Building a Successful Team

At a roundtable event at the House of Lords earlier this week there was much talk about partnerships and sustainability. The topic was the use of museums to enhance health and wellbeing. An All Party Parliamentary group is currently undertaking an Arts, Health and Wellbeing Inquiry and the event sought to showcase museum projects and to stimulate discussion and debate.

 

The view from the stairwell
The House of Lords

Most of us would agree that publically-funded institutions ought to be vehicles of social justice, placing public engagement at the heart of their activities. In fact the Museums Association have just signed up to an ethical charter promoting the very same. Yet the reality is that many in our communities feel excluded from toff's palaces, Lord Lupton's term, not mine. In the awe-inspiring surrounds of the Lords, the idea of institutions such as the British Museum, the Royal Academy, the Tates et al, building partnerships with the socially, politically and economically excluded, seemed more than a little surreal. Still, feeling the weight of the establishment supporting the burgeoning field of arts, health and wellbeing felt cause for optimism.

I was inspired as ever by the wonderful Gillian Wolfe who talked eloquently about the importance of relationship-building in achieving sustainable partnerships. She compared this task to constructing successful human relationships; they need time, trust and commitment. She knows of what she speaks. For over 30 years she pioneered innovative programmes for those deemed marginalised and excluded at Dulwich Picture Gallery, advocating public engagement well before the term was common parlance.

As she stated on being awarded an honorary doctorate at Canterbury Christ Church University in 2014: 

"I've been very lucky to have had the freedom to create innovative routes to engage non-traditional audiences such as disaffected youth, those with mental and physical disability, the elderly and notably those suffering early stage dementia and their carers. They are all embraced in enhancing cultural experiences every day of the year. The reward is always seeing the delight and joy it brings."

In a similar way, building a successful interdisciplinary team has been challenging yet rewarding. The freedom to think big without the usual restraints and frameworks of academic life, e.g. the Research Excellence Framework (REF), student satisfaction surveys, etc. has been liberating and has facilitated innovative and ambitious plans. Yet it is a challenge to bring a group together, and to embrace the differences in disciplines, training, and life experiences.

Some of the key elements that have helped build the team are:

• spending time together in different contexts - this has enabled us to bond, shape ourselves into a distinctive group, and has given us space, generating the energy needed to be creative
• listening to, and learning from each other - this has led to many fascinating conversations taking place, generating new ideas and approaches
• good leadership - this has involved attending to task and social elements - to keep the team on track, and to engender a sense of belonging
• sharing ups and downs - as with any relationship, things don't always have an upward trajectory, and here humour and acceptance has been valuable, to sustain team spirit and to and to generate trust. 

This blog is one way that we have developed ideas, initiated conversations amongst core team members, collaborators and the wider community, and is a record of a successful team building.

Success Map 3

Here's our revised schematic - thanks for all the suggestions!

Successful Ways of Relating

Two types of relating have been on my mind with regard to success...

Last week I was presenting some work on trust and suicidality at the British Sociological Association conference and it led me to thinking about Lisa's ideas on the politics of interdisciplinarity. I feel most comfortable working in the hinterlands between psychology, sociology and philosophy, but as a trained psychologist, I still experience myself as somewhat of a fraud outside of the psychology discipline. My 'outsider' status could be a fertile place of creativity, but the actuality of inhabiting material spaces across disciplines leaves me uncertain. I feel most 'at home' at those events that set themselves up explicitly as interdisciplinary.

But isn't there a problem here? If interdisciplinary-ism becomes a space in its own right, hasn't its project essentially failed? How can interdisciplinary work genuinely mesh and tether the disciplines together, in a way that opens out one field for those in another, if we silo ourselves off in special, private spaces? Working out how to work in a genuinely interdiciplinary way while maintaining connections to our various disciplines seems important. Perhaps because several of us see ourselves as having 'several hats' or 'past lives' where we do/did something different, we will be able to find news ways to straddle disciplines and negotiate the politics involved in these processes.

Credit: Wellcome Library London

Secondly, Michael and I have just been awarded a grant from the Independent Social Research Foundation for a small project on Relatedness and Relationships in Mental Health. The project will bring together psychologists, philosophers (including Lisa), sociologists, a social policy researcher and a psychiatrist to think conceptually about the roles of relating in experiencing and recovering from mental health difficulties.

This work which will run from July 2015-July 2016 will be an excellent platform for the work I am planning for this project around relational success in adversity - especially in mental health and addictions contexts. I hope to be able to develop some of the ideas we will explore here, particularly, around the relational factors that contribute to successful recovery, and the recovery factors that facilitate successful relationships, particularly in a context that privileges individualism and independence.

