involves a shared working environment, sometimes an office, yet independent activity. Unlike in a typical office environment, those co-working are usually not employed by the same organisation. Typically it is attractive to work-at-home professionals, independent contractors, or people who travel frequently who end up working in relative isolation. Co-working is the social gathering of a group of people, who are still working independently, but who share values, and who are interested in the synergy that can happen from working with talented people in the same space.

Lunch with Alex

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 15:42:35 +1000

Last week the Radicals had lunch with Alex. Dr. Alex Kalache is a current Thinker in Residence in Adelaide. He has a wealth of experience and expertise in ageing through his work as Director of the World Health Organisation as an advocate for older people. Alex joined us for pizza, and to hear us pitch each of our 6 potential solutions. Alex gave us great feedback on the ideas, saying they aligned closely with the shift of paradigm he believes is needed in ageing and care.

The Perfection Trap

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:34:47 +1000

Hi I am Seb, I haven’t written a blog yet because I have been waiting for the perfect one to pop into my head.

I am going to write about what I think of as the perfection trap, which is summed up by saying “don’t let perfection get in the way of progress”. I am constantly figuring out whether I should be putting things in front of families when they are not perfect. The thing I have learnt is that in a start up nothing is ever perfect. At family by family nothing is perfect yet, it is like we are spinning plates and we can’t ever stop to fix them because if we do that all the others will fall down.

It is a constant struggle for me because I like to create systems that work, not only for today and tomorrow but forever. The problem is that at Family by Family we create systems that are based on the user and not what is the easiest solution for me. It is hard, but necessary, to create systems that are short term fixes when I know that they will have to be changed in 2, 6, 12 months.

A good example of this is the problem we have with phones at the moment. Currently all of the sharing families are on a prepaid phone plan. This is great they get loads of credit and cannot surprise us with any bills. This was a great system when we thought of it with 10 phones to buy credit for. Now we have a problem, we need to buy phone credit for 24 phones. All of a sudden this is a time consuming job, and we have to think of a new system.

Do I wish that we could have done this differently? yes, Do I wish that there was an other way to set all of these phones up? Yes. Do I think this was the best system and right decision at the time? Absolutely. The problem is that there is no perfect answer, no magic bullet when you are setting things up. We just have to do the best thing at the time. What we come up with is almost never going to be perfect.

It sometimes feels like we are not thinking ahead, or even setting ourselves up to fail. When I feel like this I look at the alternative, if I do not create this system that I know is not perfect what will happen? The answer is simple, NOTHING. So everyday I have to remind my self that it is important to create things that lead to progress even if they do not fix the problem forever. Otherwise we will not be able to grow and try new things as an organisation. If we do not try new things we will not see out the year because Family by Family is not perfect, and because we create systems that are made to fit the families, they will keep changing as do our families.

NEW REPORT: Family by Family Playford Scoping & Start Up Report April 2012

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:00:00 +1000

Two years of work with over 100 families in the City of Marion, South Australia, tells us that Family by Family is a promising practice. A practice that fills a real need. A practice that engages families who don't typically sign up to anything. A practice that enables families to lead change.

Too many promising practices never spread. Those that do spread are too often ineffective. Practice is picked up with the best of intentions and imposed on a new area, without first understanding what it would take to work in that particular area.

We believe that simply transferring the Family by Family model from the south of Adelaide to the north would not have worked.

Funding from Playford's Communities for Children Plus and Playford Alive not only gives us a chance to adapt the Family by Family model to Playford, but it has also enabled us to develop a methodology to spread Family by Family to communities across Australia.

That methodology starts with what we call scoping. Scoping doesn't aim to re-invent the model in each new area, but to reshape it so that Family by Family is a truly local network of families helping families move towards thriving.

Understanding local families is the first stage of scoping. Over the past 3 months we've run 5 pop up stalls, met over 100 families in Playford, and hung out with 15 of those families in their homes and in the community.

This report is the story of the families we've met, what we've learned from them and how we're adapting the Family by Family model to fit Playford.

It's also the story of what we've learned about scoping, and how we'll be refining our approach to scoping next time around.

A copy of this report is available to download from our Publications page.

Financial Inclusion for Social Enterprises and Non-Profits

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 09:00:00 +1000

This workshop will focus on building an understanding of community finance and its use for asset purchase and business development.

Join us for an interactive & educational workshop designed to help you understand

recent shifts in community finance
how a loan for asset purchase could help your organisation
what barriers exist to accessing finance for asset purchase and business development.

Is your social enterprise considering growth and expansion?

property purchase?
business development?
refurbishment?
new products?
new equipment?

If so, this workshop will help you to understand how to achieve this through community finance.

Date: Thursday, 17 May 2012

Registration Time: 9:00am

Start Time: 9:30am

Concludes: 12:30pm*

Cost: Free

*Tea/coffee and a light snack will be provided during a morning tea break.

