209 – Individual Initiative and Collective Responsibility

[00:00:06] Santiago: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I’m Santiago Borio, an Impact Activation Fellow, and I’m here with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS.

Hi, David.

[00:00:17] David: Hi, Santiago, great to be doing these episodes more regularly with you again.

[00:00:23] Santiago: Yeah, well it’s been a while since the last one, but I am going to be a regular voice once again. Today I believe it’s a topic that you wanted to raise.

[00:00:35] David: Well, I suppose it comes back to the fact, as you said, our voices haven’t been there together. And you were one of the first people as employee number one in IDEMS, going through many different phases, you’ve been involved in some of the deeper discussions of what we want IDEMS to be and how we want it to work.

And there’s a topic which we’ve never touched on, which relates to our principles, and in particular our staffing principles, which I feel has become more relevant recently.

[00:01:07] Santiago: Let me clarify, we have several types of principles, at least two that I’m aware of. We have our guiding principles, which, correct me if I’m wrong, but they are a way to inform us on how to make decisions, sort of independently. If we understand the guiding principles, it is more likely that we will be able to make coherent decisions. And when I say we, I don’t mean necessarily the leadership, but every single member of the team. Good summary?

[00:01:41] David: I think it is, I mean, that’s an idealistic viewpoint of it, which I would think would be great. The more realistic viewpoint is that the guiding principles are the principles where, in how we as an organisation make decisions, if there is pushback on decisions individuals are wanting to make, it is likely to be because they don’t align with the guiding principles.

These are the principles where there are two good choices. Each principle is designed so that the alternative is also sensible or good, or could be good for the organisation, but we as an organisation choose to prioritise a particular choice, sensible choice, over another sensible choice.

[00:02:32] Santiago: And we have 20 such principles grouped in five groups of four, those are the guiding principles and that’s not the topic of this conversation. We have a whole series of those, where we go into each one, and we have a few extra episodes as well in that series. It’s called The IDEMS Principle.

But today you wanted to discuss more the staffing principles, which are part of what you and Danny called initially when you set up IDEMS, an enabling staffing model.

[00:03:09] David: That’s what we were looking to try and conceptualise, and it’s been very interesting that, actually, there hasn’t been much change, but it’s been really hard to actually enact this. And I believe we are finally making good progress related to two staffing principles, and I thought that could be the subject of our discussion. The two staffing principles in question are Individual Initiative and Collective Responsibility, and we can dig into those. 

[00:03:42] Santiago: I particularly like Collective Responsibility, and maybe we could start there. The way that I perceive it within IDEMS is that we all have our own priorities, we all have our own projects that we’re working on, and we have loads of things going on, but suddenly someone needs a bit of help with something else, and we just accommodate and we are flexible and we work together for the collective good. But that’s probably not accurate looking at your reaction, sorry for listeners, you cannot see David’s reaction.

[00:04:19] David: I hope that behaviour is a behaviour that we do as part of our culture, but that’s not what I perceive as being the heart of collective responsibility, although it is related. That’s good teamwork, and that is the fact that the responsibility for the success of any given component is not just thrown on an individual, it is something that we together take responsibility for. And I think that relates to what you are saying.

But I feel that the heart to collective responsibility alongside individual initiative is, well, the sensible counterbalance to collective responsibility is individual responsibility. And individual responsibility is not bad, it’s not something we want to avoid, we want people to take responsibility as individuals. But we don’t want them to be left holding the baby, so to speak. And so it is this idea that the responsibilities we take on as an organisation, these are collective.

It’s also related to, and we’ve had a previous episode on the inverted pyramid model of managing, where instead of managers taking responsibility away from individuals, individuals have the initiative and they have responsibility, and then your managers are supporting that, and enabling that responsibility to be taken. And the point is that it’s not then the people who are taking the initiative who are left holding the responsibility, it is then the people who are managing them, so to speak, actually have a collective responsibility with them.

So, I take responsibility for work, which I don’t micromanage is part of what I would argue is the collective responsibility. I trust my team to take the initiative in ways which are good, but if things go bad, I’m willing to come in and take also responsibility, if that makes sense, as part of the management.

[00:06:32] Santiago: But that’s, I feel, not too different to what I said.