Agential Success

Success!
Credit John Wildgoose, Wellcome Images

My idea for the project focuses on agential success. We need to better understand the notion of agential success which is often upheld as a worthy goal without being fully understood or critically examined in the philosophical, psychological, or mental health literature. The notion of agential success is usually explained in terms of an agent’s capacity to pursue and sometimes achieve her goals. My research goal is to identify the psychological factors contributing to agential success and explore the costs and benefits of those factors for human agency broadly conceived. In particular, I am interested in the relationship between success and rationality, and in the relationship between success and wellbeing.

Rationality and success

As I am starting to explore via Project PERFECT and I hopefully will explore as part of a new fellowship supported by the Templeton Foundation, positive illusions and unrealistic optimism (i.e., the tendency to have a higher opinion of oneself than is warranted by the evidence and to predict one’s own future in a rosier way than statistical evidence would recommend) seem to support successful agency. This would mean that some forms of irrationality (false beliefs and inaccurate predictions) are good for agents. But it is not clear whether optimism is beneficial and conductive to success across contexts and populations. In what way does optimism promote engagement with the social and physical environment surrounding the agent? Moreover, it is not clear that the best way to understand the literature is in terms of a trade-off between rationality and success. Cannot optimistic beliefs enhance rationality as well as success in some context, and compromise both in other contexts?

Success and wellbeing

The identification between agential success and mental health has a long history. Some of the criteria for mental health (such as good functioning) seem to be other ways to capture agential success. But it is not obvious that agents with compromised mental health are less successful as agents or that agential success intended as goal satisfaction contributes to psychological wellbeing. We can all think of cases where mental distress and creativity go together, and similarly of cases where highly successful agents present symptoms of mental distress, often related to their prioritising their goals over other aspects of their lives.

Responding to negative feedback

Once the notion of success and its relationships with other values are critically examined, the recent empirical literature on agential success can be taken to suggest that the key feature is the capacity to respond positively to negative feedback and other challenges (psychologists talk about ‘hardiness’ and ‘preparedness’ in that context, in the popular culture we talk about ‘bouncing back’, and in the mental health literature the word ‘resilience’ is used to denote some of these phenomena). Are successful people in different domains hardy and prepared for set-backs? How do they overcome disillusionment and maintain motivation in the face of failure?

In the proposed project, I see my role as analysing some features of agential success that can help us understand in what contexts and to what extent success is something that agents should aim to achieve. This requires the study of case studies: success in elite sport (which will be explored in collaboration with Silvia Camporesi), success in the arts and fashion (Victoria Tischler’s focus), success in relationships (Zoe Boden’s focus), success and mental health (Michael Larkin’s focus), success and political or social power (Matteo Mameli’s focus), and at a more methodological level, success in interdisciplinary research (which concerns all of us!). Such cases will illustrate the complexities of measuring or assessing success: elite sportspeople, successful managers, and even top academics often give up long term health prospects or happiness in their relational and family lives to achieve career objectives in their field; self-harm, psychotic symptoms, or eating disorders involve actions and experiences that are at the same time bad and good for the agent. They may bring relief and some sense of achievement or accomplishment, maybe in the short-term, but they also cause pain or suffering, and are responsible for broken relationships or ill-health down the line. And many more examples sping to mind where assumptions about success are challenged.

My own research goal is to try and understand the significance of the single case studies for the general context of any agent’s success. The framework I would like to propose rests on the notion of success criteria for engaged agency. The proposal I would like to test is that the successful agent is the agent who engages with the physical and social environment in a way that allows her to give meaning and direction to her life. This is possibly one sense of success that is central to mental health. We often identify long-term wellbeing and mental health with the agent’s capacity to effectively pursue and ultimately achieve at least some of her goals, forgetting that the agent needs to be engaged to do so: she needs the capacity to interact successfully with her physical and social environment, to feel motivated and supported, and to develop creative responses to inevitable failures and set-backs.

My dream collaborators

Charlotte Gwinner – theatre director who would assist us in producing a play on success for families, to be performed on weekends at the Wellcome Trust.

Matthew Syed – successful sportsperson and now author and media who would feature in a podcast on the residency and deliver a public lecture on what elite sports can teach us about success in more general terms.

Anne Khazam – producer for the radio programme BBC Forum (World Service) who provisionally agreed to work on one or  two episodes of the Forum with core members and collaborators on success, to be aired worldwide and available as a podcast on the BBC website. She has confirmed that her editor is keen to pursue the project.