Who Should Attend:

CEOs, CFOs, Business Managers, Finance Managers and Program Managers.

Getting There:

Driving - Casual car parking is available at 218-224 Flinders Street and 2 hour on street parks are also available around the area. Please leave adequate time to find a park if driving.

Public Transport - 99C City Loop comes along Pulteney Street (alight stop E1 and U1)

Click HERE to register for this FREE event (you will be directed to Foresters Community Finance to complete registration)

Hosted by The Australian Centre for Social Innovation and Foresters Community Finance

Changing Families

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 10:09:06 +1100

Working with families is unpredictable because this is the nature of family.

Things change for families on a constant basis. One of my challenges is making behaviour change happen for seeking families while they are in the midst of their unpredictable lives. Then add into that the constant development of the program at the systems and business end. During the 15 weeks I have been coaching there have been 3 major changes to the way I do it. Sometimes I have taken this as a personal hit, that the work I’m doing is just not cutting it.

However, I have to remember that I’m the first one to be out there on the ground doing this. I have to remember that Family by Family is very much in the growth and development stage. So is it more about adaption and mindset than to do with work ethic. I have this constant voice in my head reminding me that it is not about me. It’s that Family by Family is in the development stage. It also reminds me how lucky I am to have the space to develop such a fantastic program.

What a great investment of my time and energy I’m involved in. This is a true and honest gift we are promoting amongst families, the opportunity to create thriving families and communities.

Thanks for the heart work

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 17:25:25 +1100

A couple of weeks ago after running a Family by Family event Carolyn sent a text out to the team. Her auto correct function changed one word in that message, so instead of reading “thanks for all the hard work.” It read “thanks for all the heart work.” This got me thinking, what does it mean to do work that comes from the heart?

Hearts are vulnerable, they can break, they can stop functioning, hearts feel joy, they race faster when they are scared or excited. They are the first thing you see on the scan of your baby.

The functioning of the heart in so many ways reflects the functioning of a family. The families we work alongside do “heart work” within their families on a daily basis. It is their insight into the vulnerability of this precious thing and their ability to nurture it, even on occasion revive it, that makes them amazing sharers.

As a family coach choosing to work in a way where I really care about something is a much harder road to take than just committing to hard work. Our sharing families have shown and taught me that you will get a better result in the long run if you do a job with your whole heart. I can see and honour this in our sharing families, using them as a guide to my own vulnerabilities and passions, so together we can see our heart work influence the community.

So to all our sharing families, the real enablers of change, I forward on Carolyn’s message...

“Thanks for all your heart work.”

First steps at Family by Family

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 17:05:52 +1100

With a Bachelor in Social Policies and a dissertation about the French child protection system recently completed, I started my internship at Family by Family in mid-February.

I undertook several internships in the past, where I dealt with different issues such as domestic violence, abused children, orphans, drug addiction, poverty, errancy and migrants. I can say that I saw heaps of different dramatic situations, I have been told awful family stories. However, I have never been as overwhelmed as I have been at Family by Family.

Undertaking an internship in social innovation when you are 22 years old makes you experience many different feelings. The excitement I had during the first week when I discovered our amazing programme quickly changed to bitterness. In fact, during the first week, I idealized the programme and the sharing families that I would come across. The second week, I took a slap when I actually met the sharing families involved in the programme. After my first dinner with the sharing families, I remember telling my colleague that I could easily guess which families were sharing families and which ones were seeking. She laughed and told me that only sharing families attended this dinner. When I got back home, I felt quite upset. For me, some of the sharing families were not in a position where they could help another family because their behaviour was not appropriate: shouting at their kids, being rude, etc. I even thought they would need a link-up themselves.

After more than a month of hindsight, I know the families better now. I have noticed their strengths and that they were actually resourceful and highly resilient. I have learnt to regard them with a positive psychology approach; not to only see the empty part of the glass but focusing on their assets. It doesn’t mean that I don’t want the best for the families. It means that I have acknowledged that they need time to thrive. Regarding what they have been through, families are doing really well. I admire them. Being a sharing family is not being a perfect family, it is about having behaviours that show other families how to move on.

Over all, I think that what I found the more overwhelming is that I can identify with the families, much more than in my other placements in the past. They could be a member of my family, or I could be a member of theirs.

Co-Design

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 17:29:48 +1100

Co-design is something I’ve avoided until now. Co-design is the phase that the Radical Redesign team is currently in. We’re taking early ideas about how things could be better for carers out to people in caring situations.

We’re seeking their feedback: what ideas are interesting, what ideas aren’t, what people’d need in order to get involved, and what sort of change an idea could create. Co-design is asking people what they think, and doing more than just listening to the answer. Ideas that don’t fly in co-design are changed or discarded. Feedback we get in co-design is what decides what the rest of the project looks like.

