My bad apple, it turns out, was second hand
I have written before about my obsession with small group dynamics. Then three things happened which made me determined to research and write something more substantial on the issue.
First, I spoke to my wonderful mum about a community group in which she is involved (one of many for her). She had just been at a meeting. As I discussed with her some of the reason for it being less than fully successful, I was strongly reminded of some of the ‘tragedies’ of voluntary groups which I identified in my NCVO lecture last year.
Third, on the way back from Any Questions in Norwich last Friday, I discussed the core idea – understanding and overcoming the pathologies that stop most small voluntary groups working effectively – with Phillip Blond the Director of Res Publica. Albeit that he is a nice chap and was stuck in a car with me for three hours, he seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the project.
In between my great friend Tessy Britton FRSA sent me a link to the website Citizen’s Handbook . As I browsed it I came across a reference to an issue I had independently identified in the NCVO lecture; the bad apple problem. In essence this is that one disruptive person has a disproportionate impact on a group. It turns out that Professor Will Felps has undertaken a study which seems to prove the bad apple thesis. Not only do bad apples have more influence than they ought, but they make other people start behaving badly too.
I think this is one of a number of systematic risks and barriers to group functioning. I mentioned another in the NCVO speech: people who are obsessed with rules and process tend to end up with more influence and power than those focussed on making change happen in the world.
Maybe readers can think of more?
As usual it is a busy week with a lot going on for the RSA , but I want to dedicate my posts to digging a bit more deeply into the small group issue. Here are a couple of slightly pedestrian points with which to start.
Every day up and down the UK (and across the world) hundreds of groups of people meet to try to make the world a better place. There are four main generic reasons why groups – largely if not exclusively – made up of volunteers decide to meet up:
* To try to get something going – perhaps a neighbourhood watch group or wanting to promote community sustainability
* To try to stop something – perhaps a library closure or a plan for a metro supermarket chain to locate in a local street
* As a branch of a national membership organisation – the RSA, Friends of the Earth or the Conservative Party perhaps.
* As an adjunct to a public or publicly funded service – a parents association for a school for example
(People also get together for activities like book clubs but, drawing on existing friendship networks, these are more about sociability than social change.)
Some of these groups will succeed amazingly, others will make more modest progress, but too many – and probably, I fear, most – will end up failing. Not only will this mean the change has been frustrated but it may be that those involved, some having made the effort for the first time, may be turned off activism for good. If we could find ways of making many more groups succeed and fewer fail badly, it could have a huge impact on community capacity.
A crucial (dare I say it ‘Big Society’) task is to identify what goes wrong, try to understand why and then to explore how to make groups more resilient and likely to succeed.
Live …. from Norwich
I’m just off to do Any Questions from Norwich. It’s another chance to raise the profile of the RSA (we got a nice plug on the Today Programme this morning) but, as always, it’s balancing act between protecting the independence of the RSA while saying what I think and helping make for an interesting programme. I’ll leave readers to judge if I get it right.
But before rushing off, I wanted to share an interesting blog I read while mugging up on the health reforms (Andrew Lansley is also on AQ tonight). It’s by David Buck, Senior Fellow on health and inequalities at the King’s Fund.
The core finding of the study to which he refers is that cuts in social welfare spending have seven times as much impact on mortality levels as the same percentage increase in GDP. Of course, we currently have both falling real term social welfare spending and GDP but when the economy starts to grow again this finding will provide a very challenging backdrop to a Coalition which hopes to move investment from public to private sector while at the same time improving social outcomes.
I would love to make this point tonight but having done AQ five times the one consistent feature is that I never get the chance to make the ‘killer point’ I have prepared. Let’s see if the same thing happens tonight.
PS Has anyone spotted the seventies TV reference in the title?
Light not heat?
A core objective of the RSA is to promote informed and constructive public debate. It is an aim which runs through our history and was also central to the values of the 18th century Enlightenment, whose champions saw tackling ignorance and prejudice as essential to social advance.
It is one of the reasons we are rightly proud of the phenomenal impact of RSA Animate. Upwards of 15 million people from around the world have now viewed these lectures. This figure is made up of people who have watched all or nearly all the edited lecture (otherwise YouTube don’t count it as a view). It is clear from the comments that Animate is making ideas accessible and entertaining not only to learned people but to many who had not previously thought of themselves as the kind who would choose to sit through a lecture on a subject like human motivation, the nature of modern capitalism or the principles which guide education. The most recent – highly engaging – addition is from the renowned public intellectual Stephen Pinker and having been posted for just a few days it has already (at time of writing) reached a quarter of a million views.
