MBT-F catches up, and the theme moves on

Well, at last we have found the time to make the switch for the MBT-F manual so that it has finally adopted the much improved new (v.3) AMBIT manual "theme".

Thank you to Jon Lister and Joshua Bradley from JandJ for their expertise in helping us do this.

A theme in TiddlySpace-speak is just a set of instructions that tell the browser (that you are using to "read" the site) how to behave - effectively it sets the look of the thing, and the interface. In terms of the theory at the basis of AMBIT and MBT-F, "mentalization", the design of the theme is where the authors must attempt to mentalize their readership - have their minds, their intentions and predicaments, in mind so that something contingent can be offered.

Why Wikis?

We are trying to balance palliation of the nostalgia for the simplicity, predictability and aesthetics of a book (titles, chapter headings, pages on a wooden desk, more?!) with the many other layers of possibility that the wiki-based format adds:

* gathered multimedia content
* non-linearity of content that can be re-organised in an infinity of ways
* inter-connectivity that encourages meaningful linking of content
* searchability
* cross-comparisons between geographically dispersed practitioners.

The more things improve in the manual (incrementally, incredibly slowly, but I think perceptibly) the more I am interested in the way this feeds into, even directly influences, the way that AMBIT is maturing as a model, and has been spreading in terms of uptake by teams. Manualizing and mentalizing are not so far apart.

We are now heavily booked for trainings right out into summer 2013, with a good mix of statutory and voluntary sector teams. We have a significant trial funded and in the planning stage in Cambridgeshire, which will be carried out over the next 3 years.

Better SEARCHING supports a COMMUNITY of PRACTICE

Here is a short video clip that shows how the SEARCH function in the AMBIT manual works, and where it is... as well as demonstrating how you can use it to peek at OTHER teams' working practices, and compare, contrast and share best practice. We do not promote the idea of "AMBIT teams", but rather locally expert teams that use AMBIT as a framework or a stepping stone to develop and share their own local excellence. The search bar is one way we are trying to foster this "Community of Practice". The ideas of Community of Practice are particularly articulated by Etienne Wenger and colleagues - it is a really neat way of seeing what the AMBIT project is using the manual to support.

We Won!

We won the Guardian and Virgin Innovation Nation award! Wow... Really wasn't daring to hope for THAT!

Voting is open - PLEEEEEASE vote!

Get the vote out! The prestigious Guardian Innovation Nation Awards are decided on a combination of judge's points and public vote... Here is the link to the Guardian InnovationNation Voting page - please use it as soon as possible, and tell your friends! It would be a great boost to the project to win this.

Shortlisted for Guardian Award!

Great news - the AMBIT collaboration (represented by the most active "tiddly-manualers") has just been told that we are shortlisted for the Guardian and Virgin Business Media "Innovation Nation" award under the category for "Collaboration". See the website here.

You can see our introduction to the project at TiddlyManuals.

We have to provide a 100 word "pitch" for the project to go on the Guardian website, which is to canvas for the votes that will ultimately decide the winner...

After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, this is where we have got to:

AMBIT's innovative open source approach radically improves knowledge sharing across NHS and voluntary sector teams working with highly vulnerable, disadvantaged, disillusioned UK youth. AMBIT offers "how-to-do-it" instructions which each team adapts, refines and improves, based on their local expertise (street level workers, local youth). Any improvements are shared, compared and integrated with other ideas from teams around the country, and existing evidence, constantly improving the effectiveness of the work. Supported by open source programmers, the AMBIT project fosters co-ownership of professional knowledge and multi-stakeholder participation through sharing, remixing and evolving text, diagrams, pictures and video content for professional ‘manuals’.

Not that this site sees more than the odd passing seagull, but if you are here, and you fancy supporting us (before May 30th this year!) do slip along to the Guardian website and vote for us!

Thanks, Dickon.

Netherlands love Mentalizing

Great conference at the end of last week in lovely Haarlem, outside Amsterdam, hosted by the newly launched MBT Netherlands organsation.

The conference was in the most beautiful concert hall venue; two stages, one radically modern, all swirling wood galleries, curving so they gave you the feeling of being inside a whale (but in a nice way.) The other was strict and classical with huge windows that poured in light and framed the medieval market place below - felt very honoured to be there.

