I don’t want to take up your time so feel free to not reply, just wondering out loud how Jeroen’s method compares to the systematic cause mapping approach Michael Plant suggested in his thesis for generating new promising causes. I suppose the latter can be interpreted as a systematic way to implement Jeroen’s method; for instance, starting from this table in Plant’s thesis generating happiness intervention ideas…
...Plant notes that many solutions apply to several primary causes (rows), inviting the idea of solution clustering (as illustrated below). I suppose Jeroen’s “increasing cycling rates in cities instead of car usage” example would be what Plant calls a secondary cause, or whatever is more granular than secondary cause. Your longlist of causes seems relevant here too.
(Aside: I’m not quite a fan of the ‘primary vs secondary cause’ naming, since the shared ‘cause’ name makes me think they’re the same kind of thing when they’re not – primary causes are problems, while secondary causes are solutions. ‘Intervention area / cluster’ would’ve been more illuminating I think.)
I don’t think I read that part of Michael’s thesis before, but it does look interesting!
In general, I think it’s fairly arbitrary what a cause is—an intervention/solution can also be reframed as a problem (and hence a cause) through negation (e.g. physical activity is a preventative solution to various diseases like cardiovascular disease or diabetes, and in a real sense physical inactivity is a problem; having an ALLFED-style resilient food supply is a mitigatory solution to nuclear winter—even if we can’t prevent nuclear exchange, we can perhaps stop billions from dying from famine—and in that sense lack of foods capable of growing in abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios is a problem).
Thanks Joel, I think I agree.
I don’t want to take up your time so feel free to not reply, just wondering out loud how Jeroen’s method compares to the systematic cause mapping approach Michael Plant suggested in his thesis for generating new promising causes. I suppose the latter can be interpreted as a systematic way to implement Jeroen’s method; for instance, starting from this table in Plant’s thesis generating happiness intervention ideas…
...Plant notes that many solutions apply to several primary causes (rows), inviting the idea of solution clustering (as illustrated below). I suppose Jeroen’s “increasing cycling rates in cities instead of car usage” example would be what Plant calls a secondary cause, or whatever is more granular than secondary cause. Your longlist of causes seems relevant here too.
(Aside: I’m not quite a fan of the ‘primary vs secondary cause’ naming, since the shared ‘cause’ name makes me think they’re the same kind of thing when they’re not – primary causes are problems, while secondary causes are solutions. ‘Intervention area / cluster’ would’ve been more illuminating I think.)
Hi Mo,
I don’t think I read that part of Michael’s thesis before, but it does look interesting!
In general, I think it’s fairly arbitrary what a cause is—an intervention/solution can also be reframed as a problem (and hence a cause) through negation (e.g. physical activity is a preventative solution to various diseases like cardiovascular disease or diabetes, and in a real sense physical inactivity is a problem; having an ALLFED-style resilient food supply is a mitigatory solution to nuclear winter—even if we can’t prevent nuclear exchange, we can perhaps stop billions from dying from famine—and in that sense lack of foods capable of growing in abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios is a problem).