Ingenuity, Webby and Fellow (no, it’s not a new design consultancy)
One of my more successful posts in recent times invited people to comment or tweet in exchange for a free copy of Jamie Young’s RSA pamphlet on ingenuity. I think we ended up sending out about 80 copies and from this are also building a network of people interested in the idea.
Jamie distinguishes ingenuity from innovation in general by reference to the frugal use of resources. Ingenuity also involves surprising combinations. I guess, therefore, that RSA Animate is our very own example of ingenuity in action.
The idea of putting together an edited version of a speech (using existing material) with the animation skills of Andrew Park at Cognitive Media (using an existing technique but applying it differently) was an intuitive leap by a member of staff. Now Animate is a global phenomenon with getting on for twenty million lecture views in not much more than the last year.
The latest accolade is for RSA Animate to be shortlisted for a Webby, which is the on-line equivalent of an Oscar. The Webbys are more democratic than the Oscars so anyone can vote. So please vote for Animate here and I promise if anyone from the RSA goes to LA to receive the award it won’t be me but a much more deserving member of our brilliant events team.
RSA Animate was a stroke of genius and it may turn out that no one else can find a cleverer, more compelling better way of visualising ideas. But if you think you can, there will soon be an opportunity to prove it. We have secured funding to create an Animate Mark 2 prize (it won’t be called this) and I will make sure to share the details on this site when they are announced to the world.
It will be fascinating to see the entries. I recently spoke to someone at the British Film Institute who told me she had been looking to fund something like Animate for twenty years (not that she had any money now!). She was sceptical about whether Animate could be matched let alone surpassed.
Given that Animate came from a leap of imagination but the prize will encourage people to think of presenting lecture ideas in new ways as a problem and then to work out a solution, it will be interesting to compare the fruits of the two different processes.
But in case anyone thinks that in boasting of the 20 million views I am being too self-satisfied about the RSA here is a less comforting statistic: fewer than a quarter of RSA Fellows have watched an Animate! This is despite the generally very positive feedback in our Fellows’ survey (some of which I have passed on in earlier posts).
So after you’ve voted in the Webby’s, and after you’ve told your friends to as well, maybe you can tell any FRSA you know about the joys of Animate.
But perhaps this is a failure of imagination on my part. Imagine if instead of converting Fellows to Animate we could convert fans of Animate to becoming Fellows.
That way we could take over the world.……
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?
Cog blog
I tend – perhaps inevitably – to get fewer comments when I blog about the RSA. But as well as wanting feedback from Fellows, I would be really interested to hear what people outside the Society think of the model I am about to describe.
The RSA to which I was appointed over four years ago had a lot going for it and much to be proud of in its recent and longer distant history. But the Trustees and senior staff had also identified some major challenges which needed to be addressed, such as the external profile, image and impact of the RSA, and low levels of Fellowship engagement.
It is tedious and self-serving to go through the progress we have made on these fronts (and anyway I am hardly the most objective witness). But even as we have seen the RSA brand spread globally through RSA Animate or our influence grow through nationally respected research projects, conferences and engagement with senior politicians, and even as we have seen higher than ever levels of fellow engagement through channels like RSA Catalyst and our regional, local and issue based networks, I have found a big question nagging away at me: ‘There may be good progress on many fronts but where does it all end up?’.
By this I mean; ‘how do the key developments and functions in the Society cohere into a secure foundation for the RSA’s next stage of development?’ Or to put it (yet) another way; ‘we may have a new strapline – 21st century enlightenment – and many successful aspects to our work but how does that translate into a story about the organisation as a whole?’
Of course, I wouldn’t be asking the question if I didn’t think I was nearing an answer. Here it is:
The RSA impact engine
The model captures the unique (and I really think it is unique) way in which the modern RSA seeks to deliver its historic mission of innovation for the benefit of society.
The ideas and influence cog is about how we bring the most exciting ideas in the world into the RSA and how we use our brand, reputation and networks to get our ideas noticed by everyone from cabinet ministers to budding social entrepreneurs.
The research and development cog is about how we develop, refine, test and roll out our own ideas about how best to enhance human capability (with a particular focus on the capabilities of the least advantaged).
The Fellowship activities cog is about how RSA Fellows are themselves a powerful source of ideas and a motor of change in both society and The Society.
Although perhaps seeming outdated in its mechanical overtones, the metaphor is intended to imply that each cog must be turning in its own right and that, as it does so, it should be helping to turn the other cogs. If I was better at PowerPoint art I would also have sparks flying out the machine which would symbolise the things the RSA helps to create which then spin out into the wider world (everything from the Great Exhibition to Tomorrow’s Company to the RSA Academy).
As I listened to some fascinating debates in our Fellowship Council yesterday I could hear many Council members describing aspects of this model.
There is further to go – much further in some areas – before all the cogs are turning as fast as we want and each is connecting as well as it could with the others. It is, for example, vital that we build swiftly on the early success of Catalyst to create a strong set of expectations about how groups of Fellows are encouraged and supported to develop their own projects. Also there are important aspects of the RSA – like 8 John Adam Street – which impact on different cogs in different ways. But this, it seems to me, is a powerful way of thinking about the RSA; what makes it special and what gives it such incredible potential for the future.
The contradictions of capitalism
It’s lazy, I know, to make my readers do the work but here are three things you should be read and watched together:
Robert Peston on the revival of financial trading, in currencies and various forms of derivatives. Once again, he suggests, a small number of people are getting very rich by pursuing activities which are of dubious value to the wider ‘real’ economy.
LSE Director Howard Davies on the failure of attempts at international reform of banking and financial trading.
David Harvey’s RSA Animate, arguing that the growing power of finance in capitalism is not an accident or a coincidence, nor is it simply a reflection of human frailty, it is an inevitable development of capitalism.
Two years ago there was much talk of regulating financial transactions and rebalancing the economy towards manufacturing. There is very little of that talk now. Arguably for good reasons, the Coalition Government is sceptical of the role of Government in supporting industry, and anyway there’s no money.
So, in a very short space of time, after the most dangerous and far reaching crises in the history of global capitalism, this country and others, like America, are going back. Back to being highly dependent on a finance sector many of whose instruments are good at making some people rich, but which mortgage the future and carry major risks of contagion, and which seem to have little or no effect on the wider economy or the livelihoods of those outside finance (apart perhaps from people who sell fine wines and yachts).
For an economic layman like me, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that capitalism has become dominated by finance because its underlying logic dictates so. I am sure there is a way of achieving a more balanced and fair economy without abolishing capitalism but at the moment it doesn’t look like anyone knows what it is. Fortunately, my ignorance may be dispelled this evening with our fascinating event this evening with the development economics expert, Ha-Joon Chang, chaired by Larry Elliott.
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