Individuals, Society and Success: How does national mood infiltrate personal mood?

Our collaborator, performance poet Luke Wright, writes:

Performance poet, writer and broadcaster
Luke Wright

 

"I used to knock around with a bunch of poets and creatives in Liverpool. This was over ten years ago, just after Liverpool won its bid to become the European Capital of Culture. Suddenly there was a lot of money floating around and my pals were as keen as anyone to get a little bit of it to help them run their poetry events. 

Over the next few years they got increasingly exasperated as the powers that be spent the cash on projects that didn’t feel very cultural at all. “Future generations will marvel at the great paved spaces we have created!” the poet Nathan Jones drawled sarcastically.

We’re frequently told that public money sunk into big urban projects will not only generate billions of pounds but be good for public morale. But just how true is that? Can we ever really quantify public morale? Are these “great paved spaces” there for the happiness of the people that pass through them everyday or the glory of the leaders who put them there?

How far does national mood infiltrate personal mood? I remember walking through Chelsea after England beat Argentina in the 2002 World Cup. It would be fair to say the result was unexpected and strangers were high-fiving and beeping their horns at one another. The mood of the whole day lifted but across the city bills laid unpaid, friends fell ill, relationships ended. When it comes to personal success is there such a thing as society? 

I don’t have the answers to all these questions, probably nobody does. But I’m looking forward to working with some people whose answers will be a lot better informed than mine. I want to take these ideas and use them to inform the story of three teenagers living in East London when the Olympics were ‘won’ by Britain. How did Britain’s success in its bid to win the Olympics and then our athletes success in the games themselves affect their own successes and failures in life?"

                                                                        

 ***

Luke is currently on tour with his most recent solo show 'What I Learned From Johnny Bevan', which won the Fringe First award for new writing at Edinburgh last year: http://www.lukewright.co.uk/

Workshop on Success: A Brief Report

On 18th September at Senate House in London we met some of our collaborators for our proposed research project. It was a great day in which we explored ideas and experiences.

What is success?
We started discussing the meaning of the word "success" (etymologically linked to the Latin word for succession, and thus a term with a strong temporal and causal component) and how the residency would serve as to critically analyse everyday conceptions of success as tied to individual achievement, fame, power and competition. Success demands not just competition but cooperation, and changes our perception of ourselves and the way other perceive us. Any meaningful examination of success requires also a reflection on failure. Our own interest in success comes from its relationship with health: how does doing well relate to being well?

Polarities
Apart from success and failure, we are interested in character and context, practices and structures, individuals and communities/organisations, internal and external, public and private. How do we achieve success, and what does it do to us once we have it? Several themes emerged from the discussion, including snatching success from the jaws of defeat; experiencing failure after being a success; failing in one domain while succeeding in another; performance anxiety and corporate psychopathy; and failure as necessary, as a useful and important aspect of growth, creativity and innovation.

Success and the Theatre: Charlotte Gwinner

Charlotte Gwinner

I am really excited to be able to introduce Charlotte Gwinner to the rest of the team!

Charlotte Gwinner is an award winning theatre director and her recent credits include: Sunspots at Hampstead Theatre, Sarah Kane's 4:48 Psychosis and Crave at Sheffield Theatres, The Distance at the Orange Tree Theatre, and A View From The Bridge at the Everyman and Playhouse, Liverpool.

She has directed lots of new and classic plays including: The Knowledge and Our New Girl (Bush Theatre), Benefactors (Sheffield Theatres), and The Uncertainty Project (Paines Plough). 

She was Associate Director for the Bush Theatre, under Josie Rourke in 2006, and was awarded a Quercus award in 2014 by the National Theatre, as well becoming Associate Director for Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse. She is currently an Associate Director at Sheffield Theatres.

It is wonderful news that someone with Charlotte's experience and background is keen to collaborate on a project investigating success, especially as Charlotte herself is interested in the various aspects that make a play successful. Charlotte will help us convert some of our and her ideas on success in a play destined to young children. 

I'm looking forward to discuss the details with Charlotte and the rest of the team in September!

