Will e-harmony.co kill the Conservative Party?
The day started with a seminar hosted by the RSA-based 2020 Public Services Trust focussing on social media and the ‘post bureaucratic age’. The ‘PBA’ is often talked about as the Conservatives’ big idea: the future lies in strengthening the capacity of individuals and communities to meet their own needs rather than relying on an ever clumsier and more overbearing central state.
Our speakers, one from ‘The Economist’, the other working for the Conservatives, told a compelling story about the strengths of the PBA idea. They then explained why the internet and social media facilitate collective action and invite the state to move from a paternalistic to an enabling way of working.
I chipped in with a question about the relationship between online and real world sociability. Given that online networking has eventually to be supplemented by face to face interaction to lead to sustained social action, how does it overcome the hard problems of voluntary organisation?
For example, if community groups start to take on responsibility for providing public services they will find it hard to maintain their spontaneity and responsiveness in the face of stifling rules of public accountability.
Then there is the simple but grim fact that the bad is more powerful than the good. I mean by this that difficult, aggressive, dull activists drive away creative people quickly and permanently (bright people have lots of alternative ways of spending their time), yet it can take huge amounts of time and energy for a dynamic group to deal with someone who wants only to moan or disrupt. I call this powerful and depressing truth ‘the tragedy of the organisational commons’. Of course, the internet too is full of anti-social people but there it is much, much easier to ignore them.
The problem – I went on (and on) – is that we assume individual and collective empowerment go together when often they don’t. The television and the car have both provided people with huge opportunities and freedoms but their effect on civic life has probably been less benign. There may have been growth recently of people going to concerts, art galleries and lectures but this is ‘being alone in a crowd’. It is completely different to the hard labour and politics of working in groups, making decisions, dealing with differences.
As the internet makes it easier for people to get what they want from each other and the state, they may find there is even less reason to waste their time in the messy business of collective action.
The clever chap from the Conservative Party thought I was being far too gloomy. ‘The internet doesn’t just empower, it changes social norms’ he said. Look at internet dating. The technology is so clever and subtle that people have got over their hang-ups and are more than willing to admit they use the internet to find the perfect mate.
At which point I remembered something I have often heard from Tories: the main reason young people join the Conservative Association in affluent towns and suburbs is to find a future spouse.
So perhaps the rise of internet dating and the continued decline in Tory party membership (despite its greater success at the polls) are linked. By giving them the ability to find exactly the right person, dating sites enable the young and single to dispense with the clumsy sociability of the Conservative Association spring ball.
I was gratified that the most distinguished attendee at the seminar, Stephen Dorrell, concurred. The problem, he said, is that as the state becomes in many ways more powerful (partly as a result of the network effects of digital information), and as more people adopt a purely individualistic and transactional approach to meeting their needs, the collective institutions needed to hold decision makers to account atrophy.
Suddenly, the brave new world of the PBA was looking a little bit less bright and shiny.
The Peterborough principle
Another big day for the RSA. As well as another of our ever more dynamic new Fellows’ evenings, tonight sees the launch of our partnership with Peterborough City Council and Arts Council East.
If public agencies are to improve service outcomes in the difficult years ahead they will need to forge a different type of relationship with citizens. This is one of the assumptions behind the partnership. The project aims to develop a debate at many levels about the future for Peterborough and its residents, showing that the way people live and how they engage with decision makers is crucial to the health and prosperity of the city. As a reflection of this belief, the project has an ‘open source’ design with citizens able to make any input they wish as it unfolds.
Having arts and culture at the heart of the partnership will, we hope, be an important source of innovation. Socially engaged arts and culture can play a major role in breaking down social barriers, mobilising and enthusing people, and firing the collective imagination of the city.
The project will also engage with the shape and form of front line public services. For example, there is a programme to develop a recovery community for problem drug users. We are also seeking to build on a pilot project in Manchester to develop what we are calling ‘an area based curriculum’ through which schools and the community work together to foster a wider culture of learning.
