https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_YIaMsoUMRU
So welcome everybody. I’m excited about this voices with Reveki. I’m here with Carla Groom. Carla reached out to me a while ago and I’ve been having conversations with her and some of her co-workers on a pretty regular basis and I saw her also at the final digital campfire and in-person campfire for Rebel Wisdom in London UK just at the beginning of November. So welcome Carla. It’s great to have you here. Tell us a little bit about yourself and why you reached out to me and how you’re interested in my work etc. Well it’s really great to be here. It’s a bit of a dream come true so thank you so much for inviting me on. So I’m as I say I’m Carla Groom and I work in the UK government as a behavioral science advisor. I set up a behavioral science team in one of the largest departments in government about seven years ago after working in government for a long time but I trained as an experimental social psychologist back in the late 90s early 2000s and then I went into I thought I’ve got to be a bit more practical in what I’m doing and so I went into government and now I get to put the two together in terms of practicing behavioral science in the in the heart of government and one of the things that I love about what I do is I part of my job is to know where the cutting-edge ideas are that can help solve the hardest problems because part of my remit is to find ways of solving the hardest problems and bring whatever ideas skills capabilities will help with that so I’ve stolen ideas from design thinking, I bring in systems thinking, I find that quite a lot of the mainstream psychological literature that I was trained in is not actually that useful for what I do and so things like the sort of the heuristics and biases literature that has been sort of been run out of values been run out of that in government but actually I’m sort of when I saw your work I thought cognitive science is I’m not done with this yet there’s some ideas here that actually I could use and so I think there’s so many different applications of your ideas that strike me as helping to make sense of the kinds of problems that I’m I’m wrestling with which are sort of the the hardest problems I like to think some of the hardest problems in in the country that I work on things like how do you get people back into work if they’ve got health conditions or if they had you stop them falling out of work if they take on caring responsibilities we work in the pensions arena child maintenance so really there is just all of these really difficult problems and then there’s what I find the most interesting problems which are how does government think about these things and what are the limitations the ways that think about it we might be able to overcome to develop better solutions to problems we haven’t been able to crack yet and particularly at the moment I’m obsessing about the four p’s different kinds of knowledge and going on about this to anyone who will listen it really hit me that if anybody if there’s anywhere that feels like a place where propositional knowledge is is privileged above everything else with a you know with a bit of a concession to skills and procedural knowledge in a quite a narrow sense it’s the sort of traditional bureaucracy but actually to where where we see things that really succeed there has been perspective taking lots of perspective taking integration of perspectives and then more and more interesting participatory approaches and co-production both in terms of evolving different teams within government as well as those outside so I think this is a really useful lens for me to be able to explain some of the stuff that my team sort of tripped over in starting to look at how they could solve some of these problems because I hire people from all the different social sciences into my team to try and see what with fresh lives we can bring to problems so yeah that’s how I ended up coming in and bothering you and starting some really interesting conversations with with not only me but some of my team getting involved and I think one of them’s got a plan as well to sort of take Socrates and Socratic method and see if we can build some training around that as well so I think well then look forward to after Socrates that comes out January 9th the new series will be all about that and how to turn it into a way of life and something that can really afford responding to the meeting crisis does the does my work around the meeting crisis have an impact on what you do as well like this idea that people are suffering from from a lack of you know significant and reassuring connectedness to themselves and other people and the world I think the place where that is that’s most directly applicable is in thinking about job design because I work in an organization that has over 80,000 employees so I get the privilege of being able to sort of help talk about job design and things like that so one of the the talks in fact I gave recently and will be giving again internally is about person-centered job design and how we can fit things around people’s strengths how we create conditions of flow and things like that so I think those I think that all kind of fits in the same idea of we need to build in purpose and meaning that’s how you get productivity rather than necessarily that as a social problem because a lot of the problems that my department department for pensions is is thinking about is people need the money to live and it’s materialistic for a good reason and those are the people who are talking to us need us to focus on making sure their material needs are met right so it’s more internally you’re applying it that externally I see and so what did you think about what happened at the the the the rebel wisdom campfire about how did you find that event oh I mean it’s it’s it was great because all of their events are great it’s sad that it’s the last one because I have got so much from the rebel wisdom project in terms of both ideas theory I but also practice and then realizing that I need to be selling the practice as well as the ideas because we need to get down to understanding those sort of participatory cues and things inside us in order to make better decisions but the bit that really stuck with me was your conversation with Daniel Schmackenberger where you where you talked about the the importance if I hope that I’m paraphrasing accurately of learning to take someone else’s perspective and then not only does that give you a better understanding of a problem but by integrating that with your own you get a better understanding of you get better metacognition you become better able to see because you’re seeing through your more than one set of eyes yeah and I thought that describes some of what my team has discovered other so this sort of emotional labor of helping people