19th May 2021. Mental health. Innovation
Mental health is a collective problem; making frugal innovation work
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: Mental health is a collective problem
Since Geoff Mulgan stepped away from NESTA to join UCL’s Institute for Innovation in Public Policy, he has also been blogging more, which is completely welcome. His posts cover a wide range of policy issues.
A recent post seemed especially valuable: the observation that although we experience mental health at an individual level, and that this is how it is generally treated, it is actually a collective, social issue.
(Photo: Anton Diaz/Our Awesome Planet, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
As he notes, psychiatry already has a widely used and widely accepted tool that addresses individual mental illness. This is the DSM framework (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, now on version 5)—even if this is problematic:
There is much that can be challenged in it. It rests on an uneven evidence base (only a tiny percentage of psychology experiments are successfully replicated); it uses often arbitrary categories; it lacks much solid knowledge about causal mechanisms; and it’s prone to ideological biases (homosexuality was only taken out of the DSM in the early 1970s – before that it was treated as a disease). But it does at least provide some coherence.
But when it comes to groups and organisations, we have increasing amounts of data, but no framework. Part of the article reviews the current types of data that do exist. His question, therefore, is what our maps of collective mental health might look like. This thinking is at early stage—more questions than answers—but some contours start to emerge from the discussion:
If we had better measures we could use them not just to address negative patterns but also to promote positives - to understand what helps groups to thrive... The best predictors in the annual World Happiness reports are survey answers to the question of whether you had friends or relatives you could rely on in a crisis. We might expect that to matter for firms and groups too. An organization I helped found – Action for Happiness – for example, now has very powerful evidence on how to boost both well-being and feelings of social connectedness. There is also recent interesting evidence about how firms that followed some approaches sustained employee wellbeing through the crisis much better than others.
Mulgan also outlines some research questions that would help make our knowledge about this area of collective mental health more systematic:
What do we know about how collective mental health effects collective intelligence and decision-making?
What do we know about directions of causation, from individuals to the group and vice-versa?
How can we best spot pathologies—and their positive equivalents?
I particularly like this last idea—of looking for behaviours that represent the inverse of pathological behaviours and create positive social outcomes or group outcomes, rather than just focussing on behaviours that are destructive or extractive.
The Collective Psychology Project, now part of A Larger Us, has also been thinking along the same lines. Its strapline is, “The quest for a better future begins in the places where our states of mind and the state of the world meet.” Its working model is to get to a better future, we have work to do on ourselves; work to do with each other; and work to do together.
All in all, this feels like an idea that is right for the times. I think future generations will look back and wonder why we ever thought of mental illness as being an individual issue, not a shared one.
#2: Making frugal innovation work
Frugal innovation
I liked the frugal innovation problem solving canvas, published on Medium by Abinav Agarwal. Readers who follow this kind of thing will notice its formal similarity to Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas, and I suspect that once you crack the innovation model you might then use the second one to build the business model.
Agarwal hopes that this model will help companies break through the cognitive and cultural constraints that prevent companies seeing frugal solutions. The canvas is pretty self-explanatory, when read in conjunction with the article, which also includes various tools that might be helpful at different stages.
I particularly liked the section on assumption testing, and its associated 2x2. This seemed a good way of structuring the kinds of disagreements that can open up in a project team or a workshop at this stage in the work.
The 19 questions to ask yourself to check whether your solution is actually a frugal solution also seemed useful.
Agarwal has also published a bunch of other resources to help companies adopt a frugal approach to working, from the frugal strategy canvas to the tips to becoming a frugal company.
j2t#100
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