How to be Wrong: Recent Episodes
Ratio
Ratio explores how social connection shapes health and human development, using that learning to design better ways of living.
We conclude this series of podcasts linked to the publication How To Be Wrong with Don Berwick, renowned health policy maker and scientist. Don’s short paper Era 3 (link to the paper sent in the earlier mail) for Medicine and Health Care was the catalyst for the network that produced the How To Be Wrong paper. In this podcast, Don reflects on the paper, its reception and the prospects for new ways of thinking about learning.
Frank Oberklaid is a paediatrician at the Royal Melbourne Children’s Hospital where he founded the Centre for Community Child Health.
During the podcast Frank referred to several pioneers in the field of paediatrics:
Robert Haggerty’s work includes Stress, Risk, and Resilience in Children and Adolescents, a book edited with Lonnie Sherod, Norman Garmezy and Michael Rutter in 1994 long before the word resilience became in vogue.
Mel Levine was Professor of Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina Medical School in Chapel Hill. Here (embed the link) is a brief video of him talking about ripple effects, the way in which one problem in childhood leads to, and reinforces another. https://childrenofthecode.org/interviews/levine.htm
In his obituary the New York Times described Berry Brazelton as “America’s most celebrated baby doctor since Benjamin Spock and the pediatrician who revolutionized our understanding of how children develop psychologically”. Here he is talking about his concept of ‘touchpoints’.
Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess used the New York Longitudinal Study, beginning in 1956, to understand the role of temperament on child well-being. They classified children according to their temperament into three groups: easy -reacting to difficult situations without too much stress”; difficult -tending to withdraw from or find it hard to adapt to difficult situations; and slow warmers -low energy children who found it hard to maintain a positive outlook.
Nick Chater is Professor of Behavioural Science at the Warwick Business School, and author with George Loewenstein of The i-Frame and the s-Frame: How Focusing on Individual-Level Solutions Has Led Behavioral Public Policy Astray. The i-frame refers to science and policy focused on changing individuals. The s-frame concentrates on everything around the individual. As Nick explains in this episode, our hunger in the last decades for the i-frame has diverted our attention from the benefits of the s-frame.
References
DellaVigna and Linos (2022) evidence from 2 nudge units
Hagmann , Ho , and Loewenstein (2019) nudging out support for carbon tax
Sarah Davidson is Chief Executive of Carnegie UK Trust. Echoing Patrick McCarthy in the last podcast, Sarah brings to the work of the Trust her experience as a senior civil servant in Scottish Government. Carnegie Trust is focused on Collective Well-being. In this episode Sarah discusses the shifting culture of funding and learning within the Trust and pushing beyond ‘performance’ to authentic accountability.
Patrick McCarthy is past President of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the largest funder of social change for children and families in the United States. The Foundation is strongly invested in disadvantaged communities. Not all of those investments have paid off, but a commitment to evidence means there is always a legacy of learning. Patrick takes us through some of the lessons he has learned in over 30 years of public service, with a particular eye to the do's and don’ts of working in place.
Ann Johnson and Dan Hastings are the focus for place based work in Telford and Great Yarmouth. Their efforts are the result of a new way of working for the Lloyds Bank Foundation. Not so much about money. Or power. More about acting as the catalyst for new conversations about public policy. The work is new. It started in the pandemic. In this episode Ann and Dan give an honest, straightforward description of progress and setbacks. Read more about the Lloyds Bank work at: https://www.lloydsbankfoundation.org.uk/we-develop/transforming-and-strengthening-services/people-and-communities
Nick Davies is co-author of a report on the use of government targets. In this podcast he gives a series of examples of targets saving people’s lives and targets not only getting in the way of learning but acting as a source of deception.
Ken Masser leads a large organisation delivering Sport and Leisure services. But he is also learning how to make place the focus of learning about how to get more people involved in physical activity. That means looking well beyond gyms and pools and soccer pitches. Sport England programme is building a movement around of people like Ken and places like Rossendale. See examples of their work here.
Jill Baker from the Lloyds Bank Foundation, Richard Haigh from The Key and Laura Seebohm from the Maternal Health Alliance are all members of the How To Be Wrong network. They reflect on the network discussions and the impact it has had on the work they lead.
John Hitchin is Chief Executive of Renaisi, an organisation dedicated to improving places. He has contributed to the How to be Wrong network since its inception. He talks here about the changing prospects for the relationship between evidence and policy.
In the conversation he refers to his essay You can’t get there from here and a short blog he wrote in response to the How to be Wrong report.
https://renaisi.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/An-essay-on-the-concept-of-place-in-policy_by-John-Hitchin_2019.pdf
https://we.tl/t-MKrFtxWSWD
Jon Zaff is Director of the CERES Institute at Boston University. It is an attempt to link knowledge in the university with the needs of the communities around the university, in Jon’s case the needs of schools. His work focuses on the educational environment, the ethos, the way students relate to each other, and to their teachers.
https://www.bu.edu/wheelock/profile/jonathan-f-zaff/ https://ceresinstitute.org/