to expand their vision to include the perspectives of others is is key to some of the successes that we’ve had and so you say you think that your basic training in sorry not your basic training your significant training in basic social psychology didn’t really afford you any sort of preparation for this this kind of thing well like what was it oriented around then social the reason I asked this is social psychology is the part of psychology that’s suffering the biggest part of the replication crisis overwhelmingly so not and that doesn’t mean there isn’t good work still being done in social psychology my colleague Jeff McDonald at U of T is doing amazing work on attachment theory and its relationship to romantic relationships and that stuff replicates and etc but what do you think what like what was that what was lacking and do you think that has anything to do with why it’s going through the troubles it’s going through right now so I mean I’ve wanted to work on how you bring together psychology and practical real world problems especially to do with financial from from when I was an undergrad so before I went into experimental social psychology and the real sort of hardcore social cognition stuff was was my focus I was I thought that we would be understanding lots about the the limitations of the human mind which would tell us how we could support people to overcome those and to make better decisions but what I discovered was that the the research wasn’t necessarily in such a form that was particularly applicable I had my doubts about the generalizability of a lot of the experiments so not just the replication crisis but the generalizability crisis so all the things that Gide Gigerenza has written about yes about I knew that because my my sort of instinctive perspective take I was thinking that the way that the participants are interpreting the stimuli doesn’t necessarily bear any relationship to the presumed interpretation that comes from the hypotheses that the experiment is so I couldn’t I I thought not only could I see the replication crisis coming because it was kind of obvious from the way that data is being collected in sort of North American social cognition labs at the time but also I didn’t think that it was even generalizable and even if it was generalized it wasn’t necessarily all that useful so there was I got out of it after I did my my program in four years and then I sort of went and did a bit of individual differences and personality like for postdoc which I think is more applicable and I still talk about the big five quite a lot right I think that is really useful but then I I sort of came into the practical world first of consultancy and then and then government and was rather struck then that sort of 10 years later all of that heuristics and biases work and the social cognition work and priming and all these phenomena that I knew were had severe boundary conditions were suddenly being used to make decisions that were really important oh right so you know that’s the whole behavioral insights movement is is saying well let’s use these as a as a way to design the interventions that we might use to help people and fair enough you’ve got randomized controlled trials to see if they work or don’t work but the opportunity cost of putting those in place rather than thinking things through from different psychologically informed perspectives to me was quite was quite big and doing randomized controlled trials in a lot of areas is just not particularly possible so then you don’t have that sort of backstop so so that’s why what a lot of what my work has been has actually been saying you know what psychologists sociologists anthropologists have a lot to bring to the table but don’t just do that through the lens of randomized controlled trials and a list of cognitive biases because there’s so much more to psychology than that right so you you you generally find the more expansive and integrative frameworks of cognitive science better and more used to you exactly exactly that’s very interesting what about you personally i mean how does all of this so you this is great and of course i’m not trying to intrude on your privacy in any way but you know right so this is all you know i can see how this is all really central and important to what you’re doing in your job what about all of this literature and the stuff you’re watching and how is it impacting you personally that’s a really good question because i think it has changed me i mean i think doing this job of trying to work out how do you create the capabilities to solve the hardest problems has been something that has been much more than a job for me for the last seven years so it’s very much i go around seeing okay i’m really struggling with this or how do i explain this to people and and then i look out in areas like all the the areas that the rebel wisdom was covering i think ah there’s a bit of the answer there and a bit of the answer there so it’s sometimes it’s hard to separate the work and the personal but what i do know is that a lot of that practice work whether it’s breath work to help moderate the nervous system when you’re when you’re feeling stressed so that you respond in a more level way certainly a lot of i feel like i’m ever even more able than i than i was before to see my own thought processes so it’s like i’ve got i’ve got a um yeah two perspectives running at the same time i’m seeing through my eyes but i’m seeing my eyes at the same time and i can sort of choose between them and and i can record or mentally record what’s going on there um so that later i can say ah that’s the kind of thought process that might lead to that so i can be more and more and more and more sensitive to those so that a i can i can think about them change them but also i can explain them to other people because so much my job is explaining really things that can be quite naturally and to some of my team but teaching those to a wide range of people um is is trying to requires that you sort of meditate a lot on on how you on how you think that’s an interesting uh what you just made it brings up a question that and i’m talking to a lot of people about this in different ways about you know more and more trying to create the bridge between people’s work and their personal life about this stuff because if we can talk all that we want about sort of spirituality etc etc but but if it’s disconnected from people’s work lives it’s disconnected from the single biggest chunk of their life uh that they dedicate themselves to in a consistent manner and so you know trying to figure out how i mean obviously whatever the work is it has to do what it’s doing right you have to the government has to run and you have to help the people but right do you understand what i’m getting at like but nevertheless people have to take it up in a way that or or by means of