Meeting Curious - thinking about failure and vulnerability in the light of success

Last week, at Wellcome Collection, I met with Helen Paris,who together with Leslie Hill form Curious. Curious have already created two artworks with the support of Wellcome Trust. One about ‘gut-feelings’ (The Moment I Saw You I Knew I Could Love You) was a collaboration with gastroenterologists at Barts, London. The other, about smell and memory (On The Scent), involved collaboration with a biologist at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, India.

Helen and I had a wide ranging conversation, but one element stuck in my mind – the possibility of failure and the opportunity to fail. Helen teaches performance at Stanford, USA. In one class she asks students to experience failure by creating ‘bad’ artworks. In order to succeed in the class they have to fail in their art, which Helen says the students find very confusing. What is the role of failure in success?

For artists, learning to take risks is necessary for success. Yet taking risks results in the possibility of failure. Drawing on Nietzsche', the early contemporary choreographer Doris Humphrey described how the modern dancers should always inhabit the ‘arc between two deaths’ - the moment of falling, between standing still and lying down. For Humphrey, lack of risk was the death of the artwork. If you were safely standing, or safely lying down, nothing interesting was happening. To dance, to create 'good' art, you must take the risk - and accept the possibility of failure.

But in healthcare, risk is unacceptable.

In a Lottery-funded project about interpersonal perspectives of suicidality, I was interested to hear service-user and family members discuss how while risk, and risk-assessment was very much part of many suicidal people’s lives, care and humanity was less evident. It seemed to many of our participants, that our risk-averse healthcare culture had reduced care to box-ticking, and that the humanity had all but disappeared. I am reminded of being told about an experience of being an inpatient (partly described in an article by Amy Woods & Neil Springham), when the service-user reported that hearing kind words from the ward cleaner was a standout moment of her mental health inpatient stay.

What is the relationship between risk and care? Trust seems important here, and was lacking for those participants who had been suicidal. I’m very interested in how trust manifests between people, rather than inhabiting any one person. It is neither a cognition, a behaviour nor a feeling, but perhaps a mixture of all these, happening across persons, not inside them - in a distributed way.

Helen Paris told me she thinks of trust in terms of an invitation – the invitation is given to the audience and she awaits the response. For example, in their recent piece Out of Water, Helen holds out her hand to an audience member, who is then led down to the edge of the sea. In making the invitation there is risk and vulnerability. How will the audience member respond? Helen says creating an atmosphere of trust and safety in the artwork is important.

There is risk and vulnerability in mental health care too. For service-users, who have perhaps been let down or hurt many times before, there is huge risk in approaching services for help, and allowing themselves to become vulnerable in the moment of trust. But for the staff too there is risk and vulnerability. (And I am thinking of my own experience here, as a trainee psychotherapist). If we make ourselves vulnerable by showing care for a service-user/client, what will happen? There is risk in creating attachments with the people we ‘care’ for (and this also goes for informal carers and wider friends and family of those with mental health problems). There is risk in acknowledging that as healthcare providers we often do not have adequate methods to ease suffering, and that we, sadly, sometimes fail to keep people safe or help them become well.

In thinking about success, failure, vulnerability and risk are all implicated. This seems to be the case in both artist endeavours and in healthcare.

Stories of Success at the Heart of the Project

Logo of SparkLondon

I just had a great call with the director of one of our newly confirmed collaborators, SparkLondon. Joanna Yates started out as a Occupational Psychologist, but now runs London's storytelling events organisation, as well as working directly with companies thinking about the stories they tell.

SparkLondon hosts two types of events at present - 'SparkLondon Open Mic' nights, where anyone can tell a story based on the theme of the night. The next events on on 'Adventures in Business Gaffes' (30th July) and 'Glory' (10th August). They also host 'SparkLondon Stories' which are specially produced events with story-tellers from particular groups. The next event, produced in collaboration with Open University, focuses on the stories of sex workers.

Every event is recorded and turned into a podcast. Their podcast now has 30,000 listeners. You can listen to them here.

