The RSA mission and brand – responding to the debate

July 1, 2009 by matthewtaylor
Filed under: The RSA 

It’s time for me to respond to the challenging and fascinating conversation following my posts last week about change and branding in the RSA. I have read all the comments carefully and replied to some directly. My points don’t cover everything, but these are the issues that stood out for me:

1. The branding exercise is not a superficial paint job. We have been in the process of realigning the RSA since my first Chief Executive’s speech with its emphasis on social change and citizen responsibility. The Trustees and Exec saw the development of a new account of the RSA’s role and the re-engineering of activities around that account as a precursor to any rebrand.

2. The broad outline of the RSA’s mission and operating principles has developed iteratively in a variety of fora ranging from Fellows’ meetings to blogs and Journal articles. At the core of this is the idea that the RSA is here to enable future citizenship; in other words, we think people aggregately need to be able to think and act in different ways if we are to thrive in the future.

3. Through its unusual organisational form the RSA can pursue that goal by:

• exploring different dimensions of this idea (thus the emphasis in our lectures and Journal articles on how human beings make decisions)

• experimenting with new forms of citizen engagement, empowerment and development. This is the focus for our Projects team

• enabling the Fellowship to be a powerful force for social good and civic innovation         

• the House being a place of ideas, collaboration and creativity.

4. It turns out that this is easy to describe but many parts of it are much, much harder to do. The branding process, along with other strategic challenges like the development of the Fellowship Charter, is helping to surface some of these tough dilemmas. I described three last week of which the most challenging is making engagement with Fellows a powerful way to achieve social progress.

5. Fellows join for a variety for reasons and have a variety of ways of engaging. That will never change. But at heart we want the Fellowship proposition to contain three elements:       

• You have been chosen as a person of achievement (which is, by the way, not the same as status or seniority). The badge of FRSA celebrates that achievement

• You are being invited to join a fascinating, powerful network of people who have at their disposal a set of resources provided by the Society (everything from the Journal to the seed corn investment fund that has been set up by RSA Scotland)

• In joining you commit to supporting the RSA’s mission, not just through your annual donation (important though this is) but by engaging with our work, and being open to collaborating with the Society and other Fellows in initiatives that further this mission    

6. Redefining and renewing the idea of Fellowship is the hardest but also the most important part of this whole change process. That’s why we have been experimenting with a whole range of ways making this real, from the November 22nd 2007 event, to the City networks to the new Fellowship Council. We have come to see that the kind of shift we want to see involves challenging more traditional (hierarchical and bureaucratic) views of Fellowship, developing new capacity, and identifying content propositions (what is it that Fellows can do together to make an impact). In all of this what we need more than anything is critical true friends; people who are excited by, and committed to, a new Fellowship and can help us understand what we have to do at HQ to enable this (and who are themselves committed to being part of the process of change).

7. I am sure of two things. The RSA can become one of the most exciting and powerful third sector organisations, and to get there we still have further to climb on a steep and twisting road. In my view, the biggest barrier now is the ‘content’ challenge. We can sit and talk about the Fellowship as a force for change until the cows come home, but now we need examples of what this means in practice.  Then the Fellowship as a whole will be able to see how the combination of FRSA inventiveness and commitment and RSA HQ support can turn a good idea into exciting intervention in the wider world.

I hope this helps the debate. I know not everyone agrees with what we are trying to do. Every word I have said is open to debate and challenge by the Fellowship (and indeed by the wider public). It is unusual for a Chief Executive to talk so openly about organisational challenges but I see this as being in small part a token of the way we want to work. Finally, once again, I am incredibly heartened by the quality of the thoughts and ideas being put forward in this debate and by how much people care about the future of this amazing 255 year old Society.

