Coming clean about membership
Yesterday afternoon saw me in the City leading an NCVO seminar on the future of membership organisations. (I arrived late and, given the name of the venue and the use of blogging and twittering in the seminar, was open to the accusation ‘Taylor couldn’t organise a mash up in The Brewery’.)
From what was a lively session – part of an NCVO/RSA project on membership – three points particularly struck me:
1) Organisations find it very hard to be honest about the task of managing and engaging with their membership. It was only after I was very open about how challenging this is at the RSA that other delegates started to open up. It turns out that the issues are very similar in many different types of organisations. Change involves simultaneously confronting barriers (such as activist capture, cumbersome governance and stuffy inward looking cultures), building capacity (finding new ways – particularly on-line – of engaging people) and developing new content propositions (what are we asking members to do and how can we make this an attractive and rewarding proposition).
2) Creating a new culture and set of expectations among members and in the relationship between the centre and localities can be a major, time consuming and resource intensive change management process. Many organisations lack the confidence or resources to confront the issues, so they are continually brushed under the carpet.
3) Very few new charities are creating democratic or quasi democratic membership structures. New philanthropists and social entrepreneurs have seen the hassle that can be involved and tend to plump for much leaner and more centralised forms of governance.
I have written in the past about the need for what I called ‘a new collectivism’. More than ever we need organisations that engage people not just in signing petitions or raising money but in shaping the way the organisation works and what it tries to achieve; this is practical citizenship. But the cultures of too many membership organisations are unsuited to modern expectations and challenges and can be off-putting to, for example, younger people. That’s why this NCVO/RSA project is important not just for the organisations directly involved but for the health of wider civil society.
For more information about the NCVO/RSA project, please contact either Katherine Hudson (katherine.hudson@rsa.org.uk) or Megan Griffith Gray (Megan.Griffith@ncvo-vol.org.uk).
Post consumerism
Let me make a prediction. Over the next few months and years we will get used to a new catch phrase; ‘post consumerism’. Why? Simply because this concept forms at the intersection of a problem of human development and an external shock.
There is a growing willingness to assert that well-being, as distinct from material success, is the aim of life. This in turn has two strands; the limited correlation between wealth and contentment amongst the well-off and the sense that in poor communities, particularly among the young, the problem is as much one of psychological resilience as of material deprivation.
The external shock is the combination of climate change, rising prices and commodity shortages, and the likelihood of several years of economic stagnation.
So, just as we are starting to ask whether shopping really is the route to happiness we find we can’t afford to buy as much anyway; of such a concatenation are cultural turning points made. Of course, it could go the other way, when we find we can’t spend, spend, spend we might suddenly realise how our lives depend on it and demand that Government use up all the resources NOW (in which case the human race is doomed to triviality, conflict and well deserved species extinction).
If you think this is just the ravings of an old leftie who has found a new excuse to indulge his anti-capitalist tendencies, here are the words of Sir Martin Sorrell, arguably the most powerful marketing man in the world ‘our view, counter to what you expect, is that conspicuous consumption is not productive, and should be discouraged’ (thanks to Jules Peck for pointing out this quote in this week’s Campaign magazine).
Here are eight ideas that will rise on the tide of post consumerism:
- Sustainable design – this week the Design Council asserted in their new three year plan that good design must by definition be sustainable design
- Urban self sufficiency – time to stop ogling Felicity Kendall (if you are a man over 40) and start taking notes when watching The Good Life on UK Gold
- Make do and mend – disinvest in EasyJet and buy shares in darning wool manufacturers
- Upgradeability – technology and white goods being made so they can be upgraded without being thrown away (zero tolerance to built in obsolescence)
- City closet dwellers – people too embarrassed to admit they used to work in financial services
- Anti-consumerist chic – celebrities will positively want to be seen wearing the same outfit they wore five years ago
- Post consumerist gaming – forget Grand Theft Auto V, the must-have video games will be ‘carbon killers’ and ‘investment banker shoot ‘em up’
- The rise of the vegetarian super chef – forget macho, swearing, blood soaked cooks; we are all going to learn to do interesting things with lentils
Punk poet John Cooper Clark once said (I think) the world will end not with a bang but with a Wimpy. Cheap, disposable, unhealthy consumer capitalism is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Hoorah!
Thinking about brains
Over the next few days and weeks I am planning to use my blog to outline the argument I intend to make in my second annual chief executive’s lecture to the RSA.
Last year my subject was ‘pro-social behaviour’. The argument, in a nutshell, was that we will not be able successfully to respond to future challenges and opportunities unless we recognise that we as citizens need to change our attitudes and behaviours. I argued for a political discourse that was less ‘Government-centric’ – what should those in power be doing for us – and more ‘citizen-centric’ – what do we have to do to achieve the things that we want.