Speaking to Joanna was fanstastic - she completely understood the complexity of the theme 'success' and had many personal and professional insights into the idea of 'success against the odds', or in 'times of adversity'. She's passionate about learning from what works and uses storytelling to help companies negotiate periods of change. For this reason, I think she'll make a great contribution to the work of collaborator Dr Leah Tomkins on organisational success and our thinking about interpersonal and systems successes.

Joanna is going away to discuss our conversation with her team and come up with some more refined ideas for events and workshops that we can interweave into our residency. She's also going to look at some costings. We'll meet again later this month at one of their events, and Joanna is hoping to come to the collaborators' event on 18th September.

I'm feeling very inspired and am coming to find that stories are at the centre of the research I want to do as well. As a phenomenological psychologist stories hold a tenuous place, but in my PhD I incorporated narrative because I see it as such a pervasive part of being human. I think the stories that we tell as individuals, couples and families, especially at times of adversity, are part of what holds us together (anchors us), and helps us be successful. I am really excited about the prospect of moving forward with these research ideas!

Next meeting is with performance poet, Luke Wright...

Success Map 3

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

Connecting and Relating

Credit: Anthea Sieveking, Wellcome Images

For the project so far I have nominated two collaborators, who are both keen to take part:

Dr Leah Tomkins has a background in classics, then worked in industry for 20 years, including as Director of Change at the Cabinet Office. Like me, she retrained in psychology at Birkbeck and then completed her PhD. She now works in the field of Organisational Studies. I invited Leah because of her understanding of how organisations succeed, and particularly because of her work around the notion of the 'caring leader' and the Heideggerian idea of 'care'. I am also currently collaborating with Leah on a project about experiences of happiness. One area of interest is how achievement and happiness can be bound together - but can involve experiences of anxiety and shame as well. I see Leah's interests fitting well with Michael's and my work on relationships (Leah is also an expert in the IPA method and the phenomenological psychology approaches we use) and foresee her being involved the 'relationships and connectedness' stream, but also she will contribute to our stream on 'individuals and hierarches' as well.

Dr Andreas Aresti and the British Convict Criminology group are committed to developing critical insider perspectives on prison and the experiences of prisoners. Andreas is both an ex-prisoner and an academic. As such, he researches with communities and individuals who are impacted by the prison experience and co-founded the British Convict Criminology movement, which is an emerging theoretical perspective (originating in the US) led by ex-convict/non-convict academics. The group takes a critical perspective to existing criminal justice issues. In particular he has looked at resettlement. I am keen to work with Andreas and other members of British Convict Criminology on the 'relationships and connectedness' stream, to explore further how relationships succeed during time inside, and during the difficult resettlement period. Andy also shares expertise in the IPA methodology, but also works in more collaborative participatory ways with groups and individuals. As well as working academically, he is involved in shaping policy and doing community work, such as mentoring. With his personal and academic experience I also think Andy will be a great contribution towards the 'social contexts and alternative cultures'.

A Hub of Success

I've been thinking, dreaming, contemplating and moving towards action, in this case writing. The evolution of this project already represents success for me. It's almost ready. A group of people have come together (thank you Lisa and Michael) and developed something novel, each contributing unique insights and skills. Through a series of exchanges and interactions, many virtual, a programme of work has emerged. The discussions, (re) connections and interactions have reminded me of the importance of relational factors in achieving success. So, what are my plans for the project and who will I bring in to collaborate with?

My focus will be on creativity as a route to successful recovery from mental health problems. This addresses the Wellcome challenge of understanding the brain and how integrating humanities, arts and science approaches can contribute to this.


I will draw on my research focussing on engagement in creative activities and mental illness. Specifically my work on dementia that addresses another Wellcome challenge, that of investigating development, aging and chronic disease. This work is building evidence on how to provide and encourage supporting skills and resources in older people.


