Thriving too

Mad for co-production?

Then read this brilliant document Towards Peer production in Public Serives: Cases from Finland

There are so many interesting perspectives and examples - all beautifully written.

This inspiring quote from a citizen perspective 

“A painful but, at the same time, inspiring paradigm shift towards less-hierarchical, more collaborative, ways of managing systems and producing services is on its way. 

 People are tired of being merely spectators. They want to become participants and creators of their own lives and environments. What this trend demands of all organizations in our society, is the ability to offer more participation opportunities at all the various decision-making levers, together with clever support structures. The need for a more participatory democracy is great. 

The decision-making structures feel stale, and especially public governance appears to be increasingly unresponsive or bureaucratic for the needs of citizens.”

Pirjo Tulikukka - Helsingin kaupunginosayhdistykset ry Helka, Helsinki  

Social Town

I am visiting the town of Llanidloes in Wales – the home town of my father’s family.  I have visited the town several times a year since I was a small child and have always been fascinated by the changes it has experienced over the years.  I have become more observant with my work through Social Spaces… and even more so since we started working on projects linked directly or indirectly to high streets.  So while I won’t tell an expert on high street regeneration anything they didn’t know already – I did hope to have a chat about it in the context of my ancestratal town through this blog post.

So today is Christmas Market Day in Llandiloes. They have pulled out all the stops and have closed the street which has filled with a real mixture stalls and products and people – a change from the regular Saturday market which sees only a handful of stalls.  There are signs on the lampposts which indicate that there are regeneration efforts being undertaken in Llanidloes.

Previously my father's home and my grandparent's sweet shop

It has always been a lovely little town.  My grandparents owned a shop which was first a tailors, then a sweetshop. My ancestral home is now a Cantonese take-away which I don’t mind in the least.

But Llanidloes shows examples of changing fortunes we can see all over Britain. 

At it's commercial height it used to have a population of around 5,000 – now about 2,300

It used to have around 25 pubs – now 9

It still has its 8 big churches – now either closed, with small or regular sized congregations.

The 4 main streets which intersect at the old timber market hall used to be site of livestock markets – each of the pubs had large animal pens attached in the street.

There used to be community cinema and more small social clubs than you could name.

All together that amounts to an emormous amount of social interactivity - not present in the town any more. The activity now represents an active, but reduced local community.

6 of the 8 big churches in Llanidloes

It has changed – and out of a much longer period of economic decline it has in many ways developed a rural Wales charm of its own.  Like nearby Machynlleth, home of the Centre for Alternative Technology, Llanidloes has a counter-culture feel to it, a home for aging hippies, and as wikipedia informs me is known to local police as ‘planet Idloes’.  It has a marvellous book shop and a great vegetarian café (along with a compulsory Milk Bar).

It’s a town that has seen its fortunes change dramatically due to trade.  In the 60s it lost its train station and more recently the by-pass was built – both contributors to a decline in local industry and business, making it less attractive as a place for small scale manufacturing, now largely closed, while also helping passing visitors to Wales to avoid coming into the town.

This isn’t all a depressing tale though, it is a beautiful, if quiet, place to live. In 2008, Powys, the larger area around Llanidloes, was shown to be the happiest place to live in Britain. But it is also dwindling economically, with the classic scenario of young people moving elsewhere to find work … and this will likely continue.

It has always been called a ‘market town’.  Trade and exchange have always been central to what has happened in the town and I am becoming more and more convinced that the large focus currently being on regenerating high streets across a wide range of projects is a vital one.  Over the last couple of decades there have been many attempts, some in fact quite effective, to make schools, community centres, leisure centres, museums or reinvigorated faith-based buildings ‘the hub’ of the community – the central focus for a wide range of activity.

But in terms of history the strongest example of a tangible space that encourages human interaction, sometimes transactional, sometimes social, has always been driven by trade, and it still offers us a really powerful catalyst for overall community-level change - but one that needs to be connected with everything else that is going on.

An in-depth study of the Chicago heat wave of 1995, which resulted in 465 heat-related deaths, attributed these deaths to a combination of the cities responses to the emergency. Services such as hospitals could not cope and many shut their doors, the public opened up fire hydrants all over the city, leaving thousands of homes without water.  But curiously when they made comparisons of which areas in the city suffered the most number of deaths they discovered that one of the areas with the least deaths was a Latino area known as Little Village. 

Eric Klinenberg
 author of Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (you can read a review here) has studied this in detail and made comparisons between Little Village and North Lawderdale 

“The two communities are comparable in many ways: they have comparable elderly populations, roughly similar proportions of which live alone or in poverty. North Lawndale is ninety-six per cent black. Little Village is eighty-five per cent Latino. In the heat wave, nineteen people died in North Lawndale (a rate of forty per one hundred thousand). In Little Village, only three people died (a rate of four per one hundred thousand). Why was the death rate in North Lawndale so much higher?

A commonly proposed explanation was that Latinos had stronger family networks than African-Americans, especially networks spanning generations. Klinenberg dismisses this idea, arguing that, stereotypes notwithstanding, there is nothing about Latinos per se that disposes them to have dense family networks.

Family ties did not save people, Klinenberg argues, rather the kind of neighborhoods they lived in did.

North Lawndale has a ‘bombed-out’ appearance, with empty lots, little street life, few shops or markets, and a great deal of violent crime. Many people, especially seniors, are afraid to leave their homes. Though there are many churches, they are not so well-rooted in the community and find it difficult to provide social services to the elderly. Little Village, by contrast, is bustling with commercial activity on busy streets. There are plenty of people out on the street, shopping or simply hanging out. There are few empty lots. Local churches offer a variety of social activities for seniors. Little Village’s population grew by a third between 1970 and 1990, while North Lawndale’s more than halved.

When the heat wave came to both places, these differences mattered a great deal. In Little Village, the people most at risk of dying were able to leave their homes and go and buy supplies or simply rest in air- conditioned stores. It was not too dangerous to be outside at night. They knew people locally to call for help or check in with. In short: Residents of the most impoverished, abandoned, and dangerous places in Chicago died alone because they lived in social environments that discouraged departure from the safe houses where they had burrowed, and created obstacles to social protection that are absent from more tranquil and prosperous areas. (p.127).

Most of the African American neighborhoods with high heat wave death rates had been abandoned—by employers, stores, and residents—in recent decades. The social ecology of abandonment, dispersion, and decay makes systems of social support exceedingly difficult to sustain.

Indy Johar wrote earlier this year about reinventing the corner shop in New Start magazine:

 ‘It can be a platform for so many things – sharing goods made in different houses, bringing together the problem of food wastage with local skills around baking and cooking.

‘It’s about reinventing and supporting these small everyday fractals of real lived society and making them so much better, so much more competitive and value added that they challenge the big boys. That’s the imagination challenge and its absolutely possible.’

Perhaps we need to broaden our view of trade and exchange and view high streets not as places you go to buy things, but as whole environments where every kind of interaction social, commercial, inventive is deliberately and strategically fostered? But also perhaps think far more ambitiously and use business more cleverly as tools for societal and civic development rather than just ends.  This feels very different in practice to social responsibility agendas.

For example, in Las Vegas entrepenuer Tony Hseih, chief executive of Zappos started a $35million urban experiment to build ‘the most community-focused large city in the world’. Zappos company culture is described as ‘zanny’ … although their work place practice of everyone sitting in the same open space and employees switch desks every few months in order to get to know one another better, seems just sensible.

When the Las Vegas city government moved out of City Hall Zappos moved in.

"Then he got to thinking: If he was going to move at least 1,200 employees, why not make it possible for them to live nearby? And if they could live nearby, why not create an urban community aligned with the culture of Zappos, which encourages the kind of “serendipitous interactions” that happen in offices without walls?”."

 The adventures and misadventures of Hseih's activity so far on the project include some classic mistakes connected with the existing community and are the subject of this long article in the New York Times.  Among those adventures is the realization that of the 10,000 new residents the project hopes to attract will not all be able to live locally.”.. perhaps that some could be “commuters” — as long as they engaged in “approximately 1,000 hours per year of serendipitous encounters.”

