Hello, this is Peter Levesque. Welcome to episode nine of the Knowledge Exchange Podcast. This podcast series is a product supported by the Canadian Council on Learning – Canada's leading organization committed to improving learning across Canada and in all walks of life. I want to thank the great staff at CCL for their efforts with this project to advance our understanding of effective knowledge exchange to improve the learning of Canadians. You can download this episode, as well as one of the eleven future episodes in the series from my website at www.knowledgemobilization.net, from iTunes directly, just search for KM podcast. Alternatively go to knowledgeexchange.podomatic.com.
Rick Blickstead is a visionary leader who seems to dream in practical changes. I was inspired by his knowledge mobilization focus which is on outcomes rather than activities. He insists that social change will come through action – that sometimes the best solution is the one that is implemented rather than the potentially better one that is forever discussed. He argues for social entrepreneurship and for a culture that permits failure because it encourages risk. The concepts of mass customization, networks of outcome, and the measurement of outcomes, are all important to supporting decision making in our increasingly diverse society. Enjoy and be prepared to be stimulated.
Peter: I'm here in Toronto on Charles Street at the Wellesley Institute and Rick, why don't you introduce yourself, and tell us a little bit about what you do and what is Wellesley? Rick: Thanks Peter. I'm Rick Blickstead, I'm the CEO of the Wellesley Institute – have been for approximately 6 years. Historically I've been in both the private and public sector in terms of doing organization revitalizations. So that's about going into organizations and creating new visions, new strategies but also specializing in implementing those strategies because without implementation, it doesn't work. And as a part of that you need to have a knowledge mobilization strategy – how do you get information across various organizations. At the Wellesley, the Wellesley was a hospital and has become over time, a research capacity building and a public policy institute - what I would call a progressive centre left policy institute in the business of social change.
Peter: You've actually been identified consistently as a leader in doing this. What is it about your leadership and about Wellesley's leadership that has made changes? How have you…brought about social change?
Rick: Primarily we decided some time ago that we were going to be a pragmatic organization and the other, given that I had come out of the private sector and just my own love of entrepreneurship, is that we were going to be social entrepreneurs and involved in social re-engineering. And so if you're interested in that kind of thing, what you're interested in is outcomes rather than activities and part of the challenge that we face in the not-for-profit sector is often we focus on activities rather than outcomes. Secondly, we often look at issues as if they're complex because they're systemic issues – and yes they are complex but we use complexity as an excuse for inaction, that it's just so complex you can't break it down and therefore we talk more about it than do it and I think our view of the whole knowledge exchange and mobilization issue was to really drive social change through action and sometimes that meant that the best solution was not the best solution, it was only second best because if you can't implement it, it doesn't do any good. So we really focused on developing solutions that were implementable and hence that has made us much more entrepreneurial.
Peter: So one of the ways that knowledge exchanged has been described at CCL is bringing people and evidence together to influence behavior and I can hear that in what you're just saying. Can you give an example?
I could say, “what does this mean to you?” or “how do you think about this?” but I think given what you've just said, it's about practice or practical organization. Rick: Yes.
Peter: Give me an example.
Rick: Well okay, let's take our initial work in community-based research. Our goal right from the beginning was to ensure that we brought the rigor of academic life and the lived experiences of communities to create evidence that policy makers and decision makers could look at and say, “Yes, this is well founded.” Because part of the challenge was that it was quite anecdotal and you can…that can only go so far.
So as we developed our whole research programs and our policy programs we would bring people together and always ask the question so what and then also what now and you've talked about this before and I've heard you use almost that same expression, that you…just doing the work and doing the research and bringing people together, that's a means to an end. The end is actually an activity or an outcome. So we were always focused on very strong deliverables and whether or not that is…I mean right now we're doing a huge project in St. James Town on immigrant health and we're connecting with the community but we keep asking the question, “how is this going to change what the government is doing today or what communities are doing today?” That's the business we're in. Peter: So how do you support that process? What are the incentives or what is the infrastructure to support that process?