AMBIT got a very positive welcome, for which I am most grateful, and the notion of TiddlyManuals seemed to interest people. The day afterwards a group of MBT treatment developers met to think specifically about MBT and Adolescence. What was so encouraging was the strong sense that two parallel processes were occurring.

First, there was increasing clarity and confidence that there is a shared common core of what underpins mentalizing therapies... that is both respectful of other branches of therapeutic endeavour, but also quite distinctive.

Second, there is a rich variety of implementations and variants, that seems entirely in keeping with the fact that Mentalizing is above all an imaginative activity, that must respond contingently to its setting if it is to be "what it says on the tin". So there are settings where MBT is using groups and individual work, and settings where it is using Family and Individual work, and settings where it is using all three. In Geneva (with Martin Debbane and colleagues) it works with youth mandated into treatment by courts, in London (Trudie Rossouw and colleagues) it has been deployed in CAMHS outpatient clinics and a "tier 4" specialist in-patient unit. AMBIT is just another (though even more heavily adapted, and actively adapting) variant in this sense...

What comes out of this (at least in my mind, and others seem interested in ways that may simply reflect their kind and polite manner in keeping with their mentalizing excellence, but I dare to hope is more!) is the goodness of fit with a Tiddlymanuals-type approach to the manualization of such an approach. Tiddlymanuals and their "amoeba-like" capacity to include content from multiple other wikis allow layers of core manual ("what is mentalizing, how it arises, the neuroscience, and how we translate all that into a basic mentalizing stance") along with sort "epi-" or "meta-manualizations" of the kinds of local tweaks, adjustments, responses and delivery systems that fit this to the specifics of a local social ecology... so all roads lead to tiddlyspace, tiddlywiki and the use of co-constructed wiki manuals n'est ce que pas?!

Implementing change, sustaining change and sustaining fidelity

Thinking a lot about the nature of the task (and it is a paradoxical one) of standing in front of a team (that usually already has a great deal of expertise) and suggesting to them ways that they may wish to change their understanding and practice... so as to get better.

We bang on about the need to support self efficacy in teams (as in our patients), but tell 'em what to do... well, not quite: part of our method is to avoid trying to generate teams that are badged as "AMBIT teams" - but instead to offer AMBIT as a platform upon which local teams can find space to develop and share their own locally-developed and locally-tested expertise, in a "fecund mix" of evidence based practice, and their own hard-won practice-based evidence. This might be seen as a bit tricksy in one way, as our manual "template" (upon which we hope they'll write and show their improvements and tricks and techniques)is pretty big, even overwhelming...

Part of it requires a shift towards an outcomes-focused approach - does this stuff make a difference in the direction I want it to (or more importantly that my patients want)? So then the challenge is not just to show a team some neat and satisfying ideas and tricks, but to make a difference to their outcomes, and more than that, to establish patterns of behaviour that are sustainable. That last sentence is a double-entendre - but not in a saucy way. The behaviour change made by a team can be sustainable or not (i.e. does the team keep doing it?) but also, the method of working can make a team sustainable or not (i.e. do the workers burn out, get sick, get bored?)

We figure that the people that WRITE the manuals are generally the best at FOLLOWING them, too, but that there is also this stuff called evidence out there, that is better than benign eclecticism and safer than the lonely visionary; hence the different layers of content in tiddlymanuals or tiddlyspace - the capacity for one person's (or team's) wiki to include the content of another one's, and then to overwrite pages written by others - to create my own local version, without in any way affecting the pages that the original author wrote, and still curates.

We have recently been invited to write a paper for the journal Attachment and Human Development and we are thinking about help-seeking behaviours a lot, and how might a treatment manual act as a kind of place to turn to for help. Look at how Google have managed it! A locally-adapted tiddlymanual might act a bit like that - a place that people turn to, if a better "secure base" isn't available. Our developing hypothesis is not to suggest that a bit of wikification can or should ever replace a great supervisor or experienced colleague, but that in the absence of that person, people might turn to a great looking manual that "delivers the goods" predictably... but in the same way that we are able to "scribble" over our parents and other attachment figures (in the privacy of our own minds we can, and usually do, hold our own ideas about what our parents reveal of themselves) we can also "scribble " over the core manual - hold our own ideas about it, if you like... and just as this makes our parent/attachment figure recognisable, familiar, safe to us, so - we hope - our wiki-adaptations help to make the manual feel recgnisable, familiar and safe.