practices and frameworks that bridge between their personal life and their work life does that make sense and land for you um i i think so let me try so um uh is this about how how do these practices and ideas affect you personally maybe give me one more go at it yeah so what i’m saying is there’s there’s there seems to be uh an additional dimension i’ll frame it in terms of responding to the meaning crisis there’s an additional dimension and i’m talking a lot of people about it is right yes we can talk about all the practices people need to be doing out here uh right but we need to create bridges bridging practices that help them transfer these practices into work and also take patterns that and habits that they might be cultivating work and learn how to bring it home and work on it you get get a two-way get a two-way bridge built between work life and personal life did that did that did that was that clear yes yes absolutely i think that was really important um a couple thoughts that come to mind one is um the the work that i’ve been doing on person-centered job design where the very so my my team is brings people in who have the variety of different social scientific um backgrounds different professional experiences um but one of the although there’s a certain level of consistency of uh practices that we that we train people it takes about two years to learn to do what we do properly um what i’m really keen to do is say well what is it that you’re bringing with you um from you know what is it that you sort of have a real passion about and what is it that you have um real expertise in um so not the traditional model of of um sort of a corporate organization and civil service is no different so we’ve got a role we’ve got some tasks that you do and we’ll create a role um the role might well be influenced by the person who did it before so you’re the new susan or you’re the new john um but actually nobody is the new they bring in their own expertise so in my team we we tell people that they that they don’t need to become someone else in fact we’re interested in finding out more and more about them so that we can get the maximum value from them not in a kind of um exploitative way but actually people love that and it also gives them a another way of getting um a sense of progression um status that isn’t just about climbing up a pyramid which obviously is a as um eric winesign has pointed out there’s a bit of a ponzi scheme feel about that but not everyone can get those promotions but everybody can become an expert so in my team it’s not that you’re oh which grade is it that oh i’ll go talk to somebody who’s a team leader like who’s the person who knows about this topic who’s the person who’s expert in systems thinking or theory of change and then you go and then you go to talk to them so that really levels everything and it just gives people a sense that that they are bringing their whole selves to work that that they’re not they’re not just they’re they’re inhabiting work in a in a fuller sense it’s not just a role in fact i hate the word roles and i think we need to move past a lot of the connotations of roles if we’re going to progress as an industrial society okay well first of all let’s let’s slow down on this because this is a really juicy point first of all that’s a philosophically profound thing about let’s try to get past the notion of roles which were drawn from sort of the dramatic right you know theater and stuff like that so that i want to come back to that but i want to get a little bit more again you don’t have to give away secret sauce or anything but like what do you what is this this you know person centered job design like what does it look like more specifically what what do you do with people how would how would it work how long does the process take it sounds like it’s very dialogical back and forth does it is it iterative like how does it work oh absolutely and and and i don’t have any problems sharing any of our workings there’s some some stuff about the way about the policy problems that we work on that um that i can’t share but i’m very keen to give away as much of what we’ve discovered as possible um not least because it’s a good but secondarily because if people can comment on it then i can improve it so i’m more than happy to talk about the way that we’ve been playing around with things in in in the team so we’ve got a number of new starters that are actually coming in over the next um six weeks and we’ve been having a rethink about exactly how our induction process works um and one of the things we do is um matching those new starters to roles where they can they they can hit the ground running because they already know something about about the area so we’re hiring one person who’s got a health services background we’ve got a piece of work on um how carers navigate um the the the system of support for their their sick or disabled family member so we put her on that project so she’s already bringing in her expertise um to to work in that area so we think carefully we don’t just say oh we’ve got four new starters we’ve got four empty posts we’ll just stick them in there we we think okay what’s that fit going to be what’s the the the the qualities that we saw at interviews our interviews are way more in depth than the normal civil service interview i’m happy to talk about that as well but we get a real sense of who people are and i sit on every single board so i can see all of that and i can match people up and say okay you’ll learn best from this person but then something that came up in a recent meeting was um the team was saying we should have managed moves every 18 months um not compulsory but an option to to work in different areas so you learn from from from different people but one of the things that we do um in those in management conversations um we have lots and lots of in of managed forums for coming together as a team but and lots of one-to-ones and in those one-to-ones we don’t talk about development needs which is the traditional sort of euphemism for there’s something about you that doesn’t fit the box that we need um can you please change and i say you know roles have development needs people don’t people might have learning goals things that they can learn to do that either they’re excited to learn to do or that would make their lives a lot easier but i don’t think we should be doing that kind of messing around with the participatory level in the self um without fully informed consent and knowing what we’re doing because actually if you change somebody’s self well what if the thing that you really like to interview goes away right right so there’s um so some of this is about planning people’s um initial couple of years who are they going to see what projects are they going to work on but right from the beginning we’ll be asking people about their past about