"Richard Florida, urban theorist and author of “The Rise of the Creative Class.” doesn’t withhold praise for the Downtown Project, but Florida thinks it needs a “robust community process,” in which an outside group could help build consensus with the surrounding community and create a plan that takes their wishes­ into account. “You can have serendipity,” he said. “But when you’re building a community, you also need a strategy.”

But it is an interesting time to read about these experiments. Why couldn’t a local council act in a similar way? Lambeth Council have their own plans to modernize the town hall in a way that could help it become a catalyst … 

Beam and Anchor

And what of smaller collectives such as Beam and Anchor and The Common Room idea we prototyped last month in Norwich, or the Creative Coop in Colchester - can groups of active, enterprising people in themselves act as engine rooms of civic and commerical change?

Trade School lesson at The Common Room Prototype Day

There are many of us trying out new things in high streets.  In conversations with other people working in and around this work recently, both as professionals and volunteers, it is clear that there is a great deal to share around what works best in which context, what offers a sustainable future … 

 

The Work Shop - working with residents to remodel the system together

Tessy and I have been working in the Coop Policy team at Lambeth for a couple of months now. And first impressions have been very positive! I've met the Brixton Pound team, who are offered desk space, and was there on the day it was announced that staff could sign up to recieve part of their income in B£ to spend locally, and support the local economy. Sue Sheehan @GreenCChampion is Coop through and through, connecting, inspiring, supporting, advising over 500 Green Champions across the borough. And a lovely stranger called Wayne spontaneously helped us carry 48 green plastic watering cans down the street from the town hall on a grey Monday afternoon.

Lambeth is one of the 21 councils around the UK becoming a Cooperative Council. It is changing the way that it is structured, and the types of activities it does to have a greater focus on collaboration and empowerment. And to find new ways to incorporate the knowledge, resources, skills and ambition of the brilliant and diverse residents of Lambeth.

By working together as equals, we will all have much better results than any single organisation or individual can manage on their own. But some of the current systems, social norms and expectations in both the public sector and many community groups, were not developed with this in mind. For example, residents opinions are often sought through consultation or voting. But it is not often that they have an opportunity to incorporate their knowledge. Community groups often work to hold the council to account, but don't always easily step out of a slightly adversarial role to collaborate well.

The systems need to change - and for this to work well - we all need to develop them together.

The Work Shop is designed so everyone can talk more directly about how residents, the council, and its partners might work together in new ways. How can the Cooperative Council provide the right mix of support, facilitation and encouragement? How can we create more genuine and open relationships with more people? And how can we remain robust on issues of accountability and equality? 

Can we turn the positive vision of a cooperative borough into a tangible, real world experience? Can we co-design new systems to support cooperative working?

We are opening Tuesday 27 November. Come and find out...

www.theworkshop.so

@theworkshop01

www.theworkshop01.eventbrite.com

A(re)imagined Library: organizing by doing part 2 (of …)

My head is still spinning from last week’s events. Two and a half months ago I wrote about my day in the park, trying to start conversations with people about organizing an alternative to the library which was closing. What I didn’t know then, was I would be co-organizing a 5-day festival showcasing to everyone what kind of ideas we picked up during the first 6 months of conversations.

There is a lot to tell about the festival, but my head is too tired to write it down (and I have to take a step back first too, something which writing this isn’t helping J). But I want to reflect a bit on the reason why we organized the festival the way we did it.

First why a festival? Why not take everything we learned during our conversations, turn it into a project plan and ask people to back us? Why not write a proposal and see if we could find partners which can help us launch the Reading Room? Why pop-up for 5 days, make people excited, and then close shop again? These are good questions, but part of the answers is we weren’t sure what we wanted to create. The conversations gave us first glimpses of what it could be like, but no clear indication of what it should be. So we decided that we needed to experiment. On my desktop I have this picture from a slide by Tom Hulme from IDEO, and that is exactly what we did in this case. By organizing the festival we gave ourselves the opportunity to learn what we want to create.

Secondly by organizing the festival we could directly engage a lot of people. The whole festival was only made possible by the involvement of some 70 volunteers. Some just added a small bit, some were instrumental to the success (spoiler alert: yes the festival was a big success. The space looked stunning and most elements where well visited and liked). During the day in the park we met Martin, who was into Linux and computers and who volunteered to create a whole network for us with 5 working computers and wifi. Then there was Ruud, who is an interior designer by profession and who volunteered to create a stunning space. And then there where Karin and Merel. The first designed our logo and flyers, the second our pr-plan and our website. They all added their professionals expertise to enable us to make an even better statement.

Because that is the third reason why we organized the festival. Because no matter how good Joke and I can write, we would never have been able to put into words what we created during the festival. First of all, we would never have set out for a building of such scale. For we got a building from a housing corporation for free for a month which was 300 square meters. It was a former hamam which had been empty for more than a year. The scale of the building was a bit frightening at first, but once we got used to it and started to work there, we saw all kinds of potential. Since there was no natural light in the back of the space, and it was partly closed off, we added a cinema to the original plans, showcasing films by Rotterdam filmmakers. All these little surprises added to the great programmed we put together. We organized the festival around 5 themes: learning, reading, reading to, meeting and sharing. Each theme was made tangible by organizing related activities during the day. This ranged from organizing workshops on day one (based on the principles of Trade School) to readings by poets and a meeting between reading groups on day two. Day three all kinds of activities for kids were organized and the fourth day was a day full of events set up for like-minded people to meet each other. On the final day we explored the possibilities of sharing by hosting several conversations. We closed off the week with great lentil soup from the neighbors from across and music by Jaap Hekman en Klaas Blonk (you will hear them in the video attached at the end of this post). 

And next to all these activities we had fresh coffee and tea, wifi, magazines, daily newspapers (3 dutch, one Turkish, and one Chinese) and more than a 1000 books which people could just take home. So even if there was no program people came to talk, work, take a book or just drink a cup of coffee and enjoy the nice atmosphere.

Adding all this together, we now have a great argument in our hands to start conversations with all kinds of parties in the city to see how they can help us to keep this public space open. So we have been creating a community by doing the festival and together we can now make a better argument of what we want to do. And even more so, we now actually have an idea what we want to create. And finally we want to do it in this particular space if possible. For where the space first was a bit frightening, I now can see no other use for it than a Reading Room.

There is much more to reflect back on – which I will be doing over the coming weeks – and I will be sharing this with you. As things stand, we now aim to open our doors again in 1 march. In the mean time we will be making plans, talk to a lot of people and do small interventions from time to time (so people won’t forget us, but also to test out new ideas). But first I’m going to close my eyes, think back about all the exciting stuff which happened in the last week, and smile!

leeszaal delen from fcr on Vimeo.

 

 

Bootstrapping, discipline and designing change

We are big fans of Theory of Change thinking. It’s a planning methodology originally designed by the Aspen Institute which helps you break down big visions and goals into small steps - working backwards to consider what pre-conditions are necessary for each step to be successful.  You also document your assumptions along the way. It is used increasingly in US by funders as an evaluation framework – you can measure different points more easily.

We’ve been using TOC  in a number of different ways:

-  In community workshops.  Our activity helps groups to think about what the essential small steps that need to be taken (usually the social ones), and often lead people to come up with some really imaginative solutions to getting their projects unstuck.

-  Theory planning based on our research.  We have studied over 100 innnovative local projects to understand how they designed and managed change.

Now we are looking at developing a third use – this one to collaboratively gather learning and help people iterate on their change plans.

With the Collaborative 3D Mapping activity we developed we are using the highly visual mapping process to gather knowledge from a group of people – insights that can be surfaced and shared within a group wishing to start a project from resources they already have.

Theory of Change MAP-it

Working in collaboration with Social Spaces Belgium - a research group based at the Media Arts Design Faculty in Genk – we have developed a proto-type methodology to collaboratively gather learning and insights from a group of people who have already developed a project.  Essentially mashing together Social Spaces Genk's participatory mapping - Map-it - technology, Theory of Change principles, open source icons from the amazing The Noun Project, plus collaborative participatory methodologies, we intend to help develop a new way of collective learning.

Would you like to help us test it?

