Building culture for co-production - Chapter 9. Living in difficult times

We can’t always provide money but we can often provide one or more of the following instead:

Time

Social contact

Information

Skills and Learning

Spaces or places

Objects or items

What else might we provide?

How can we help each other today?

Visioning exercise

(Adapted from The Work That Reconnects Network) work as a team to reflect and share your thoughts, draw a picture and talk:

1. It’s 2050 and you are sitting quietly with a cup of tea reflecting on the work of your community, organisation or team. You are so delighted with what we have achieved since Covid. What are you most proud of?
2. Back to now: If our beautiful planet could speak (humanity and nature being one), what is it trying to tell us about the role it needs your community, organisation or team to play?
3. What do you need to enable you to make your contribution to this 'great turning' (as Joanna Macy calls it) towards sustainability and a fair society?
4. What is your community, organisation or team already doing that begins to meet the needs identified in the previous questions?
5. What more / different / other / else does your community, organisation or team need to do? What do you need to stop or pause?

Adapted from A Whole New World: Public Service in the time of Coronavirus.

Allowing public servants to be human — focussing the attention of public servants on building relationships with those they serve — to understand their strengths and needs and respond appropriately to both. This means liberating public servants (and those they serve) from attempts to control their work in a hierarchical manner, and instead focusses on building trust at all levels.

Creating continuous learning — in situations of uncertainty, we often do not know what the ‘right’ thing to do is. There is no manual from which to operate. So, everyone must learn, as they go. It is the job of managers to create emergent learning environments and practices; ‘learning by doing’.

Nurturing healthy Systems — Healthy systems are ones in which different actors can co-ordinate and collaborate effectively. Healthy systems produce good outcomes. They are characterised by trust, openness and honesty. It is the job of leaders (at all levels) to create and nurture healthy systems. It is the quality of relationships within them that enables the relevant systems to respond effectively in a crisis. If you have been investing in your relationships previously, you will now be reaping a dividend. If you haven’t previously invested in building relationships between actors in the system, now is a great time to start.

Human Learning Systems is also an approach which can be explored, developed, and applied. See Human Learning Systems

Old normal

This is the normal that existed before the current crisis in which we find ourselves now. It will quickly become hard to remember all the details of this normal. There will be things that you are missing from this time and there will be things that you never liked anyway. There may even be people who you have lost.

When you get a chance, make a note of the aspects of this normal that you would like to let go of and the ones that you might have to mourn, if we cannot return to them.

Transition normal ←You are here!

As your current crisis starts, you will be dealing mainly with the practicalities of emergency response. You may be dealing with emotions such as pain and shock, or this may come later, delayed by the need to respond rapidly and effectively in the moment. There will be moments (however brief) when you have the time to notice what is happening around you. In these moments, ask questions like:

What is happening right now?
What am I grateful for?
How has connection and relationship (unexpectedly) strengthened?
How are we innovating in ways that could be useful later?

New normal

This is where you will land as you come out of your current crisis, perhaps into another crisis or, if you are lucky, into a period of relative stability. From where you are now, you can have only very limited certainty about this normal. But you can make choices now that might influence how it could be.

Identify your baggage and luggage from ‘Transition normal’. (Do this any time during ‘Transition normal’, as you cannot be sure about your travel date into ‘New normal’. Update your baggage and luggage list, as necessary).

• Luggage = the aspects of ‘Transition normal’ that I’d prefer to keep
• Baggage = the aspects of ‘Transition normal’ that I’d prefer to leave behind

Take actions as early as you can that will help you retain or restore your luggage.
Take actions that will help you leave your baggage behind.

Look after yourself and others and the nature around you!

What else do we need to consider?

There is no need to be frightened of change – we and our systems are constantly changing and it is possible to enjoy learning how to change (develop) in a good way, through practice.

Also consider how the social model can focus and assist your thinking in relation to this.

Have confidence in our previous ideas – if we tried something earlier this is not a reason to give up but is a rich source of data which we can use to help us try again by creating a different (potentially better) prototype.

Be open to morphing these old ideas in the face of new evidence – be creative, be innovative!