[00:06:35] David: It isn’t too different. I guess the key difference is the way that you framed it, it was about people chipping into help. Whereas responsibility is not just coming in to help. I have responsibility for it, others can come and help me, that’s one thing, but at the end of the day, it’s my responsibility.

And so the key is that collective responsibility, it’s not only that people are coming in to help, but it’s that you are not alone in having that responsibility. The way that that would happen is the fact that the responsibility for that actually being a success is something which is collective and others have that responsibility alongside you, even if that project is your initiative.

[00:07:23] Santiago: Okay. And, of course it doesn’t work on its own, it needs that individual responsibility as well.

[00:07:32] David: Absolutely. So it is not collective responsibility to avoid the need for individual responsibility. It is we need individuals to take responsibility and to be responsible, but within a culture of collective responsibility. It is not that you are responsible and others therefore are just there to support you or to help you. It is that actually you are responsible and others are stepping in to be responsible as well, and to actually take responsibility, a joint responsibility, a collective responsibility. 

[00:08:10] Santiago: And Individual Initiative then?

[00:08:14] David: So this is where I feel we’ve made breakthrough recently. How do you enable people to take the initiative while still having this element of collective responsibility? The key we are aiming for is this enabling environment, in which we recruit highly skilled people who have the potential to succeed, and we want them to be able to take the initiative and succeed while being part of something bigger.

And we’ve been getting towards a framing, and we’ve been thinking about this for years, about how can we make this visible? And there was a piece of work that happened as a particular technology.

[00:08:58] Santiago: Sorry, before we get into that, can I question you on the Individual Initiative? I think there’s loads of examples. One is how Lily said, I’m interested in carbon footprint and I have this idea for this R package, can I develop it as part of my work? And you said, of course. And she developed the Carbon R package for R, which I think it’s wonderfully done and very important.

Similar to that, there’s all sorts of individual projects that we feel that we can bring into the table, as well as taking individual lead or responsibility for certain activities or IDEMS projects. And I think without that Individual Initiative, the Impact Activation Fellowships wouldn’t quite work as well.

[00:09:56] David: Yeah, the initiative could be, as you said, for a little project, which somebody is interested in, just wants to get on and do, and produce as part of their IDEMS role. It could be for collaboration, it could be for a trip, Georg is going off to teach at AIMS Cameroon, and taking the initiative to do that three week course. These are the things where he’s taken the initiative to design and develop that course, he’s taken time to do that.

This is something which, enabling that individual initiative is really important as part of what we want to be and how we want to enable our staff to grow and to take the initiative. Because quite often, what is needed is observed by the people who are closest to the ground, who are actually doing the work, not by the person who always has the sort of mile high view. Both are important, but enabling people who are involved on the ground to say, no, this is really needed, it’s really important, it would add value to these people in this way.

That’s a big part of who we are, enabling people to take the initiative so that what is happening on the ground is impactful and effective. That’s essential in everything we do. So setting up that culture where people feel empowered to take the initiative, to trust their skills, their training, so to speak, and to observe what is needed and take steps towards that, is really important.

[00:11:31] Santiago: Another example could be me coming to you recently saying I want to support this new STACK library that is being developed for real analysis questions. And you said automatically yes, and we put it reasonably high in my priority list.

[00:11:48] David: Yes, absolutely. But this does come with collective responsibility, because once that initiative has been taken and exists, it doesn’t exist in isolation.

I’d like to take another example. Michele, who’s just joined and who I’m really enjoying doing episodes with, so regular listeners will have heard his voice and we’ll have heard him talk about the initiative he took with respect to the AI STACK authoring tool or agent. He came with that idea, this is something that he had already done a bit of work on and he was keen on pursuing, and we said, great, we’re happy for you to take that initiative and support that initiative.

But it isn’t that we then leave him to just do it, once that initiative has become part of what we’re doing, we tie it in. And so we’ve taken collective responsibility for that, other people have now been brought in and got involved, so have now shaped it in different ways, yourself included. And we have discussed how this ties into the AI agents we want to see elsewhere in IDEMS work.

And what are the core principles? The fact that, you know, I’ve pushed to say I want the AI agent to be working on our Git repos because that will enable other things and it would become more reusable. 

