Fellowship – some big questions

June 24, 2009 by
Filed under: The RSA, Uncategorized 

Interesting responses to my post yesterday; both as comments and direct e-mails to me.  Some eyebrows were raised at me being so explicit about the challenges the RSA faces. Apart from wanting genuinely to engage Fellows, there is a wider reason why I am committed to openness. 

One of the problems with accountability and trust in modern society is that every organisation (private, public and third sector) feels the need to say how wonderful it is in every way. This means it is often very hard for taxpayers, customers, shareholders or the public to get a handle on what is really going on. The best recent example of this was the banks. The risks they were taking with various complex financial investments were in their annual reports but the information was expressed blandly and hidden behind all the propaganda about their successes and social responsibility.

In the post credit crunch world leaders to balance the need to project their organisation positively with the duty to give an accurate and frank account of challenges and risks.

On the issue of the Fellowship, the discussion around my post has identified some important issues for our new Fellowship Council to address. These include:

* What level of Fellowship engagement is it realistic and reasonable to expect ?

* Is Fellowship engagement primarily a function of top down initiatives that Fellows choose to engage with or about creating the scope for Fellows to develop their own ideas and initiative and get buy in from the Scoiety?

* Related to this, is the key quality to Fellowship apart from its staus, the connection to, and support of, what we do at JSA (lectures, web, Journal, projects) or is it access to the network of other Fellows?

We are pleased so far with the turnout in the Fellowship Council election, but there is still plenty of time for people to vote. The election is important because the Council will need, from the start, to get to grips with some big questions.

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10 Comments on Fellowship – some big questions

  1. David Wilcox on Wed, 24th Jun 2009 9:39 am

    2. Thanks Matthew for opening up. We have an online forum on the London City Network site discussing these and other issues, and where I’ve just highlighted one simple suggestion for building London Fellowship bottom-up: run a Tuttle Club at JAS. In practice that means an informal, self-organising drop-in event on a regular basis. Is commercial lettings policy such an impossible barrier?

  2. Laura Billings on Wed, 24th Jun 2009 10:37 am

    3. Hey David

    Interesting that the meeting space issue is getting another airing today. I have just been walking round the House with collagues taking photos of the spaces and rooms that aren’t currently very amenable to meeting, but that really could be if we mapped them out, changed furniture, put in screens or projectors etc. We’re really trying hard to balance the need for the House as a commercial enterprise, to make money for the charity arm of the RSA, so we can continue to do all the things that we do, whilst also making the House a more open and creative space for Fellows.

    One of the ideas we’ve been exploring for the Fellowship Charter, is that Fellows can help support the RSA by bringing business to the House. Maybe there is a way a regular meet up could do this, if people came for lunch or something?

    Couple of questions…
    How would that be different to the current regular monthly meetings around the UK?
    http://www.thersa.org/fellowship/rsa-networks/how-can-i-get-involved/city-networks-near-you

    What about Fellows that don’t live in London? Wouldn’t it be better to work on a format for Tuttle-esque meetings that can be rolled out UK wide and benefit everyone?

  3. David Wilcox on Wed, 24th Jun 2009 10:48 am

    4. Hi Laura – thanks for creative response. I’m being a bit parochial/regional in pushing JAS for London I know … but the commercial/social approach you mention would be interesting. Let’s be socially entrepreneurial!
    And yes to a format for elsewhere. Could pilot in London:-) Maybe Tuttle Team would help? http://www.thetuttleteam.com/

    I’m meeting Lloyd and the team this afternoon … so sure to have more ideas later. Overall it’s great that fresh Fellow-staff ideas are emerging

  4. Lopa Patel on Wed, 24th Jun 2009 12:20 pm

    5. Matthew,

    Many thanks for raising the issue of ‘engagement’ with RSA Fellows and between Fellows. I think the RSA’s move to introducing an elected Fellowship Council is an innovative step forward – one that will help outline future ways to improve the dialogue between and among fellows.

    One thing we must be a little wary of though, is the over-reliance on using any one particular mode of communication – particularly blogs, social media networks or twitter. While I applaud the use of all these, I note some reluctance or wariness among Fellows to fully engage with social media at this stage.

