7 June 2023. Making sense | Food
What we are doing when we are sense-making // The five challenges for a UK food policy. (#464)
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1: What we are doing when we are sense-making
Rob Miller has embarked on an interesting project on his Roblog blog—a complete introduction to sense-making, spread over 18 fortnightly posts. He’s a couple of posts in, so it’s a good moment to mention it.
He defined sense-making in his first post in this way:
To me, sense-making is the practice of dealing with situations that are complex and defy easy understanding, or that are changing rapidly, where the relationship between cause and effect is unclear.
He also quotes Dave Snowden’s simpler definition:
(T)o him, sense-making is answering the question “how do I make sense of the world so I can act in it?”
This makes it seem like quite a formal process, but in practice we engage in sense-making all of the time. We just may do it more or less unconsciously, and more or less well.
(Paintbrushes. Image: Pxhere: CC0 Public Domain).
So, Miller suggests that sense-making is an activity that goes deep into human culture and human history, and that it’s about narratives and stories. But it’s also a practice, in the sense that it is something that we can reason about, and analyse, and get better at.
In the second post, he sets out to describe the characteristics of sense-making that distinguish it from other thinking practices, breaking it down to six things. (Obviously this list about sense-making is also the product of a sense-making process):
Complex, not simple
Narrative, not numeric
Plausible, not correct
Social, not individual
External, not internal
Continuous, not static
I’ll come back to the word “plausible” later on.
But working through this list:
complex, because sense-making is more valuable and more necessary when the relationship between cause and effect is not straightforward. (“Complex, not complicated”, is another more technical way to describe this.)
narrative, because sense-making using stories ro explain the world. (I’m reminded of a an argument I once read that suggested that good futures work iterated between stories and systems).
plausible, because sense-making “favours usefulness over accuracy. Making another connection here, this sounds a bit like Richard Rumelt’s description of a strategy “diagnosis”: A good diagnosis simplifies the complexity by identifying the critical aspects of the situations.
social, because you don’t do this on your own. Sense-making is a social process that involves interaction with others. Again, some of the discussions about futures work being a process of “social construction” seems to fall into this space as well.
external, because sense-making is about your relationship with the outside world.
continuous, because it’s not a closed process with an ending. You learn and adjust your sense of the world as new things happen and new patterns emerge.
So just picking up on the word “plausible”. I’m really not sure why it gets used so widely, since part of its actual definition in English is about deception.
seeming likely to be true, or able to be believed: a plausible explanation/excuse
A plausible person appears to be honest and telling the truth, even if they are not: a plausible salesman.
(That is from Cambridge Dictionaries). Or, for American readers, from Merriam Webster:
1: superficially fair, reasonable, or valuable but often deceptively so: a plausible pretext
2: superficially pleasing or persuasive: “a swindler … , then a quack, then a smooth, plausible gentleman”—Ralph Waldo Emerson
3: appearing worthy of belief: the argument was both powerful and plausible.
My view here has been coloured by learning that when people—usually people in positions of power—described scenarios as “implausible” they almost always mean, “something that my worldview does not permit me to explore.”
In general, therefore, I always use the word “credible” instead.
I’d also just pick up on Rob Miller’s suggestion in the first piece that sense-making is becoming more important because “change is speeding up”. That’s not really what the evidence says. What is happening is that complexity is increasing, along with volumes of information (or worse, volumes of data), at the same time as our deep mental models of how the world works are being challenged by the end of modernity.
That’s why stories work, and why this work is social. We are, essentially, trying out on each other different mental models of how the world works to see if we can find a version that explains it better. As George Box said, “All models are wrong. Some are useful”.
I’d also make a connection here between sense-making processes and Tony Hodgson’s work on visual facilitation (which can be found at H3Uni), which offers a structured process for surfacing and capturing ideas in a group that is trying to make sense of things.
By the time Miller has finished this project, he’s going to have about 10,000 words on sense-making, by my estimation. So I hope he’s also planning to turn it into a short book when he’s finished.
2: The five challenges for a coherent food strategy
There seems to be a bit of a food theme emerging this week, with the news that the Food Research Collaboration has closed its (metaphorical) doors at the end of May after almost a decade of work. The Collaboration was an academic and civil society project supported by the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation. The FRC brought together:
academics, civil society groups and practitioners to produce and share the evidence-based knowledge needed to protect and expand the UK’s sustainable food sector.
One of its leading lights was the academic researcher Tim Lang, who has—over the course of about 25 years—moved from being a dangerous radical to somewhere in the centre of the debates on food, while not changing his own views much at all.
(Professor Tim Lang. Photo: City University)
In April, Lang wrote a blog for the FRC that summarised what he saw as the five challenges facing the UK as we try to build a “Good Food Plan”. (Some of this is “local difficulties”; some is more widely relevant.) He starts with the fact that Henry Dimbleby’s independent, but government-commissioned, report on a National Food Strategy—called, simply, “The Plan”—has largely been ignored by the government:
Many outside government couldn’t believe that the NFS Plan wouldn’t be taken seriously. Never underestimate the enemies of the public interest.