Principles

In any project designed and implemented, different members of the group have different roles, make different observations and often come to different conclusions.  We are constantly trying to make sense of our experiences and learn form them.  What can happen is that we come to conclusions based on small sets of information.  In trying to get a broader picture to evaluate what happened, what worked etc, we often rely on interviews and a single person analyzing and reporting the results. Or we have open meetings to go over progress or achievements without a significant structure to document our ideas and conclusions. The shortcomings of these methods is that it relies on one person to reveal insights. A common problem in qualititive research is that we all have our own knowledge bases and experiences through which we interpret our observations.  This can lead to criticisms of bias - but more importantly it doesn't capitilise on the collective knowledge bases that could be drawn together to reveal unusual, and perhaps more acurate, insights and learning.  And sadly, people don't seem to read reports anymore. Knowledge therefor needs to be more collaboratively built, more digestable and more accurate if it is going to help us make better decisions when designing change.

How TOC MAP-it will work

As a group a TOC diagram will be drawn to document what happened on a project.  Using sheets of icon stickers the process will surface observations, draw out pre-conditions, discuss alternative view points and help the group to analyse and draw out collective insights together. The icon stickers provide a visual language so that the diagrams are more readily understood by the participating group (and others who will want to understand it from a distance) and will work also as research prompts to aid the facilitation process. These charts with visual references will also serve to make different TOCs more comparable by creating a common framework.  The second stage will be to draw a revised TOC for a future iteration of the project – gathering the collective learning from the first stage not just into a list of observations, but rather a critical, analysed and disciplined strategy and framework for doing things better.

Why we think its important?

The literature on business is now dense with advice on how to avoid business failure by working to different sets of rules.  But it is hard to find much writing about other types of initiatives - either within a community or a non-business based organisation. We think that we need some smarter ways of designing change and learning more collectively and transparently in the social sector.

Business researchers and writers often come at the issue from different perspectives and research projects into the subject, but there are a number of books I have read recently which, although they offer very different advice overall, share some key messages:

Don’t borrow a lot of money to start your business. 

Bootstrap, work with what you have, certainly in the beginning.  It’s a great constraint for ingenuity, it means that you own your work 100%, you won’t hire too many people before you need them … and most importantly it gives you the freedom to work iteratively.

"Don’t rely on others to fund your idea, imitate creatively, keep value higher than price, pivot often, and more." The Rebel Entrepreneur (by  Jonathan Moules)

Be disciplined

Observe, measure … base your decisions on lessons emerging from your actions.

"When faced with uncertainty ... not look primarily to other people, conventional wisdom, authority figures, or peers for direction; they look primarily to empirical evidence. They rely upon direct observation, practical experimentation, and direct engagement with tangible evidence. They make their bold, creative moves from a sound empirical base." Great by Choice (by Jim collins & Morten Hansen)

Work iteratively

Eric Ries – author of The Lean Startup – calls it pivoting, but it is basically testing, assessing and deciding about changing direction or persevering with your plan.

In The Rebel Entrepeneur Jonathan Moules has a detailed chapter called ‘Don’t get hung up on the business plan’, while in Rework (by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson) there are essays entitled ‘Learning from mistakes is overrated’, and 'Planning is guessing’.

What all these ideas do is attempt to bust myths around the visionary entrepreneur, living off his wits and intuition, walking into a bank with a 100 page business plan, which he then follows to the letter to a life of success and glory. Some estimate that 1 in 3 businesses fail within the first 3 years.

Some of the strategies around planning are new – some of them, such as being disciplined and more informed about decision-making, are much older and feel more like common sense - but they do challenge some common assumptions about innate brilliance and instinct - many of them we seem to have adopted in the community and social sectors. Research shows that many successes come from testing and thinking methodically and carefully.

What I find particularly interesting is a lot of it feels like applying research principles to business, which makes perfect sense.  Try something, observe and measure, change and begin your learning cycle again.  It’s a classic Action Research cycle and what design thinking folks also called rapid prototyping, live testing etc - which is what we are doing with TOC  MAP-it.

Would you like to help us test the methodology (while we also help you too)?

We are obsessive testers and we test in real life situations.  We don’t believe that doing something once or twice is enough.  Really useful new methodologies - *that work* - need testing in many different places and contexts … with lots of different people.  That’s why we have tested our community workshop activities in over 80 communities.

We know for example that with this TOC MAP-it we will likely start out with 3-4 times more icons that we will find we generally need once tested.

Have you recently completed a project and know there are things you want to learn?  Email me if you are a community group or funding-limited organisation and would like to have a free experimental mapping session!

{Note: We can only do free sessions at the moment where they can fit around our exisiting work and committments ... and in and around London areas. Organisations with regular amounts of funding should ask for an estimate.}

Skills behind every door

The Travelling Pantry mini hit the road again today stuffed to the limits with bright furniture, refreshments, posters and our favourite shiney tea urn - heading for the Tulse Hill Estate in Brixton. We've been getting to know the area and the people that live there recently, as part of a collaboration with Lambeth Council and the Residents Association.

The Tulse Hill estate is full of people with skills and resources, aspirations and ideas; and there are several nice green and communal spaces. But they aren't being used perhaps as much as they could be, and there aren't a lot of opportunities for people to meet their neighbours, or spend time in the open spaces. So we're working to help surface and link the many assets in the area, through projects that will introduce more people to each other, teach skills, and share resources.

There is a roving exhibition featuring inspiring and positive community-led projects from around the world that show the potential to do a lot with a little when many different people are included. And with a space for people to add their ideas for what they want to see more of on Tulse Hill Estate. And today, we did a pop up cafe on the grass between the blocks. With ice cold juice, biscuits and free conversation in the afternoon sunshine – we were introducing the idea of a Trade School and had a Skills Game to show just how many skills people have that are often taken for granted.

The idea was received positively by people we spoke to, and during our conversations some of the lessons that people felt they could offer included ‘how to make compost from kitchen waste’, ‘an introduction to world politics’ and ‘children’s activities – how to keep your kids happy and safe’. And the Skills Game board soon filled up with ticks as people picked out the things they knew how to do - starting to show the unique variety of classes that Trade School Tulse Hill might include.

Even standing on the grass in sight of maybe 40 or so windows today, it's amazing to think about just how many skills and ideas and interests are part of the people behind each one...

(Adapted from blogs first posted on the Lambeth Council Cooperative Toolkit)

Ageing, designing and Illich

I visited my stepmother for a couple of days over the weekend.  She’s 90 years old and lives in the middle of Wales in a small town, where she has lived for nearly all her life.

The conversation returned frequently about what changes she was making to ensure that she could remain living in her home.  These included getting more assistance with shopping for food, donating more to Dial a Ride and wearing an emergency bracelet.

I also spent time talking to my brother in law who recently started working with the Bath Institute of Medical Engineering, where they are designing and testing quite a few interesting products.  I was struck yet again by how different disciplines come up with different solutions to the same problems.  reinforcing again the Law of the Instument where Maslow says: "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." 

Here are a couple of examplesof what they are working on at BIME:

Ward Clock: They are testing a very large clock in wards with sever dementia patients.  The clocks don’t just tell the time, they tell you the year, that it is morning or afternoon etc. Time disorientation is very distressing to these patients and early signs are that the presence of the clock has calmed these wards – with less calls and distress.  When I stayed in Wales my step mother gets about 10 calls each day from an old friend who lives in a local home – asking where they are, where there parents are etc.

Light Tray: Dementia patients, and many elderly in fact, get anxious about losing important objects.  This goes as far as effecting how they sleep. They have designed a covered tray on which people can place important objects such as keys and glasses.  They can keep the tray near their bed at night and with a single touch the tray is illuminated with low-level light – revealing their important objects. This is showing the help a lot of people sleep through the night.

In both these examples a simple technology based solution is found – where frequently medication was the first thought for both types of anxiety and loss of sleep. As well as looking at the problem through the eyes of a different profession, it is also not taking the most direct route to solve the problem.

My favourite example of using indirect means to create powerful effects is the Grace Living Centre in Oklahoma where they designed their home to include a nursery school.  The effects of the elderly living in close proximity with small children, helping them learn to read, watching them play etc has been that the need for medication has gone down and the reading ages of the children has gone up.  I mention this example quite a bit in workshops and talks because it demonstrates such a big leap of confidence in a fundamental principle ‘elderly people and small children are good for one another’.  They even left 6 inch gaps at the top of the doors so that the sounds of the children could spread throughout the building.

Other research has shown that older residents living in nursing homes live longer if they have a house plant to care for.

