December, A Time for Reflection

There’s an article from the September-October 2024 magazine of the Harvard Business Review where Michael Luca and Amy C. Edmondson (you’ll recognize that name from ‘psychological safety’ and Right Kind of Wrong) that summarizes ACT’s mission beautifully:

“When considering internal data or the results of a study, often business leaders either take the evidence presented as gospel or dismiss it altogether. Both approaches are misguided. “ ~Summary, Where Data-Driven Decision-Making Can Go Wrong

The article goes into greater detail and calls out the importance of matching information with the question being asked (internal validity), the pitfall of underestimating the importance of sample size (particularly relevant to many counties in our region), and the challenge of aligning outcomes with actual program activities. It is as though the authors have attended meetings here in Rochester!

We at ACT Rochester have turned to narrative as another key part of the solution to data-driven decision-making going wrong. If we challenge our default assumptions, we are more likely to ask the questions that Luca and Edmondson suggest and avoid the pitfalls.

So, in the spirit of reinforcing new ideas, the Brain Food posts in the month of December will be re-posts from the time before email alerts. We will highlight staff top picks from posts before October. ACT Rochester social media will call out older posts as well. We have worked hard on Brain Food throughout all of 2024 and want to make sure you don’t miss anything!

Happy December, friends of ACT! Please enjoy your Brain Food, nutrition for healthy thought :-)

Feedback Surveys

You probably noticed a feedback survey that pops up when you get to the ACT website, and again when you leave. To those of you who filled both out - thank you! We encourage you to take the 5 minutes to complete both surveys.

Why are we surveying you? Well, after we gave you some time with the new site, we wanted to learn about who is using the site and how you are using it so that we can keep making it better. We will be taking this survey down in late December and will post new questions after a short break. ACT is a data initiative, after all, and is committed to learning as much as we can about how to make this website a useful tool.

We will report back on survey results in January 2025! Stay tuned for that particular Brain Food, and thank you again for participating.

How is it already November?

It’s November 1st!

We are nearing the end of the calendar year for 2024 - what are you focusing on? Is there a storyline you’ve been stuck in that you need to change? Is there an old statistic that you rely on in conversation that needs updating? There are two months of 2024 left to execute our resolutions before we make some more for 2025. Please consider adding ACT to your reflection - if you have any feedback, please feel free to send it to actrochester@racf.org and please fill out the pop-up survey when you visit the website!

November is also a celebration month for a whole range of things, including:

• National Adoption Month

• American Diabetes Month

• Aviation History Month

• Banana Pudding Lovers Month

• Bereaved Siblings Month, Worldwide

• Diabetic Eye Disease Month

• National Epilepsy Awareness Month

• Eye Donation Month

• National Family Caregivers Month

• National Georgia Pecan Month

• National Inspirational Role Models Month

• National Long-Term Care Awareness Month

• Lung Cancer Awareness Month

• National Marrow Awareness Month

• Movember

• National Memoir Writing Month

• National Native-American Heritage Month

• National Novel Writing Month

• Peanut Butter Lovers’ Month

• Picture Book Month

• Prematurity Awareness Month

• National Runaway Prevention Month

• Vegan Month, Worldwide

What are you going to celebrate this November?

The Science of Failing Well

There’s such a thing as failing well? Yep, and Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson’s 2023 book Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well provides the detailed formula for productive failure and the circumstances to turn failure into innovation.

You may recognize the author’s name, as Dr. Edmondson coined the term psychological safety from her research about the dynamics behind successful teams. Psychological safety is an environment that encourages candor and reframes mistakes as learning opportunities. From this work, Dr. Edmondson turns to the idea of good failures.

If you read the book with a lens toward social change, it is a prescription for continuous improvement, intentional iterative action, and rigorous problem-solving. As Dr. Edmondson says, “Intelligent failures provide valuable new knowledge. They bring discovery. They occur when experimentation is necessary simply because answers are not knowable in advance” (p.11). Social transformation requires new knowledge and discovery precisely because we are asking hard, complicated questions.

Particularly poignant is the second part of the book: practicing the science of failing well. The three chapters in part two focus on self-awareness, situation awareness, and system awareness and how each intersect with failure. Dr. Edmondson highlights how our biases, contexts, and system dynamics influence how we frame (and our tolerance of) failure.

The overarching argument in the book is that fear of failure stifles innovation, so we need to take the fear away and be open to the good failures. Page 63 even poses some questions that would help us design a smart pilot program/intervention (spoiler: the goal of the pilot should be to learn as much as possible, not to prove the success of the innovation to funders)! Chapter 7: Appreciating Systems (p.227) is particularly relevant for our collective impact efforts.

The last chapter of the book begins with a quote from tennis legend Billie Jean King: “For me, losing a tennis match isn’t failure. It’s research.” Food for thought!

Source: Edmondson, A. C. (2023). Right kind of wrong: The science of failing well. Simon and Schuster.

Curated Book: The Way Out

ACT Rochester Advisory Committee member Sharon Stiller attended a presentation by Columbia professor of psychology and education Dr. Peter T Coleman and recommended his book, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization.

Instead of pitching the book, let me provide some quotes to whet your appetite:

“We don’t process new information neutrally, instead we are motivated to make sense of it in ways that are consistent with our existing worldview…” (pg. 30)

“After a sufficient reset, the next order of business is to locate what is already working. This practice is based on research findings that change-resistant problems are often most responsive to positive deviance or bright spots, existing remedies that have already arisen and proven useful and sustainable within the context of the problem.” (pg. 77)

“when feedback on the result of our actions come in it is time to pay more attention, not less; to make more decisions, not fewer. It involves starting wisely, making corrections in midcourse, and learning from our mistakes.” (pg. 203)

ACT Rochester followers should find these quotes familiar and while the topic for Dr. Coleman is the political polarization, the points made in the book are very applicable to our community’s struggles with social change.

The good thing to know is that the way of thinking that ACT Rochester has been promoting - the scientific method, embracing complexity, continuous improvement - are based in science! Peter Coleman’s The Way Out is a great resource as we continue toward social transformation.

Source: Coleman, P. T. (2021). The way out: How to overcome toxic polarization. Columbia University Press.

Curated Article: An Innovative Approach to Traffic Safety

The Stanford Social Innovation Review has an excellent article titled “A New Model for Saving Lives on Roads Around the World” that both highlights a successful program in India and models rigorous problem-solving. 

The article begins with descriptive statistics to paint the picture of the safety crisis for vehicles in India. Authors point out that India has only 1 percent of the world’s motor vehicles yet accounts for 11 percent of road crash fatalities. The data story is clear: Intervention is necessary. 

This article is particularly notable because of its advanced use of data for decision-making. In one section, authors describe how data indicated a need to prevent rear-end collisions, but that guidance from the West suggested tactile edge lines that didn’t work in India. The solution began with existing guidance and was then customized to suit the Indian community in need. Continuous improvement in action.

The Design Thinking section of the Stanford Social Innovation Review is an excellent resource to train our thinking about problem-solving.

The Pursuit of Improvement

In our last post, we shared a bit about the importance of pilot programs and the value of having an end point to analyze impact. Pilots are one example of using improvement science to find solutions and make changes.

Taking a wider view, pilots are often part of a commonly used approach called the Plan Do Study Act (PDSA) Cycle. Data is at the heart of every step in this systematic problem-solving model. It is essential for understanding the problem, identifying potential solutions, and determining whether these changes actually lead to improvement.

Learn more about how the PDSA Cycle works and how it can be applied to almost any improvement project and feel free to contact actrochester@racf.org for assistance.