The project aims will also draw on the RSA Fellowship and lecture programme to bring new perspectives on the choices facing the city.
Peterborough is a successful city in many ways and far from the most socially and economically deprived. However levels of trust, engagement and attachment to place are lower than average and problems like crime and drug use higher. These problems often get worse when population rises take place and the Peterborough population is set to grow by about 20,000 over the next decade.
Peterborough leaders share with the RSA the view that we need to cultivate a more ambitious model of citizenship – more engaged, more self-reliant, more pro-social – and that this needs to be done, in part, through the development of a stronger sense of identity and attachment. At its heart this project seeks to answer a question I have often posed before: what kind of people do we need to be to create the better future we want?
The me gene?
Following yesterday’s discussion about whether some folks have a ‘people gene’ which makes them innately adept as social networking, I fell to pondering whether I have any special abilities….
I have always thought of myself as one of those people who is quite good at several things but not very good at any. I am an experienced manager of organisations which seem to become more successful while I’m in charge. But I am not very systematic or patient. I rely too much on drive and passion which can be exhausting for me and nerve wracking for my colleagues.
I like ideas and I communicate them reasonably well but I am not a proper intellectual who does his own research and writes original and authoritative work. I am an OK broadcaster but not good enough to become famous or be given my own programme. I am a political player, knowing and occasionally influencing politicians and their advisers, but I lack the intellectual and personal discipline to be a politician myself.
This certainly doesn’t makes me into a renaissance man, the kind who as well as being a prominent scientist, plays a musical instrument to concert standard, speaks five languages fluently and has set up a variety of innovative charities. All the things I do tend to be based of a similar core skill set – basically an ability to talk reasonably persuasively. This makes for a life which is interesting but wearing on the self esteem: I have varied days but spend much of them with people who are clearly much better than me at the thing they are good at. They will leave a mark on the world which will still be traced long after they are gone. My impression is a footprint in the sand; soon washed away by the next tide.
Being both self obsessed and a glass-half-empty kind of guy I tend to wish things were different. Wouldn’t it be great to be seriously good at something, even something quite obscure? But then I wonder whether I’m even thinking about this realistically.
Perhaps everyone, or at least most people, feel this way, spread thinly and never quite hitting the first grade at anything? Or maybe very few people do, and I should count my lucky stars for managing to be at least partially self-satisfied? Then again my unease may be well-founded: I need quickly to alight on some activity or enthusiasm which might give me the rare satisfaction of expertise or excellence without which life will always feel shallow. Or is it possible through counselling and positive thinking to add together all the ‘B pluses’ of my existence and say that together they represent a least an existential ‘A minus’?
What do you think, dear reader? Are you, or do you aspire to be, an all-rounder or a specialist. Have you moved from one to the other and how was it for you when you did?
And lest you be tempted, let me preempt your jibe by sharing the response already given to these musings by a close friend:
‘But Matthew, don’t be silly, there is one thing in which you excel and to which you have given decades of disciplined and focused attention- talking about yourself’
Eureka!
As many current and former colleagues will confirm, it is a dangerous business presenting me with emerging research findings. Always eager to discover something newsworthy, and better at big concepts than methodological detail, I am prone to seize on tentative findings and turn them into a massive breakthrough in human understanding.
The dismayed research team has then to deal as best they can with the fallout as I charge around town, telling anyone who cares to listen that we have made a great discovery while each time expanding just a little bit further on what I was originally told. Within a short period any resemblance between the modest claim supported by the research and my towering hyperbole is mere coincidence.
So, I sensed a nervous frisson run through the team when yesterday I seized on a very early finding of our Connected Communities project, being undertaken in New Cross Gate. The researchers are now analysing the nearly 200 interviews which aim to map the social networks of local residents. The results confirm starkly the hypothesis that many people in disadvantaged areas have very limited social networks – for example a significant minority say not only that they don’t know anyone in authority but they don’t know anyone who knows anyone in authority.