Rick: I think first of all, it really starts with a culture that has to be adopted by the whole organization. So for example, our governance structure at the board is called Social Entrepreneurship governance, so our board members know that they are policy focused and outcome focused.
We create a culture with the people internally that says: #1, they have a permission to fail, because if you don't have a permission to fail then you don't take risks, #2, that it's better to ask forgiveness than permission. So I don't know everything that's going on in this organization and I'd hate to have that. I mean I'd like people to sort of say, “I'm working on this - I'm doing a little bit on this” and if it gets too big I need to know all of it but you know it's great to have people out there trying new things. If you're not entrepreneurial in this organization and if you're not able to identify new opportunities…you know to sit down with somebody and say, “Hey, here's an idea”. Just today we're sitting down with an organization looking at the racialization of poverty and the next thing we know we're developing a commissioned research project. So that's the culture you have to have - you're always willing to push the envelope. Peter: The Canadian Council on Learning is about creating an environment that supports lifelong learning.
Rick: Right.
Peter: Can you link social entrepreneurship and lifelong learning together?
Rick: One of the tenants that I've always used is…throughout my entire life is, learning is a journey not a destination and that's a cliché and it's trite but it's also true and if you look at, and having been involved in university life, one of the challenges that we have in this economy is that there are no more right answers with the exception of maybe math and some sciences, we're always pushing the envelope and even in the sciences what we thought 20 years ago is not what we think today. So what you have to do is to ensure that organizations have an absolute dedication to learning – to making sure that you provide an environment where they're always willing to actually question the status quo. And as a result of that, you create organizations that have people in them that are always willing to learn more because they don't know it all. So when we work in projects, we're always saying, “well why is it this way? Why don't you push that paradigm? Why aren't you looking at this out of a different perspective? Why don't you think this can be accomplished?” But at the same time, we have to make sure that we also have the data to do it you know - that we have the evidence because you can't just do everything sort of off the cuff. Peter: Fundamentally what we're trying to get to is the full value of what we know. How do you, as an organization, or how do you as a leader, know that you're getting the full value from the processes here within the organization? How do you measure the value if it's not a normal monetary fiscal marketplace? Rick: That's a real challenge and something that I think we're okay at now…not great. So let me take it in a few steps and sort of peel the onion a bit here. The first thing is to recognize that we need to have facts and figures to support our arguments and I think part of the problem in the 3rd sector is that we have…we've been killed by stodgy research by, what I might call the right wing organizations or the right of centre organizations, because we didn't have the right data. Number two, one of the challenges, and it's a paradox because researchers are really good at having the data but sometimes they're not that good as interpreting what that data means from a societal point of view. The third part then says you've got to be willing to take leaps of faith in terms of your experience, so here we basically hired senior people who had the opportunity and the background to be able to make leaps of faith because I'm willing to make decision based on 80% of the information or 85(%) - I don't need to go to 95(%) or 100(%). And so, as part of a learning environment, you've got to put in the issue that a culture has to also have a willingness to make some quantum leaps of faith based on anecdotal experience. Peter: So let's talk a little bit about that because what you're saying is that you're willing to take decisions without complete information. When do you know you have enough?