If Ivan Illich were looking at these examples I am sure he would be pleased.  His writings on the powerful rise of the medical profession and making a market for medication seems relevant. There are still massive forces at work with pharmaceutical  company’s intests, but I wonder if Illich would have been surprised at how much being a doctor would change over time into a more holistic research-based profession, drawing on different disciplines, such as tech inventors like my brother in law, to solve problems. 

Doctors now prescribe exercise, and soon they will be recommending more social contact I hope, especially given that low social contact has the same risk of early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, being an alcoholic, and twice the risk of being obese. 

Illiche’s criticisms and commentary on the medical profession were profound and accurate - and even 40 years later very relevant.  He cites the case of the ‘barefoot doctors’ in China (official pic above), where in 1968, after twenty years of Mao’s regime ‘the Medical College of Shalnghai had to conclude that it was engaged in the training of ‘so called first-rate doctors … who ignore five million peasants and serve only minorities in cities.  In China this led to a major institutional inversion.’  At the time of writing in 1973, Illich reported that one million health workers had reached ‘acceptable levels of competence’.  These health workers were laymen who in periods of low agricultural manpower needs attended short courses.

A lot of the design work at BIME in Bath is focused on helping older people stay independent in their homes, where unfortunately the risk of isolation is also high. Which is why a number of the products they are designing are now becoming more social e.g. tablet based support for cooking simple meals and activating safety measures in the case of early smoke detection. Connecting the call outs and the cooking to neighbours and friends will offer a really interesting mixture – with possible multiple benefits, from increased confidence and agency, to social connection and health and nutrition.  

These tools, particularly when 'socialised' in the local community, are essentially very practical and clever, rather than ideological, and this feels like a good step forward to me.

 

Social Collaborative Platforms: Scalable, Sustainable ... and Fundable!

If you’ve had a very imaginative idea but are struggling to scale up or duplicate through regular enterprise models and methods there is a chance you have created a Social Collaborative Platform without realising it. I have only recently come up with these observations, as always I am keen to know what you think.

Here's what SCPs could possibly look like

-       They are imaginative social ideas that a group of people were compelled to try out under their own steam.

-        Sometime over the last 5 years the idea was adopted by other groups of people from around the world. 

-       These ideas are replicated largely on a voluntary basis and are not social franchises.

-       The idea founders often encourge new groups to create their own logos, plan their own events, while creating some supportive infrastructure through websites, guides and advice.

-       These ideas are often strategic and have multiple effects in the communities where they are implemented.

- These ideas spread in a sustainable way by the founder groups adopting a high autonomy/high trust model of collaboration.

I have at least 6 or 7 examples that I think fit this description, by how they have been developed and how well they have scaled, but below are 4 that I know sufficiently well to describe.

Example 1 Social Media Surgeries

Started by Nick Booth & co in Birmingham.  An idea to set up free social media sessions for local community groups with a group of professionals working voluntarily. There are now 90 groups registered on their site which support the organisation of local events. 

Example 2 Sunday Soup

Started by InCUBATE, an arts based research in Chicago in 2007.  Sunday Soup is a ‘meal-based micro-granting' model.  The basic formula is that a group of people come together to share a meal and all the income from that meal is given as a grant to support a creative project. Everyone who purchases the meal gets one vote to determine who receives the grant. There are currently 66 groups across the world – the majority have been started in the last 2 years.  They have different names and logos.

Eample 3 Trade School

Started by Caroline Woolard & co in 2009 in New York. Trade School is a project that where people barter for instruction and offers everyone the chance to learn something new in exchange for skills, spaces or objects.  Laura Billings has just completed the first run of Trade School London, and there are Trade Schools being started in Cardiff, Milan, Singapore, Paris …. Trade Schools often have different logos and supported by the team in New York who are setting up the network as a co-operative.

Example 4 Community Lover’s Guide to the Universe

I put the book Hand Made together collaboratively in 2010.  The series has become the Community Lover’s Guide to the Universe – with nearly 50 local voluntary editors across the world collecting stories about new types of community projects to publish. Rotterdam was published last month and May will see the publication of Amsterdam, Birmingham and Hackney.  Editors are using the process of putting the books together to create supportive knowledge sharing networks. 

These projects are working to a different model and because they are a bit confusing and the funders are not recognising them sufficiently yet. 

-       They are largely voluntary – but they aren’t charitable.  They are about groups of people wanting to do something good in their communities and see something valuable in these ideas.  The groups recognise that the projects either help spread knowledge, bring people together sociably but productively and can be used strategically to connect people and build trust at local level.

 -       A group of people would likely be unable to pay some sort of franchise fee to the project originator because the group would be unlikely to see any sort of business model in the idea – but there is a social model.  The idea would therefore be limited in its spread by the ability of people to turn them into businesses or charities of some kind.

- Their value is often a secondary benefit and often difficult to measured (Social Media Surgeries are doing a brilliant job of capturing effects) e.g. connection and relationships potentially reduces unemployment or depression, or even crime.

These projects challenge the idea of scalability in that they are spreading because they don’t involve money. For example with Community Lover’s Guides if we had budgets we would have to limit the number of issues we created by the amount of budget we had.  The core of these projects is money free…. But people need to survive so how are they doing that? In a number of different ways:

1. Founders are achieving funding to develop the infrastructure around the project to support the networks of groups e.g. websites
2. Value and content is being created around the project from the learning and network – giving people an opportunity to help others with technical support or consultancy.
3. Local groups are supporting their projects by simply chipping in for refreshments or are using empty spaces … and generally gathering existing resources.
4. Sometimes people have other paid jobs and do this on the side. It may not feel the same as volunteering for a charity, but people still don't feel they have to be paid for everything they do - particularly if it does some good in the world.

But overall, despite the difficulties, I wonder if there is sufficient evidence for funders to start to recognise this as a new model, that could start to sit more comfortably in their understanding of what works and why.  Sometimes it’s a social enterprise model, sometimes it’s a charity model and sometimes it’s a Social Collaborative Platform – that needs funding at the top – but not through every transaction.

If we want to see more of these very practical, very strategic and imaginative projects (which can be views as 'social tools') being developed we need to rely on more than the love that some of these projects are currently sustained on ... The model calls for funding at the top end for development and support - and smaller scale funding at community level to help with logistics.

Big Lunch is one of the few Social Collaborative Platforms which started on a fully funded footing, knowing from the start where the funding was needed - but it would be great to see a lot more funded in this way. 

In the social innovation sector we worry about the difficulties of scaling a lot. I wonder if a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of when to use which scaling and funding models wouldn't help us all achieve a lot more?

If you wanted to you could argue that The RSA and The Hub share many of the characteristics of a Social Collaborative Platform, but they achieve funding through mixtures of membership, co-operatives, enterprise etc. But these two examples also create brands, ideas, tools, methods, start up funding etc, and foster networks and collaboration which enable others to start something (network, enterprse,etc) at local level - very successfully indeed.

I can think of 3 projects that are struggling to be social enterprises at the moment who should be thinking about becoming a valuable Social Collaborative Platform, but through lack of funding/sponsorship are unable to make what feels like an enormous leap…. To give it away (strategically) to grow.

 

Somewhereto_ … Can we have one for everyone?

I was invited to an Action Group last Tuesday on Giving Spaces at the Cabinet Office, set up by the people at Somewhereto_, led by Sam Conniff of Livity.  If you aren’t familiar with Somewhereto_, it is an amazing project which has been unlocking empty spaces for young people to experiment and use. 

somewhereto_ aims to:

• unlock space to help young people
• create a movement which will enable young people to engage with their creative and cultural passions
• transform use of space throughout local communities

To date, somewhereto_ has…

• unlocked 308,000 sq ft of space,
• negotiated 1732 somewhereto_ space matches, between young people and space holders
• worked with youth partners to engage with young people and space partners who have access to the space which young people need
• highlighted we have potentially leveraged £1.6m in premises costs^.

 I have been a fan of the project since it was in planning and have been astonished at how well the project has been implemented.  On Tuesday we heard from two young people who had used the spaces that were made available to them, not only to fulfil their own aspirations and showcase their own talents and ideas… but also to support other young people do the same.  It was pretty inspiring.

Also inspiring was the dedication  and enthusiasm shown by the local project organisers who have been taking on the tougher side – speaking to local councils and businesses to release the spaces and to cut through red tape … of which there is a lot.