[00:13:07] Santiago: And how to develop them responsibly as well.

[00:13:10] David: Exactly. That initiative was taken. But once that initiative has started, it’s not something where we say, oh, that Michele’s thing, let’s let him get on and do it. No, we now talk about, well, how does this relate to our principles? How do our guiding principles shape this initiative? How does it relate to our other work? How does it tie in? What are the other ways? Who are the other people who can support this, who can enable this? How do we actually look for funding so that this could become something more? So this is something where once that initiative exists, there’s a collective responsibility to see it succeed.

[00:13:48] Santiago: And now I think it’s a good time to bring in this new breakthrough that you were mentioning because how do you manage this Individual Initiative with Collective Responsibility? That’s really hard. 

[00:14:01] David: It is. And we’ve been working on this for a number of different years. I mean, I have to say this is representative of just how slowly I work at times. I’ve been thinking about this problem for 15 years at least. 

[00:14:14] Santiago: I was there at a maths camp, I think it was 2014, when this idea was discussed formally within a team and it didn’t take off then. I don’t think it was the right time, but now I think it is the right time.

[00:14:33] David: And this is the thing, you know, I’d already been thinking about it for four years by then at least. But as you say, that wasn’t the right time. Now it has matured and there’s elements of it which are taking shape. And at the recent team meeting, it started growing into something which internally we can use. And hopefully then it can be something which could be shared externally.

And I believe this idea and this essence of this tool could be something that really could be reusable in many contexts where people share the same two principles, they want to support individual initiative and collective responsibility.

Now I do want to be clear. I can think of many contexts where you wouldn’t want that. You would want something like institutional initiative and individual responsibility. That would be a sensible set of principles for a different organisation.

[00:15:35] Santiago: That’s what you see very much in schools in many ways. There’s the policy from the senior management team. But as a teacher, I was individually responsible for the progress of my students, for what happened in my classroom. Yes, with the, guidance and policies of my management in all sorts of ways.

[00:16:00] David: And if you needed or you wanted to bring in a new innovation, you’d go through the institutional structures to do so. This is institutional initiative to be able to affect change, and so on, while you have your individual responsibility. We are not saying that is a bad situation. We are just saying that there are other contexts where individual initiative with collective responsibility can serve institutions well. And we are an institution that has bought in to the fact that we could be better served by enabling individual initiative with collective responsibility.

[00:16:40] Santiago: Okay. You mentioned this tool. Explain.

[00:16:44] David: The tool in itself is a simple implementation of enacting these principles. And there’s other frameworks for this. One framework that I’ve heard about, Persons, Project, Organisation Dataset, that’s what it is, I believe, the PPOD. And the idea is, just like what we’re doing in terms of having the initiatives, this is about having people in projects who are also in the organisations, and you’re wanting to get a data set of all of this together.

There’s a whole set of people who have been thinking about this in different contexts, and what we’re trying to do is we want to center these initiatives. We want individuals to be able to take the initiative, so therefore, in our concept, each initiative has a responsible person. Responsible is a bad word, but it is a person who is taking that initiative.

[00:17:45] Santiago: I think it is more towards leadership of that initiative. And who do you go to if you need a decision, an informed decision to be made about that initiative.

[00:17:58] David: Well, I mean, I do believe responsible is the right word. The reason that it makes me slightly uncomfortable is that it seems like you have individual initiative with individual responsibility. However, the key is initiatives are not isolated, they are linked to other initiatives. And they are linked, in some sense, by a parent child relationship in terms of responsibility.

So the initiative, which has an individual who is responsible for that initiative, is often the child of another initiative which somebody else is responsible for. And this is how you get to your collective responsibility, that actually you have these chains of responsibility that become visible, that the parent child relationship in terms of responsibility, it isn’t that the person who is responsible for an initiative is ultimately responsible for that initiative.

On the contrary, it isn’t just the individual who is responsible for an initiative, who has responsibility, it’s the whole parental chain of people who are part of parental initiatives or grand parental initiatives who have responsibility. This is your collective responsibility. That whole chain of people have a form of responsibility.

And now of course, if ever there’s a need for the support as you described it, well, it might be that the siblings come in to help. Now they’re not coming in in terms of taking responsibility, but it might be that your parental initiative knows who are the people who are best placed to help because they have multiple such initiatives that they are responsible for.