Rick: I think you do a couple of things. First of all you make it time sensitive so that you create…you create drop dead dates and I think that's really important in terms of getting people to make decisions because so much research – if you take people who've grown up in the research environment or even the policy environment, you know they're looking at long term systemic - 10 years, 20 years and so their windows just keep…you know it's not unusual that a document that's always late from a researcher because it's always being put off and new information's coming up and they want to be bang on it. So part of it is putting a time on it - there's a provincial election or there's a federal budget and it has to be ready for January 1st and so you've got to be prepared to make decisions based on that. The second is, knowing that…I think they're intuitively you can make some decisions when you say, “ I've got most of what I need here – it walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, it is a duck” and as a result of that part of that is experience and part of that is saying “look, if someone were to read this paper, would they say that our policy recommendations are based on enough information” and I think that's…if you look through your clients' perspective. Peter: One of the hesitancies that I've heard from a number of people is there's this conversation about knowledge exchange being the right information to this right people in the right format at the right time and the question or the pushback that I always get is, “well how do you know you're right?” And part of what you're saying is it's a collaborative process and there's a trust part here and there's a relationship and there's also the context. Rick: First of all no one anymore has the monopoly on knowledge. I mean there's just too much out there. And secondly, no one's not that darn…that bright – I think bright people really know what they don't know and so they build teams around them and they collaborate with people who have a particular expertise in various areas. Now you also though, I believe, have to temper that with…you know sometimes a piece of knowledge that you didn't think, if you were a gatekeeper, would have said maybe that shouldn't have gone to that person. But that shred of knowledge is something that allows them to go to a next level. So we're not afraid to sort of, get it right all the time – to make sure it's always 100%; the right people at the right time and that's great theory but I do believe sometimes that using the shotgun and the rifle approach is important. Peter: So what are your biggest challenges?
Rick: If I were to sort of cascade it, the first thing is always picking the right topic – that eventually it's going to be of interest to people. Often I think, sometimes we work on stuff that no one's interested in. And that's fine if you're in academia if you're interested in just 10 other people in the world knowing about it but that's not the business that we're in so it has to have some scale to it. The second part, and the challenge that we've got is insuring we get the right people on it and I think it's so easy to go back to, quote, unquote “the experts in their field” and as a result of that, we don't let sometimes, the young mavericks come up. So one of the things we've tried to work on are, who are the up and coming mavericks that have got a different viewpoint, that challenge the status quo? Finding those people is a challenge. The third part is to actually put it in a translatable form that people understand.
Peter: Can you give an example?
Rick: Well we did a blueprint on homelessness for example…first we started with a lot of…looking at a lot of the research that was already out there because often what we want to do is reinvent the wheel and again another cliché but so many times…see researchers have always been paid and funded to do what they think is new research. For us, 95% of what we want to do has already been published. So you've got to be able to scour stuff and be able to then say, “what's new that I want to bolt on to it?” and that's where you spend your money. So then, when we were developing the blueprint, there was a lot of information out there but “What are the solutions that are actually pragmatic and where would the money come from?” Because if you want to talk to a politician, part of what they're saying is, there's no more money, where do you want to take it from? So you have to have an argument that actually looks at economics. I was just at a launch of a poverty group the other day and quite frankly I wanted to say, “Where's the beef?” What are the numbers that a policy maker can actually say if we did this we would save X and therefore I'm willing to invest Y. The last thing then is you then make sure that disseminate, and I think part of the big thing about knowledge mobilization is that it's a good example of what I would call, mass customization. You have one key message or a few key messages but you have to customize each one of those to the various stakeholders. Because the NGO leader may think very differently than the policy leader and yet we try to get everybody with one approach and I think we're getting caught up in…I would like to see a lot more work done in not the theory of knowledge mobilization but the practical nature of how do you actually get a message out. Peter: Right…absolutely. So do you have an example of where you've done that mass customization or is this something that you are trying to implement? Rick: Well if you take for example, we'd done a survey about a year ago with EDs…of 300 EDs and a one of them… Peter: Executive Directors. Rick: Yes, sorry – executive directors and CEOs and we asked them the question of what were their major…part of the survey was what are their major challenges? Part of their major challenges was getting funding but also…the other thing was that they're spending far too much time on filling out forms because the model used to be the government gave you some…you know 80%, you filled out your one sheet for the government, but now you've got 10 funders giving you your 80% and everyone wants different information in different ways. So we've taken the leaders of NGOs and turned them from leaders to administrators because now they spend most of their time filling out forms and looking for funding. So we created a project which said, we can't do business this way anymore. We created a different strategy to talk to funders…so we have an association of funders; we have a different report for them. We had a different piece for policy makers, so we met with policy makers separately. We had a different…even in policy makers we had a different, between what I would call, independent policy makers and the government bureaucracy policy makers. And then we took a different tactic to deal with…actually NGO leaders and so, in this way we had in effect, 4 or 5 different dissemination strategies – the same message but different ways of doing it.