In my previous work as a teacher, I avoided co-design. But many of the best teachers I knew used a version of it every day. These teachers involved the students as much as possible in setting the classroom’s course: how classes ran, what good work looked like, what projects and areas of interest to explore. They asked for genuine feedback on their hunches, teaching and goals. When I think back on my teaching days, I think I mainly avoided this. Why? Because it’s scary. If you really do co-design, you have to be willing to throw things out the window and start again. You have to let go of your control of your idea of how things should be, and be open to following others lead. You have to let go of the idea that you know best. It’s hard.

There’s heaps to learn from co-design. It’s part of the process where were learn so much, and one that I wish I’d used more before. It takes some humility to do, and a bit of pluck too.

Stop Me in the Street

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:42:29 +1100

It’s been too long since my last blog post and we’ve moved into the create stage.

It’s all about mulling over the findings from our latest report “Love Ins, Lobsters and Racing Cars”, the generation of some ideas or solutions and heading out to share them with people and practitioners to hear what they think, what they like, what will work and what won’t (this part is called co-design).

At Radical Redesign HQ the heat has really been turned up! In late January we spend a few days holed up in Maccelsfield learning some new ways to generate ideas or components of ideas, how to package those ideas to resemble a solution and ways to visualse those ideas to help communicate them.

At the moment we are smack bang in the middle of co-design and it seems like the ideas are evolving and being reshaped by the minute. 2 hours in a lounge room with a carer in Unley or at a kitchen table with a 75 year old in Salisbury is just so useful. It’s worth more than a few weeks sitting in the studio dreaming up ideas imagining what people might say and do, how they might react.

Taking our ideas to the streets, to the people living and breathing the lives we are trying to improve - to get closer to their version of great living is really helping create better ideas. We have been mocking up posters, creating menus, designing brochures and catalogues all in an effort to help people understand our ideas and how they might run. We’ve been getting feedback about whats great and whats not. What people would readily engage with, what they might engage with if it was tweaked or what they just wouldn’t have a bar of. Understanding whats behind peoples preferences is helping us to flesh out our ideas.

Our first stakeholder event held in early February was a wonderful opportunity to get to meet many of the practitioners and service providers in this space. We unleashed the opportunity areas we are looking at developing solutions in and had got some valuable feedback and input. We have also spend some time in many of the services out there in the older peoples space and continue to do so. It’s been really valuable tapping into the knowledge and using it string and mesh together ideas into solutions. Having multiple avenues of input has helped me cultivate my ideas into something much more specific, robust and detailed (theres still a long way to go!).

Having a way of talking about the project, what we are doing and how we are doing it to people from different backgrounds is proving vital. Sometimes people get what I’m talking about and I’m pretty sure sometimes they don’t. Explaining the project and talking with people is a great way of consolidating what we are learning, getting input and again - reshaping our ideas. If you stop me in the street and ask me to explain the point where the project is I might explain it well or maybe not so well - sometimes I need time for my thinking to catch up with how much I am learning. However I explain it, I am always interested in uncovering new ways and people to help our ideas move forward.

Stop me in the street. I’d love to chat with you.

Grandmother Lorri during a co-design session with Jenna

New report: Developing skills for life and work: Accelerating social and emotional learning across South Australia

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 09:30:13 +1100

Recent years have seen significant shifts in the world of work, with the focus moving away from industry, towards innovation and the ‘knowledge economy'. At the same time, the global economic slowdown has meant fewer labour market opportunities, particularly for young people. Consequently, young people today enter a world of unparalleled uncertainty and risk, with the most marginalised and vulnerable facing the greatest threat.

The majority of young people in South Australia continue to thrive, with lower than average youth unemployment, and a well-performing school system. But for a significant proportion of young people, the transition from school to further education and especially to the workplace, remains challenging. Efforts to improve formal qualifications and work-based training have been redoubled in response, but there is also a growing consensus that more must be done to build the ‘softer' skills which employers say are increasingly important in getting on at work.

In this paper we explore the evidence for the importance of a greater emphasis on social and emotional learning, as part of a holistic view of young people’s education. We look firstly to the trends in the field globally, and in Australia and South Australia specifically, highlighting the need for new approaches.

This report was a partnership between the Young Foundation, TACSI and the Foundation for Young Australians.

Read the full report here.

New Report: Love-ins, Lobster, & Racing Cars.

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:30:13 +1100

Mike and Liz

10 kilos of bananas, 200 Anzac biscuits, and 130 conversations later, the Radical Redesign have published the next report from their Ageing and Caring project.

After two months spent with people in Unley and Salisbury we’ve come to the end of our ‘Look and Listen’ phase and are proud to launch our report, “Love-ins, Lobsters and Racing Cars: Great living in late adulthood.” We've learnt a lot about what great living looks and feels like for people in caring roles and relationships. Click here to download.

The report tells the stories of the people we've met, and outlines 7 opportunities we’ve identified for enabling more people in caring roles and relationships to lead great lives.

