Big finance, big myths and a singing heart
Sometimes everything comes together and it all seems worthwhile.
So it was last night at an event organised by the Profit with Purpose FRSA network. Over a 100 people turned up at the Shell building in Waterloo to hear and participate in a Q and A with sustainability economist Professor Tim Jackson. Network leaders Kim van Niekerk and Alison Rodwell (supported by network manager Sam Thomas) should be pleased with what was a lively and intelligent discussion.
For me the event spanned two enthusiasms: FRSA networks and corporate responsibility.
On the latter I got some great insights ahead of my annual lecture in June. We discussed the contrast between what appears to be a real shift in the culture of some large businesses and the apparent resistance to any reform of the finance sector. I talked earlier in the week about the radical ideas of Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo, but to that can be added the visionary thinking of Kingfisher’s Ian Cheshire and of Paul Polman at Unilever. Three swallows, even really important ones, don’t make a summer but each of these leaders is going well beyond traditional CSR to talk about different models of value and business.
But according to one speaker last night, when reading up about Pepsico I had missed a more sobering recent news story. Apparently, investment analysts have told the corporation to stop going on about values and focus more on flogging crisps and fizzy drinks.
The question – which I want to explore more tomorrow – is why is there so much positive change in the leadership of retail companies and so little among those who manage our money?
I also want to take the opportunity of last night’s event to make an different point. A couple of times recently I have heard the accusation that the RSA has centralised its support for Fellows’ activities. This may be based on the fact that the major areas of increased investment in Fellowship – our team of network managers and the Catalyst fund – are managed from London. But it is wrong and for a very simple reason.
The activities that network managers and Catalyst support all emerge from the enthusiasms and ideas of Fellows.
It was great last night that I was asked to a network looking at something at the front of my mind. But as I go round the country to a variety of events organised by Fellows, with the support of network managers, I find myself discussing issues ranging from design (in Newcastle) to small business (in Brighton) to place shaping (In Leicester) to sustainability (in Bristol).
In the next few days our Scotland network manager Jamie Cooke and the Chair of RSA Scotland will be going to the first ever Highlands FRSA network. They – like me – will have no idea what will emerge from that meeting as a priority for Highland Fellows, but whatever it is (assuming it is within the broad charitable remit of the RSA) we will try to support it.
The recent Fellowship survey showed a high level of awareness and enthusiasm among Fellows for local and issue-based networks. As Fellowship engagement and activity increases Trustees and the Fellowship Council will need to develop a set of protocols around where the RSA brand can be used, and what last resort powers of intervention may be needed if a network seems to be acting in a way that goes outside or damages the RSA’s charitable purpose. But this is about risk management not control. The content of Fellows’ activities will continue to be determined by them and supported by us.
Some people may find this too permissive, arguing that Fellows’ energies should be channelled in particular directions. Some others believe that local activities should require sanctioning by regional committees (not that this is by any means the majority view of our regions), but why create constraints unless there is evidence of a problem?
When I look out over the Fellowship – from Plymouth to Inverness, from Newcastle to New York – I see more and more people doing great stuff in a way that enhances the RSA’s image and impact as a fount of social innovation. And, at the risk of sounding mawkish, it makes my old heart sing.
Lipsmackin’ thirstquenchin’ acetastin’…… valuepromotin’, responsibilitytakin….
Over the next 24 hours something will happen which I thought until recently was going to excite me enormously: the RSA Animate of my 2010 annual lecture will pass half a million views. Sadly, my anticipation of this moment was pretty much dissipated by the comments of one of this blog’s readers. He suggested that people watched the Animate for the pictures not my words, pointed out that my lecture has been watched fewer times than nearly all the other Animates (and a lot less than the most successful), and said the lesson I should take from the 3290 likes versus 67 dislikes on YouTube is not that I am being favoured 50 to 1 but that only 1 in 150 can be bothered to express an opinion.
As regular readers know, it doesn’t take much criticism for me to descend into self-doubt, so I will let the 500,000 landmark pass without further comment. (By the way, Professor, I am fully aware that self deprecation is nothing but artfully veiled narcissism.)
But if one positive aspect of 21stcentury enlightenment has been wrenched from my grasp, fortunately there is another to hand. In our recent Fellowship survey (based on a large and representative sample) the proportion of RSA Fellows who said they liked the new strap-line outnumbered those who opposed by 5 to 1. Given that new brands tend initially to annoy people (think of the 2012 Olympic logo, for example) this is a very good result.
This has helped reinforce my intention to make the focus of my 2011 lecture the 21st century enlightenment business (rather than an earlier idea of the 21st century enlightenment organisation, which I found just too hard to pin down).
I have read two things in the last few days which I will no doubt quote in the final lecture. The first is a fantastic book – ‘the strange non death of neo-liberalism’ – by Colin Crouch, Professor of Governance and Public Management at Warwick University. The book isn’t due to be published until June ( I am determined it should be launched here at the RSA) so I can’t reveal much, except to say that Professor Crouch makes a powerful argument for the importance of civil society organisations in balancing and challenging the power of Transnational Organisations both as economic and political actors.