Peter: So how do you know you're successful? Rick: Well that comes to the whole issue of – we talked earlier about measuring activities than outcomes and I think one of the reasons – not I think, I'm convinced my own opinion that one of the reasons we look at activities more is because it's easier to measure than an outcome. A great example of that right now is the wait time strategy in Ontario. We're really not measuring the outcomes of health, what we're measuring is an activity that says, it took a shorter time to go in than not. What we're doing is actually starting to look at…we have already started having clear objectives of every paper that we put out so at the beginning we say, “What would we term this as being successful?” So there's an outcome there that we can measure as opposed to what is the activity. The second thing we then look at are different forms of measurement so for example, if we're looking at a policy paper, we will look at things like how many times has it been picked up by the Star? How many times has it been in another journal? How many times… Then we actually look at and follow change in terms of either health outcomes in communities or health…or outcomes in public policy…for example, if we make an intervention and then we see that the government has made a change in a law or a by-law then we can say we've had an affect. The challenge is that nobody…there's very few Ministers will stand up and say. “Thank you Wellesley for changing my mind on this” or “Thank you Board of Trade” or “Thank you whomever”. So you've got to be able to see it as a collective outcome. We've worked on numerous things that the city that I would be…arrogant of me to say we did that. I know we had influence but there were a number of other people that I'm sure had influence too. So you've got to be able to understand that. Peter: So it's almost that there's this process of assisting the lifelong learning activities of people in decision making processes. Rick: You know, you've been on that side Peter and you know, we think that policy makers or bureaucrats or even people running organizations have these massive amounts of information and they can take it all in and what we say is, “look, when the window comes, we need to be there and we need to be succinct because they don't know have the time”, like anybody else and it's important that as information changes, we are continually revising our blueprint on housing because things change - you have to look at….we have to walk step-in-step with the people who are making decisions about that - on affordable housing by giving them new information. We're putting a lot of money for example, into what we call the Virtual Wellesley which is our whole sort of internet, however you want to call it, knowledge exchange strategy. The reason we built it is for knowledge exchange and dissemination not because we want people to know more about the Wellesley.
Peter: I'm going to ask the impossible question but if you're going to look at knowledge exchange and the activities of Wellesley 10 years down the road, where are you going to be? How do you see it?
Rick: I would hope that people would look back and say…first of all the Wellesley starts off with having very good information that's very supportive. Secondly that they are a bunch of smart people who have been able to analyze the information, not just produce it because good people that you want to follow or to whom you want to listen, have an ability to analyze and tell you what all this means. And then in terms therefore of knowledge mobilization, they will have said these people have been a catalyst to helping me change the way I look at something or help me look at it in a sharper…with a sharper perspective and as a result of that, I was able to contribute to social change. I would like them to say, if I look at it from a brand reputational point of view, I'd like them to say that the Wellesley is a good source and a good catalyst and good broker to make that happen and that they, in effect are always evolving. That's what we'll be – we'll be in 10 years from now, one of the best and hopefully the best, progressive center institute that offers pragmatic results on social change in the area of urban health. Peter: Rick it's always been a pleasure to meet with you and you always push my thinking on this and so before I've closed any of these interviews, I've left an open question: do you have any final words? Something that you want to say that just hasn't been said in this conversation so far? Rick: Well I think it's important as we move forward, that we move away from networks of interest to networks of outcome. That so often we believe that we're collaborating and we're building another network, when there's already a network out there, and that we're not as focused on actually getting stuff done as we are…how many times have you been, I've been to something where you could turn around and think that you're still in Kansas – that it hasn't really moved forward. And I think that's because we're not willing to take the risks associated with that sometimes and we're too involved in the process rather than the outcome and so I'd like to see a lot more time dated stuff where we say, “okay we've got 6 months to do this and by gosh and if it isn't done then why am I at this meeting?” Peter: Let's do it. Rick: Okay Peter: Right. Thanks again Rick: Thank you.
