Firstly let me say that this topic (the impact of complex variables on practice) will be dealt with in far greater detail in the Chapter on Research and Evaluation. This Sub-Chapter is included because transfer or translation of new ideas to action is linked to complexity and influences choice of modality – which means, as we said already, the way things are done.
Attitudes will always influence practice and it is interesting to contrast technology and helping type work in the field of translating what is known to work well from research and evaluation into what is actually done on the ground.
Looking at it from the Pillars perspective, this is (usually) what politicians would like to be done, what the civil and public service pays to get done, what academics say is best practice and what is constantly promoted in the media as to what should be done.
In this, work with our Focus Group is quite different to other fields of human endeavour – not only science and technology but also education, medicine, business etc.
We discussed propagation in respect of systems in a previous Chapter.
I have always found it interesting that new developments propagate quite quickly from source (inventor or developer) to service user (consumer) in the totally reductionist fields of engineering and science, and (once initial fears are dealt with), in the partially reductionist fields of economics, finance, farming, tourism, medicine, teaching and similar.
I observe that the more holism that is required for success the slower the propagation of the new development. Also, if there is immediate and certain monetary advantage to be gained propagation will usually be fast.
While there is hidden monetary gain in preventing a young man going to prison, it is a long term investment with an uncertain outcome and it does not offer an immediate and certain advantage – hence the slow propagation. I make an attempt to display this graphically below.
The vertical line (axis is the technical word) represents the Speed Of Propagation and the horizontal axis represents the Degree Of Holism.
On the Vertical Axis, 20 is very fast propagation; and 0 is very slow. On the Horizontal Axis, 1 is Totally Reductive and 20 is Totally Holistic. For example, 1 to 5 might be engineering or banking, 5 to 15 could be farming, teaching, medicine, tourism; and 15 to 20 would be the kind of work that concerns this website.
This graph is not derived quantitatively but it makes a lot of sense to me and I include it here to see if it makes sense to anyone else!