The second was a report of a speech by the visionary CEO of PepsiCo Indra Nooyi. I hope readers don’t mind, but I am going to quote her at some length:
“Especially over the last four or five years we have been shaping and evolving PepsiCo for the realities of a new environment that we believe is going to be quite a lot different over the next decade. I think the next decade will be defined by a number of trends that will have a big impact on our business and the broader industry. Let me just talk about five of these trends.
“First, the continued growth of emerging and developing markets. More than ever, any company’s growth is going to be defined to the extent to which they have a presence in developing and emerging markets. And I believe this trend will continue into the future as developed markets’ growth rates slow down and developing and emerging markets pickup.
“Second big trend, health and wellness — this is no longer a trend or a fad. This is here to stay. Profound changes are underway, both due to the aging population and significant pressure from external sources for consumers to change their lifestyles and to get healthier.
“Environment sustainability — I don’t want to spend any time talking about it. That’s a major trend that is here to stay.
“The other trend is the digital revolution. It has fully revolutionized the way we need to engage with consumers and the way we innovate.
“And lastly, the role of brands and their connection to a purpose. This is a relatively new trend, and recently we are beginning to notice that people the world over are relating to global brands if they connect to them through a higher purpose. Additionally, we’re also noticing, especially in the food and beverage space, that there appears to be a hark back to local brands which bring back good memories.”
Given my earlier musings about enlightened companies looking for a ‘sweet spot (an unintended pun in this context) where the goals of competitive success and making a benign social impact become mutually reinforcing, I find points two, three and five particularly interesting. Indeed, someone told me the other day (completely off the record so I am only sharing it with you, mum) that at a recent meeting of senior executives Indra Nooyi’s message was in essence: there’s no future in making money by persuading people to pour junk down their throats. I also note that the other day PepsiCo launched their first entirely plant-based bottle.
If a global brand like PepsiCo is thinking and acting like this, the idea that firms could become a major driver of progress in the next century seems less and less far-fetched.
Listomania
Generally in speeches anecdotes are more reliable than jokes. It helps that they are personal, even better if they are true. There’s a story about a brutal put down I suffered as a County Councillor which I must have told a thousand times – it’s never once let me down.
It’s only fair I guess that when I make up, or wildly exaggerate, a story it doesn’t always go so well. After trying it out a few times with limited success, I have dropped the one about hearing a boys’ football coach shouting at his team ‘the reason we’re 4-0 behind at half-time comes down to the three T’s: The defence, the midfield and the attack’. I have actually heard comments nearly as dumb as this but not, I have to admit, this one.
I use the story in self-deprecation when listing points that I have managed to contrive to have the same opening letter. You know the kind of thing: success depends on planning, purpose, priorities, passion and poinsettias.
Which is all by way of excusing my retreat into intellectual laziness in response to the brilliant and bewildering comments I received over the weekend in reply to my Friday post on small groups. Making lists and classifying things is generally a very facile way of tackling concepts; I should know, this was more or less all I did as a sociology undergraduate.
But as I ran home from work tonight (to keep fit, I wasn’t being pursued by enraged Fellows), and, as I tried to keep at bay a rising pessimism over whether the idea of a study of the working of small groups makes any sense, I found myself reverting to typologies of small voluntary groups.
For example, in terms of group purpose we might distinguish between a finite/narrow purpose (for example, a campaign to keep a library open or stop a supermarket chain opening a store on the village high street) and an open ended/broad purpose (for example, an environmental group seeking to raise awareness of green issues). As groups evolve, finite purposes can often shift into broader campaigns and open-ended purposes can often be broken down into finite aims, but does this change the group dynamics?
It then occurred to me – partly because one of the Friday comments referred to how several roundtable groups organize local firework displays – that some group purposes are episodic and that this may be a particular characteristic of rural groups, relating to annual events like the summer fete or the Ambridge Christmas pantomime.
Another dimension is the degree to which aims are devolved or emerge locally. Local political parties will tend to use materials and respond to instructions from national HQ. There is, then, a continuum to entirely independent local groups. One of the most enjoyable organisations I joined was Leamington Spa anti-apartheid. While we got our inspiration from an international campaign (this was the late ’80s and there hadn’t been apartheid in Leamington Spa for at least a decade) and sometimes participated in national events, nearly everything we did emerged as ideas from our own meetings above a pub.
So what does this all tell us? Almost certainly absolutely nothing, apart from confirmation that typologies are a device for the conceptually craven. But by creating the paper-thin illusion that I have still got some momentum, it has at least allowed me to get to bedtime without abandoning as impossible the whole idea of writing intelligently about small groups. That’s my excuse for posting, you’ll have to work out your own for reading to the end.
Help us to get to the bottom of bottom up organisation
I promised (threatened) yesterday to ask my readers to help with a research project I am scoping with FRSA and social entrepreneur Tessy Britton.
