14 – The Continually Evolving Principle

[00:00:00] Lily: Hello and welcome to the IDEMS Principle. I’m Lily Clements, an Impact Activation Fellow, and I’m here today with David Stern, one of our founding directors at IDEMS.

Hi David.

[00:00:16] David: Hi Lily. I’m looking forward to another Principle discussion.

[00:00:20] Lily: Yes, and today we’re planning to discuss Continually Evolving.

[00:00:24] David: I love this one.

[00:00:26] Lily: Great. How about you start with just a summary on what Continually Evolving is.

[00:00:32] David: I think it’s self-explanatory. It’s maybe one of the most self-explanatory principles, which is underused. I don’t hear it used. Many of the principles are things which actually in certain circles, you hear these words a lot or these terms a lot, systems thinking, transdisciplinary, capacity building, sustainable development.

These are all things where, they’re catchwords that a lot of people relate to, they use, they have their own interpretation of. But I very rarely hear people talk about things continually evolving. And it’s something I believe in really deeply, and it’s one of our principles.

So as a principle, this principle provides a world-view for the company. It fights against complacency and stimulates innovation. Really, what it does is it forces us to accept, and I’ve discussed this in other principle discussions, where Continually Evolving means we need to accept that we’re not building things for ourselves. We are going to have to be challenged by some of our other principles to build, enable others to take over and then move on to something else, reinvent ourselves.

That element of continually evolving, not just for us, but for society. It’s one of the sort of, one of the driving principles for me in my everyday thought.

[00:01:57] Lily: And so what are we evolving for? My assumption here is continually evolving, it’s about developing solutions that we are, that can work now. And then, as things kind of progress, maybe as we apply it to different settings or scenarios, or just as the world progresses, that the developments and the systems that we’ve created evolve with them.

[00:02:21] David: That’s possibly a small part of what I see is continually evolving. Yes, the software that we create, we’re designing it so that it’s not stuck in a particular technology base. Even software languages are moving very fast at the moment. We want to be ready to evolve with those languages. Yes, our development processes are such that it can adapt to how the world changes around us and to how the needs evolve as we observe them, as people start using the things that we build.

But this isn’t about our software packages, this is about everything. This is a world view. I would argue that one of the main ways in which this sort of affects me and my thinking is an element of how do you deal with what is called, or what some people call, wicked problems or grand challenges.

These are problems you can never actually solve. All you can do is you can try to make progress. But progress is never ending. Let me give you an example. This would be education. Improving the quality of education. You can’t ever solve that. You can never get to a perfect education system. You can always evolve the education system and if you do it in constructive ways, then you get a positive evolution and it gets better and better. However good you are, there would still be points for improvement. You can continue to improve, and that’s just continually evolving.

So it’s also about recognising when we’re taking on these big challenges. They aren’t things which have a solution and then you’re done. We don’t think or build in that way. We really think about the fact that there’s a need now, we can serve the current needs, and there will be other needs later. Maybe we know what they are, maybe we don’t. But there will always be this sort of continuation of needs and this evolution of society, which will always present challenges that need to be addressed, that where opportunities will exist to move things forward to make things better. And that’s a big part of the Continually Evolving for me.

And if you want the component you discussed, which is about how we apply that to how we build software, that’s just a part of it. That is not the central part of it.

[00:04:43] Lily: No, thank you for explaining and clearing that up. I guess then my concern comes in that, in a project, in the way that the world works, is you’re given a project or you apply for a project and you have funding for a set amount of years. If we want, we can do what we can to develop in that set amount of years to have something that can be adaptable. But after those years of up, how do you then continue to evolve that if you don’t have the funding streams coming in for it?

[00:05:16] David: You’re absolutely right. And these sort of project funding cycles are really central to a lot of areas of work where we currently work. And this is one of the things where this is not an obvious principle for a company. Actually, most consultancy based companies, because we have to be honest, right now, that’s what we are. Most consultancy based companies, this is not how they think. They really think project to project, come do something well, make an impact, move on.

This is sort of part of this human centred design approach, which is extremely effective. And I’m not saying it’s wrong. As with all of our principles, it’s not that what we’re doing is right and what others are doing is wrong. No, not at all. We just have felt that for us, this is the approach we are taking. And so when we take on a project which has a fixed funding term, I’m always thinking, okay so when the funding ends, how will it be maintained? Will it sustain itself? How will we continue to be evolved even if we don’t have another funding cycle for that? What will this lead to? How does it relate to the other things we’re doing?

And so a lot of the work that we do and the way we do things in transdisciplinary ways is tied in with the fact that actually, let’s say we have a software set which we develop on one project, where we then find that in a totally other discipline we can reuse it, and if the funding doesn’t come from that first source to continue developing it, it might come from a second source.