Participants Dudley and Daphne with their dog Dasha.

Thanks to everyone who so openly let us into their lives, living rooms and kitchens. We can’t wait to bring some of our early ideas back to you in the next month and work together to design some great new solutions.

Thanks too to the many services we spent time with, who were so open and positive about sharing the way they do things.

We look forward to hearing what you think of the report! Get it here.

Solutions that work

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:55:00 +1100

On 4th November 2011, South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill launched Solved, our latest effort in scouting for and sharing social solutions working to address social issues across Australia.

Spotters took to the streets and over the next 6 weeks, put forward a total of 80 solutions. Each entry went into the draw for $5000 cash and 10 hours of expert mentoring from Christian Stenta, TACSI’s Venture Support Leader.

After hours of careful analysis and deliberation, the judges’ votes are in... it’s a tie!

Our congratulations go to Welcome to Australia and Produce to the People Tasmania, both of whom have been selected as the winning solutions. Each project will receive $2,500 in cash from TACSI as well as 10 hours of expert consultancy.

Produce to the People Tasmania is a locally driven initiative aimed at addressing the issues organic waste and food security in north western Tasmania. PTTP have successfully replicated a model initially developed in San Francisco, USA within a new context to meet a locally identified need.

Welcome to Australia is a powerful, community driven social media campaign sharing a positive voice around asylum seeking, refugees and multiculturalism that is not politically aligned or focused on policy.

For more information contact Christian Stenta on (08) 8110 9957.

The power of play at Family by Family - Part 1

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:32:28 +1100

Before joining TACSI I was a junior primary teacher. For many years I tried to spread the word to anyone who’d listen about the importance of play for children’s development and wellbeing.To be honest I’m not sure if I’ve been too successful. Some realise it’s value for little kids but as soon as children hit school learning to read and write (formally) becomes the overwhelming priority. In fact, learning these skills, along with skills in numeracy, will dominate a child’s day at school five days a week for 12 or so years. And it has to if you want them to do well in NAPLAN and a whole range of other testing. I’m not saying these skills aren’t important, they are, but I believe these skills only make up a small part of what children need to become a happy and healthy, involved member of their community.

Since starting at Family by Family and working more directly with parents as well as kids, I’m getting a sense of what is blocking the paths to being happy, healthy and connected within a community. Families are stressed and many of the stressors seem to be centered around:

isolation
strained family relationships
concern over children’s behaviour

More so than ever I can see the value of play for both kids and adults, especially when it has the power to positively impact on the stressors listed above. And it does so for the following reasons:

Play brings people together. Think of how many people at sporting clubs or hobby groups connect over a common interest, regardless of their differences.
Play can strengthen relationships. It gives families a chance to be there for one another, build trust and diffuse anger. Play can also create a safe environment to work through past troubles.
Play gives kids something to do and it’s what they should be doing naturally. Often children’s bad behaviour comes from boredom or not being able to use their energy constructively.
Play is fun and it’s ok to have fun, even if you’re an adult!

So whilst I always knew play was vital for children and their families maybe my approach to spreading the word wasn't quite right. I thought I had to teach families how to play because they didn’t know how. And while I’m sure everyone could benefit from trying out some new ideas, I’ve realised many families actually do play very well. What they do need help with is to learn to make it a priority. We all need to realise that it’s ok to play and that it’s just as important as learning to read and write. We also need to know that the more time and effort families invest in playing the better the outcomes for their family will be.

Country music trumps merino socks - How can we create the experiences that people really care for?

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 10:32:05 +1100

Christmas has been approaching so fast this year, hasn’t it? It seemed like December has been under a time lapse rushing to become history. At the radical redesign studio our thinking & doing caps have been focused on creating the Insights & Opportunities report of the caring project (to be released in January).

Evenings and weekends we’ve spent in look & listen mode in the “ethnography zone” with people in Salisbury and Unley. Those many impressions and thoughts during the intense days of December helped me frame a first hunch to a question that I’ve been schlepping with me: If during the look & listen phase we get to deeply understand people’s life as it play out every day, how can these insights then facilitate experiences that work for people in the creating phases?

It seems an answer to this question might be just under the Christmas tree.

My Christmas shopping of gifts and experiences for the family suffered badly this year. A case of too little too late. While I speak regularly with my family and long-time friends, based in Europe, I haven’t spent much time hanging out with them. We speak about our lives, rather than live them together. So I found it hard to put myself in their shoes, what could help them with their plans for 2012? What experience could give them joy in the new year? Weren’t it for a few tip offs from people around them the stockings would have looked awfully vanilla – timeless pairs of socks that would be little more than trade ins come Boxing Day.

