From R to R'

A team, a family or community has routines, scripts or habits because of the value they generate. Examples are the way of working together, mourning or educating. Changing a routine is realisation of a particular value in a different way. Consider working together and one employee enterprises, mourning without a church ceremony or educating with new learning. Through these initiatives the present routine ® changes into a new routine (R’). R’ means doing common things commonly in a different way. Doing common things in a different way is our definition of social innovation. We have in Dutch a booklet called Innovatie in Zicht dealing with this change.

Somebody able to talk about his practical theory proves sight on own routines. In practice though, most teams are not aware of their own routine. Being critical about the own routine is not within reach. One can rule out the possibility that such a team would intend to change its routines. When I became inspector of agricultural education in 1986 I met a formers’ representative who was convinced that someone had et be a born Westlander – someone for the South Holland glass district, to have potential for a good glasshouse entrepreneur. He regarded  superior routine as something one needed to inherit. Difficult to acquire and alternative routines … do not excist. This thought is wide spread the same as the belief in the existence of autonomy and unique identity through birth and descent.

Routines are connected with security and certainty, and sometime with positions and rights. Certainty and positions are only taken in venture when absolutely necessary. For this reason and the unconsciousness of the existence of routine, the change of routine is rare – this is what one should expect because routine itself provides a value called stability.

Many changes are focussed on finding new insights and creation of new designs. An insight is something true and a design is something that works. When is comes to social change most times the insights and designs are sufficiently available. Without retrospect (reflection on own routine) these insights and design don not have the slightest chance of acceptation. A well-known example is the use of a new information system for customer control in an enterprise where the employees  in the front office do not cooperate. Another example is the ‘innovation’ caused by the cell phone, that could be introduced without any need to change routines to start off with. In practice nevertheless large sums of money are spent in the production of insights and designs and even more time and money is spent for the development of policy plans for such change.

Such plans are improved into the perfection, while the plans do not matter at all. What matters in the first palce is the reflection on common routines. That is the first step from R àR’

R accent Ltd. applies this principle for the improvement of vocational and professional education.