And so we’re looking for ways to get things reused. This is the part of our Open by Default. By being open, we are enabling ourselves and others to take it up and to evolve it and to take it to the next level at every stage. And so we feel that open is not enough. There’s lots and lots of great open projects which die because people don’t have the next step and they don’t bring in the community around that.

Again, this relates to the fact that our principles don’t work in isolation. We couldn’t be Continually Evolving, we couldn’t focus on that, prioritise that, if it wasn’t for so many of our other principles. The ideas of Local Innovation, of Viral Scaling, they’re all related to this.

You can’t get viral scaling to be really effective without evolution. When we talked about viral scaling and this idea that as things spread, if they spread virally, it’s really powerful if they can evolve. If you can have influences which push for positive evolution, either through incentive structures or other mechanisms, then you actually get really powerful viral scaling.

So there’s many different approaches to this which tie in and where the idea of actually starting from this principle of Continually Evolving, in some sense, it’s a nothing principle because of course, everything’s continually evolving. But to actually consciously work in that way is totally in contradiction with many of the places I’ve worked before, where you take on a project, you deliver it, and once you’ve delivered it, you wash your hands of it.

And that is not how we work. This principle forces us to always be thinking, even if our partners don’t want to drive this forward, we will continue to drive it forward. Even if our partners get somebody else to drive it forward, we would continue to be involved, even if we’re not funded. Because it becomes part of the bigger picture of the things that we’re involved in, that we want to influence, we want to be part of the evolution.

[00:09:03] Lily: Doesn’t this then mean, though, that things are starting to grow quite exponentially within the workload?

[00:09:09] David: Absolutely. You are aware of this. Many people, you know, are aware of these issues about the exponential growth within the workload. And while IDEMS as an organisation was growing exponentially, those two sort of matched.

So there is a danger for IDEMS if it doesn’t grow at the moment, because there are elements of this which are leading to an element of exponential growth, we have a sort of growing set of things we’re responsible for. And so right now, while we’re small, there is a challenge around this, to have the growth which matches our responsibilities, to continually engage with this sort of evolving set of interventions that we’ve been part of, that we remain in contact with, even when we’re not directly funded to work on.

But I do want to come back to what do we actually mean by evolving? And I must say, most people associate this with biology. I don’t. I’m a mathematician. I associate it with mathematics.

[00:10:15] Lily: And I’m a mathematician or a mathematical scientist, but I still associate it with biology though. So what is that difference between, what is the difference between those two words, one for biologists and one for mathematicians?

[00:10:30] David: My favourite instance of this is I had a friend who did a PhD in medieval French literature. And one of the things I love to ask is, what does medieval French literature have in common with biology?

[00:10:43] Lily: Okay.

[00:10:45] David: The mathematics you use to study them is both the mathematics of evolution, that actually to study how text changed over time, the history of text, how language had evolved in medieval French literature, you look at the evolution of the language, you understand which texts were copies from each other, because it was all copied by hand. And when people copied it they made changes. Some were intentional, some were just mistakes. But as you copied from one text to another, or as ideas spread from one text to another then you could see the evolution of the language, you could see the evolution at place within the literature and over time.

And so the point is that the mathematics of evolution is exactly the same whether you’re talking about studying ancient texts or whether you’re talking about studying how animals have over time changed. It is that process which is enabled simply by imperfect replication. It is a term I love and which many people don’t like and don’t understand.

[00:11:55] Lily: Imperfect replication, okay, which I assume means things evolving or being replicated but not to the exact.

[00:12:04] David: Exactly, that there is some form of replication, as in things get repeated, from something, there is something else produced, that’s your replication. But if it’s done perfectly, it’s boring, mathematically, nothing changes.

As soon as you have any form of change, as soon as you have imperfect replication where the things which exist once it’s been replicated are different in any small way from what was there before, then you have the mathematics needed for evolution. Because then the question is, are there pressures on that system, which means that certain forms of that replication replicate more than other forms of the replication.

A spelling mistake might be less likely to spread than a change in pronunciation, which leads to a change in how a word is written as the language evolves. So those two things are, maybe one of them has a better chance of them being adopted more consistently in the future than the other. And that would be in the medieval French literature and an instance of where replication, which is imperfect, with pressures which are coming from what people believe is the correct way to write something will then actually lead to, some changes sticking and finding their way into other texts. Whereas other changes just dying out and so on. And so that’s the same mathematical process. Some people get hung up on whether evolution relates to religion or not. And this is one of the reasons that that’s not a discussion that I need to go into.

If you think of it as a mathematical process rather than a biological process, it is something which is very understandable, explainable, and it is something which does not relate to any particular world view. It is simply a way of explaining the way systems change when they have a form of imperfect replication.

[00:14:17] Lily: Okay. So how does this then link to us continually evolving? This is about IDEMS, things can evolve imperfectly over time or between groups?