their experiences we’ll see the way they approach problems say oh you’re bringing this to the party is that because you you’ve got a psych background or a geography background is that because of the work you did before um tell us more about that and we really encourage those conversations we also have something called journal club um where each week um each month i think it is we have a slot to bring a paper or book or a blog post and that really encourages people to bring things there that they’re passionate about they know something about from their discipline and you teach then that professional perspective and language to all the others so we’re constantly trying to draw out make make us more than the sum of our parts and to integrate that into a sort of a new whole that is that that is even better than any of those individual disciplines or individuals could have done on their own and you said your your interview process is much longer like towards what end and how so so um the it’s the interview itself that’s longer rather than there being more stages so the standard approach is first you do a an application and then if you’re sifted in then you have an interview the traditional approach is 40 minute interviews um with um sort of the exact same questions for every uh candidate um and they usually give us an example of a time when um which is uh which essentially it favors it favors i think this is a technical term bullshitting it favors people who can quickly tell a story to match the piece that the evidence they’ve got um and uh uh to the question that you’ve asked um dress it up nicely and tell a story whereas we actually authentically want to know what people are bringing to the party so we we our interviews aren’t 40 minutes they’re 75 minutes um that’s as long as we can go before people get so tired that they’re not doing themselves a good service at that point yeah there’s a huge limit to how long they can be and we start them with um give us a five minute presentation on a piece of what you’re proud of so that is bring them at their best what is it that you really you know really makes you shine and so a it relaxes them b it gives you an impression of them at their best how they talk how they think what they would most enjoy bringing to the party and then we have um three questions covering the three different criteria of my team which is collaboration and co-production and design and systems thinking um and uh behavioral thinking right and what we do there is is they say give us your best give it what is the best example that meets those criteria so no clever questions and we tell them that crucially in advance so you’re not having to work with it on the spot so they can sit down and think what is the best evidence i can bring to this in multiple examples one example none of this formulaic approach and then the real depth skill in the interviewer is to probe so instead of saying give me this example of time then so i can check it off it’s okay well you’re saying that now with their stakeholders there that challenged you so it becomes more of the pressure on the interviewer to find out if they’re depth behind the story that story they’ve told you but also to understand if they’re meeting the whole range of criteria through actually asking about their world so yes come away from the interview saying they’ve never felt so heard before right right so i can see how the participatory in the perspectival is playing a role in what you do yes yes oh wow that’s that is so oh wow that is so cool that’s so cool so carl do you do do you do follow up with them like you know five months later whatever like see how they’re doing or do they find are they’re finding the work more meaningful etc what kind of follow-up or do you do any follow-up so um i mean everyone who’s who’s successful stays in the team so i get to see that i’m in a really privileged position if i do all the interviews and i get to see all of the performance oh so i know i know for a fact that people have been through our full interview process i have a hundred percent success rate they’re all brilliant so i don’t obviously i don’t know who we might have missed um but i do know that even people who don’t get it say that they really love the experience especially people in neurodivergent conditions and that’s the whole thing we can talk about if you like which is that my team is heavily skewed towards people in neurodivergent conditions who often don’t know that until they get in the team oh i realize that there’s something very different about them um but i’m pretty sure that we would they would often have not got through a standard recruitment process but this process is designed to be accessible to people whose brains work in in different ways but in um we certainly always ask about the people who do get in the team we always ask them for follow-up multiple times about how the recruitment process worked how the induction process worked even now that we’re doing the induction for new starters we had a hive mind a kind of a brainstorm about well what’s been the experiences of people who have been most recent new starters what have been the people who are supporting them what are the things that are at the unmet user needs what things work well so we kind of we keep they keep that feedback loop going as much as possible and because we tend to have a very much lower rate of churn than other simple service jobs um we can we can really look at the longitudinal progress of people so uh yeah you sparked my interest there so you get you have quite a neurodiverse group um uh what does that mean um so i didn’t know when i started this team that i’m autistic um um but it explains a lot about why i have the particular and unusual but in some cases um very effective unusually effective way of doing policy making um and strategy and analysis right and so part of the rationale for sort of putting putting me in charge of this was that um it’s like well can we get more of what kala does we don’t really know how she does it um as well as the fact that i had the background in behavioral science and i’d come up with a bit of an idea about how behavioral science might be practiced in in our department usefully um and it’s there’s a there’s a kind of an interesting question of is it the behavioral science that is delivering the remarkable outcomes of my team or is it the fact that i hire people with neurodivergent conditions and i don’t i think that’s a false dichotomy right right um and i and interestingly they’re not the people in my team are not necessarily all autistic um in fact i’d say that the the largest group is adhd but we also have dyslexia dyslexia dyscalculia um and i think it’s that process of being different that leads you to be able to look different to not get sucked in to process and norms and the shared understanding that dominates