Success as an Outsider
I plan to engage with my colleagues and creators in the outsider art field to explore how creative endeavor can lead to success within the art world and the costs and benefits associated with this. Some, even those with severe and chronic mental health problems, have achieved considerable success as recognised artists. The current popularity of the ‘outsider’ art field is testimony to this. ‘Outsider’ art, a term coined by Roger Cardinal in 1972, defines artists as those outsider or peripheral to mainstream art training and infrastructure. It is now a contested term as it serves to reinforce differences between individuals within and outside the art world, and, implicitly, those with and without mental health issues or other challenges to social and cultural inclusion. Despite this, in 2013 there were at least 5 major exhibitions of outsider art in Europe alone which demonstrate success in the art world. The movement has its own dedicated art magazine: Raw Vision. There are now 2 commercial outsider art fairs in NYC and Paris each year where art made by untrained artists, many of whom have mental health or learning difficulties, exchange hands for substantial sums of money.

Whilst exhibitions, press coverage, and fairs increase the profile of artists and their work, it could be suggested that those benefiting are the art dealers rather than the artists themselves. Some artists indicate that commercial exposure can be exploitative and even damaging to mental health. I would like to explore relationships in this context, which would link to Zoe’s work stream. I will work with John Maizels, the editor of Raw Vision magazine. Coverage of artists and events in this publication represent an important marker of artistic success and wider recognition.

Outputs: John has agreed to work with us to develop an article or series of articles in his publication focussing on notions of success within the outsider art field. This will enable findings from our residency to reach an international audience in the specialist art field, a marker of artistic achievement (success).

Both the work on creativity and aging (dementia) and outsider art lead to many opportunities for public engagement. I plan multi art form activities working with Errol Francis. Errol is an artist, curator and researcher. He has recently established the research and creative consultancy –PSY- based at London College of Communication (I am a member of this group). Errol has a string track record of curating and directing festivals with mental health themes. Most recently the acclaimed ACE-funded Anxiety Festival 2014 and 'Acting Out' (2015) http://www.actingout2015.org (I am a curatorial consultant on ‘acting out’).

Outputs: An art exhibition and/or festival, across multi art forms and featuring new commissions on the themes emerging from the residency.

Success and Performance
I plan to explore creative expression through a phenomenological framework, informed by positive psychology. In particular I plan to look at artistic activity as a form of ‘flow’ state and one which results in enhanced wellbeing but also production of valuable aesthetic artifacts. Also, artistic activity may be viewed as a component of posttraumatic growth (PTG), that is a way that one’s life is enhanced as a result of traumatic experiences such as mental illness and events preceding it. I would also aim to explore how artwork made by those with mental illness may be used to successfully connect them to significant others and to the wider community. Here I plan a collaboration with the filmmaker David Bickerstaff. David has enjoyed considerable success with films on artistic, mental health and environmental themes. He has collaborated with the Wellcome Trust on numerous occasions e.g. Madness and Modernity and is working with them currently on a future exhibition that focuses on mindfulness.

Outputs: a short film on themes emerging from the residency and a peer-revised publication in Arts and Health.

I would like to broaden this work stream to include performance within sport and other arenas such as theatre working with Jules Evans and Hannah Gravestock.

Jules Evans is an author, philosopher and is policy director at the centre for the study of emotions at QMUL. He is also a broadcaster e.g. he recently presented a piece on flourishing on BBC Radio 3. He has been a BBC 'new generation thinker'. He is co-organiser of the London Philosophy Club and has been working with businesses, elite sportspeople e.g. Saracens football club and in prisons teaching flourishing and 'the good life'. His book Philosophy for life and other dangerous situations has been published in 19 countries. It has been #1 in Amazon.co.uk’s philosophy chart, a Guardian Books bestseller, and a Times book of the year. His next text (due 2016) focusses upon ecstatic experiences.

Output: Jules will develop a seminar series on flourishing and success in a variety of public, clinical and community settings.

Hannah Gravestock is a former elite ice skater. She provides performance coaching in theatrical and sporting arenas. She has established innovative training modalities e.g. drawing, to enhance success in the theatre and in sporting venues. She has worked with people with dementia in residential care settings.

Output: Development of performance and drawing based interactive training programmes.

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?

Bricolage

It's been a very interesting couple of weeks.