The frustrations won’t surprise you. How do they get more spaces unlocked quicker? How can we change some of the systems which mean the local authorities act with extreme caution, rather that with realism and imagination?

There is certainly willing… but a long way to go …

The meeting was under Chatham House rules, but I do feel at liberty to quote the Minister that was present who called for local authorities ‘to be bolder’ and to use the ‘General Power of Competence’ to find reasons for saying yes to more of these initiatives.

I came away inspired by a brilliantly conceived project, being brilliantly executed … and wishing that we could have a bigger Somewhereto_ that unlocked spaces for everyone’s use,  as well as young people … and also with renewed conviction that these sorts of projects only work this well when there is expert facilitation.

Thanks to Sam for the invitation and to Miranda Sawyer for such animated faciliation and Oli Barrett for bringing his whistle ... and in particlar to the young people who came and shared their inspiring stories! 

Trade School London - barter for knowledge

Today Miriam taught us about analogue photography and how to make cyanotype prints with sunlight. Last week Ansel brought his wormery in from home to teach us how to make compost. The week before (among other things) we were turning whales pink with photoshop thanks to Tanya, designing usable websites with Rae, and growing food in the city with Kristen.

Trade School London has been up and running for a few weeks now - and there is still a chance to come along to the last few classes in our first season. Breadbaking, poetry and cycle maintenance are still open to attend - just book online and bring your exchange item to give to the teacher.

Trade School runs on a barter and exchange system. Not in the sense of haggling someone down to the cheapest price possible - but offering things of value other than money, in exchange for the opportunity to learn something new.

It has been a fascinating experience seeing how people react to the idea, and how we can revalue what we find important. We are still mid season, and I'm sure more realisations will trickle through in the coming weeks, but some initial thoughts...

Normally, on the way out of the door, I grab bag, phone, keys, wallet and off. I know if there is something I want during the day, I can exchange money for it without consciously thinking beyond the numerical price attached to it. (Actually, my ethics are stronger than that, but for the sake of argument..!) For Trade School I was thinking several days in advance of the class what I would bring the teacher, wondering if it was suitable, weighing up if it was a fair deal, and remembering to get it sorted out. It's a fundamentally different way of thinking from the start.

At the classes, sometimes before, and sometimes after, each person would explain their item and pass it on to the teacher. It felt much more personal and intimate than paying with money. People had baked cakes, brought plants they'd grown from seed, passed on books they had enjoyed, gathered various belongings. As a teacher of one class myself I had a longer attachment to the experience and the people that came as I ate some of the swapped bananas for breakfast the next morning, started reading the book and looked up some music suggestions I was given. Not only does each item have a story attached to it. more importantly it has a person attached to it. It's something that links two or more people together in an experience, over time. Now tell me the last time you felt like that about a banana!

It does take a while to get your head round - although the Trade School concept is simple, the underlying ideas around alternative economics and exchange are complex. The current financial economic model is so embedded in our thinking and behaviour it takes a while to unpick and feel comfortable with something else. But based on the positive feedback from people so far - there is a lot of value in this way of treating one another and the resources we have, that we are often currently over looking.

***

Trade School is a great way to learn, share resources, and make new connections. The first season runs until end April, then we are taking a quick break. If you would like to find out more, or start a Trade School in your area - get in touch!
london [@] tradeschool.coop

www.tradeschool.coop/london

Mobile & Mint - free workshops around East London

Mobile & Mint is hitting the streets...

Offering free community workshops around East London - to spread new ideas, and inspire collaborative action. Click to book!

Available for community groups, networks of interest, residents associations, voluntary organisations, groups of friends, anyone interested in positive change... Around Hackney and Tower Hamlets - cycle lanes permitting!

Based on the Travelling Pantry project, Mobile & Mint shares new ideas from community practise around the world (collected through collaborative books Hand Made and The Community Lover's Guide to the Universe); plus a series of tried and tested methods to encourage the co-design of new types of community projects.

+ learn about new types of community activities from around the world
+ design new collaborative projects
+ apply strategic planning and positively re-assess available resources

Click to book!

Launching 19 April with a class at Trade School London, with special guest Maurice. 
Thu 19 Apr, 8pm. FARM:shop, 20 Dalston Lane. More on the Trade School London site.

And fitting in as many workshops as possible from then.

Thank you to...
Lindsay Noble for her inspired design
Christian from East London Furniture for the custom built fruit crate
The Hackney Bike Workshop, Bikeworks, and Paul Gleeson for joint effort helping me to get the wheels on straight.
More pics here 

More consumption than collaboration?

 

This week I went to a one day summit on Collaborative Consumption hosted by NESTA. And I found myself getting a little hot under the collar during some of the talks. But also optimistic about the changes in consumption patterns. I've been trying to work out why, and this is where I am at with it so far.

In the accompanying pamphlet, collaborative consumption is described as the 'socialising of markets', which is largely enabled by technology. A shift towards 'organising, sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting and swapping'.

The 'collaborative' part I take no issue in. In fact from all the examples of projects and activities I've been involved in, seen and met from Travelling Pantry workshops, the Community Lover's Guide to the Universe network and more - it's when people begin to collaborate and pool ideas, resources, skills, energy and knowledge that great things start to happen.

The 'consumption' part is the bit that is causing me a headache! In a consumer or traditional business model there are particular types of behaviour that we are all used to. It's a mature paradigm. You pay your money, you get your item or service. You go on your way. Sometimes that's fine, sometimes I think things would be better if there was something more...

In some of the examples we heard on Friday - for example a new car hire scheme from EasyJet, or a luxury Mayfair flat holiday let - the mode of consumption may have moved from buying and ownership, to renting and bringing back. But it is still a classic consumer relationship for the people involved. And I don't think the audience was left under any illusion that the aim of these businesses was primarily to use a market opportunity and make money. Lots of it. It wasn't designed to foster 'collaboration', it just happens to need a bit more of it to work well.

In the same talk, another great organisation was given a name check. The Good Gym - set up by Ivo Gormley - where runners are paired with someone less mobile, and drop in to have a chat, take a pint of milk or a paper. This is not like a normal gym membership. There is more human interaction, relationship building, a positive purpose alongside the exercise, more social connections and benefits. It feels collaborative. It doesn't feel like 'consumption'. There is a business model behind it, and it is scalable. But it is not just a service, and it is designed to make enough money to run, not to make vast sums of profit for someone.

Another example is Trade School (and we are just about to open the doors to Trade School London ) where people offer to teach a new skill to others, and pupils barter to come along. Exchange items range from design advice, new recipe suggestions, mix cds, books, art materials, maps.. Teacher and pupils form a relationship before class begins, everyone is valued equally, what we learn and teach is re-assessed. The classes aren't 'free' because there is a value in the barter items, and the social nature of exchange. Again - this feels like collaboration, and less like consumption. Again, the model is scalable with Trade Schools opening in London, Singapore, Paris and more this year. Again the aim is to spread the idea, not make bundles of profit.

What made me uneasy is the lumping together of all these ideas under one 'collaborative consumption' umbrella. It feels like traditional business models, ideas around scaling and efficiency and what we term a 'successful' business are in danger of confusing or polluting a fragile new creative, collaborative way of working that needs some nurturing.

Some questions I scribbled down during the talks that I am still pondering the answers to include...

One quote that was stated was 'there is more value in usage than in ownership'. Why was the value being talked about largely monetary? During all the presentations the numbers presented were mainly profits and growth in users. There was a nod to environmental savings around carbon or landfill tons from car sharing and swapping possessions, but no one seemed to value or measure the social impact.

It was said that in order to make a collaborative consumption business work you needed to get people to trust 1) the idea 2) the company and 3) the peer network. So trust in each other as peers comes last on that list? One of the examples of such a company was an online toy renting service for parents. Surely if we foster trusting relationships with our neighbours as a first, then trust in an idea we could just share toys with each other rather than pay unnecessarily for a service? Does the 'collaborative consumption' model serve to keep us from trusting each other and still in need of a service so it can make money?