But the finding upon which I alighted related to who and what are the main foci for networks. Not only are these centres – as we might predict - local institutions, like schools or Sure Start, or local public servants, like postmen or wardens, but a particular kind of person. It appears that those who say they most value neighbourliness are also those to whom most people connect.
This immediately put me in mind of two recent statements made at recent RSA Great Room events. First, there was David Halpern telling us that what appears to shape levels of happiness within nations is not so much their material circumstances as what they say most matters. So, for example, the Danes are the happiest people in the world partly because, uniquely, they say that ‘love’ is the most important component of contentment (unlike the miserable Bulgarians who say it is money). Second, there was the comment by the author of ‘Connected’, Nicholas Christakis, that there is a significant genetic component (around 40%) to explain why some people are better social networkers than others.
As the research team tried in vain to get me engaged with others aspects of their findings I was already air-born with my flight of fancy…..
It appears that some people bothvalue social networking (it is what makes them happy) and are adept at it. These people are potentially a massive resource for any community. There is no reason to believe that this character trait will be less prevalent in deprived communities than anywhere else. However, it may, for a whole variety for reasons, be the case that these people are not in positions where the community as a whole can best capitalise on these skills. (Indeed it may be that some of those in key formal positions of influence – the ones we tend to assume are the most important – are not themselves well-endowed with networking skills.)
Therefore, it should be a key plank of strategies to build community resilience that we identify who these people are and that we give them resources (for example, access to social media) so they can apply their skills. These are the people public authorities should engage when they are designing some or other policy intervention.
You might think this is a bold and interesting enough claim to be going on with, especially as it is based on analysing only about a quarter of the returns. But surely we can go that one step further. Doesn’t our research offer convincing proof of ‘the people gene’? If only we could find the people carrying the gene, support them, listen to them, make them be the leaders they were born to be, we could transform the resilience and capacity of every community.
The left would rejoice as deprivation was tackled, the right would celebrate the evidence that it is not in the actions of the state but in the capacities of civil society that the path to social renewal lies. The RSA would be seen to have been responsible for one of the most powerful findings in modern social science and its (surprisingly young-looking) Chief Executive would become a household name, winner of awards, friend of Presidents, feted at home and abroad for his leadership and wisdom, a regular on the One Show …..
‘Nurse, I think it may be time for Mr Taylor’s medicine.’
The RSA at its best
Not every day is good but sometimes in my job I stumble on unexpected treasures. Yesterday afternoon I helped host the awards ceremony for the UK finalists of the European Business Awards for the Environment (EBAE). The awards process is overseen by the RSA Environment Awards Forum which has at its heart a group of talented, committed, Fellows. For years these Fellows have been working to develop proper accreditation for a multitude of environment and business awards schemes. Their work resulted in DEFRA choosing the Forum to decide which award winners should be entered for the prestigious European awards. The process has been very successful with the UK regularly being European winners.
I enjoyed the awards ceremony for three reasons. First, we got to hear about some great environmental work ranging from Sainsbury’s saving miles of paper by printing double sided receipts to a successful sustainable hotel. After the winter we have just had, people were particularly taken with a new technique for filling potholes, which removes the need to dig up the road and is thus quicker, quieter, cheaper and generates less landfill waste. There was an abundance of innovation, corporate responsibility and business leadership on show in the eleven awards handed out by Environment Minister, Dan Norris.
Second, after all the controversy over climate change science, and the growing tide of media and public scepticism, it was good to hear from businesses that were convinced that a commitment to high environmental standards was not just the best thing to do but motivated staff, saved money and enhanced their brand.
Third, it was great to see this model example of what Fellows can achieve when backed up by some quality staff time. The Environment Forum used to be the project of our valued colleague, Simon Fordham, and since his retirement the task has fallen into the very capable hands of Rebecca Daddow. Just like the examples of Chelmsford and Sheffield I gave last week, the RSA is often at its best when it combines the expertise of Fellows and the resources of John Adam Street.
So, it was a great afternoon and fingers crossed one of the award winners will soon be lifting the crown in Brussels.
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