Lang himself manages to embrace the optimism of the long-term activist with the scepticism of experience. He is fairly certain that sooner or later a British government will need to take food seriously—just that it won’t be this one.
The five challenges, therefore, are designed to lay out the sort of policy agenda that a government that did plan to take food seriously would need to address.
1. How much food to grow?
Should the UK grow more? I think yes. Could it? Yes. Will it? Not at present. The 54% currently home grown should be ratcheted up to the 80% it was in the early 1980s. Why? Because food is once more part of cultural and economic geopolitical uncertainty... The UK imports apples and pears. There’s no need. It imports meat. Ditto. It eats some foods it couldn’t grow – bananas, melons. It has a food manufacturing sector which needs an overhaul, churning out ultra-processed foods. They make money but damage the NHS. False economics.
The guideline here, he says, should be “low carbon; low footprint; healthy”. But one of the trends of the 2020s is likely to be that food becomes part of the definition of security.
2. Food labour
Food is the world’s biggest employer. It’s the UK’s biggest employer, although food service has been weakened by migrant EU workers returning to the EU. Defra set up a review which only focussed on manufacturing labour when what’s needed is a food systems approach. The UK europeanised its food tastes when in the EU. Migrants picked the crops, milked the cows, worked the cappuccino machines, cooked the pizzas. Government says: invest in technology to replace them. But that doesn’t come onstream for 10-15 years.
But post-Brexit, migrants are still coming in to the UK to pick the crops, as they do almost everywhere, but they’re more likely to be paying gangmasters to get here. Hence: a food strategy also needs to come with a labour strategy.
3. How to change diets
It must partly be a plan to turn off the tap which pours out ultra-processed foods that create the pressure of diet-related ill-health for the NHS. And it must be partly a plan to shift diets, not by individualistic exhortation or moralising but by proper support. Changing the conditions to facilitate good health... pricing, taxes, regulation, tougher controls on marketing, changes to the immediate food environment.
The rationale for this is that the current system is a massive market failure—the food “market” sprays out external costs everywhere—health, climate, even the education system, where poor diet is a factor in reducing attention in class and reducing attainment levels.
4. Food as a driver of the cost of living crisis
(W)hy does energy get all the political attention while current 18% food price inflation is deemed unstoppable? For me, this exposes the UK’s distorted set of economic values. Massive housing costs are taken as a ‘ladder’ or an investment opportunity, while a good food system is assumed to be one which delivers cheap food. Let’s drop this myth of cheap food… A Good Food Plan will have to accept that good food does not necessarily come cheap. We get what we pay for.
One of the corollaries here is that if we are going to pay more for food, we need to pay less for some other things. Some of the other broken markets—housing, energy, and so on—also need to be addressed. It won’t show up that much in the GDP figures, but better food is actually an investment in improved standards of wellbeing.
5. The deep sore of food inequalities
The world of food is massively divided , whether we look at it globally, within even rich countries like the UK, or within households. Life expectancy is nearly ten years lower in poor areas than affluent ones. A Good Food Plan must not confuse ‘levelling up’ with narrowing inequalities.... (W)e know that more equal societies are ones where even the relatively poor have a sense of rights and entitlement.
(Food bank store in Bradford. Photo: Betty Longbottom/geograph.org. CC BY-SA 2.0)
I’ve written about this before, but the idea of the right to affordable, accessible and nutritional food seems to be slowly moving up the policy S-curve, moving from the “framing” space where it would be an emerging issue into the “advancing” or advocacy stage. That’s partly driven by the costs of unhealthy food to everyone. But it’s also driven by an ethical or moral view about the way in which poor food in childhood creates lifelong costs for people.
As I said at the start of this post, Tim has both the scepticism of the lifelong activist, and their optimism.In a final post on the last day of the FRC he drew on that experience in equal measure, in a post called ‘Never Give Up!’. At one level, no matter how much progress is made, the agri-foods sector will always try to reverse it. One the other hand:
It’s not all bad news. The public interest in food matters grows. New research and ideas pour out. Scotland has won the Good Food Nation Act, and Wales is in the process of agreeing a Good Food Wales Bill. One of the lessons we’ve learned in the FRC decade is never to lose heart. Keep plugging away with data, arguments, listening, summarizing, explaining, winning friends, engaging with realities. There is no shortage of deep, powerful opponents, but never give up.
And he also has an interesting perspective on the way in which crises open up the public policy landscape:
In a crisis, normality is in flux; so if normality is your problem, seize the moment. Easier said than done, I hear you say. Actually, what happens in crises is that positions that have patiently been building up, gathering evidence, trading arguments, influencing potential influencers, can suddenly gain legitimacy. Can, but not necessarily will. Timing matters, as does the building of alliances.
But what can happen in a crisis is that existing policies suddenly run out of road. Even if the government-commissioned National Food Strategy was quietly shelved, it still exists as a public policy report, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper—or the gap between the lobbying of special interests, and the outcomes of existing policies, to grow from a crack to a chasm.
j2t#464
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