[00:19:55] Santiago: A nice example of that, nice and concrete, is this podcast. I am the person responsible, and I put quotes around that, for The IDEMS Podcast. And one of the children or grandchildren is the publishing of each episode, which is led by Johnny. So I do the editing, I make sure everything’s happening, I do the first editing, Johnny does the publications.

Now, Johnny had to go on leave for personal reasons, and he looked at, okay, who’s the parent, who’s the child of what I do? And he came to me as the parent and said, I’m gonna be on leave, can you take responsibility for my part? And as part of the collective responsibility, I said, of course, and I did his bits because I have the skillsets.

But if I didn’t have the skillset to do that, I would have been responsible to find the person who has the skills to do what he does in that part of the initiative.

[00:21:07] David: But, what you are describing is simply good teamwork, you’d expect this in any team. What the tool is hoping to do is it’s hoping to make this really visible, even when the initiative to create something new lies with any individual. And the idea of this is, if this works well for us as an organisation, it will help us to not only make this visible, but actually to help it evolve over time.

We’ve actually got later today, our first instance where we are going to use this as part of a review process with a member of staff where we are going to actually use it to set the agenda, and sort of say, what are the things we need to discuss as part of the review and what you have responsibility for and what you are going to hand over responsibility for, and who that’s going to and so on. It’s a really interesting way, if it works, that nobody needs to ask permission, can I create an initiative? If you have to ask permission, you haven’t got individual initiative, we’ve got the systems wrong. So everyone should feel that they can create an initiative.

But that doesn’t mean automatically that that initiative is well embedded in IDEMS. Any sort of stray initiatives will stand out because they don’t have these parental relationships. And so it is going to be how individuals can take the initiative and then how that becomes visible to other people who might not otherwise have known that that initiative was happening, and to create these links of responsibility, where these initiatives lie and how they fit into a coherent whole for which we have collective responsibility.

This is what we’re hoping it will achieve, we don’t know yet, we’re in very early days of actually trying it out, but it’s interesting.

[00:23:08] Santiago: Yes. And, I think what’s missing in the discussion is that the tool itself, because what you’ve been describing is structured data, so the tool itself is a way of visualising this data in a really interesting and intuitive way. And I think we should recognise Gabe, another new member of staff, who understood what was needed. And Lily and George as well and others who have been working on this in the background as well.

[00:23:42] David: Lucie as well. 

[00:23:44] Santiago: And Kate of course. Gabe, took the initial processes and just built this fantastic tool. 

[00:23:50] David: As someone with an engineering background, actually, these network graphs are, there were lots of tools to build them. And this is what actually, even over a decade ago when we were discussing, these tools existed, they weren’t quite as good then, but they existed and this was mentioned, well, I dunno if it mentioned in that meeting, but I was talking about these tools back then, 10, 15 years ago. So they exist.

The problem, and this is the really interesting thing, it’s not a question of the technology, it’s not a question of the actual idea of how it can help with the people. It’s that combination. This is the heart of what we’re finding in so many areas. It is this ability to build something which is serving a very human purpose with a technology which enables it, and doing so in a way, which is, we hope, going to exactly enact our principles of Individual Initiative and Collective Responsibility, and to be able to make visible how these principles actually can play out in practice in the way that we work.

We don’t know, watch this space, this is very early days. You might never hear about this again on the episodes because it withers and dies. But my hope is that in the next six months, we’ll be talking about this tool again, and this tool will become something we can then say, this is what it’s enabled us to do, this is how it’s enabled us as an organisation to support individuals to drive forward initiatives, for us to elevate certain initiatives which have taken on more importance, and so on. 

[00:25:36] Santiago: For the audience, you will hear about this certainly because I already have a follow up episode on this that I would like to discuss.

[00:25:43] David: Well, we should be more transparent than this. If it is a really terrible failure, you will hear about it as well. We will talk about our failures. So for better or for worse, whatever happens, we’ll discuss this again over the next six months or a year as these ideas start really taking shape into something very concrete.

[00:26:07] Santiago: On that note, thank you very much, David.

[00:26:09] David: Thank you.