I've been writing and speaking to potential collaborators about getting involved in our planned project, and that has been a very positive experience. It has been really good to be able to make plans with long-standing collaborators, but the scope of a new project means that I've also been able to open up conversations with new collaborators, too, which is very exciting. One of the nicest discoveries has been the opening up of the grey area between 'new' and 'old' though. The Hub proposal is a license to pick up conversations with some of those people that one always means to work with, but for one or reason or another, never quite sets up the opportunity. The importance of picking up these loose ends and good intentions while they are meaningful has sadly been underlined for me this month, with the untimely death of a greatly admired and very successful colleague. I had shared a great many of these 'let's catch up and make a plan' conversations with this colleague, and I liked him very much: the intentions were genuine. There's a big hole in the clinical psychology community at Birmingham, and there are a lot of people (including me) trying to make sense of its sudden and unanticipated appearance.

A happier dimension of the process has been the permission to 'cross over' into non-academic territory. With Victoria thinking about visual arts, and Zoë reflecting on dance and performance, I've been thinking about successful co-production and collaboration, so I'm really pleased that Geoff Farina and Chris Brokaw (two very experienced and articulate musicians) have agreed to join us for an event and performance exploring these phenomena:

https://vimeo.com/18949930

As a sometime musician myself, it will be quite liberating to work in zone where it is possible to draw on connections from my 'other life.'

Possibilities

I've really enjoyed reading the other posts on the blog, and it has given me a lot to think about. Mostly, I have been a little overwhelmed by the options. Earlier this week, however, I think my ideas began to consolidate, and today I spent several hours writing to potential collaborators. Some of them are people that I've worked with for years, and some of them will be new collaborations, opened up by the interdisciplinary remit here. It has been very exciting writing to these latter ones. Looking forward to the replies now, and hoping that they're as enthusiastic as I am!

Imagery and Optimism as Ingredients of Success

Credit: Jasmine Parker, Wellcome Images

In the last couple of days I further elaborated my thoughts on the success project, and on ways my research questions can be addressed in collaboration with the other potential team members.

On Monday, as part of a public engagement event I organised for the Arts & Science Festival in Birmingham, I heard a talk by Amy Hardy on imagery that touched on many aspects of my interest in success.

She talked about imagining supports both memory construction and forward planning, and she discussed several examples of the costs and benefits of imagery. Some of her examples, the use of imagery to improve academic performance or performance in elite sports, and the use of imagery in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) in the context of post-traumatic stress, are cases in which the way we use imagery helps us overcome obstacles and achieve the results we want to achieve.

When I am thinking about a talk I need to deliver to a tough audience, imagining how giving the talk will be like before it takes place will make me less nervous and more confident, improving my performance. Similarly, it has been shown that elite sportspeople improve their performance in competitive events when they imagine the race or the match in advance of competing. The key is to focus on the process, not the outcome. Imagining the event is part of the preparation for it. It is conducive to success.

Some Reflections on the 'Success' Theme and Team

On the train back from London last week, I made a lot of notes in order to try to capture some of my initial thought about a collaborative project on success. Lisa, Zoë, Matteo, and myself had lunch together before an event about interdisciplinary research collaborations at the Wellcome Collection, and discussed some of our ideas. It struck us that there was a promising set of overlaps in the topics and questions which we wanted to address. After lunch, we attended the event, and heard from Wellcome Trust staff, and from Felicity Callard, leader of the current ‘Rest’ Hub residency.

In the breaks between presentations we had a lot to think about, and a lot to talk to each other about. When we had arrived, we were told that the event was being time-lapse photographed. On the train home, it occurred to me how much time we had spent together as a four, rather than dispersing ourselves around the room. We also spent that time in an unusual rhythm, alternating between periods of quiet reflection (or stunned silence - gloss as you prefer!) where we all tried to process the overwhelming surge of ideas and possibilities, and other periods of intense discussion where we worked together to give these ideas some shape. I came away convinced that Lisa’s initial idea of ‘success’ was going to work really well as a means of facilitating interdisciplinary research, and that we already had enough in common (in terms of interests in experience, ethics, 'the good, healthy life,' and 'the good society') to make that research cohere.

