Trastorno obsesivo compulsivo

A n innovative project is ultimately intended to benefit people and, since people are often organised into systems, the system should

therefore benefit also. A project, though, may not provide the benefit directly. It is often supposed to bring about an 'improvement', a change in the way a system operates, so that benefits will eventually occur for the people in the system. All the members of the system thus have an important stake in the decision to undertake a project and in determining what they see as a benefit to themselves. The best projects seem to balance benefits and costs so that they achieve the

greatest benefits for the largest number of people with the least associated costs. The position of balance may not always be easy to decide, since what may benefit one group may at the same time cause extra work or less benefit for another. It is most unlikely that a project will be fair to everyone. Hence the pattern of participation is crucial to the eventual outcome. There is another reason, too, why participation is central to a discussion of the implementation phase of the project. Repeated analysis of the processes of innovations have shown that the eventual outcome depends on the involvement, actions and motivation of many people who may not even be the beneficiaries of the project. A system ideally represents the collective actions of a group of people. The necessity of participation is obvious if the actions are to be truly collective. Full participation may be an ideal which can never be achieved; some people will participate relatively more than others. The extent to which people participate will also be interpreted by different groups or people in different ways. It is not an absolute concept.

The problem of participation is complex, and has a number of dimensions. There are the questions of who participates, and wht are the problems in participating in a project. To what level do people participate and by what means do they become involved? What is the form of leader­ ship in the project?

Regardless of the 'political' system or the prevailing economic or employment situation, all societies contain hierarchies of some sort another. The major function of the hierarchy is to substitute for participation. It is obviously impractical to have vast numbers of people involved in the control or management of a system and some

tasks at the different levels of a hierarchy will require particular skills or experience. Decisions are therefore often taken by the few, rather thai the many. Hierarchies may vary in strength and stability. Within a hierarchy there may be several sub-hierarchies. Connections between groups or hierarchies are the means by which commuiication is made and these may tend to distort information, particularly if this involves negative feedback. The control of, or access to, information is the prerogative of key persons in the hierarchy.

The introduction of a major project into a web of overlapping hierarchies such as the educational system, or a school,

disturbs the existing pattern of internal connections and cohesion. For example, those who have the highest status in the existing hierarchy generally negotiate with their counterparts in the project to establish who on a day to day basis will take responsibility for the project. This pattern was clearly seen in schools in the Curriculum Reappraisal exercise. The Heads of most of the schools were themselves too busy with many other things to be directly concerned with the project. As a result a Deputy Head or another senior teacher became the school co-ordinator for the project. Through these persons most of the information about the project was both fed into the school and

released to the world outside. At the lowest level cf the pyramid were to be found practitioners and the 'users' of the project, which may actually have been designed for their benefit. But it is at the lowest levels that the strength of the connections is likely to be least and the sense of cohesion weakest!

People may become involved to very different levels in a major project. An attempt to provide a classification of these levels was made by Havelock and Iluberman who listed the following six levels':

a) Awareness; to know that something exists. Without awareness there can be no participation.

b) Being informed; to have knowledge of the goals of the project, who is involved, what is being done,etc.

c) Representational consent; participants select those who will be involved in the project (including themselves).

d) Direct consent; participants decide that the project shall be undertaken.

e) Vicarious consent; participants have knowledge of all major decisions and are in agreement with them.

f) Full participation; participants are full members of all groups making decisions for the project. Only those who direct a project and their close associates are likely to reach this level.