There was talk of 'curated communities' i.e. that the marketing and branding was specifically designed to attract like-minded members who would join a peer network and pay for a service. Again this speaks to the fact that profit is the motive, rather than collaboration. Where are the benefits from bridging social connections across ages, cultures, genders in a monoculture network?
When is enough enough? Why does money and profit still seem to be king? Can there be enough to grease the wheels in a business, and allow for all the other values and ways of interacting besides 'consumption' take their place more equally? Where is the balance?

Hmm. 
Having said all of that, I would rather end on a positive note. If this wave of 'collaborative consumption' really does go to scale, and there is a shift away from the classic ownership consumption models currently it should be positive as a way of us all being much more resourceful, and perhaps as a bridge towards a truly collaborative future.

 

Social Spaces: Business in Beta

I tell this story about how Social Spaces started at nearly every workshop - people seem to like the unexpected sense of joie de vivre it introduces.  David Gauntlett and I had been working on this idea for several months - it went something like this "people are doing things differently, they are showing us that the traditional ways of doing things in communities needs to change".  We spoke to funders, considered a research bid... etc.  Then one day, inspired, infected almost, by the stories of the projects I was getting in for Hand Made, I had an idea while doing laps in the pool.  I wasn't going to wait around any longer, I was going to take these ideas on to the road, in a mini, and see how people responded to these new ideas ... see what happened...what could be learned ... and that's what I did for 6 months, travelling 20,000 miles, in 40 workshops with about 1000 people. I had no funding at all.  The communities that requested free workshops helped to cover petrol ... and they kindly put me up over night.  I found myself in student digs, sofas, *terrible* hotels ... and beautiful guests rooms. It was an incredible experience ... and didn't feel very much like prototyping new concepts ... which is what it was all about.

Time goes on and we are always looking forward.  But yesterday I was emailing this very nice lady at IDEO Patterns about Community Lover's Guide to Rotterdam  launch and I had reason to look over the list of patterns they have been highighting.  The very first edition was in 2009 called Business in Beta - Don't wait for perfect, launch and learn - by Colin Raney- and I had forgotten all about it.  Looking back I think that this issue was one of the single biggest influences on taking the ideas on the road in the Travelling Pantry in 2010... and reading it over yesterday made me think how much of this attitude is now in everthing we do ... and everything we encourage for community projects to do as well ... sort of in our DNA now...And it is really adictive working in this unbounded way.

Here were their suggestions on taking action:

1. Go early, go often

Building experimentation into your business is harder than you think. Start small and stay focused. Try everything, but don’t try it all in one prototype.

2. Learning by doing

Build value for the business as you prototype. If you fail, what will you have learned? What will you salvage?

3. Inspiration through constraint

Don’t exhaust yourself searching for money and resources. The tighter your constraints, the more creative your prototypes will be.

4. Open to opportunity

Look for unanticipated ways customers are using your offering. Their improvisations may be the future of your business.

So, just wanted to say a big thank you to IDEO for Patterns... and giving this project the inspiration it needed at exactly the right moment it needed it!  And it has turned this project into a open, collaborative adventure... 

And if you are intested in news ways of developing business and ideas the Design the new Business film released this week (and embedded below) is really fascinating. 

Social Brain Lab: Introduction to trust building

{Image above from the S1NGLETOWN installation)

For nearly two weeks I have had writing this post on trust on my list.  However every day I do or say something stupid myself... and if I wait until I am better at this stuff myself this will never get written... so here it is.  

Why is trust so important?

We all know its important, particularly when we want to work with others.  The more complex the situation or collaboration, the more trust plays a part in achieving success.  Studies have shown that relational trust, or more particularly lack of trust between people, has a direct cost to organisations – everything costs more money because it slows everything down and without trust you also have to create much more elaborate processes to compensate…

Studies have shown that relational trust also has indirect effects and collectively this can have some powerful results.

A large and influential study that focused on the importance of relationships within school communities was conducted by Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider and was published as Trust in Schools, in 2002.  This important work studied the effects of high and low relational trust in schools and they concluded that there was a direct correlation between the levels of relational trust in the whole school community: students, parents and teachers, and the academic results of the students.  Additionally they concluded that:

Relationship trust is forged in daily social exchanges. . .Relational trust constitutes the connective tissue that binds these individuals together around advancing the education and welfare of children. (Bryk &  Schneider, 2002, p 137 + 144)

 So high levels of relational trust makes things faster, cheaper and better….

Trust and the Social Brain

Chances are that without understanding in detail how trust works, we may be trustworthy in some ways and not others. The problem is that parts of the human brain sort of aggregate all the data about us, and then print out a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the trust question without saying how it got this answer.  Trust is a very finely tuned biological safety feature.  We all know about our 'fight or flight', an automated system, which is constantly and instantaneously on the look out for signs of danger. On a more subtle scale this system is quietly gathering data on everything going on around us – then it synthesizes all that information and jumps to a conclusion. On the one hand very useful and on the other sometimes rather annoying.

What this means is that there is no way around the system. Although our brains might be more or less finely tuned (we can for example become 'hyper-vigilant' to trust issues after a few negative experiences) …  no amount of acting classes are going get you past the everyday ability of a human to detect a lack a trustworthiness in another person.

We are so biologically tuned into one another that we effect each other's heart rate and blood pressure within minutes of entering the same space.  The blood-pressure of a sick person reduces when another person sits with them - even if they are unconscious or asleep.  This subtle back and forth between us leads us to share moods quickly and easily, and it also gives us very strong instincts about trust... sometimes instantly and sometimes based on a lot of data gathered by our brains over time.

Trust behaviours 

At the highest level trust is about being honest and maintaining a high degree of integrity.  The word ‘integrity’ means ‘being whole’… integrated.  So what you show on the outside should reflect what’s on the inside.If it isn't... if we pick up some inconguity, however sublte or hard to define, between what people might being presenting to us, and what we think their real intentions might be, we start to distrust.  Being a person with a good reputation for integrity also involves a person demonstrating their integrity outwardly.  If you are a hermit it would be difficult for people to know if you were trustworthy or not.  

You might not wish to think that you are being highly judgmental about people around you – but you will find that your brain likely has been working on your behalf.

Trust in a community context

We said that our focus in the Social Brain Lab was to look at these issues in the community context.  I mentioned above that in the Trust in Schools research they showed that relational trust correlated to student’s grades. How many other effects might come from a high trust community?

I have blogged a lot against approaches to getting communities active that use conflict as a deliberate tool.  Agitating groups of people around grievances I believe is very manipulative and very ineffectual long term.  If you believe, as I do, that we are going to develop better social outcomes through collaboration, between local authorities, schools, community groups, councilors etc ... then building relational trust has to be an integral part of building ‘collaborative capacity’.

In my experience conflict in local communities divides and fractures existing social networks … and people can behave in shocking ways.  The most common narrative is that the object, person, organization takes on some very unpleasant characteristics.  This ‘demonising’ gives the campaigning group permission to do or say pretty much anything in order to win.  

If you want to collaborate on community projects trust is also essential.  When you work in organizations there are processes, which to some extent compensates (poorly) for lack of trust. 

We have for years tried to do this in communities by working through stifling committee structures, often attracting only the most determined and skilled… but repelling the majority.   Thankfully we see signs of change... and in all the new examples of communities working creatively and collaboratively that we have studied,  you will find trust at the core of their success.

My favourite quote on trust:

"Having spent many years trying to define the essential of trust, I have arrived at the position that if two people could say two things to each other and mean them, then there was the basis for trust.  The two things are “I mean you no harm” and “I seek your greatest good”

Jim Meehan, British Psychologist and Poet 

Knowledge, learning and the Social Brain Lab

We have started the Social Brain Lab to develop some practical tools to use in communities.  

All the projects we study at Social Spaces involve connecting people at local level. The projects often have multiple effects: raising awareness of environmental issues, introducing new ways to encourage informal learning or starting enterprises. 

However, we know that connection itself is important for two primary reasons:

 1. Positive relationships, trust and denser networks lead to new things happening

2. Creating social connection is valuable in itself.

More detail on this here.

Drawing on our existing research and knowledge in metacognition, collaboration and learning... plus our long running study of emergent community projects which, by design, fundamentally change how people interact face-to-face, the Social Brain Lab aims to collaborate with others to condense the large volume of research and data (social capital, social neuroscience, wellbeing etc) into a number of tools designed specifically to give a practical working knowledge of these important insights and stimulate further project ideas in a community workshop setting.

