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.’
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Comments
8 Comments on Eureka!
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Is Rigorous Advocacy an Oxymoron? : Connected Communities on
Thu, 4th Mar 2010 12:49 pm
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Jonathan Rowson on
Thu, 4th Mar 2010 12:54 pm
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Marie Millward on
Thu, 4th Mar 2010 1:50 pm
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bayrak on
Thu, 4th Mar 2010 3:59 pm
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Caitriona on
Thu, 4th Mar 2010 9:44 pm
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Ian Leslie on
Fri, 5th Mar 2010 9:31 am
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David Wilcox on
Fri, 5th Mar 2010 10:49 am
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matthewtaylor on
Sun, 7th Mar 2010 9:32 pm
[...] context explains the recent musings of our great leader, who accurately reflected the ambience of a meeting yesterday in which the Connected Communities [...]
We enjoyed your Eureka insight! And I would agree that one important insight is worth a million qualifications. All the same, I have tried to unpack the tension between rigour and relevance that you allude to above.
http://connectedcommunities.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/03/04/is-rigorous-advocacy-an-oxymoron/
This hits the nail on the head and the implications un-connectedness is mostly unrecognised. Our local Sure Start ran short couses, baby massage, baby yoga etc for 6 weeks – the groups were deliberately broken up after 6 weeks so that “cliques” of parents did not form. “Cliques” are social networks and exactly what new mums need. The fact that this was seen as a negative thing is astonishing.
Congratulations !
Very very nice site
Thank you.. =)
The social networker sounds like a Mum I know! She has never had a formal “community” position, yet somehow she manages to bring neighbours who’ve never spoken before together, get people volunteering for local charities for the first time in their life, makes sure people in the neighbourhood never feel completely isolated. She moved cities a few years ago and the buzz and the transformation in the area in which she now lives is remarked upon by so many people when you go and visit. I’m not so sure she’d enjoy being “elevated” to a “leadership” position, however.
She does it mostly through being incredibly effective at passing on gossip (benign) I think.
People tell her stuff because of her genuine and warm interest in other people, and the constant supply of news and snippits she knows about the neighbours mean she’s a draw for other people, so they tend to congregate around her and join in whatever she’s doing. A much under-appreciated skill.
At the risk of sounding like a plodder, your research doesn’t offer any proof or evidence of a “people gene”, because it has no mechanism for separating genetic from environmental effects. The “gene” part of your argument – and thus your second point – is superfluous. The more substantial point is about whether, if the state could identify these social mavens, it should seek to cultivate them and use them as conduits to the community in which they live. I’d like to see you getting more specific about what that might mean. What does giving people “access to social media” entail – showing them how to use Facebook? Not sure you need a state intervention to do that. Even if you did, it would only be useful, by definition, if the rest of the community was using it.
I can see that identifying these people might be good in the context of the gathering of information and insight into a community – using their social expertise as a portal. Didn’t Demos suggest talking to hairdressers a few years ago?
Could this be a BIG Fellowship project, as discussed over here? Supporting the connectors (whatever their genes), and becoming new connectors where necessary.
Some nice points here. Thank you all (and for your kind words Bayrak)
Caitriona, your mum sounds great and you are right she must be protected from people who want to interfere in what she does brilliantly and turn into a community leader, whatever that is. Marie, what a bad bit of thinking in your Sure Start. the point is there will also be ‘cliques’ the question is whether they are open and benign or closed and insular.
David, I do hope the Fellowship will get more engaged in the Connected Community project, that we can develop version of the work that can be taken up by Fellows’ groups, and that we can answer some of the important questions raised by Ian.
Jonathan – a really thoughtful piece. I guess my view is that you can strongly argue for a position while at the same time admitting that it is based on faith and values as well as (some) evidence. This, I believe, is the Weberian position – we can never be objective so best to be honest about our subjectivity.
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