well most environments but especially something like the civil service and so i can pick this up when i’m interviewing is are people making assumptions that they’re not testing are they questioning the way things should be done are they looking at things from the first principles and if you do that chances are when they end up with the team it’s like you probably tick one of those diagnostic boxes and then they go through a process of feeling safe to raise that possibility and then they go and get a diagnosis and then the team’s like yay jump in the club so it’s a really it’s amazing to watch these often young people come in and go through that that journey um uh that if they’ve been in a traditional corporate environment they might come in and all of that special skills and potential would be squashed and instead we harness it and then we also think about the person said to job design extends to things like well does one person have to do it all if you’ve got a superpower that probably comes with a weakness and does that actually we match this person up with this person oh uber job share so that you are complementing each other you implement opponent processing in collective intelligence that’s fantastic oh and so you’re and you’re looking for those cognitive styles and the complementarity in the interview 100 that’s brilliant that is brilliant wow we certainly do it when we’re matching people up as well so we’re looking in the interviews we’re looking for people who we think can can do that questioning gentle questioning of the status quo taking other people with them being able to not only understand problems differently but act in the world differently but then when they come in we make sure we recognize that superpowers come with limitations and i’d rather have people with superpowers and work around it than than have people who are kind of moderately good at lots of things yes yes yes i see that really tapping into point of processing within distributed cognition so like there’s a lot of innovation it’s really exciting to hear now you’ll forgive me if i have some of a somewhat kafka-esque view of the civil service right but so to put this in context but i take it that this is not how the civil service in general is running and so like that sounds like it poses particular challenges for you obviously you’re successful and they want you and your team to be doing what they’re doing but i imagine you bump into a lot of often probably implicit resistance and sometimes explicit resistance because what that’s not the way it’s done and that sort of stuff is that true or am i ever am i just projecting that’s a good summary of my life oh no oh no um um gosh i’m so sorry that we’ve got noise coming through can you hear that nothing at all okay great in that case i’m just going to ignore those noise um no that is a very good description of of my life um i would say well on the positive side um we are starting to spread these practices more widely i’m really excited about that so because my team kind of has the excuse of being a new discipline uh and a relatively well a tiny team in this in the in the grand scheme of 80 000 employees um i’ve been able to use it as a laboratory for testing out different ways of doing things um and then things that seemed to be completely inadmissible like the notion of questions in advance is the best candidate so questions giving it um questions in advance to interview candidates has for a while been recognized as a reasonable adjustment for people with autism or similar conditions right but the problem for me is um well what biggest one is what about the undiagnosed you’re going to be screening all of those out yeah um and secondly questions in advance is actually better for everyone um if you’ve that kind of um shared reality bullshitting type conversation um is uh the sort of play the game is the best way of saying if your if your processes if your recruitment processes encourage you to play the game you’re going to be ruling out people from a different class different culture um uh lots and lots of differences people with caring responsibilities might not have time to prepare for all the millions of different questions you ask so we just say we’re looking for this and this and this give us your best examples of those and we will probe the hell out of it we will really try to understand where you’re coming from um that’s on in one hand it seems completely obviously normal but if you’ve if you’ve grown up in a system where um that is seen as thinking on your feet and and thinking on your feet is a useful skill in much of the civil service i think it’s probably overvalued um but it’s important if i go and see a minister i have to be able to think on my feet but i can’t do work without questions in advance because they’re two different cognitive processes but um the the question from the minister about oh well how do you think i would solve that problem i’m good my brain’s gonna it’s gonna alight on all of the things that might be able to help them solve their problem but if you ask me a question about autobiographical memory that says why don’t you give me an example of a time when but you don’t really mean an example of a time when you did that thing you mean an example that you know will hit the the script a competency which that question thinks it’s designed to get at my autistic brain doesn’t do it i will give you literally what the best example of the time when i won’t give you the best example that you’re looking for from my past so um so for very clear reasons that i’ve been able to start to put a name to the advantages that the that the civil service thinks it’s getting from the process of requiring people to do this quick thinking in an interview um i’ve said i’d say no look there’s actually science behind why that might you might question that hypothesis and secondly i’ve tried out this process of questions in advance and we’ve had brilliant experience from panelists from candidates the people who get through are brilliant um so what’s the problem uh and by the way there’s an awfully large number of undiagnosed people with asperger’s who are quite likely to be well suited to civil service work its detail oriented systems its analysis um so we’ve been able to to start to get first people interested with the analytical community because they know that they’ve got over representation of people from these conditions so lots of bits of the department across government are all starting to get on the bandwagon it’s like maybe we could do maybe we could do questions in advance and it’s actually within the rules so there isn’t a rule that says you can’t it’s just a very strong convention right um so that’s a good example of me taking something that was a real problem especially for my team testing alternatives fixing it coming up with an explanation of why that fix works