There are other ways the RSA is opening up ideas to a wide audience. Last night saw the second recording at the RSA of a set of lectures to feature in the new Radio Four slot ‘Four Thought’ being broadcast on Wednesday nights at 8.45. Radio Four is seeking to develop a new style of presentation, part lecture, part story-telling, part raconteurism. As it is broadcast right after Moral Maze I can’t be the compere, but RSA Fellows make up a large part of the audience and the Society is credited on air at the start of each programme.
It also make sure that my RSA role is mentioned in my intro on ‘Maze’. I know it’s a programme that drives some people nuts but I think it can, at its best, provide an invaluable and provocative insight into the moral dimensions of a contemporary issue. Its slightly adversarial nature may not be to everyone’s taste but it gives the programme its edge. Tonight we are debating whether charities (especially big ones delivering public services) have lost sight of the spirit of spontaneity and altruism which inspired their creation.
I have written here in the past of a long standing ambition to find a way of subverting the adversarial nature of much public debate. I have tried various ways of developing a programme format to do this. Now at last I think I have the right idea, and Radio Four have commissioned a pilot. But as it’s still in the formative phase I am looking for any thoughts and tips from my wonderful readers. The programme – provisionally titled ‘agree to differ’ – works like this. Two people well known for holding totally opposing views on a big issue are asked to participate. They are joined by an active Chair/presenter and a fourth person who may be well known for their opinions on other issues but has no strong view on the matter in question.
The meat of the programme comprises the protagonists interviewing each other to discover what lies at the core of their respective beliefs. For this to work they have to agree to abide by some strict rules, chief among which is that they have to conduct the interview in a thoughtful and friendly way, genuinely seeking to find out what makes the other person hold their beliefs. The role of the chair is to ensure the rules are enforced. The role of the independent guest is to reflect on how what they have heard has influenced their own view of the issue at question.
The power of the programme is that it subverts the usual process of public disagreement in which we caricature our opponents’ beliefs and – more perniciously – denigrate the motives which lie behind those beliefs. Instead the programme’s participants are committed to trying to get to the heart of the matter. Does their difference reflect disagreement about core facts, about ideological starting points or even matters of faith? Does the attempt to discover the foundations of polarised beliefs reinforce difference or start to bridge the divide?
So, dear readers, do you think this will work? How would you refine the idea? Can you think of some good parings (George Monbiot and Matt Ridley on capitalism and the environment, or John Gray and Jonathan Sachs on whether human beings are capable of ethical development are a couple of suggestions that have been made to me).
Who knows, if the format works on the radio (or even if it doesn’t) maybe we can try it out at the RSA. After all shedding light where there has previously been mainly heat is surely a foundational enlightenment ideal?
The cultural contributions of capitalism?
Until I heard Radio 4’s Last Word yesterday evening I didn’t know about the recent death of Daniel Bell, the pioneering sociologist and futurist (although he didn’t like that label).
As someone who is both an internationalist and enthusiastic about decentralising power, I have been fond of quoting Bell: ‘the national state has become too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems’.
But the phrase for which Bell will probably be most remembered comes in the title of his book ‘the coming of post-industrial society’. Bell was both fascinated and troubled by changes in the nature of capitalism and the culture which those changed spawned. He returned to those themes in 1978 a book – which despite its mixed record in terms of prediction – I would strongly recommend.
In ‘The cultural contradictions of capitalism’, Bell argues that the values such as industriousness, responsibility and deferred gratification necessary for the emergence of industrial capitalism (an idea taken from Weber) are now being undermined by the ‘naughty but nice’/'because your worth it’ (neither campaign existed in 1978 but you know what I mean) culture of consumerism
Glancing this morning at Bell’s foreword to the book, I came across this statement:
‘I am a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture’.
In the early nineties an American political strategist (I have never been able to source the quotation) said something like ‘in modern politics the left has won the social argument, the right has won the economic argument and the centre the political argument’. This may have seemed true through the nineties as the Democrats and New Labour embraced the free market and the right reluctantly endorsed social liberalism, but in 2011 I suspect Bell’s combination of perspectives may look a lot more enticing.