My interest in knowledge really grew doing the research and analysis for my MA Ed.  I used Lewin’s Equation to describe the overarching question “does knowledge about how we function change the way we behave?”.  Lewin’s Equation states that

B=ƒ(P,E)  Behaviour = Function of (Personality in their Environment). 

Do specific pieces of knowledge add to the influences of personality and environment? 

Are there automated human responses that can be drawn into more conscious decision-making processes with knowledge? 

Does knowledge help us to interpret life situations more accurately to inform our choices and subsequent behaviours?

Tracking knowledge through cognitive processes is a pretty complex and time consuming process. The research that I undertook involved teaching 200 teenagers over 2 years in a number of very different schools a set of experiential lessons on human functioning from many different disciplines.  I interviewed students at various stages, looking for cognitive patterns and learning processes in the analysis.

I took my emergent results to a number of specialists to help understand what the analysis was revealing, including long time friend and inspiration Colleen McLaughlin from Cambridge University… and Ian Morris, Head of Wellbeing at Wellington College, who had worked with me with the original student lessons.

The final learning model that emerged is described in the diagram below which I called Informed Autonomy, a model which I believe to be original in this type of research and strongly supports the idea of teaching young people about human functioning, as I expressed in this RSA article in 2008. 

The most significant results of the research were as follows:

-       Knowledge matters – knowing about how we function can change behaviour firstly on a conscious level .. eventually at a judgement level.

-       Knowledge matters more when you process it fully, connecting it to your personal experiences. Knowledge + cognitive processes + experience is the essential combination required for learning.

-       Knowledge triggers self-observation, repeated instances of self-observation lead to building personal knowledge.

-       You don’t need to use therapeutic methods (such as group self-disclosure) to build personal knowledge.

-       Higher level cognitive processes are required. In Blooms Taxonomy terms this equates to ‘Applying’ upwards… which comes after ‘remembering’ and ‘understanding’.

Worth noting here is the brilliant work of the RSA's Social Brain project who have also done some work since on the value of teaching people about how their brains work.

So what has all this got to do with the Social Brain Lab?

In the same way that knowledge was condenced into the most relevant elements for the original research we are hoping to do the same for people designing community social projects. What knowledge from neuroscience and social neuroscience could help when applied to this setting? Can this type of knowledge help people collaborate better, design projects better ...?

We would like to develop these new tools in collaboration with other people because we know there is a lot of deep understanding out there about what knowledge is most up-to-date in research terms, and what tried and tested methods and social processes continue to work. We think that mixing this up with some design thinking could create some really helpful open source tools for communities to use.  

There is an open invitation to take part in this work, so if you are interested please do get in touch!

If you are interested in new ways of building knowledge, and want to see how this might work in a social context, please join us in the Ad Hoc Enquiries!

{NB If you are an organisation that would like to use the learning models above in your work, for non commercial purposes only, please do get in touch for permissions and more detail on the research process}

 

The Ad Hoc Enquiries: Do you have a new theory?

Starting in February 2012 Social Spaces will be running a series of 12 exploratory new events at Hub Westminster.

The primary assumption for the project is that there is new knowledge to be built and that we need to find new collaborative ways of building it.

These weekly Enquiries are structured events designed to give people who have designed and implemented innovation local projects an opportunity to describe their work and their emerging insights to a group of interested and experienced peers. These innovation projects are required to be working specifically in the participatory paradigm where creative and strategic solution seeking and collaborative working are their most evident characteristics. 

What happens at an Enquiry?

The evenings will begin with a sociable supper, during which the ‘theorist(s)’ will present their project, their theory of change and new emergent theory - followed by a number pieces of evidence to support their theory. 

Each participant in turn will state their core disciplinary perspective e.g. science, philosophy, design etc and offers either a supporting or challenging statement for the theory, connecting with other knowledge bases to understand and interpret the new theory. 

How will the Enquiries be documented?

Each week the event will ‘extreme’ recorded to a structured and pre-set format and set into a large format digital/on demand book including all participants names and responses. The events will be audio live streamed - and later converted into podcasts.

Why are they called The Ad Hoc Enquiries?

Enquiry

The name ‘enquiry’ goes some way to describe the format for the evenings. The name implies that the answers to our new questions are not currently evident and that some specific process is needed to draw out the ideas and examine the evidence.

The purpose of these events is a serious one, and the idea of calling it an ‘enquiry’ implies that some noteworthy and important work will take place during these evenings.   ‘Enquiry’ is also an academic term to describe an investigation into a specific topic or question.

Ad Hoc

The word ‘ad hoc’ is a term used in a number of contexts including scientific and philosophical theory; national investigations; technology systems and networks theory. There is also a link to the term Adhocracy, described by Alvin Toffler in the book Future Shock to mean an organisational structure working in the opposite way to a bureauracy.

How have we developed the format?

We have used understanding of how thinking in a new type of social setting might take place to develop this new format.  The events are structured to achieve knowledge creation through social and intellectual interaction and to be respectful of people’s ideas and the time they are offering to the project through the documentation and sharing process. 

The format takes account of the different phases individual and collective cognition might take place: stimulation/processing/connection/discussion/synthesis/building further on emergent ideas. 

The structure secures the serious aspects of the project's aims, and will therefor also allow a great deal of playfulness and fun to be injected into the evenings. We will be running these events in *very* strict order... possibly even using a gavel....

Call for new theories - do you have one?

 The first stage in preparing for these events is to ask people to submit their ideas for a theory they would like to present.

1. Have you developed an innovative local project?

2. Does this project work in the Creative/Collaborative paradigm?  

What we mean here is the work should not work in the Consumer, Representative, Charity or Challenge participatory paradigms.  There may be some of these in the mixture - but overall the project needs to work more collaboratively with communities and local authorities, possibly reconfiguring existing systems and fundamentally changing the way the community interacts in some way (See here and here for more details on how we see the Creative/Collaborative paradigm)

Apply here!

Deadline for applications to present a theory: 25 January 2012 

Register early interest to attend and participate in an Ad Hoc Enquiry here!

More pics of our cubes

 

Social Business: A response to the Portas Review on highstreet revival

(Photo credit London Shop Fronts blog by Emily Webber)

Over the Christmas break I read the Portas Review into the future of our highstreets - and I agree with the sentiment expressed that highstreets seem to be an often under-used or under-respected asset; and that in order for high streets and communities to thrive that we need a mix of commercial retail, with other cultural and social experiences; and that we would benefit from people making the shift from consumer to more active co-creator.

However, I found myself questioning some of the methods or solutions proposed - and here is some of my thinking why.

Representative 'Town Teams' to create shared vision of high street 

I like the idea of a group of passionate people working together for the benefit of the whole high street. Bringing together retailers, building owners, Council and residents to collaborate and develop new possibilities. But I think that as we make the shift to 'co-creators' we are learning new roles, and new ways of working together that are unlikely to happen spontaneously in a classic meeting or planning setting. As Portas notes later in the report "quite often it is only the noisy minority that contribute" which can sometimes be an issue with small groups claiming to be representative of a whole community. We've seen the positive impact of leaving things 'unfinished' so that people can contribute in meaningful ways - perhaps if the whole vision is completed and curated by a small representative group this may hamper wider involvement and co-creation. I think that because we need a more sophisticated shift in thinking and acting, we need to move past getting people together to problem solve, and employ both new meeting techniques and some creative ways for people to engage in different ways. See Tessy's post for more on the differences between representative and creative collaborative paradigm.

Serving a community's needs and community consultation

The report states the role of a town centre is to serve a communities needs. But what if the role of a town centre were to be an asset, a resource for a communities aspirations, and a source of inspiration? It also says that people should be consulted on town centre development - with big corporates putting money behind a campaign to get more people involved in town planning. Getting more people involved is something I would agree with - but again I think that it needs to be more nuanced than traditional consultation (we listen and go and design what you want, then bring it back as a finished product for you to consume). What if instead of 'consulting' local councils were there to encourage and facilitate involvement, create connections and help make ideas a reality.  