In contrast, it was so easy to think of small but meaningful surprises for the people that have been very happy to share a sliver of their life with me during the last few weeks. People like Leon who is an expert in repairing trailers and find precious metals in old appliances to be sold on to the recycling yard. Or Barbara, a proud Scottish lady who likes to teach her parrots how to speak, and is an expert in preparing tasty short bread, haggis and other delicatessen. Or Daphne who loves decorating cakes but hasn’t done so for many years and firmly believes that cupcakes aren’t sold at up and coming purveyors of specialist patisseries.

I’ve started to understand where people are coming from and where they want to go. Leon likes for instance spending more time line dancing at the country music or to enjoy a nice bottle of Shiraz with friends. Barbara loves a voucher for delicatessen and for trips to meet people again who share her wicked sense of humor. Daphne likes an assortment of cupcakes with fancy frosting and her husband Dudley likes that ticket for a day of respite at the car races to soak in the action and the hypnotising noise.

During the times spent together a little magic happened. Tuning a classic V8 with layers of dust on its bonnet with Dudley in a fully kitted out work shop with cob webs, or spending time with Leon at the country music were the stepping stones to grasp their ideas of what a good day in their life looks like. With this experience in mind it is then possible to work out not only what they’d like more of in their lives but also what would make a good gift for them - a gift that gets them closer to their idea of a good life.

So next time I want to fill the stocking of someone that I care about I’ll better make sure I first understand through experiencing where they come from and where they’re going to avoid that vanilla pair of socks experience.

Scaling Social Impact

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 17:12:12 +1100

Hello! I am Suhit Anantula, the new Business Coach of Family by Family.

As you would all be familiar, the Radical Redesign team at TACSI over a year of innovation created the Family by Family Project. Now, the project is headed by Carolyn, there is a new team and they are expanding. Where to next? What the team at TACSI rightly identified is that as a social enterprise, how can we increase our social impact? How can we scale? That is where I come in.

My background is in business. I worked in sales, Investment banking, social entrepreneurship in rural India, many failed startup attempts, the environmental field and currently working in Families SA with an MBA. In all these roles, I have learned that there is tremendous value in using Business tools and techniques in the social space.

In simple terms, how can we scale Family by Family. What is the business model required to do this? From a business point of view, what the Radical Redesign team has achieved is a new methodology to create innovative products. The working backwards methodology of social sciences plus design thinking has a great potential to come up with new solutions for social problems. However, we need a methodology to scale it, to grow it, to increase our social impact.

The best analogy I can give is the iPhone. Before the iPhone, a smartphone looked like a Blackberry. The best keyboard, emails, BBM messenger, internet on the phone etc. After the iPhone innovation every smartphone started to look like it. That is great product innovation. That is not enough though. The growth of the iPhone and its increasing impact is due to a number of other factors like superior manufacturing, supply chain management, marketing and sales, financial management, negotiations with carriers, Apple retail stores, creating the App store and developer relationships and on and on. You get the idea. There is tremendous business model innovation and organisational capability behind the product development.

This is the exact kind of work that is required to scale Family by Family. I am a big believer in design thinking and will be using the design thinking principles to develop the business model behind Family by Family. I am very excited to work with Family by Family as well as Brenton and the rest of the team at TACSI.

As we learn to scale Family by Family, we will be sharing our experiences here. In due course, we should start to codify this knowledge in such a way that it can be shared across other new product innovations that will be coming out of TACSI.

For more on business and the social sector, check out my blog - www.worldisgreen.com

Designing Better Lives

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 11:05:30 +1100

Designing better lives: An economist’s appreciation of design

Nicholas Gruen [1]

Design is often described as making things not only useable but useful and desirable/delightful. We'd agree this is important - but what is even more fundamental (and rare) is making things that prompt change.

Sarah Schulman and Chris Vanstone [2]

I.

Design is on the march. Apple teeters on being the most highly valued company in the world – its core competitive strength lying in design and systems integration, not technology. ‘Design thinking’ is becoming increasingly prominent not only in the development of products and processes, but also in the delivery of services. So much so that Deloitte has recently begun investing heavily in its own ability to provide its clients with design knowhow as a crucial engine of its innovation and competitiveness. As I write this, a prominent article on Australia’s Deloitte Online’s homepage [3] is titled “Design thinking demystified”. So what is the core contribution of design and what is behind its rise?

Adam Smith’s invocation of the benefits of self-interest – or as he called it self-love – is famously encapsulated in this aphorism:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

Smith’s point is not that self-interest is good in itself, but that the self-interest of one person in a market brings them into relation with others’ self-interest. Note that Smith’s injunction (implicitly to both parties) is for each to seek their own interest by addressing themselves to the other’s interest. Since Smith founded it, the discipline of economics has focused on the incentives facing each of the parties to a bargain and on their relative bargaining strength.