and then selling it more widely and if in our department we can start to understand the implications of choices in recruitment processes we’re the ones who work with employers to take on unemployed people i mean the abilities for us to take this one little practice and expand it across the entire society are really are huge yes sorry i went off on one no no no no not at all that was great catch fire all that you want it’s it’s fantastic so very close to that right like you you you you said that you think a lot of your team uh with you and you say things with good reason um is actually adhd why might you think that so i i i often teach that adhd is probably not a disorder it’s probably it was probably extremely beneficial cognitive style in the environment in which we had evolved for 99.9 percent of our biological history hunter gatherers it’s only when you take those people that would be high status in that world and then plunk them into this sedentary abstract symbolic world that’s largely instrumental and meaningless that they that they are they are diagnosed as um having a defect um yes so i’m just wondering what is it and you know i get it that you’re i’m asking you to just speculate intuitively on the spot right but what is it what is it about that cognitive style that makes them so useful to your team so such a good fit for your team that’s a really that’s a really really great question um so you know the the obvious um answer is they’re part of the neurodivergent tribes or neuro tribes um and that means that they are set up to spot what’s going on more than people who are neurotypical they’re not part of the same shared reality as the yeah yeah so that’s a part of it is simply having a different brain right um is is useful um and even that being left-handed might lead you to be able to be constantly able to come up with new solutions and workarounds that’s what we’re doing we’re problem solvers so say okay how do we think about this problem differently what’s different way around it so if you spent your whole life having to very quickly come up with a way to do something that isn’t the way everyone else has been doing because you can’t then that means that when the way everyone else is doing something is not leading to a solution you might be able to come up with a new a new one ah so i think i think that’s part of it but adhd in particular um now this is a speculation from having known lots of adhd people been married to one um that i think that they can be really observant yeah because the world jumps out at you yeah so um so i think the noticing skills of people with adhd are exceptional yes um and and i and i my team does a lot of observational work um and even whether it’s formal observation like going and watching one of the um assessments that’s done to see whether somebody can get a benefit um or whether it’s informal so how is that meeting work why is this why is this piece of work or this program not performing well there’s some kind of conflict going on and they will notice things they don’t tend to just zoom in on the process and then block everything else out um they they notice um uh so i i think i think those would be my lead hypotheses about why and they just tend to be really sociable people as well that kind of extroversion um thing seems to be adhd and we need people who really love people and are prepared to have some quite difficult conversations because relating to your earlier point it is like part of the skill set we need is to help our colleagues outside the team to navigate quite a difficult journey which um well i’d love to talk about if there was time but that that process of realizing that that they thought they were seeing the whole problem that the problem is in front of them all the time um that actually if you reframed it looked at a different way the solutions there that was there in front of them we know as cognitive scientists there’s nothing wrong about that you haven’t failed because you didn’t see all the frames at the same time in a world where you assume that what you see is all there is and that all there is is what you see then you’re going to you’re going to find that an ego threat to have somebody come in and say not oh well you know we can we know from the from the cognitive science literature that that humans have biases and this this and this way you couldn’t possibly know that therefore we have a new idea for how we might solve this problem therefore we can write a set of recommendations that’s put in some randomized control trials and recommend that to the minister that has no ego threat for the person who owns the problem that we’re helping with but to be told if you just looked at it this way new solution pops up that is a really that’s a that’s a that’s a traumatic process so i need people who can hold that space through that and for some reason i think people with adhd and dyspraxia actually are able to do that with a remarkable sensitivity and resilience yeah i mean those are two features the one you just mentioned about that sort of you know role resiliency but but also you know that the the perspectival resiliency also the ability to disidentify and the noticing that that those are precisely things that make them very good hunter-gatherers right so that that right that’s exactly right right so you’re hunting the deer right so you’re hunting the deer you got to be in the deer’s mind but wait wait there now there’s an opportunity of right to to actually shift to this oh we can actually you know find the elk instead of the deer and shift and right and then notice and all that stuff that’s going on um yeah that that that really that that jives well with with the uh with the uh with the hypothesis that i was talking about that leads me to something that i wanted to come back to and you said something really philosophically provocative uh so i want to give you a chance to develop it a little bit more and maybe i can probe it a little bit more you you say we should try and get get past or dispense with the notion of roles that to me is a really juicy and profound thing to say and given that you’re you’ve said so much that’s already so exciting and interesting i want to hear what you have to say about that um well i i my my thoughts on this are not as developed as um as i um but there’s to me actually i haven’t thought about roles necessarily in the sort of the dramatic i’ve thought of roles more mechanistically like um organizations that are set up on a model that was designed for factories where people are being treated as um either poor substitutes for machines or machines plus um you’re you’re and and very clear process interdependencies between those those different pieces don’t give a lot of room for flexibility or maneuver you need people who come in and do a thing in a prescribed way that somebody else can come in and check um and