A metaphor, a hack, a ladder: On the difficulty of telling yourself the truth

I wrote a couple of pieces for apolitical a few years ago, but didn’t persevere. I then got an invitation to discuss my experience with the inevitable internal review and had a good discussion. Saying that apolitical seemed very optimised to its audience, which of course is its right. However its eagerness to demonstrate its usefulness to readers’ careers in the civil service, it rather played itself out of what I wrote about. I hoped what I wrote was useful, but it also often tried to look at more fundamental things about the way particular approaches were keeping us from progress. Anyway, they seemed to understand my point and said they’d be interested in publishing more stuff from me. So I sent off this essay and they seemed keen to publish it.

Then I was told that I needed to answer three framing questions — which you’ll see below.

I wrote back

I can see that this could be a good template for lots of articles, including some of the kinds of articles that I write, but this isn’t that kind of article. Is it possible to vary this template at all? Would you consider labelling it a special essay or ‘think piece’?

Anyway the answer was …

No.

Then I worked out a way to meet the requirement that, courtesy of a bit of playfulness actually improved it. The editors also added sub-headings which I left in without paying much attention to them — I hope they improve it.

• The problem: The fat relentless ego.
• Why it matters: It’s not about you.
• The solution: Unselfing.

You may have done an exercise like the one illustrated here where you draw a picture and then you do it again with the picture upside down. Having done it years ago I can assure you it made a huge difference. It’s a lovely illustration of Richard Feynman’s assertion that, in science, “you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool”.

The ‘before’ picture is ‘theory-laden’. But the exercise shows you how bad your theory is — how what you know for sure just ain’t so. The ‘before’ picture is laden with ill-judged shortcuts — an eye is a white pinched egg shape, framed by eyebrows and eyelashes with a dark pupil in the middle. Well no it’s not. Not when you look carefully and then try drawing what you see. Who’d have thought that would be a better way to draw?

The exercise demonstrates the way in which learning to see is, at the same time, an unlearning of how not to see. Yet the way of seeing you must unlearn is already second nature to you. Keynes expressed this difficulty when it comes to changing our framework of thought: “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.”

Yet the drawing exercise is richer. It shows us how, even after we stop getting theory so wrong, we’ve only just begun. We now need to reassemble bundles of tacit knowledge and reconfigure them around whatever task is at hand. Each bundle on its own (looking, drawing) and also in connection (looking to draw and then looking back with some renewed focus for our attention). Getting better at this is not explicitly conceptual. It’s a matter of practising, learning, and integrating what we’ve learned and then doing it again. We’re building ‘muscle memory’.

Sketching out a theory

The greater practical content of the drawing exercise conjures up for me the experience of building Family by Family at The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI). Venturing out from what we all know (or think we do) about what troubled families do wrong and what they should do about it, the designers sought to unlearn what they knew, to go through a laborious discipline to help give agency to the families in collaborating to build the programme. (There’s an analogy with psychotherapy. Patients want a better life, but they want lots of other things as well. Successful therapy involves confronting the discomfort of really choosing a better life — which means unchoosing some of our security blankets and ingrained habits.)

Those running the process that led to Family by Family had to work through prior ways of seeing that had been interposed — by theory, academia, bureaucratic systems and the families. They had to make progress by noticing, trying and testing with the families and then building the programme as Toyota would build a car, through endless cycles of design, prototyping, testing, and then repeating it all to ensure smooth production down the assembly line. And then, once production has begun, further optimising the process every day of the car’s production life.

And, as with the portrait, we’re rewarded and reassured by things seeming ‘right’. Having seen through a glass darkly we find ourselves a little closer to seeing face to face — with a revivified understanding of reality. As TACSI board member Martin Stewart Weeks put it:

TACSI’s method … 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. … 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 … that consume the professionals.

I’ve previously talked about the power of the ‘hack’. Discovering that some problem in the world is real might leave us painfully far from solving it. A ‘hack’ occurs where our insight about the problem also affords us an insight or even a clear method of improving it. In the case of the drawing exercise, we gain insight into the problem as the hack helps us solve it. The hack of drawing a face upside down enables us to see how our implicit theories (in this case of what an eye, a nose and a mouth look like) are getting in the way. The hack enables us to see what comes next — which in the case of drawing is not more ‘theory’ but building capabilities slowly, patiently with practice. This is the ladder.

Filling in the gaps

And this is what happened with Family by Family. The programme took lots of practical work. And it can only be maintained with practical work testing, developing and improving aspects of the programme. Likewise, the families need to work at things to improve their lives. With the drawing, with Family by Family, with psychotherapy (and at a pinch, Keynes’ General Theory), the breakthroughs require what Iris Murdoch calls ‘unselfing’ — finding a way of slaying “the fat relentless ego” and its attachment to something it knows … or thinks it does. Making further progress requires further unselfing — the process of learning new things, or building muscle memory. This will be assisted by owning how little you know. And for as long as the learning proceeds, the unselfing never stops.

The example of learning what’s really required to draw better gives us a window on how hard it is to get the social services bureaucracy interested in learning how to deliver programmes that work. Keynes was a genius. The rest of us are not. More to the point, Keynes’ obstacles to ‘unselfing’ were intellectual. It’s hard enough to convince others in a discipline that one’s new way of thinking makes sense, but how much harder is it to move beyond business-as-usual in in social services which:

• are of immense subtlety
• are about things people already have implicit theories about?

But if one gets that far with a new programme, if it’s to really succeed the whole system must respond to it on the merits. This will involve the many different people and systems in it giving the new possibilities their due rather than the business-as-usual treatment. And these things are stacked against that happening:

• Those with power to allocate system resources have far higher status than those designing and running programmes in the field.
• What must be done involves the coordination of numerous functions by large institutions with many stakeholders and institutional imperatives.
• The politicians directing our institutions have strong priors about how the world works or must acquire them once the media require them to role-play their competence for the public.

These things tempt those inside these systems to make do with what they know — draw that theoretical face — and certainly not adopt strategies to force them to acknowledge the capaciousness of their ignorance and incapacity. Indeed I can hear mission, vision and values statements coming on, to say nothing of a strategy to really sort out one’s priorities.

And then there’s political discourse itself. As James Burnham argues, over nine-tenths of political discussion is wish-fulfilment (or I’d add, allocating blame for problems rather than solving them). Our ideologies provide endless tempting off-ramps from this unexciting business of engaging with reality and trying to improve it. Having articulated how difficult these problems are, I can hardly be accused of having come up with a ‘hack’ to get us instantly doing better. It’s a lot harder than getting better at drawing. But the process is similar for those who are up for it. It starts with unselfing — and more importantly, the institutional equivalent of it — and the unselfing never ends.