But there are more things in heaven and earth. For the butchers, bakers and brewers of Smith’s time there was no great mystery as to what constituted the customer’s wants or needs. Today’s world is much more complex. If you’re making computers or even cars, customers have specific wants that are not so easily divined by producers. Thus, part of Japan’s auto-producers’ recipe for competitive success was meticulous attention to consumer needs.[4]

This process has now gone much further. A great transformation occurred at the outset of the personal computer era when the Apple Macintosh showed that consumers didn’t just want more technical capability from their software and hardware – something that could be captured well enough in standard disclosures of those technical capabilities. They wanted user-friendliness – a very different thing and something inherently difficult to ‘disclose’ in specifications.

It turns out you can’t really make a car or a computer useable without a lot of work, almost invariably involving the users themselves. And indeed there is a discipline that has grown up under our noses which has been all but ignored by economists and policy makers but which nevertheless addresses itself to this issue. That discipline is design.

II.

Design is often thought of as an essentially aesthetic overlay on products. We know it contributes to usefulness – indeed, particularly since functionalism, usefulness is part of the aesthetic. Yet, as Steve Jobs is famous for insisting, good design is not fundamentally about how something looks but rather how it works. Intriguingly, Adam Smith would have agreed. He quoted his friend and fellow philosopher David Hume to the effect that utility was one of the principal sources of the beauty of things. Indeed, Smith went further, arguing that people were often more strongly motivated by the beauty of all the complex parts of some mechanical or social artefact working felicitously together than they were by the utility to which it gave rise.[5]

Smith was particularly proud of this gloss on Hume, and I suspect it explains much of Steve Jobs’ commercial success too. Jobs’ genius also helps illustrate something else of great significance in modern design. Consumers may not have sufficient information or expertise to know what they themselves want. In such circumstances good design often requires creative leaps beyond simple functionality. Jobs was celebrated for his intuitive leaps in anticipating the way new technology might be used to make new kinds of products before consumers could tell market researchers how much they might like them.

These developments have been a source of great renewal within the discipline of design and have underpinned the increased attention and prestige it is receiving. The revolution Apple started with the ‘user-friendliness’ of the graphical user interface has morphed into a preoccupation with actively designing ‘user-experience’ – or UX among the cognoscenti – to the point that, for Web 2.0, useability (including the pleasure of use) has become a precondition of competitive success.

III.

And, as I learned on taking up the chairmanship of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI) in late 2010, in some places these ideas are being taken further still. If design principles matter when considering the interface between humans and their increasingly indispensible gadgets, or when considering the design of bank branches and airport executive departure lounges, how much more important might they be when considering the interactions within more complex social institutions in health, education and social support?

TACSI established a Radical Redesign team to explore and extend these ideas. We recruited Sarah Schulman, a social scientist, and Chris Vanstone, a designer, who together form a professional partnership from the UK with some exciting projects behind them, and Carolyn Curtis, an Australian social worker on secondment from the South Australian Department of Families and Communities (now renamed Communities and Social Inclusion). The cross-disciplinary nature of the team draws attention to another critical feature of design. Despite endless exhortations for academics and professionals to be more cross-disciplinary, a variety of institutional imperatives in most disciplines appear to push towards ever-increasing specialisation. (Again, it was Smith, the apostle of the division of labour who warned us of its capacity to so narrow our focus as to dehumanise workers in a factory.) Yet the usual practice early in any design project is the search for insights from any number of divergent perspectives. To achieve this, design is usually built around small, cross-disciplinary teams. If there is a discipline of the cross-disciplinary, it is design.

The brief of Radical Redesign’s cross-disciplinary team was to find a way to reduce the likelihood of families falling into crisis and so requiring the services of the state. It began by consulting various relevant literatures. It also embraced ‘ethnographic methods’ – an exotic name for a very ordinary process that is nevertheless (astonishingly enough) rare in social welfare agencies. The team visited families but with purposes different to the ones social workers might have had. The team spent time with them in order get to know them, their environment, values, routines and aspirations. Its objective was not to advise, instruct or assess in accordance with agency procedures, but to engage the families in a search for what might improve their lives.

The result, after a substantial period of prototyping, trial, error and refinement, was the Family-by-Family program. It is a hybrid between a mentoring or peer support and a behaviour change program. In traditional programs, social workers might work directly with individuals or (unusually) with families on specific issues. In Family by Family, ‘sharing’ families, who have been through difficult times but who seem to have made their way through them, are paired with ‘seeking’ families, who are seeking something better in their lives and may be at risk of falling into crisis. As my colleague on the TACSI board, Martin Stewart Weeks, puts it:

Instead of assuming people, in this case families, need a service in the traditional sense, it suggests that to a large extent they are the service. The real subversion of the design method is that it assumes the best way to learn is to look and listen. Hard, for a long time, with some humility and always from the perspective of the people who want to improve their lives, thrive or whatever other positive outcome they yearn for. For all its obsession with focus groups and customer surveys, this is something the public sector often finds extraordinarily hard. This is why people always react so positively to Family by Family for all its simplicity and old-fashioned ordinariness. It’s so far removed from the often rigid and contrived rhythms of ‘consultation’ and ‘co-production’ that consume the professionals. [6]

IV.

