Innovation is as innovation does
What do you generate by burning bad people? The answer, of course, is synergy.
This overused concept is on my mind right now.
I used it quite a lot this morning in my speech to the HE Leadership Institute (a high point of which was me reading aloud some of the great comments to Monday’s blog). As well as challenging universities to be better at collaboration with other local agencies and with other HEIs I also talked about the need to promote better collaboration within institutions.
It is in spaces and processes which bring together people with different interests, expertise and resources that innovation is most likely to occur. It is also here that we can identify ‘the hidden wealth’ (a capacity for creativity, generosity, trust and solidarity) which often lies dormant trapped between specialisms and hierarchies and crushed by narrow incentives.
In the past, speaking of such issues has (notwithstanding my brilliant way with words, on which it is perhaps unnecessary for me to dwell ongoingly at this moment in time) left me with a hollow sensation. It was all very well blahing on about innovation, but not being a brilliant entrepreneur, inventor or explorer myself, who am I to opine on such matters?
But now it feels like I may have some foundation of authority on which to stand. When the RSA, in conjunction with our friends at CRI, won a contract to provide post-treatment drug and alcohol rehabilitation services in West Kent it was important for three main reasons: first, providing public services on a payment by results basis is an exciting new challenge for the Society; second, we have this opportunity following a six year process of research, prototyping and experimentation; and third, because the bid had Fellowship engagement at its heart.
Already, I hear this engagement paying off with meetings to explore collaboration between the West Kent project team and Fellows who are senior in local public services, the community sector and business. A similarly high powered gathering held recently in Peterborough – also discussing community support for people in recovery – apparently reaped both great ideas and concrete offers of help.
Over the last few years we have sought fundamentally to change expectations of Fellowship. Instead of an assumption that the primary role of Fellows is as donors who enable paid staff to have ideas to change the world, we see Fellows themselves as being full participants in our charitable mission. This means we can really tap into the hidden wealth of our Fellows and the idea of Fellowship.
Despite West Kent, Peterborough and many other examples of Fellowship action, the journey is far from complete. Having now raised expectations and aspirations we have the welcome, but growing, challenge of providing sufficient support for an ever more active and ambitious Fellowship.
But it does now feel like we can advocate social innovation to others from a position of insight and legitimacy. I also have no hesitation is inviting anyone out there who has a generous, collaborative and inventive mind set to explore the possibility of Fellowship (if you want to know more email me at matthew.taylor@rsa.org.uk).
And finally another synergy: our events team has built some great partnerships, including with prestigious media outlets like Channel Four and LBC. One example is our hosting of BBC Radio 4’s series Four Thought. The short lecture on education and creativity being broadcast tonight at 8.45 is given by RSA Fellowship Council member Gerard Darby. Whatever a self-satisfied old bureaucrat like me says, it is great FRSAs like Gerard who are the best possible advert for RSA Fellowship.
Old whine in new battles?
I trace my amateur interest in psychology to a trick my parents used to play on me. When, as I fear was often, I was in a rebarbative mood one of them would say ‘oh dear, Matthew’s got a whine’. Then they would get me to stand still with my eyes closed while one of them pushed some tweezers into my open mouth. Then, as they commanded me to open my eyes, they would triumphantly wave a small white object which they had ‘found’ at the back of throat; this was ‘the whine’. It wasn’t until some time later that I realised this was a simple sleight of hand deploying one of my mother’s coffee sweeteners. But at the time it worked and I would immediately cheer up responding positively when mother would say ‘now then, up to your bedroom and back to work on the A levels’.
The work paid off and here I am at the RSA preparing to chair an event with one of the world’s leading public intellectuals, Steven Pinker, whose latest book ‘The better angels of our nature’ is subtitled ‘The decline of violence in history and its causes’. I know some people are a bit stuffy about Pinker (including, I have to admit, one of the aforementioned parents) but I think it’s a great book. As it’s over 700 pages long I planned to dip in to it selectively over the weekend but wherever I started I found it hard to stop reading.