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Comments

7 Comments on The RSA mission and brand – responding to the debate

  1. John Green on Fri, 3rd Jul 2009 8:38 pm

    2. I am said that the executive chose a new path without telling the fellowship what they were up to nor inviting any input. You are aware that after nearly 20 years of fellowship I was unhappy with the change of direction and certainly with the concept of a director who saw himself as a new Messiah

    I am now a former Fellow

  2. matthewtaylor on Mon, 6th Jul 2009 7:43 am

    3. Sorry about that John. The RSA was very unclear about what t was for when took over and very many Fellows were disgruntled (indeed there was an active pressure group of Fellows called ‘Fellows Voices’ complaining about a lack of engagement from JAS. Outside the RSA very few people knew what we dd and many people erroneously thought we were an arts organisation. My intention was to return the RSA to its civic activist origins. As for engaging Fellows we are just concluding the election by Fellows of a new Fellowship Council and, as the very many comments to my earlier blogs on the RSA show, there s a really active debate taken place in the Fellowship about how we go forward. But, thanks, anyway, for your comment.

  3. David Wilcox on Tue, 7th Jul 2009 4:46 pm

    4. I nearly became a former Fellow in frustration at the failure to create a good online networking system, and adequately involve Fellows in the development of new directions. However, I do now sense a much stronger commitment to engage with Fellows, and the council election process has – at least in London – helped Fellows and potential Fellows discuss more openly what we need.
    The rather opportunistic ad hoc development of Ning-based online networks in place of a central system has meant we have worked more closely with staff and each other, and invented as we go.
    With greater involvement in – and responsibility for – networking, comes another realisation. We need a stronger Fellowship “offer” … but perhaps that offer is not so much what RSA central can offer us individually, but what offers we are prepared to make to each other in terms of learning together and developing projects. If the value lies in the network, it will be realised by networked relationships.
    So events and networking systems underpin conversations -> new relationships -> greater trust -> new ideas and activities.
    We do still need leadership. I was inspired by Matthew’s civic innovation vision in 2007: the problem then was RSA didn’t have the systems to provide central support, we hadn’t developed relationships around the Fellowship to do things for ourselves, expectations were too high, resources inadequate.
    This time around we need more engagement with Fellows to confirm direction and principles, and more co-design of the practice.
    I don’t know what’s next. I do know it’s too interesting to give up.

  4. angela dove on Thu, 16th Jul 2009 10:18 pm

    5. I’m taking part in the RSA London City Network blog as someone deeply interested in both the history and future of the RSA. I’m not a fellow, but a potential fellow who is finding it hard to see exactly what the offer from the RSA might mean to me. Congratulations on the content of your blog, you are opening up fundemental issues in a clear and incisive way. When the RSA was founded it was a unique, cutting edge organisation, devoted to furthering innovation in the sciences, agriculture and arts. The agricultural aspect was big at the time, and is of course one of the major global concerns of the 21st. century. I guess many people might think the Royal Society of Arts is purely an arts based organisation. One of the turn-offs for me, and possibly many others, is the perception of the RSA as some kind of exclusive club, which frankly is anathema to the principles of open resource, sharing knowledge and fostering collaborative work and innovation.

  5. David Wilcox on Fri, 17th Jul 2009 9:01 am

    6. Angela wrote “One of the turn-offs for me, and possibly many others, is the perception of the RSA as some kind of exclusive club, which frankly is anathema to the principles of open resource, sharing knowledge and fostering collaborative work and innovation.”
    That has also been a concern for some Fellows, and potentially at odds with Matthew’s vision of 2007 for the Fellowship as a network for civic innovation.
    It was the reason that a group of us set up OpenRSA to help promote changes from the inside out and the outside in. While there have been a few ups and downs along the way, there’s now a friendly spirit of collaboration between staff and Fellows on the open agenda … so I hope Matthew won’t mind me mentioning that we have just set up a new network at http://openrsa.ning.com for Fellows, staff and friends. We aim to help link up the growing number of other open City and regional networks (like London) being developed around the RSA. David Jennings has already done a rather clever feed to aggregate topics from other Ning sites.
    Old civic institutions like the RSA can be hugely frustrating because of the deeply embedded culture from less open times … but from your reports of research, on the London network, Angela, it sounds as if there’s also some inspiration too if you dig back far enough. Do tell us more!

  6. matthewtaylor on Fri, 17th Jul 2009 6:15 pm

    7. Thanks Angela. I hope David’s really helpful comment has helped reassure you. you sound to me like just the kind of person we are looking for as the RSA returns to it civic activist origins

  7. matthewtaylor on Fri, 17th Jul 2009 6:15 pm

    8. Thanks David. Really helpful

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