These thoughts conjure up one of Friedrick Hayek’s central motivating ideas. In a series of essays in the 1940s, Hayek critiqued the way in which the intelligentsia increasingly privileged some kinds of knowledge over others. They were privileging their own kind of knowledge – of systematic inquiry and knowhow such as engineering. By contrast, unsystematic knowledge of the everyday – knowledge pertaining to some local time, place or context, or to the idiosyncratic preferences of individuals – was given short shrift.

When applied outside its proper sphere – for instance to government – this mindset spelled hubris. It failed to appreciate the extent to which the governed would make their own decisions. Indeed, one of the central motifs of Hayek’s denunciation of Soviet-style central planning is its under-appreciation of the local (unsystematic) knowledge of those on the ground. For the “marvel” of the price system was that it acted as “a system of telecommunications” to distribute the sum of information about local trading conditions and opportunities throughout the economy.

Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is . . . a body of very important but unorganized knowledge: . . . the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. [In this] respect . . . practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active coöperation. We need to remember only how much we have to learn in any occupation after we have completed our theoretical training, how big a part of our working life we spend learning particular jobs, and how valuable an asset in all walks of life is knowledge of people, of local conditions, and of special circumstances.[7]

Hayek’s concern here was knowledge of market conditions, and so he juxtaposed the knowledge of scientists and engineers with the knowledge of traders. It is unfortunate that Hayek’s preoccupation with prosecuting his case – now thankfully won – against central planning so comprehensively diverted him from exploring the wider relevance of his ideas. In this context those ideas enable us to better understand the potential of design and ‘design thinking’. For the ‘scientific’ knowledge from systematic inquiries into psychology, sociology and even economics give us far less purchase on the human world than the disciplines of natural science and engineering give us over the natural world. Moreover, the point of any social action is to influence the experience of those ‘on the ground’.

Introducing design thinking on the homepage of Australia’s Deloitte Online website, Zaana Howard extracts the following “generally agreed upon” characteristics of design thinking:

Empathy: development of a deep understanding of the needs of people for whom the solution is being designed; seeing and ‘feeling’ the world through their lens in order to develop a rich understanding of the problem context.

Human centredness: design thinking considers the needs of all people affected by the problem – customers, employees, business partners, suppliers – and solutions are designed accordingly.

Holistic view: it locates the problem within its wider context and understands its interrelationships and interdependencies with other systems.

Collaboration: collaborating with people from multidisciplinary backgrounds enables radical innovation through the bringing together of diverse skills, knowledge and experiences.

Design doing: despite its cognitive connotations, design thinking is action oriented, valuing doing and making things over thinking and meeting.

Visualisation: visualisation may take many forms – sketches, prototypes, mind maps or stories – all of which allow for interaction with ideas and solutions, and act as conversation starters to develop shared understanding and iterative design.

Future orientation: design thinking is focused on creating better results for the future, not just on resolving problems for short term gain.[8]

In contrast to scientific knowledge, the elements of ‘design thinking’ as expounded here are from the lifeworld.[9] Thus described, design thinking stands as a counter-narrative or foil to systematic and scientific knowledge offering an antidote to the hubris that Hayek warned us against so presciently.

One might even go so far as to argue that the current dominance of scientific over local, contextual knowledge of life as experienced, of theory over practical wisdom, is precisely the wrong way around. Of course systematic, scientific knowledge is of great importance – and is a central reason for our species’ progress in recent centuries. Yet, if the preeminent value of science is its contribution to our lives, the skills of practical wisdom should surely guide our appreciation and application of systematic knowledge. In Family by Family, organised disciplinary knowledge is consulted wherever useful in designing the program and rolling it out to families. But it remains in the background, mediated by and subordinated to the practical commonsense of those on the ground. The professional knowledge of the social worker is reintroduced and recast.

V.

With the model having completed its initial proving up and now being rolled out to other suburbs, the program is receiving some media attention. Presenters on the 7 pm project commented on how old-fashioned it was – like neighbourhoods of old with people helping one another out. These observations point to the essential simplicity of Family by Family and its goals. And they illustrate something else. As with much good design, it is unobtrusive to the point of invisibility.[10] Yet, despite its informal ‘feel’ and mode of operation, the program has been painstakingly designed from the ground up. Throughout the program a range of routines, events and materials have been scrupulously co-designed by the team and the users through endless prototyping, testing, feedback and iteration. Here are Schulman and Vanstone on the design input to the program:

The Family by Family Blueprint runs to nearly 100 ‘scenes’ each scene being 'designed' and each scene calling on at least one designed 'touchpoint' (e.g. a brochure or work book or manual) that is itself designed. We estimate the documentation of this to run to over 200 pages and the number of designed 'touchpoints' to exceed 150. We've detailed to this level because we're designing for scale.[11]

Specific designed aspects of the program include:

recruitment materials;
events;
training camps;
the professional 'coach' role;
websites;
promotional materials;
the visual identity of Family by Family;
measurement systems and
backend systems such as customer relationship management systems.