On my way to Edinburgh to chair the RSA Scotland Angus Millar Lecture featuring Matt Ridley (a writer who shares Pinker’s optimistic world view), I got engrossed in the chapter on our inner demons. Pinker reminds his readers of what he calls the ‘moralisation gap’. This is the gap between the sympathetic, indeed self satisfied, way we perceive our own behaviour and the critical way we view behaviour (including exactly the same behaviour as our own) in others.
This got me to thinking about an issue I have raised in previous posts: how can we make groups of people – say, for example, a group of RSA Fellows meeting to discuss the possibility of a local initiative – work more effectively? A starting point is to think about some of the recurrent problems that can affect such groups. Here are three: people dominating the conversation, reacting badly when their view doesn’t prevail or not volunteering when it comes to the tasks necessary to take forward decisions made in the meeting.
According to the research, we are all likely to think we are less guilty of these failings than other people. So, how about a process in which the chair of the meeting explains to the participants that research has shown that these three failings (although it could be others) are the biggest dangers to a meeting and asks people to write down on a piece of paper how guilty they think they are of committing them on say a five point scale ranging from very (5) to not at all (1). Then the chair collects the bits of paper (which have been filled in anonymously) and makes a quick calculation. As most people will have written either ’1′ or ’2′, the chair can declare delightedly that the group is well above average. The hope then is that a combination of solidarity, self fulfilling prophesy and a raising of normative thresholds will lead everyone in the room to live up to their self perception.
The design isn’t perfect. It uses our narcissism but it doesn’t channel the energy of our critical tendencies. Maybe readers can think of cleverer ways of using the moralisation gap for the common good. Of course, some people might object that no one is that gullible. To them I cite a small boy standing in a kitchen in York with his mouth open. But to be fair to me (and I do tend to be just that) it was very stressful doing A levels at the age of six!
Stoking the flames of renewal
I hate Stoke on Trent. It is a place of pain, rain and misery. Before Fellows and friends from the Potteries denounce me, I should admit that my feelings are totally unreasonable and entirely based on having watched my beloved West Bromwich Albion get repeatedly beaten – usually in the bleak mid-winter – by their bogey team Stoke City.
But today I associate the Staffordshire metropolis with inspiration.
On Saturday the RSA – some great Fellows and enthusiastic staff – were honoured to join with Stoke Community Action Fund in hosting Stoke Stories. Rather like the recent Our Leicester event this was a day dedicated to bringing together a wide range of active local citizens and civic organisations to discuss how the city can survive and thrive in these difficult times.
RSA colleagues will be posting more detailed accounts of the day on the Fellowship blog but I want to explore the wider issues generated by events like this. In essence, the attempt to mobilise civil society (which includes public and private organisations with a commitment to place that goes beyond legal responsibilities and profit maximisation) can be seen to have three sets of objectives.
The first is to some extent accomplished in the very holding of the event. It is to strengthen connections and create a context for new initiatives and collaborations. If the Stoke event achieved nothing more, it would have been worth it for the lively Facebook page and a great email list creating forums for ideas to be launched and developed. In his closing remarks, Danny Flynn from North Staffs YMCA, instructed all the delegates to talk to one person they did not already know and then send the outcome of their conversation to local MP Tristram Hunt.
The second and third objectives are tougher to achieve: with the economy in the doldrums, unemployment rising, living standards falling and public service provision being cut, is it possible to generate either improvements in the quality of people’s lives or the health of the local economy? To understand whether and how this is possible requires the development of what I have called ‘a social economy of place’.
On the one hand, this means identifying, mobilising and organising key factors of social production to generate better outcomes for local citizens. Key amongst these factors are:
- Time
- Care and compassion
- Regard and esteem
- Creativity, innovation and hope
In relation to these factors, we know those in play could be applied more productively and also that every large community contains a deep reservoir of untapped time, compassion, esteem and creativity. The big question is: ‘how much social good could in practice be released by the better articulation of these factors?’ To take two obvious examples: could the spare time of those who are unemployed and under employed be better directed towards those whose main problem is loneliness and social isolation; or could better linkages between people make a variety of sporting and cultural activities more viable and affordable, think here of book clubs or kids’ football tournaments.
