If I got to determine the school curriculum, I would be optimising for collective efficacy.

So I live in a gentrified but still mixed neighbourhood in London (we’re the newbies at just under a decade) and we have an active WhatsApp group.

Recently there was a cold snap and a road nearby iced over – it was in the shade and cyclists kept on wiping out on it. For some reason the council didn’t come and salt it.

Somebody went out and created a sign on a weighted chair so it didn’t blow away. And this is a small thing but I LOVE that I live somewhere there is a shared belief that (a) our neighbourhood is worth spending effort on, and (b) you can just do things.

Similarly we all love when the swifts visit (beautiful birds), so somebody started a group to get swift nest boxes made and installed collectively, then applied for subsidy funding, then got everyone to chip in such that people who couldn’t afford it could have their boxes paid for, and now suddenly we’re all writing to MPs and following the legislation to include swift nesting sites in new build houses. Etc.

It’s called collective efficacy, the belief that you can make a difference by acting together.

(People who have heard of Greta Thunberg tend to have a stronger sense of collective efficacy (2021).)

It’s so heartening.

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You can just do things

That phrase was a Twitter thing for a while, and I haven’t done the archaeology on the phrase but there’s this blog post by Milan Cvitkovic from 2020: Things you’re allowed to do.

e.g.

• Say I don’t know
• Tape over annoying LED lights
• Buy goods/services from your friends

I read down the list saying to myself, yeah duh of course, to almost every single one, then hit certain ones and was like – oh yeah, I can just do that.

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I think collective efficacy is maybe 50% taking off the blinkers and giving yourself (as a group) permission to do things.

But it’s also 50% belief that it’s worth acting at all.

And that belief is founded part in care, and part in faith that what you are doing can actually make a difference.

For instance:

A lot of my belief in the power of government comes from the fact that, back in the day, London’s tech scene was not all that. So in 2009 I worked with Georgina Voss to figure out the gap, then in 2010 bizarrely got invited on a trade mission to India with the Prime Minister and got the opportunity to make the case about east London to them, and based on that No. 10 launched Tech City (which we had named on the plane), and that acted as a catalyst on the work that everyone was already doing to get the cluster going, and then we were off to the races. WIRED magazine wrote it up in 2019: The story of London’s tech scene, as told by those who built it (paywall-busting link).

So I had that experience and now I believe that, if I can find the right ask, there’s always the possibility to make things better.

That’s a rare experience. I’m very lucky.

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ALTHOUGH.

Should we believe in luck?

Psychologist Richard Wiseman, The Luck Factor (2003, PDF):

I gave both [self-identified] lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message “Stop counting - There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.”

Lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles.

They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

I insist that people are not born lucky. I insist that luck can be trained.

You can just be lucky?

(Well, not absolutely, I have my privilege too, but maybe let’s recalibrate luck from believing it is entirely random, that’s what I’m saying.)

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When I was a kid I used to play these unforgivingly impossible video games – that’s what home video games were like then. No open world play, multiple ways to win, or adaptive difficulty. Just pixel-precise platform jumps and timing.

Yet you always knew that there was a way onto the next screen, however long it took.

It taught a kind of stubborn optimism.

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Or, in another context, No fate but what we make.

Same same.

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All of which makes me ask:

Could we invent free-to-plan mobile games which train luckiness?

Are there games for classrooms that would cement a faith in collective efficacy in kids?

Or maybe it’s proof by demonstration.

I’m going into my kid’s school in a couple of weeks to show the class photos of what it looks like inside factories. The stuff around us was made by people like us; it’s not divine in origin; factories are just rooms.

I have faith that - somehow - at some point down the line - this act will help.