VI.

Unlike most design, Family by Family seeks not to facilitate some end state, but to facilitate change. But where Steve Jobs might have had the uncanny knack of divining what people had not yet realised they wanted, Family by Family is built to assist its participants to come to understand and articulate the change they want and to help them realise it. Thus, at the outset and throughout the program, coaches take families through a process of reflecting on and refining their goals and then working to achieve them.

This is not just a program in which families mentor other families. It recasts the role of each of the players. The family members are no longer simply getting ‘counselling’ from a social worker – they’re much more active in the process. And the external influence on the seeking families is not a social worker but rather sharing families, who are coached by outsiders. The training of the coaches is an integral part of the design of the program only now being fully worked out as the program is being scaled up. Those coaches may, but need not, be qualified social workers, but their training shows them how to maintain a balance between being informal and focusing families on setting goals and monitoring their progress towards them.

I think of all this when I’m discussing the program with politicians and administrators who often assume that replicating our achievements will be straightforward. If only! We know only one means to effect the requisite transformations in these multiple social roles – Family by Family.

It is too early to pronounce the program a success as there is insufficient data to evaluate it rigorously. However, the signs are extremely positive. Virtually everyone associated with the program has been very enthusiastic, from its sponsors in government and the third sector to the families themselves, many of whom describe their involvement with the program with great excitement.[12]

VII.

Family by Family is at the forefront of contemporary experimentation with social forms. But it is built upon the kind of perennial insight that somehow became marginalised in many of the workings of modern government and society. Within a community, our own health and happiness is ultimately bound up with the health and happiness of others’ lives. That was something that Adam Smith pondered deeply. His 1759 book Theory of Moral Sentiments sought to delineate the social preconditions of a healthy society and economy. It begins: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it”.[13] In fact in most cases, as Smith understood only too well, we gain more than the pleasure of seeing others’ happiness. But given that human freedom and human happiness is found within a social context, Family by Family tries for a new synthesis of local and generalised professional knowledge.

Anxiously observing the French Revolution at the end of his life in 1790, Smith looked with foreboding on the emerging triumph of what today we would call ideology, and what Hayek called the hubris of ‘scientistism’. That was the conceit that those with sufficient expertise can (and therefore ought to) make better decisions about people’s lives than they can make themselves. In the last, revised edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments he warned against “the man of system” enraptured with the beauty of some ideal for government.

He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess–board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess–board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess–board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it.

Smith went on to point out that if those two principles oppose each other, “the game will go on miserably.” Certainly it has for some families in crisis. By contrast, as Smith puts it:

If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful.

Family by Family deploys the discipline of design in an attempt to bring that integration about – intellectually between systematic knowledge and the lifeworld of families, and in practice between the world of state-funded services and the intended beneficiaries of those services.

Time will tell how successful we have been.

[1] Nicholas Gruen is CEO of Lateral Economics and Chairman of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation. He is grateful to Martin Stewart-Weeks, Anne Edwards and Matthew Silva for comments on an earlier drafts.

[2] Personal correspondence.

[3] http://online.deloitte.com.au/ Accessed on 25th Nov.

[4] There was more to it than that. The Japanese production system was not just better at integrating the perspectives of producer and consumer. It decentralised the process of decision-making within the production system by actively involving suppliers and employees in endlessly optimising the entire production process.

[5] See Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part IV, Chapter I. “Of the beauty which the appearance of Utility bestows upon all the productions of art, and of the extensive influence of this species of Beauty” at http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=192&layout=html or http://tinyurl.com/3muq6au.

[6] Personal correspondence – slightly edited.

[7] Hayek, Friedrich A., 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, American Economic Review. XXXV, No. 4. pp. 519-30 viewed at http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html.

[8] Howard, Zaana, 2011. “Design Thinking Demystified” at http://online.deloitte.com.au/our-thinking/design_thinking.html accessed on 27th Nov, 2011.

[9] My use of the term ‘lifeworld’ is commonsensical, rather than a term of art, and I would content myself with this dictionary definition: “the sum total of physical surroundings and everyday experiences that make up an individual's world.” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lifeworld accessed on 17th Dec, 2011.

[10] Rule 5 of Deiter Ram’s 10 rules of good design is that good design be unobtrusive. http://www.vitsoe.com/en/gb/about/dieterrams/gooddesign.

[11] Personal correspondence.

[12] See for instance http://vimeo.com/23628619. Many other resources can be found here: http://vimeo.com/search/videos/search:tacsi%20family%20by%20family./st/53d350f7 accessed on 17th Dec, 2011.

[13] The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1790, available at http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=192&layout=html.