Take actions that have immediate effect – design your prototype so that it makes a positive difference from the start.

For more details on prototyping.

It is great to discover that we can use technology to reduce our carbon footprint, breathe cleaner air and reduce commuter stresses but it remains challenging to rebuild all the elements of a healthy office-based workplace online.

One of the biggest challenges is how to recreate those informal, chance meetings that can make us so effective when we work in a shared space.

Keeping in contact with your colleagues from different backgrounds, roles and organisations helps your work and your health. Maintaining contact with others can help you feel part of ‘Team Wales’ and brief informal check-ins (especially with people who work on different topics) can improve your effectiveness. It is not easy to do, but remember that we all need to be needed, so be creative and ask for small but definite contributions. You don’t need an excuse to make a healthy choice – whether that is inviting, accepting or declining till next week/month because you are busy just now.

Here is what some of us have been trying. Why not try one for yourself?

• Literally recreate chance meetings: when you notice that you’re missing someone; invite them for a virtual cuppa to acknowledge that: ‘we would have met in the coffee queue by now’ or ‘usually, I get to chat with you in the corridor/canteen sooner than this’.
• Create opportunities for random conversations: check that your colleague is flagged ‘green’ (i.e. free to talk) and ping them an invite for a quick virtual cuppa.
• Recreate a ‘sense of what’s going on by hearing conversations round and about’ by interspersing the daily huddle with ‘what’s occurring?’ sessions where we talk about what we are doing in ways that generate random connections.
• Don’t be shy of instigating or strengthening your personal performance check-ins. Use strength-based coaching or simply take the opportunity to briefly put something to your manager (or another colleague) for their ideas.
• If you have a daily or weekly check in to say ‘hello’ in the morning, invite occasional guests to join you or pair up, every now and again, with another team.
• Make time for a virtual coffee break with some colleagues just to catch up. Having other human interaction (with offline space for yourself in between) is beneficial for you and your work. Talk about how you feel and what you are up to. What can you get up to together?
• Experiment with virtual ‘playtime’ - virtual activities, quizzes, Pictionary, mindfulness, craft sessions, etc. Challenge 2 teams to play collaboratively or competitively.
• Start your day with an on-line exercise class and invite a friend to come along and review it over a virtual cuppa. Or join a weekly mediation session, e.g. Breathing Space
• Begin a new club or society – or bring an old one online.
• Set up a ‘random coffee trail’; a ‘virtual cuppa’ where people opt in to be randomly allocated a partner and each pair finds time for an informal virtual meeting, each month.
• Start every meeting with a check in and finish with a check out – ask how you feel (in a word or a sentence) and ask another good question, too.
• Investigate using the multiple rooms element of Zoom or MS Teams so that you can have pair work in your – formal or informal – meetings.
• Arrange a webinar, make a film, create a podcast, write a poem, write a song or perform together.

Vision

We aim to embody and enable loving responses to our predicament.

See also Inner Development Goals

Principles

We return repeatedly to 3 principles:

• return to compassion. We seek to return to universal compassion in all our work. We remind each other to notice in ourselves when anger, fear, panic, or insecurity may be influencing our thoughts or behaviours. We remember to take care of ourselves, especially when the urgency of our predicament can easily lead to burnout.
• return to curiosity. We recognise that we do not have many answers on specific technical or policy matters. Instead, our aim is to provide a space and an invitation to participate in generative dialogue that is founded in kindness and curiosity.
• return to respect. We respect other people’s situations and the way that they may be reacting to our alarming predicament, while seeking to build and curate nourishing spaces for deep adaptation.

Guiding questions

Four questions guide our approach:

• resilience: what do we most value that we want to keep and how?
• relinquishment: what do we need to let go of so as not to make matters worse?
• restoration: what could we bring back to help us with these difficult times?
• reconciliation: with what and whom shall we make peace as we awaken to our mutual mortality?

Our commitment

We are committed to learning how to become a loving response to our predicament. We have very little idea how to do this, but everyone has something to contribute.

This is how we choose to spend our remaining time, whatever happens.

You can find out more about the Deep Adaptation Forum here or read stories about what we are learning here.