The topic is small groups and this is the outline of the research report ( I would say ‘book’ but as every book idea I’ve ever had has crashed and burned I don’t want to curse the project).
1. Small groups of volunteers can change the world, and here are some examples.
2. But most small groups fail to fulfil their potential and here are the main reasons people give for groups under-performing.
3. Under these reasons are a set of systematic vulnerabilities from which small groups suffer (and here are some of the deeper reasons for these vulnerabilities which lie in human nature, patterns of human interaction and processes of collective action).
4. Here are a set of principles and practices which can together significantly increase the chances of small groups being successful.
5. Here are some ideas for how we could build a stronger infrastructure of support, guidance and celebration for small groups (for example, how about more prizes and awards for groups rather than just heroic individuals?).
Of course, we wouldn’t even be thinking of the project if we didn’t already have some hunches about the contents of chapters three, four and five. For example – in relation to what goes wrong in groups - I have in the past talked about the bad apple problem that disruptive people drive out constructive people much better than vice versa, and about the ‘Stalin’ problem which is the people who focus (sometimes obsessively) on process who tend to end up with more influence than those focussed on action.
On four, Tessy believes (as I said yesterday) that groups trying to do something constructive are more likely to thrive than ones simply opposing something being done to them. I also believe that groups are much stronger if every person in the group is expected to perform functions and actions, which probably means there is a maximum optimum size beyond which a split is likely to emerge between active and passive members. We both think that groups need to spend some time at the outset agreeing norms and protocols which can avoid difficulties down the line, and that these need to be regularly re-presented to keep the group on track.
Tessy has also made the interesting suggestion that small groups may be most likely to succeed if their origins lie in two or three people who know each other well and prepare the ground before a wider group of strangers are involved.
Anyway, whether or not Tessy and I do this project depends a lot on you, dear readers. As we will both be doing this mainly in our spare time, we need to build as wide a group as possible of community activists who will help us with research, ideas and feedback.
The first ask is this: we are looking for example of successful small groups and reasons why they have succeeded. Although all small groups have some dynamics in common, we are not so interested in groups in workplaces or that bring people together in professional paid capacities. Instead the focus is on community based (for the want of a better term, ‘bottom –up’) groups of volunteers, the kind which, for example, are involved in working for their locality to become a transition town.
So, over to you. Is this interesting an, if so, can you share some of your community organisation war stories?
Thank you
Opposing, creating, bonding and bridging
Over the next few days I want to return to some recurrent themes in recent posts – the Big Society and small groups – and (tomorrow) I’m hoping readers can help get a research project off the ground.
I must admit that my job at the moment feels a bit unbalanced. A lot of time is being spent addressing governance issues – both at the national and regional level. It is important to get governance right, act as honest brokers in regional disputes and respond to legitimate concerns or complaints. But it is equally important that our primary focus is on delivering our charitable mission and continuing to enable more Fellows to engage with the Society and each other. I will use a future post to share the conclusions of a major survey of Fellows’ opinions, but the top line is that the overwhelming majority of Fellows (by about 5 to 1 in a large and representative sample) are positive about the direction in which the RSA is going right now.
So I prize moments when I can shift my focus from how to balance disparate views about the governance of our Society to how we can maximise the RSA’s impact on society. One such moment came in a recent conversation with former Fellowship Council chair, Tessy Britton. We were discussing the main lessons from initiatives like Tessy’s ‘Travelling Pantry’ for the debate about how cash strapped public agencies tap into the hidden wealth which lies in every community.
I particularly liked a point Tessy made about community organisation. Thinking about engagement often starts from the idea of mobilising complaints and opposition to the actions of public authorities. But Tessy’s work starts from creating projects – which is, of course, the same starting point as our own RSA Catalyst. Indeed Tessy argues that the content of the project - which could be anything from baking bread to creating a pop up facility for social entrepreneurs – matters less than the fact that it is creative. From this she has concluded that while reactive and oppositional groups create bonding social capital (networks between people who are alike or think alike), engagement focussed on generating new capacity and projects is more likely to create bridging capital (between people with different backgrounds, skills and approaches).
There is something intuitively appealing about this idea. While campaigning against something often means people signing up to the same actions in pursuit of the same demand (everyone collecting names on a petition, everyone turning up to the demo), creating something new in the community will mean drawing on the different insights, talents and resources of group members.
But even while I want to believe Tessy is right I can see some of the objections. First, groups campaigning against something can be diverse and develop approaches which combine multiple forms of action (as well as the petitions there are t-shirts to design, Facebook pages to create, letters to write). Second, creative groups can themselves be quite homogenous or end up with a small group doing all the work. Third, groups that start off oppositional can evolve into a source of new ideas and initiatives.
Given the caveats, is there still a core truth: that the question ‘how do we create’ is inherently more likely to generate long lasting community capacity than the question ‘how can we stop…’? Given that most activists I know think that the main source of energy in communities right now is being generated by anger and protest about cuts (we will see the national manifestation on Saturday) this seems like something worth exploring.
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