Since last year there have been a number of further contributions to thinking about citizen behaviour. The most recent is a short pamphlet from DEMOS featuring essays about public behaviour from leading politicians. The pamphlet is edited by Duncan O’Leary, who also pens an interesting concluding chapter. O’Leary argues that the utilitarian argument for intervening to change behaviours (in areas from parenting to public health) should be supplemented (and in same cases tempered) by an account of how we enhance the capacity of all citizens to feel in control of their lives as individuals and members of communities.
O’Leary is right. For my lecture I chose the unwieldy phrase ‘pro-social behaviour’ to signal that thinking about future citizenship should start from a positive question about human capacity. This is the idea I want to build on in this year’s lecture.
I am interested in two dimensions of human development. The first element concerns individual human capacity and, in particular, what we beginning to understand about the content, adaptability and idiosyncrasies of our cognitive processes.
I will argue that we are entering ‘an era of neurological reflexivity’, by which I mean a time when we can begin to adapt behaviours and policies to a richer understanding of how our brains (and not just our conscious minds) work.
Observer readers will have seen a major article yesterday about IQ and whether and how it can be enhanced. This is just part of a bigger debate about how we can shape our brains to better adapt us to today and tomorrow’s world.
I want to link this idea to a theme I have explored in blogs and articles earlier this year; new collectivism. The claim here is that people are willing – are indeed enthusiastic – about working with others to create a better future but that they want to do this ways which fit with modern lifestyles and expectations.
I am not as clear as I need to be about how to link these two ideas but that’s one of the things I hope to work through in coming blogs.
Local elections
News pages will continue to be consumed over the bank holiday weekend by the fall out from the local elections. I’ll no doubt be asked to do some punditry, and I will make sure that this is in my former capacity, rather than my current one, and that my observations are as impartial as possible.
But I’d like to offer up a few observations now.
It’s not clear whether these elections are more analogous to the 2004 elections, from which Labour recovered, or to 1995 which marked the beginning of the end for the Conservatives.
I don’t perceive a fundamental shift in public priorities as was witness in 1995, but on the other hand the Conservatives are showing the kind of optimism and self confidence we haven’t witnessed since the early years of the Blair project.
But perhaps the most interesting result from yesterday was the turnout in the London mayoral election. By all accounts it is much higher than the previous election and this highlights three things.
1. Voters are more motivated by voting for people than parties
2. Having charismatic candidates helps fire up the public imagination
3. Voters are more likely to vote when they think the result is close so their vote matters.
In the wake of the disappointing turn out in 2001 much ink was spilt on the inexorable decline of public participation in the democratic process. In all the reports, conferences etc on how to engage people in politics post-2001 what wasn’t recognised is that modern people are both more sophisticated and less deferential than their predecessors, so they’re more likely to make rational choices about how and when to use their voting rights.
As I’ve said before, it’s not that people aren’t interested in collective action and collective decision making, just that the ways in which we seek to engage people needs to be more responsive and tailored to their new ways of thinking and living.
So of course there will be moaning about the lack of turn out in elections around the country, but how many races had the sex appeal and glamour of the London mayoral election – or for that matter could honestly say the results would as directly affect people’s lives? This backs up a recent IPPR report which says that if we want to have a more vibrant political debate there is a strong case for having mayors in all major UK cities in order to enable people to have a stake in local democracy.
A quantum theory of jokes
I have a quantum theory of jokes. When I hear a good new gag (new to me, at least) I can’t wait to tell those of my friends who like that kind of thing. But however good the joke, and however well it goes down at first, gradually its power diminishes.
I have reached the conclusion that there is simply a limit to how many times you can tell the same joke without somehow subliminally signalling to your listener that they are hearing the one line equivalent of an episode of Porridge on UK Gold; still funny but not fresh.
I fear speeches are the same. Recently I have been performing my ‘social aspiration gap’ speech twice every week. The talks vary in length and detail from a fifty minute version for the annual Cornwall Lecture to a five minute summary for a new Fellows evening in Cambridge. While the basic argument goes down OK, a fear of sounding stale means on every occasion I try to add some new aspect, fact or perspective.
The aspect that is currently expanding concerns the idea of changing consciousness. My argument involves explaining what I mean by change then offering a direction for change:
Every day we learn more about the capacities and idiosyncrasies of our thought processes. Research in neuroscience, social psychology, sociology, policy evaluation can help us understand how politics and policy might enable us to think and live in ways that work for the twenty-first century.
Maybe along the way I’ll find out why it is my jokes don’t last.
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