The credit crunch, the slow and uneven recovery, high levels of economic inequality, and our continued dependence on the naked and unaccountable interests of finance have all undermined the popular legitimacy of modern capitalism. The excesses of statism under the last Government have led to a reassertion of liberalism in the political sphere shown for example in support both for strengthening civil liberties and decentralising power. Meanwhile concerns about the weakening of social norms and bonds and clashes of cultures and religious values in a shrinking world have given new voice to social conservatives on the left and right.
These thoughts touch on the emerging topic for my 2011 annual lecture. Bell’s values triptych provides part of the background against which companies are facing higher expectations – and in some cases setting themselves more ambitious objectives – for social engagement. The hypothesis is that citizens need in aggregate to change their ways and companies can use their brand-based relationship with customers to encourage better ways of living.
I suggested last week that ‘organisations need to be aiming for a sweet spot…which combines their competitive edge with levering their brand and relationships for social good. I then came across this piece in the Guardian
I suspect a hard headed scholar like Bell would have been quite sceptical about the ability of consumer capitalism to foster individual and civic virtue. Whether the benign behaviour change encouraged by Flora or Nike can be real and long lasting, whether it’s a strategy open more generally to companies and what such a strategy means for the way a company organises itself are issue I intend to explore further. Perhaps as a tribute to Bell I should think about calling my lecture ‘the cultural contributions of capitalism’?
Short term choices and long term well-being
When economists argue against Government intervention on the grounds that markets left to their own devices eventually find a benign equilibrium, a frequent riposte is to quote John Maynard Keynes: ‘The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead’. Might this insight shape the debate about new measures of well-being?
Yesterday I chaired a conference which had well-being as one of its themes. The man from the Office of National Statistics described the preparation being done for the inclusion of well-being questions in the 2011 Integrated Household Survey. There was also a lot of praise for NEF’s report ‘Measuring our progress: the power of well-being’ which was published earlier this week.
NEF propose what they call a dynamic model of well-being which links external conditions (eg income, employment) and personal resources (eg self-esteem, resilience) to good functioning (eg having autonomy, being connected to others) and good feelings (eg happiness, satisfaction).
NEF’s work is powerful, as might be expected given the think tank has been looking at this issue for a decade. There is an interesting discussion in the paper about the relationship between objective ‘drivers’ and subjective ‘outcomes’ in terms of feelings of well-being. NEF says that a key tool emerging from the information to be compiled by ONS should be what they call drivers of well-being (DoW), those factors which are shown to be most relevant to well-being and therefore should be prioritised in policy making and resource allocation.
This can all get quite technical (I suspect all the issues I cover in this post have been well rehearsed in the burgeoning well-being literature). Indeed, there is a danger that a debate about what really matters to most people becomes one that only a few people can understand. So I am loath to introduce a new dimension of complexity, but this is where Keynes comes in.
The relationship between objective circumstance and well-being is itself dynamic. To give a trivial example, if I had been asked last week how I felt about life just before an expensive, intrusive and painful dental procedure I might have been even more gloomy than normal. But this is just a temporary phenomenon and very soon – in fact already – I actually feel better about myself for having sorted out my problem.
The shadow cast by today’s experiences varies greatly in length. Some bad experiences diminish in significance and can even make us stronger; for example curable physical illness, well managed bereavement, business failure. Others are much more likely to have long term detriment; for example, childhood neglect or acute mental illness.
Which brings me back to Keynes. Being always inclined to take a charitable view of politicians’ motives (something which has made me a target for some rather juicy abuse in the past), I don’t think the Coalition Government is uncaring about those being impacted by its crash austerity programme. However, I also think – and here there is an echo of Mrs Thatcher – the Coalition believes it is worth paying a high price in the short to medium term to achieve a fundamental restructuring of the state and of societal expectations.
As we have seen this week, part of that price is very high youth unemployment. But we also know that if young people experience a lengthy period of unemployment it appears to have lifetime effects on their ability to gain and hold on to a job; they may get work when the economy picks up but they are much more likely to lose it when the economic cycle turns again.
Weighting objective factors by their long term impact on well-being could help to encourage more responsible policy making. It should influence the case made not just by Government but by the Opposition.
Coalition ministers accuse those who argue against severe austerity of being short-termist and irresponsible, but in opening up a debate about well-being (for which he is to be applauded) David Cameron may be providing the basis for a counter argument. It is certainly true that sooner or later the economy will pick up, austerity will end and people’s life circumstances will improve. In this sense the Coalition strategy is bound to succeed in the end. But not only is Keynes right that in the long run we are all dead, in the long run many will be scarred by – and all of us paying the price for – what has happened in the short term.
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