Outcome-making

There are three tools in the outcome-making toolkit: words, actions, time. All of these have agency. All three of these make an outcome, any outcome. The relationship between these three factors make behaviour patterns. Time, words and actions are the foundation of people-making.

That is very different way of understanding people, quite different form looking at a person as being a set of qualities that we can expose through a questionnaire, or 10 subtests, or percentile levels or scaled scores.

Actions are given meanings by words. Words and actions go together. Time matters because some word-action associations last a long time, and time also matters because when word-action associations get repeated over time, or repeated to a wide audience, the pairing becomes increasingly recognised and increasingly recognisable as 'the way it is'. It's a simple process e.g. we think that action means this child is hyperactive, parents, teachers, paediatrician agree and so this child 'has' hyperacitvity and hyperacivity is a 'thing'.

All of these are simplistic examples of the process, the process of reality-making. The examples do not do justice to agential realism , but it provides an insight into the transparency that agential realism offers psychology and our understanding of human behaviour. Real' is an agreed recognition of a relational pattern of words, action and time.

Current psychology that identifies and labels behaviours relies on the recognisability from its audience. The only difference is that agential realism gives us the transparency to see the reality-making process in operation. What were once descriptions of behaviours are now widely accepted as being real because the language is saying they are real and a wode audience is agreeing with it. Labels have become 'the way it is'. Other possibilities are simply not recognised. It's not that they do not exist, it's just that other possibilities do not have the audience or the words to be recognisable.

What is 'real' is a fragile as ripples in the air, as fragile as the words that are used to give meaning to the actions.

So what is real in psychology is fragile. But when exposed as being so tenuous as a constructed idea what is real becomes a field of potential for change. If we change the words, we change the meaning of the behavior, make a different meaning recognisable for an audience and then we have changed the potential for what the behaviour can be. This is the foundation of people-making.

One of the first instances in which I applied this way of thinking was years ago when a shcool was struggling with a 7 year old girl, Tia, who refused to do any schoolwork. She was wild. She physically fought adults and other children, trashed classrooms, and ran around the school with adults in wild and exhausting pursuits after her.

It might have been easy, but it would have been a slow process to get some sort of clinical diagnosis and throughout that time, Tia would have been repeating and consolidating (adding more meaning) to her actions. We could have spent hours trying to 'find the reason'. We did neither. All that we did was change the language that we used.

Tia heard adults talking about happy-making. Wild instances and extreme outbursts we talked about as Tia needing more happy-making. Happy-making involved a range of actions, colouring, running outside, being read to, writing stories, doing maths which she liked, all of which she could show adults. It only took 2-3 days before she wanted to show her class teacher what she was doing and the number of wild incidents reduced. A wild moment turned into, OK what do we need to do to get happy back?

The change happened over 2 weeks. Happy-making, doing things that other children weren't doing was not the wonderful world of happiness that she really wanted from school. Being immersed in happy-making was no longer the only thing that mattered to her. After 2 weeks she was spending days in class, doing classroom learning. It was not entirely smooth and wonderful, but she was being a school girl.

Looking back and thinking about the three tools in the behaviour-making tool kit, what we did was dramatically reduce the amount of time spent in chasing (literally) wild behaviours, put words to make schoolwork and showing her teacher what she could do the most meaningful action for her. We made pleasing her teacher recognisable for her. Adults in the school were recognised as being able to deliver happy-making, and the actions of being a school girl (doing class work, reading, writing, maths) all got to be included in the happy-making repertoire of things she could do.

We took the power out of Tia's actions simply by giving them a different (unexpected) meaning; we restored agency to adults in school and moved Tia's actions into a schoolgirl discourse.

Agential realism let us (me) construct this intervention. The buy-in of adults in consistently using the agreed language and doing the agreed actions in response to Tia's behaviours made it work.

This was the first significant example of applying agential realism to make an outcome that we wanted. Time, words, actions - we used all three tools.