The economic challenge is even tougher. It is whether, on the one hand, money spent in a place can circulate for longer and more widely in that place (think here of various schemes to encourage people to purchase from locally owned shops) and, on the other, stronger social bonds can start to generate commercial opportunities based on cluster effects or economies of scale (for example, could local craftspeople combine to create a shared marketing and on-line trading capacity).
It is great that the RSA is involved in initiatives like those in Stoke and Leicester. But as a research and development organisation with links to the wider world of ideas, the RSA should be aiming to work with localities to do the tough work of exploring how civic enthusiasm can be applied to a civic strategy underpinned by a robust social economy of place.
As so often the problem is capacity. The RSA has a great deal of relevant insight and experience from projects like Connected Communities and Citizen Power. I would love to find the funding to enable a major action research project (which we would happily do in collaboration with partners) to explore one of the most important questions of our time: how do we tap the hidden wealth of every community so that society can flourish despite the continuing frailties of the market and state.
Maximum impact
Often an issue engages us because over a short period of time it has come up from different angles in different contexts. For me themost recent example concerns the way the RSA describes social impact. The issue cropped up at a recent Trustee meeting in relation to different views about how we should judge the success for RSA projects. For some Trustees the most important thing is impact on the ground, others would like to see evidence that we are influencing policy makers and breaking through more consistently into the national media.
Then, on Friday, we had an internal meeting involving senior managers where there was discussion of a paper proposing the development of single corporate framework for assessing impact. Finally, on Saturday in Todmorden I saw a great example of the RSA making an impact – in this case supporting a fantastic initiative which has built great social capital in town – but also one which it is quite hard to capture as a conventional output.
So I feel these questions need further thought and having such great readers – who are generally enthusiastic about the RSA – I thought that over the next few days I might share some of my thought processes with you.
Last year the RSA Trustees agreed to launch a new strapline: twenty first century enlightenment. The feeling was that this worked at several levels. It combines a reference to our eighteenth century enlightenment origins with a commitment to be relevant in the century ahead. It refers to our mission to open up new ideas to the world. But the strap line also referred to a more substantive conversation about the Society’s modern mission which had been taking place among Trustees and in other RSA forums.
Twenty first century enlightenment means different things to different people, but I gave my personal take on it in my 2010 annual lecture. In essence this was an argument of three parts:
1) For the world to meet major challenges and to flourish in the 21st century we need a step change in human capability, including significant changes in the ways we think and behave: in short we need citizens who are more engaged, more resourceful and more inclined to be pro-social.
2) If we seek to enhance human capability we need to understand what drives human behaviour. From disciplines as varied as neuroscience, behavioural economics, sociology, anthropology, evolutionary psychology new, more complex and more nuanced accounts of human nature are emerging to challenge the formerly dominant myth of homo economicus.
3) Putting together the challenges generated by the modern world with new thinking about human behaviour provides an opportunity to reconsider the way we have come to interpret some of the founding ideas of the post enlightenment era; namely autonomy, universalism and humanism.
As I say, this is just my take but it helps to explain why measuring impact is a tricky problem. The relationship between our mission and what we do is reasonably clear, the difficulty comes when we move from what we do (output) to what we want to achieve (outcome).
The thirty five million on-line views of RSA events proves we are making ideas interesting and accessible to a mass audience. But apart from the many positive comments on YouTube and other places how do we know that those ideas are having an impact beyond entertainment? And should we more ambitious about using the events programme to surface new issues in ways which really have an impact on public discourse?
Our projects in areas ranging from design and education to social networks and behaviour change all relate to questions of human capability. We can point to good publications, rising media profile and concrete real world impacts such as our Whole Person Recovery work in Sussex or the achievements of our Academies, but if we wanted to aim for a more profound long-lasting influence and change what would it be and in what areas would we focus?
As my day in Todmorden vividly showed, our investment in supporting Fellows’ activities is starting to pay off in an ever growing level of Fellowship activity (as another example, last week saw over 150 people attend a Profit with Purpose network meeting here in London). But can we aspire to all these disparate initiatives coalescing into the RSA Fellowship making a substantial contribution to civil society?