'Facilitated permeability'

As we listened to the presentations, I was struck by the enthusiasm of the Wellcome staff. Some of my more recent research involves understanding organisational change processes in healthcare, and particularly the psychological aspects of that (in terms of identity, status, group dynamics and processes, for example). I’m quite used to being an ‘outsider’ who is coming into an organisation for research purposes. Usually this process is a cautious negotiation; sometimes it is characterised by defensiveness and obstruction. The thing that really struck me about the attitude of the Trust staff was how open and encouraging they were. I came away with the idea of the Trust as a very permeable space. I think part of our conversations about how to proceed from here will need to be about how we can demonstrate our ‘good faith’ and trustworthy-ness (it’s good to be invited in, but it’s also right - and polite – to get a sense of the boundaries and expectations before accepting such an open invitation). I also think we need to give a lot of thought to how we use that permeability in our plans for a project on success. It’s clearly a critical feature of the concept: who will join us in the project, and in what sequence, and what will they do there?

Planning

A less positive aspect of the event was the sense of ‘ordeal’ which seemed to be associated with the application process for funding for large collaborative projects when Felicity Callard spoke about her team’s experience of that. I can’t say that this didn’t dent my enthusiasm for a time. On reflection, however, I think we can perhaps make our experience of that process a bit more positive if we take the opportunity to learn from past experience and the experience of others. We can do this partly by using this blog to ‘stay ahead of the curve,’ and to keep track of our ideas and plans. And we can align our diaries and block out some chunks of time for meetings and development work at key times. 

Interdisciplinary and Public Engagement

Here are some of the question relevant to what we want to achieve from our proposed project:

• What kinds of events and processes can we set up during our project?

• How can we make sure that each of these activities presents us with an opportunity to learn something about the meaning and quality of ‘success’, and for our partners and collaborators to learn something too?

• How can make sure that we gain as many insights as possible from taking an interdisciplinary approach to these activities?

• And finally, how can we structure this so that it combines to form a coherent programme of work, and adds to our cumulative knowledge about success and health?

The possibilities afforded by this seem very exciting, but I also feel a bit of trepidation about it. If we are successful, then we will be embracing a really new way of working for a couple of years. I can imagine that this will be transformational in terms of integrating art and performance in the project. I have begun to appreciate just how important it will be to have Victoria’s curatorial experience as part of our team!

It was really useful for four of us to all be in the same place, I thought. The link between the interdisciplinary component and the curatorial elements really started to take shape in our discussions that afternoon. On the train home, I could see that we’d had a small sample of the sort of thing that a project of this form might offer up every day. Through our conversation, we opened up some avenues for including some aspects of our research interests that we hadn’t initially considered relevant. I’m now quite keen to think about the Experience-Based Co-Design (EBCD) work as part of this scheme, for example. Partly this arose through getting a better sense of Matteo’s interests in empowerment, and in access to social and structural resources, and partly it arose from a ‘lightbulb’ moment. Bringing people together – with the purpose is to improve health – and bringing them there to engage with the idea of success is an opportunity to ‘learn from what works.’ In terms of service-user involvement and healthcare improvement, EBCD fits really with that agenda. 

Structure

As we talked, I began to visualise a structure to our theme. The project is going to be segmented (there are elements of work on success at the personal, interpersonal, social and cultural-structural) and layered (we can foresee themes on success as a response to negative feedback, costs of success, the relational context of success, the different meanings and values associated with different definitions of success, the notion of ‘succeeding against the odds,’ success in elite domains, success in the arts as a source of wellbeing - and so on). Zoe described ‘thriving and striving’ as one of our interests and this certainly seemed to capture the dynamic very well.

Spokes reach out from this hub, connecting the core members to various partners and collaborators. Each of these spokes captures a different strands of work, linking to a likely output. Our task now is to add some detail to these strands, so that we begin to see how they might fit together, and how they might best be structured. I’m really excited at the prospect of so many different levels of activity – co-produced ‘events,’ insights into processes through performances, development and delivery of some innovative research outcomes, opportunities for engaging with some new audiences,  and many of those potentially leading to co-authorship/co-presentation.