there’s that i think that whole approach to thinking about how humans add value in a particularly in a service and sort of knowledge economy context um is utterly unhelpful um and that instead we should be saying well what’s the problem that we are trying to solve and what can this person bring to it rather than what’s the task that we think is most likely well it’s not even that you really think through is that task going to solve the problem because people don’t even think about the problem they’ve already the system as a whole has desired decided that the problem falls into this group of tasks and therefore that the tasks will be solved using this set of processes and then you bring people in who have a capability why the performance processes already or can learn it and it’s but if you were instead to say let’s not look at the work to be done or the task to be done but the problem to be solved that gives you a much greater range of ways that you can add value to that problem which gives you space then to say hey we’ve got this person who with a broad set of criteria that we that we need for the team there’s lots and lots of variation in what they might be able to bring to this how would you look at this problem watch watch a bunch of other people do it but don’t feel like you’ve got to how would you bring that how would you and in fact when you’ve got an approach to that bring that to our whole team and then get them to pitch in and say how else they would help solve that problem and to me that is how you really you you solve problems better than turning them into work streams and turning people into cogs in those work streams i think it’s dehumanizing i think it’s wasteful um and i and i think there’s there’s a sort of there’s a sense some implicit sense that we that this isn’t a good way to work but nobody knows how to name why it’s not a good way to work and how to transition to something better do you think that particular sort of rapid narrowing and mechanization is also related to the point you just made a few minutes ago about people presuming that they know the whole thing because they have the whole system and how things slot into the system and that gives them sort of the the pretense that they know the whole because they have the whole system right model and how it has has has determined everything and where everything goes and how everything fits together do you think there’s a relationship between those two um i don’t think that the people think that they know the whole thing in terms of the whole system so i think i think they’re related but they’re different so what i think is going on is that the that people assume that it’s not possible to know the whole system which up to a point is true and that the way that the system is designed is almost ordained to be the right way of managing oh i see i see but they are expected to be able to understand the bit of that the bit of that system has been plonked in front of them right even though they’re actually not seeing that whole piece they’re just seeing one piece that the system is plopped in front of them and there’s a bigger problem underneath so if they’re in communications they think their job is to move words not to think about the needs of the people i mean i’m paraphrasing here there’s lots of fantastic professionals but that is that that is the way the system is set up so what my guys are doing another level of which it’s challenging is that i tell them you need to own the whole it’s not okay to say well that’s somebody else’s problem that’s something you’re thinking in a problem-centered and user-centered way you can’t get away with that um and that’s really it takes a lot of confidence to be able to work in an environment where you are where where you are trying to own the whole um and not the bit that the system has spat out at you and that the system will credit you for achieving or not achieving so it takes quite a lot of leadership from me to to carve out an incentive structure within within or culturally within my team to keep those other incentives out um and to create this sense of where’s the problem who cares about it what does it look like to them how do we solve what what’s the problem and how do we understand it better and therefore bring on the people to help solve it right right that’s an excellent explanation so let me sure i understand you there’s the idea that nobody can possibly understand the whole um some god-like beings in the past somehow constructed this system um it can’t be any better than it is um my best thing is to right just to understand my piece and then what what i what what conceit i get is that because of my my obedience to the system it gives me the capacity to know this piece perfectly well and then all i have to do is do that did do i understand you correctly now i think that i think that’s most of it i think um the bit the bit that that i i probably should um should correct is the idea that it couldn’t be better everybody all knows that it could be better but the fact that it could be um and nobody knows how to make it much better is just it’s another thing you learn to deal with oh i see so that’s a learned helplessness that is crucial to most to the survival of a number of people well a large number of people in this sort of organization so it’s it’s beyond my ken i can’t understand it um but i can understand this little piece really well it doesn’t work as what prob it’s not probably working very well but nobody can possibly know how to fix it and so we’ll just do the best we can uh and that’s probably at times thought to be not very much at all but i just do my job and i get rewarded for what i do in my job is that is that the picture am i getting it better now i i think so if i could um uh actually i think there’s a way of clarifying this by me you’ve got it spot on the problem statement that sits underneath my team um is that uh the department just like any other organization makes decisions based on assumptions about behavior that are sometimes not true right so that was a that was that was how i set up the whole team was around that problem statement because everybody in the civil service could say yeah that does sometimes happen yeah it’s a problem and no other professional function is set up to fix it now there’s two parts of that statement one bit is that dwp makes decisions based on assumptions about behavior that aren’t true now if we focus on the assumptions about behavior that aren’t true that is something that’s that’s relatively easy to fix you can come into a problem you can say okay let’s look what the assumptions about behavior here there’s a decent chance some of them are even recognized as as dodgy assumptions it’s just you know you’ve got to make the best assumption you can economic models are notorious for this they have to have them they have to have assumptions