In focussing on outcomes rather than more easily measured outputs there is a danger that the discussion becomes rather abstract and speculative. But I also think that part of the RSA being a truly innovative organisation could be that we try to judge ourselves by distinctive criteria, developing new metrics and making new kinds of arguments about impact. One possibility, for example, might be that we use the forthcoming Fellowship survey to ask some deeper questions about how being a Fellow changes people’s sense of social efficacy and responsibility. Social network analysis (an area in which the RSA is now seen to be a leading practitioner) might also enable us to see how our work ripples out beyond our immediate stakeholder groups.
I hope to return to these issues later in the week and – as always – I’ll be interested to see of readers have their own perspectives.
It’s incredible, it’s edible, it’s Todmorden
I am writing this on the way back from a fantastic day in Todmorden, the home of Incredible Edible Todmorden. I can’t say catching the last train back to London from the bleak badlands of Stockport is my idea of a good Saturday night but the journey was certainly worth it.
I’m sure many of my readers will know about IET. It is a fantastic project based on the simple idea of local people growing food. The driving force behind the project is Pamela Warhurst. She told me the idea occurred to her and her friends after she heard a lecture by Professor Tim Lang, so there was a nice symmetry when my trip ended with me introducing Tim at a packed meeting in Todmorden’s wonderfully preserved Hippodrome Theatre.
Before the event I had been shown round the IET green route which included Pam’s original private rose garden, which is now a tiny public garden full of vegetables and herbs. My guide Estelle then showed me the raised beds planted by the canal, the places where standard issue municipal prickly bushes had been replaced with edible plants, and the health centre which has a border of strawberry plants maintained by a GP who used to grow strawberries in Poland as well as a raised bed planted with medicinal plants. Most of this has been done without asking for permission (or only asking for it after the planting) and all of it by volunteers.
The project is now having impacts across the town. Small businesses are being created including a soap maker who uses IET herbs. All the town’s schools are involved, especially the high school where a BTEC in agriculture is proving very popular and where a local sustainable fish farming social business in being developed. And in case IET sounds like it is one of those worthy but achingly middle class green initiatives, its ideas are also being implemented by a local social housing provider.
It is hardly surprising that visitors from all over the world are flocking to Todmorden to learn more about IET. Today, people from twenty existing or putative schemes like IET gathered to share ideas, discuss experiences and develop collaboration.
For me the project packed extra impact for two reasons. The first is that RSA Fellows have played an important role in developing supporting and publicising IET. I met some fantastic Fellows during the day, the kind of people who give the Society a good name whenever they mention their association. The second is that the project fits so well with the idea that we need to close the social aspiration gap (the gap between the future people say they want and the one we are likely to build unless we are willing to change some of the ways we think and act). I have said that closing the gap means encouraging people to be ‘more engaged, more resourceful and more pro-social’. By getting people to think about food and the impact of our food choices, in encouraging people to grow and cook their own food, and in mobilising volunteers from all sectors of the community IET as well as demonstrable building civic capacity IET is a microcosm of the new ways of living we need.
So, it’s ten to ten and we’ve only just left Stoke on Trent but, for once, I’m not complaining.
RSA Animate
RSA Mobile
RSA Comment- RSA Projects Blogs
- Twitter @RSAMatthew
- RSAMatthew: On my way to RSA Xmas party - I won't stay too long as it spoils the fun to have the boss around
- RSAMatthew: @DAaronovitch Reading Sennett more like an artistic than a intellectual exercise - best to skip over the bits that don't work for you
- RSAMatthew: @AdamYogaPilates No Bovril but kep warm by indignation at Fulham fans who arrive late, leave early and keep jumping up to get a snack !
RSA Bookshop
The RSA Bookshop, in partnership with Blackwell's the UK's leading academic bookseller, offers Fellows and friends an opportunity to purchase books and to explore our speakers’ ideas in greater detail. Visit the RSA Bookshop.