Do we need to ‘change our behaviour’ or ‘develop our practice’?

Posted on 18 May 2013 by Helen Wilding

In public health, the notion of behaviour change has been around for a while. The focus stems from the desire to reduce or eliminate ‘health risk behaviours’ like smoking or alcohol or to introduce ‘health enhancing behaviours’ like physical activity or nutritious diets. There has been plenty of research by health psychologists to explain how behaviour change happens (descriptive theories) that are now being used to design interventions (turning them into prescriptive theories but that’s another matter).

But that’s not what I want to focus on – there has been this odd creep of phrases like ‘behaviour change’ into the language of leadership and management. It seems not only do leaders and managers need to ‘change their behaviour’, they also need to know how to change that of their ‘subordinates’. I’m all for seeing how helpful ideas can be when you transfer them across disciplines but I feel very uneasy about this transfer. Continue reading →

Knowledge to action (or theories in practice)

Posted on 14 May 2013 by Helen Wilding

I’ve always been uncomfortable about phrases such as ‘knowledge transfer’. I thought that this was predominantly a question of epistemological stance – that knowledge is socially constructed, but I’ve read a couple of things in the last week that has expanded my thinking on this…

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Regeneration management, development management and public health – are they learning enough from each other?

Posted on 4 May 2013 by Helen Wilding

I have no idea how this line of thought started really – and in some ways I don’t know if I want to explore it in depth – but today I found myself getting quite frustrated that there doesn’t appear (on the surface) to be as much inter-disciplinary learning and synergies as there could be between regeneration management, development management and public health. They seem quite siloed in perspective.

Not really where it is going to take me, but I’ll start off by exploring what those terms mean…..

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If ‘research’ is the answer, what is the question?

Posted on 28 April 2013 by Helen Wilding

A while back, I wrote a blog with a similar title to this – but with ‘systems thinking’ rather than ‘research’ the focus of the answer. That blog was inspired by Ison (2010, 187)’s discussion about – if ‘managing’ is the answer what is the question.

This frame of inquiry came to mind today as I started thinking about the purpose of ‘research’ – what is the system to which doing research is the answer?

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Health is controversial

Posted on 22 April 2013 by Helen Wilding

I can’t count how many times I’ve at least hinted at the phrase in the title of this post. Following Ison (2010, page 231/232), my stock phrase is something like “wellbeing and health concerns, are characterized by interdependencies, complexity, uncertainty and controversy and involve multiple stakeholders with different perspectives”. It’s these type of characteristics that lead us to call health a ‘wicked issue’ or a ‘mess’.

But I suppose I’ve never really taken stock of just how ‘controversial’ health is. I started thinking about this the other day and realised that a lot of the time the ‘multiple stakeholders with different perspectives’ can’t even agree how to word the questions, let alone any of the ‘answers’. What’s more when people want to illustrate the ‘wickedness’, they often don’t even take on ‘health’ in its entirety they break it down into example issues or more focused concerns like obesity or sexual health – it seems that ‘health’ is so wicked you have to chunk it up.

So I thought I’d try and summarise my thinking on this controversial concept – in doing so I hope that I will bring into focus the nature of what makes the territory so difficult to negotiate through. By the way, I’m making no attempt to ‘hide’ where my own perspective lies!

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What makes a systems approach?

Posted on 12 April 2013 by Helen Wilding

In the last week, I have been part of a great conversation in the LinkedIn STiP alumni group about systems approaches. It started with a question from Arwen asking what other systems approaches there are out there, other than the ones that made up the core part of our TU811 Systems approaches for managing change curriculum.

Before that thread disappears too far into the archive, I wanted to capture here some of my key reflections.

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Returning to the ‘design turn’

Posted on 12 March 2013 by Helen Wilding

A conversation on my LinkedIn STiP alumni group has sparked me to think once again about the concept of a ‘design turn in my systems practice’.

It’s been a while so let’s recap.

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A new step in my learning trajectory

Posted on 10 March 2013 by Helen Wilding

Every so often in this blog I have marked a ‘key event’ in the flux of events unfolding through time that collectively make up my learning/development journey. These transition points have often marked a change in the type of posts I write and why I am writing them. This is one of those posts…as I am about to embark on a new phase of ‘temporary purposeful activity’ in my learning.

Just after Christmas I made the decision to apply to do a Professional Doctorate in Public Health with University of Lancaster. And in the last couple of weeks I have been offered a place and accepted it. It starts with a residential week in June (with some pre and post work) then in September it gets going again. As a professional doctorate it is ‘distance learning’ and designed to be done alongside having a job. In essence the first two years are ‘taught’ with a curriculum covering public health theory/policy/practice and research skills/methods then from year three you start a work-based research project leading to a 35,000 word Thesis. Gulp.

So why? what motivated me to do this? what is my purpose?

Continue reading →

Time to re-think ‘workplace health’

Posted on 7 March 2013 by Helen Wilding

Something has really been bothering me recently about ‘workplace health’ initiatives.

We seem to have got into a real mess about the PURPOSE of this type of focus.

The employer perspective is of the importance of PRODUCTIVITY and the WASTAGE caused by people being ill or off work. As a result the initiative’s success is measured in terms of sickness absence, rather than in terms of employee wellbeing as a positive condition. The questions shifts from – what can we do to enable people’s wellbeing? (the salutogenic perspective) to – what can we do to stop people being off-sick? (the pathogenic perspective). Back to the use and abuse of measurement issue – what we get is a punitive system that performance manages levels of sick leave and game playing starts – people take annual leave or use flexi time, rather than reporting a sick day. Or presenteeism – people coming to work and pretending to work even when they are not fit to be there, perhaps passing on infections to colleagues in the process. Recorded sick leave goes down, employers herald this a success, but the wellbeing of the workforce has not improved. Public health professionals are complicit in this, they make the case for workplace health initiatives in terms of the cost of days work lost.

The other thing that bugs me is that workplace health initiatives purely see the workplace as a site of health promotion or traditional public health ‘lifestyle’ interventions. We use the workplace to tell people about the importance of eating 5-a-day but then don’t give any thought to whether or not they can get affordable healthy food during their working day. We use the workplace to train people in emotional resilience – telling them they have to be resilient to stress – this means that if they go off with stress it becomes the employees fault for not being resilient enough (nothing to do with workplace stressors at all!). So in essence we are telling people to be healthy and happy (and therefore productive and not waste employer’s resources) but give very little thought to the physical, social and economic conditions in which they are doing their work.

The bottom line is – we need to re-think workplace health. Continue reading →

Just Practicing

sharing my journey through landscapes of practice

Do we need to ‘change our behaviour’ or ‘develop our practice’?

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Knowledge to action (or theories in practice)

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Regeneration management, development management and public health – are they learning enough from each other?

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If ‘research’ is the answer, what is the question?

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Health is controversial

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What makes a systems approach?

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Returning to the ‘design turn’

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A new step in my learning trajectory

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