Lesson 1: Interventions become part of the context

Whenever an intervention of any sort enters a context it becomes part of the context ^[1]

One colleague calls this “Heisenberg’s Lesson” after the physicist’s famous rule of quantum mechanics that the observer is part of the experiment. That an observer is also a part of the context, shaping it and in turn being shaped, is a truth now widely accepted across professions and endeavors. How much more impact do we have if we are not mere observers but also active participants in a context we enter?

An intervention is intended to have an impact. This is the point. We want to create change. As a result, we cannot claim separation from the context.

Lesson 1 tells us two things. The first is that we do we create change. This is a hopeful sign! Of course, we also create ripples of change that we did not intend.

The second is that if we intervene, we need to think hard about our impacts.

If we are trying to have an impact on a context, then it follows that we should try to have the impact that we intend. We want to make sure we are having the intended positive impact. Further, because we are creating change, we need to pay attention to the other impacts, apart from our intentions, that we are having. But, we cannot understand any of our impacts if we do not know some precise things about the context. We need, therefore, to do a context analysis.

A context may be complex. We cannot ever know everything. So the question is what exactly do we need to know in order to good work. This is the subject of the second lesson of Do No Harm.

There is no such thing as neutrality^[2]

What do I mean by this outrageous statement?

No intervention is seen as neutral by people in the context.

Interveners may strive to follow a principle of neutrality (and often they should). Nonetheless, local people in a context do not experience our actions and behaviors as having neutral impacts. Their experience is that our words about neutrality do not match their observations about the impacts.

The principle of impartiality, by contrast, is often readily understood and accepted.

This is a caution about the language we use to describe our interventions and our principles. As the section on Messages makes clear, how we behave matters much more than the words we use. When there is a disconnect between words and actions, when we say one thing but appear to act in another, we lose trust and respect because we are not showing trust and respect.

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Next Page Lesson 2: Contexts are characterized by Dividers and Connectors

^[1] ” . . . “Heisenberg’s Lesson” after the physicist’s famous rule of quantum mechanics that the observer is part of the experiment.

Actually, the “observer effect” does not originate with Heisenberg, though conflating Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle with the Observer Effect is common. In part, this conflation came about because Heisenberg himself often included an example of the observer effect in his explanations of uncertainty. Variations of his examples have become enshrined in high school physics textbooks. When we are first exposed to quantum mechanics, we learn these examples.

These examples we learn are not exactly wrong (though neither are they exactly right; this duality seems to be common when studying quantum mechanics). Heisenberg was thinking about the observer effect when he proposed the Uncertainty Principle—and he was thinking about other types of uncertainty as well. Heisenberg and his contemporary colleagues understood “uncertainty” at the quantum level to mean several things, with the challenges of measurement just one of these.

We now know that the problem of measurement at the quantum level is not as significant as Heisenberg supposed. The fact that interventions become part of a context, however, is still extraordinarily significant.

^[2] There is no such thing as neutrality

The IFRC helpfully makes a clear distinction between the principles of Neutrality and Impartiality.