Amy Hardy – research clinical psychologist interested in the role of imagery in mental health who will deliver a series of lectures on positive and negative aspects of imagery and its role in ‘success’ (including a critical perspective of the recovery framework in mental health).

Some outputs and activities

• Preparation of two research articles on agential success
• Organization of a series of interviews, lectures and debates with experts from different backgrounds (podcasted)
• Book: Bortolotti and Larkin, Health and Happiness, Routledge (contracted)
• Contribution to set up an open access journal: Journal of Human Experience
• Co-editing a collection on success with papers from Core Members and their collaborators
• One or two episodes of BBC Forum (World Service) for each year of residency: (1) on individual vs. society and (2) on success in sport and performance art.
• Play for families on success to be performed at weekends at the Wellcome Collection.
• Two informal exhibitions in the Hub or Reading Room contributing to the two themes, success and rationality, and success and mental health.

Success Map 2

Glad you like the idea. Thanks for the helpful comments.

Here's a slightly messier version. It's tricky to get the balance right between the need to come up with something which makes sense 'at a glance' and the aesthetic effect that we want (whic,h I agree, needs to mirror some of the sprawl and complexity of a real Tube map, because that is one of the nice entailments of the metaphor when transferred to our plans). I don't think it's quite there yet, but it's getting better. I'll try breaking up the neatness of the green perimeter I think, in the next version.

I'm afraid I can't do broken/dotted lines at the perimeter: I've made the diagram in Prezi, and the template doesn't give me that option. But the advantage of using Prezi is that further down the line we can embed content into the circular frames (the stations) and zoom in to these. So we can use the map to present the proposal, if we get the map to a state where we are happy with it.

Success Map 1

First draft, what do you think?

Interdisciplinary Work and its Politics

Credit: Wellcome Library, London

In the last few days I have been thinking about several aspects of success, inspired by the other posts on the blog and by new readings. Today I'll write about one aspect, inspired by previous posts by Michael and Matteo: what success means when applied to interdisciplinary work. Here I'm not interested in whether interdisciplinary work is successful in terms of fulfilling research objectives and making progress with a complex issue. Rather, I'm interesting in whether reflection on interdisciplinary work can succeed at changing the politics of research and the sense of what is acceptable and desirable at the stage in which research is presented and disseminated.

My research has always been at the intersection of philosophy and psychology. I think some issues cannot be investigated successfully within one discipline, because one way of thinking about them needs to be constrained by the theories and empirical findings that another discipline generates. Recently I have become less apologetic about my methodological commitments, and I have started submitting thoroughly interdisciplinary work to those journals that are known as "core philosophy journals", that is, they have an excellent intra-disciplinary reputation (they are good for the REF), but do not have a history of publishing inter-disciplinary work. This was in part an experiment. The result has been fascinating.


In the two recent cases I have in mind, feedback has been overall of excellent quality, and my work has been by and large favourably reviewed. No objections have been raised to the research methodology, but I have received comments such as:

• "One cannot write a paper on x without mentioning work by philosophers A and B on x" (notice that there is no requirement that the work to be referred to is also discussed in depth or integrated into the proposed account);
• "Too much of the paper is spent describing the psychological evidence, surely the author can summarise the results without going into so many details" (notice that there is no suggestion that the references to the psychological evidence are irrelevant). 

I find it interesting that there is no substantial objection to the methodology, but there are reservations to the way the argument is presented. The attempt is to make one's work more respectable (more publishable?) but limiting the extent to which it appears (as opposed to is) interdisciplinary. One of the issues that I would love to discuss as part of the residency in the Hub is the politics of interdisciplinarity and its implications for success: When our methods change does our style also need to change to reflect that? How can interdisciplinary work succeed at pioneering new ways to present argumentation, communicate results, engage different audiences?

I think that within a collaborative and interdisciplinary project like ours we would be able to uniquely address such questions because it would require people from different disciplines to talk, think, and write together, but also make things happen. How does an interdisciplinary team jointly interviews an expert, commissions a play, elicits ideas from the public, moderates a debate, invites artists and performers to work together? How would the interdisciplinary (and individual) differences that would characterise any core team play out in such contexts? For the team members, each public engagement event will be like throwing a party where one person may take the lead in the organisation, but the space to be filled and brought to life is essentially shared, and the rules of engagement need to be negotiated.

My guess (hope?) is that the natural reaction of defensiveness I encountered in my "experiment" with submitting work to core journals will give way, and creative solutions will be explored to doing and presenting research. I envisage creating space for research that challenges common assumptions about success, and moulding new modes of presentation to fit the research questions and methodology, rather than imposing a mode of presentation that satisfies previously codified criteria of acceptability.