they’ll be very carefully caveated by the economists but they’re in there so we do a version of expanding that out um finding all the behavioral assumptions and then finding ways to test them and say but what if people did it this way and if they’re likely to do it that way and let’s go and see if they do it that way that’s going to screw up that system is not going to work so that’s the bit that’s quite easy to wrap people’s heads around but i’ve always thought that there were two parts of the problem statement because dwp makes decisions based on assumptions about anything that aren’t true is also part of what social science can come and fix because the decision making process itself the nature of the collective intelligence that is the civil service that is what we are there to do we are we are a collective we have an institution that is a is a set of collective intelligences they’re designed to understand what the electorate wants from us via our elected officials and do things that citizens either can’t do or don’t want to do for themselves that they’ve handed over to to government and yet the process by which decisions are made isn’t anybody’s focus oh i mean everybody’s engaged in it everybody knows that their job is to make those decisions as well as possible and to contribute to better decision making processes but there’s no theory of that kind of systemic consciousness it’s almost like that’s divorced from the people which is why that sense of it being ordained isn’t sometimes it’s kind of seen as well either it’s the politicians are making decisions or the senior officials are making decisions but up to a point there’s also a sense which is accurate that historic decisions collectively made on the basis that we don’t entirely understand the interacting ways we don’t entirely understand has created an environment a socially created environment right you can’t talk to that you can’t look at well my team’s looking at it and we’re going to start to make some progress on this but it is a whole field of organizational thinking that i just don’t think a lot anybody’s been playing in that yes yes totally i’m glad i pushed you on that well didn’t push you drew you out on this because that is so profound what you just said so you there’s this there’s this like there’s this you know i don’t know i want to use a term from almost like from like from like there’s this tradition that has a life of its own running you know you know diachronically through the collective intelligence and it’s almost transparent to people they they look through it but they’d never step back and look at it in an ongoing manner to see if it should be questioned or if it could be improved or if it’s misleading or if it’s bullshitting in powerful ways and even if they did look at it and there are plenty of people do spot it which is why we have civil service reform agendas or internal change agendas but there’s a lack of proper ontological understanding of what it is right right who can change this collective decision making it’s not necessarily the permanent secretary it’s not even the prime minister necessarily that can make these changes it’s something else yes you’re talking about something that in a very real sense is a cultural change rather than just a an administrative reform yes yes exactly exactly you’ve got you’ve got to get all of this down on paper we’ve got to write something about this because this i think a lot of this would translate out into a lot of the work that i’m doing about you know trying to build these communities of communities build the religion that’s not a religion all this kind of stuff it’s very valuable info i hope you’re like i hope you’re writing stuff down and taking notes and writing a book because this i’ll help you with it this is so that is so important this is so important it does it does feel like we the civil service is simply an example of organizations everywhere yes big ones and the ones that don’t are the startups who have a particular kind of set of characteristics and produce different kind of stuff but as soon as they reach a certain size or a certain longevity yeah they turn into this this is something about the way that humans cooperate in the modern world is not seen it doesn’t seem to be subject to change it’s a systematic change in a way we know how to do think talk about but i’m building my little team are the right people to start to be able to notice this think about it talk about it name it and then start to think about ways that you could actually get purchase on it this is amazing well i mean i and i’ve been having ongoing they’re not just discussions we sort of think aloud together with me me and your team and and i and your team i should say um and so i of course i want to keep doing that but this has been this has been so i you just it was just so great i always like to give my guests sort of the last word it doesn’t have to be summative doesn’t have to be cumulative it can it can be it can be you know you know provocative it can be inspiring but i just want to give you you know now just stepping outside of how you’re within the civil service what would you say to the broader audience that’s been watching this um well if it’s i’m guessing there’s a significant overlap between your audience and sort of rebel wisdom audience are the people blessed to spend so much of the last four years with um and i do think that there’s a we need to talk about institutional reform and it’s not that the institutions don’t want to reform either i’m not i’m not saying anything that isn’t fairly commonly in every civil service reform document that comes out every couple of years and and always change is made but i do think that um one of the things that i found well exciting that i’m doing but frustrating that no one else is doing is bringing those um uh those ideas into institutions there’s a sense that oh we’ve got to work outside of the institutions to make anything better it’s like well a i don’t think that’s possible and b it’s not necessary and c it could be very dangerous if you if you don’t work with the institution so um i i think it’s it’s it’s a plea to to look more closely and in a more sort of human to human way at those institutions to not stereotype them and anthropomorphize them to recognize that the people in them are people like you know people who really want to do good who are really smart who are following the rules where they need to um and and if you can find ways to engage um support come up with ideas there will be a way to to to make that happen and it doesn’t we don’t just have to look at this kind of cultural level and then say well all we can do is little stuff in our community that’s great i mean do stuff in your communities but we need to work with the institutions but it can be that’s beautiful thank you so much carla thank you so much thank you so much