    Use of tried and tested means of communication – letters and magazines, as well as new media, would help the RSA achieve a consistent message across all media.

    Perhaps a survey on Fellows preferred methods of engagement would be helpful?

  5. Adrian Thacker on Wed, 24th Jun 2009 2:58 pm

    6. I’m on coffee break so I’ll be quick.

    The honesty of this conversation is to be commended.

    Not living in London, it’s quite difficult to access many of the lectures & talks, and I do come across many ‘dormant’ fellows. I guess the Pareto rule applies. Here in the West Mids, things are becoming more acitve & I’ve recently received an email about a social networking website and there’s a monthly get together in Starbucks.

    I think that Fellowship involvement can be both responding to initiatives from the centre and bottom up. Frankly I’d never considered some of the current issues until they were raised at a strategic level. They’re challenging issues too, and surely that’s what the RSA is about.

    thanks

  6. Richard Katz on Wed, 24th Jun 2009 3:04 pm

    7. Matthew

    Having read yesterday and today’s posts, it might help to focus minds if you could answer in just a few words ‘What is the RSA for?’

    Many thanks and best wishes

    Richard

  7. Marco Verweij on Thu, 25th Jun 2009 9:15 am

    8. Hi Matthew:

    It seems to me that your twin goals of giving the RSA a clearer profile and involve the Fellows more can be reached in a relatively straightforward manner. This process would start with the RSA leadership and Fellows outlining a (perhaps small) set of concrete and pressing social ills in the UK. The next step would then be organizing extensive deliberations among interested Fellows (and perhaps other people as well) as to which governmental policies, NGO activities and forms of (social) entrepreneurship would seem to solve these ills in an efficient, equitable, effective and widely acceptable manner. In the course of that process, it should/may become clear as well which role, if any, the RSA could play in any implementation phase. Increasing the deliberative quality of political debate in the UK would be a very important role the RSA could play, and would give it a clear profile. (I do believe that bifurcated nature of the UK parliamentary system is not always conducive to reasoned, deliberative debate – and that’s putting it politely). Using its extensive network of interested, knowledgeable and motivated Fellows to do much of the deliberating would rope the Fellows in as well. In social science, quite a few techniques for such deliberative processes have been developed. One description of such a process can be found in chapter 8 of the ‘Clumsy Solutions for a Complex World’ book that Mike Thompson and I co-edited (the chapter on ‘Floods and Fairness in Hungary’). But for this purposes perhaps the most suitable tool is ‘deliberative polling’, developed by Stanford professor James Fishkin (see: http://cdd.stanford.edu/polls/docs/summary/). The conclusions of such deliberative processes could then be written in reports published by the RSA – to be picked up (or, of course, ignored) by the government, political parties, social entrepreneurs, etc.

    Cheers,

    Marco

  8. David Wilcox on Thu, 25th Jun 2009 10:03 am

    9. To complement Marco’s deliberative process, how about a joint staff-Fellows innovation zone to develop ideas on what RSA is for/can do …. unfettered by 250 years of organisational silt … ahem, tradition. Inspired by this http://bit.ly/WEovt (h/t @edmittance, @jackmartinleith)

  9. David Wilcox on Thu, 25th Jun 2009 10:17 am

    10. Hi Laura
    1. Engagement face-to-face: I’ve confirmed that http://www.thetuttleteam.com/ are keen to develop ideas for Tuttle-type formats. Worth a chat with @lloyddavis? Tuttling tomorrow Friday 10am at an in-the-park venue http://bit.ly/XeeDi … all welcome, of course.
    2. Engagement online: I’m conscious I’m taking over MT’s commenting …. is there, could there be, another RSA open space online for this sort of discussion? Just a simple WordPress blog for Fellows as an interim measure? We have the regional Ning sites, but nothing central outside a login. I love Matthew’s blogging, but we can only comment, and not initiate.

  10. The RSA mission and brand - responding to the debate : Matthew Taylor’s blog on Wed, 1st Jul 2009 1:31 pm

    11. [...] 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 [...]

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