[00:14:29] David: This relates to many of our other principles, Viral Scaling. I would argue viral scaling, getting people to share amongst themselves. That’s the replication part. Local Innovation, that’s supporting things being imperfect in directed ways, so that there’s actually directionality to the way those changes are happening. That’s your local innovation that we’re trying to support.

The Open by Default, of course, this is an element of what makes imperfect replication possible within software contexts. Other people can take what we build and make their own thing from it. And actually finding ways to support that, and actually build things in such a way that is encouraged and enabled, is a big part of what we get from thinking about Continually Evolving. So let me give you a very concrete component of that.

In the way we try to develop software, we try to be rather modular. You know this from developing packages in R.

[00:15:27] Lily: Yes.

[00:15:28] David: And the point is that actually getting things down to things which could be used in different contexts gives them a chance of then evolving in a different way than they would if they were just tied in and bundled into something bigger.

We break them down into a small piece where somebody else may take that up and pick it up and say actually I want to make this grow in a different direction. And that’s possible. Now, there’s also elements at the other end of enabling local innovation which come from this, where what we’re trying to do is find ways to separate out content from code in ways which enable people to take ownership of a small part of the infrastructure, but that they are owning and they’re making their own. It’s no longer ours.

Building apps or chatbots where we hand over a part of the development process to the content creators and to others, but we do it in such a way that we are enabling that replication for them to share it with others and to come back and to support those changes to come back into something which is then going to continually evolve.

That’s the sort of thing that we make those design choices with this principle in mind. It’s a really deep principle for me, and it’s something where we’re only just starting to build the structures that we think are needed. But it’s very different as a way to think about the world than we found many other people do, despite the fact that this is such an obvious… truism; language, everything evolves.

[00:17:03] Lily: Okay. That’s very interesting. And I guess leads to a lot of other kind of questions and conversations that could very much stem out of this. But I guess just where we started, is there somewhere where this principle came from, initially, or has it stemmed from other principles, so that those other principles can stand?

[00:17:28] David: It’s a really good question. In my thinking, my conscious thought on continually evolving really stemmed from actually thinking about scale, and thinking about viral scaling specifically. And the idea that actually to achieve viral scaling in meaningful ways, we need to consciously direct the evolution and the replication, the scaling which is happening, and think about it and actually try to study it and learn from it.

Because how things scale and when they scale virally, it isn’t that there’s no influences, you need to understand what are the things influencing it. And that is really a thought or a study process on evolution of whatever it is which is going viral. And this of course is something which people understand much better now than they did even just a few years ago because of COVID.

And everybody knows about the different variants of COVID, the evolution of the disease, and how a particular variant suddenly took over from the other variants. And what that meant and what that led to is something which people understand now. This idea that the disease was continually evolving, so as we were studying it we were needing to think about how it was changing as a disease.

This is, I believe now it is the time for society to understand continually evolving and to really try to build society which think about this, which actually study this, which make this sort of more central and more visible. Interestingly, we had continually evolving pre COVID. So this has been a principle for many years for us, right since IDEMS was formed.

But I believe it’s now coming into a time when people are ready to understand this as a principle. I am surprised that I’ve not seen the literature on this. I’ve not seen people really discuss this as much as I feel it warrants. Of course, evolution is something which is studied and it’s studied in all sorts of disciplines, as I say, from medieval French literature to, of course, biology and many other things beyond.

But the idea of wondering and thinking about and investigating how societies continually evolve is one where I feel there hasn’t been enough talk, enough discussion, enough study.

[00:19:59] Lily: No, thank you very much. I think we probably should leave it there. And do you have any final bits you’d like to add?

[00:20:05] David: I guess the one final thing I’d like, and I really appreciate this sort of discussion on this principle, because I think it is one where I feel very strongly that thinking in this way has transformed pretty much every aspect of how IDEMS as a company works.

So if I had to have a single principle where I feel bringing this into my thinking has had the most individual impact on decisions that we’ve made, it has really been this one. Continually Evolving is a really tough principle to actually live it. I don’t recommend it for many others, especially not consultancy groups, it’s a hard principle, but it is a really powerful thing to bring in to how we work and really accepting it.

And maybe I’ll just really finish by, there was a talk I attended a few years ago where I was inspired by a group who call themselves the uncertainty experts. One of the things which this reinforced to me is this aspect that we’re not alone in recognising that part of the reason we are comfortable with thinking and working in a system which is continually evolving is because I was already aware of the importance of uncertainty.

Uncertainty, if you want certainty, then thinking in a continually evolving mindset is horrifying. Because you cannot have certainty about anything. And so you have to be comfortable with uncertainty to embrace continually evolving as a mindset.

[00:21:51] Lily: Thank you very much for that, David. And it’s been a pleasure as always.

[00:21:57] David: Oh, thank you.