Community use of vacant properties and short term 'meanwhile' uses

While I agree with the need for highstreets to enable innovative, creative activities I think that hosting this solely in vacant or temporary spaces is perhaps not the best way forward. Why are we reducing the social uses to short term animation and temporary spaces? If we acknowledge that the high street needs to be a 'dynamic social place with a sense of belonging' we need to give people time to get to know each other, give the social elements time to bed down and be a permanent part of the mix. And by viewing the social simply as a colonisation method that can then be transplanted by 'real' business and full rates when it's successful in bringing in more people, new ideas and connections -  begins to price the social out again, and keeps the current competitive profit driven model at top of hierarchy, potentially loosing the extra social value found in supportive co-creation methods.

Social as a secondary effect of economic activity

The report says that the high street is social space: people interact by chatting in the market place, or sharing an enjoyable consumer experience. Social connections and the positive benefits from this are seen as an important secondary effect of shopping on the local highstreet. I wouldn't disagree with this - knowing the name of my local green grocer feels like something important to my sense of place (but I'll be honest, in a decade or more of local shopping I've not made new friends through the experience, because a straight transactional relationship is not really conducive to this). So if the secondary (perhaps unintended) social benefits are clearly a valuable thing then why are we stopping there? Imagine the secondary effects of a truly co-created high street experience - what if people had the opportunity to meet over baking, growing, building, making. Building lasting relationships through shared activities - rather than chance greetings over transient commercial transactions.

The individual's role to shop locally

The report highlights our responsibility to 'meet, trade and shop in high streets' in order for them to thrive. I don't disagree - I personally chose to support local businesses as much as I can and feel much happier about my contribution going to Hassan and his family up the road, that the bottomless pockets of Tesco. But as noted above, I think that this consumer model that we know so well reduces us to simply economic players in the town centre. It is our role to be there and shop. We aren't expected to, and largely don't have the opportunity to create, or build it. We are there to consume - and it could be argued that is is this pattern of behaviour that created the out of town shopping phenomena, largely responsible for the decline in high street success, in the first place.

 

Shops can be more than just shops

I read through 55 pages to find the bit that most interested me, right at the end...There is a suggestion that an ideal would be "big shops being more than just shops" and the examples cited are book shops in cafes, or a running club meeting point in a sports shop. And perhaps a 'swap shop' for different skills, and work hubs.
This sounds more like it to me... we need to bring back the social to the highstreet in an integrated, co-created way. From the grass roots up, skillfully facilitatied by those who know their way round the red tape and systems - be that local authorities, landlords, or retailers.

What's the alternative?
I think that if we are a bit braver in our expectations of the high street, more critical of the impact of our current repeated patterns of behaviour, and made the best of our opportunities to reimaging the assets and resources contained in it, we could begin to create a much richer social space ogether. 

If instead of another service that is provided for us to consume, (albeit by a new wider group of players than previously) we could be genuinely involved in the creation of social, cultural, and educational experiences. Instead of reducing the social to occasional spaces or secondary effects, I think we should aspire to create a truly integrated social high street. 

Putting it into practise
Mary Portas ends by recommending that several trials and pilots are initiated to take this report forward. If anyone would like to offer a highstreet to start putting this into practise, do get in touch - we'd be more than happy to get stuck in...

 

How Do We Create New Knowledge for Creative/Collaborative Participatory Paradigm?

Thank you for the fascinating response to my post earlier this week asking if we are seeing a new participation paradigm emerging called Creative/Collaborative.

Having read the post you may or may not be persuaded that perhaps something new is going on?  Perhaps you have noticed some ideas and projects that don’t fit into the more mature paradigms… 

To follow on I wanted to outline a bit more detail about what I think some of the strengths and vulnerabilities of Creative/Collaborative might be.

Strengths

The evidence is mounting that connected communities with active and involved citizen have wide ranging and important human effects – increasing protective factors through clever social means and secondary effects. These individual research projects (example below on unemployment) are painting a picture where we can begin to see that a higher density of coordinated and strategic activity at local level might produce secondary effects that no linear organisational service delivery would hope to achieve.

One example of how local government and citizens are working together is the Reading Council project where parents with older children are mentoring families with young children – called Expert Mums. It is more than an idea about how to deliver services more efficiently – it is about doing things better through creative thinking and collaboration.  Having spent time with the remarkable team, led by Melani Oliver, who have been developing Expert Mums it is obvious that this project is totally collaborative – both in its co-design with the parents – right through to the training ... in fact creativity and collaboration are completely woven into the idea's design.

Vulnerabilities

1. Because it is still emerging we don’t understand it fully yet

 Myself and others at Social Spaces have been studying this phenomenon for a few years now.  It is emergent and so we need to be constantly watching and analysing… as well as discussing and arguing.  It is both exciting and demanding work.  We have been trying to do two things at once – learning from communities that are being successful  - and seeing how to spread this emergent knowledge to others.  By taking a positive deviance approach, studying what key factors are making local projects successful, we have been able to make some significant headway in understanding new ways of working in this new paradigm. But it is ongoing work and we need many many clever people to take this emergent knowledge to the maturity needed.

2. It is difficult

Working in this new way is more difficult – no question about that. But less about the work being difficult in itself - but more because it is different.  It requires a whole new set of methods and ideas – drawn from a whole host of disciplines.  It also requires a deep understanding of how change might be designed – not with last year's methods, but right now.  The communities we visit are ambitious – they don’t want help to start a project, or write a funding bid… they want to transform their communities.  They want their neighbourhoods to be good places to raise their children – drug and violence free.  They want people to feel welcome and appreciated – not lonely or depressed or poor.  And they want to be involved in making that happen – they have a real conviction that they can make change.

But making change is not so easy.  In organisations, where employees are paid to change, the statistic for successfully achieving any type of transformational change is believed to be around 25%. In the Charity or Challenge paradigms making change is much easier – one using compassion and the other pressure. Using your ingenuity to make change is difficult enough – but to do this collaboratively – with other living humans – is tough stuff.

3. Patchy and ineffectual

The more we work in this paradigm we see that being inspired is part of the story - it is motivating and exciting. Having one's imagination captured, having a collective vision of a more positive future - one that you might be able to make happen through the contribution of your own efforts - is essential.  But we think it is going to take more than that to have real impact.  It will take new knowledge and facilitation (from government and other professionals). It will also require new structures of funding. We are seeing examples where wrong sums of money injected at the wrong time can kill this type of work easier at times than no money.

So failure to have collective impact, failure to co-ordinate, collaborate and build on small initial steps .... wrong, or less sophisticated types of evaluation ... over time this could all add up to people losing confidence in its potential.

4. It might threaten other paradigms

As described in this article by Philip Colligan “Equipping citizens with the skills and knowledge to help themselves and each other is clearly a good investment. But running through many of these innovations is a more radical idea that challenges the nature of professionalism and expertise.” 

Additionally there are many professionals working in communities who work only in particular paradigms that are currently not that compatible with Creative/Collaborative.

But that isn't the full story by any means.  Professionals have valuable expertise to offer citizens - as citizens are increasingly creating knowledge themselves.  This exchange needs to become two-way, open and collaborative.  If we think it is right (and ultimately effective) for citizens to take the lead on making and shaping their communities - what sort of new professional practices need to evolve to facilitate and support this new type of activity?

The Challenge – The Opportunity – The Invitation

In summary, I believe that there is a new paradigm emerging that requires intense study, investment and sheer hard work.  I believe it has the real potential to change how the world works.  Over the last year I feel personally that some progress has been made in understanding how it all might work - our work is improving every week.

But, unfortunately or fortunately, whichever way you want to look at it, I also believe that the only way to make some significant progress in surfacing, understanding, growing and spreading this new knowledge is – you probably guessed already – collaboratively. And creatively.

At this moment in time you cannot sign up to do a degree course in the new Creative/Collaborative paradigm.  But there are university projects which are working on bits of it.  I estimate that there are 30-50 university projects world wide currently working at the intersection of localism – either through environment/design/social/art/tech/philosophy/policy and so on.  These projects are very important – but equally important are the hundreds of projects emerging at community level which are creative and collaborative.  While we may in the past have labelled these projects ‘practice’… I don’t believe this is true.  These projects are generating valuable knowledge.  You could consider that these grassroots projects are in fact conducting action research – but currently much of this knowledge isn’t being gathered.

Howard Gardner once suggested that it took 10 years for educational research generated at university level to reach schools widely.  This knowledge is far too important and timely to wait for traditional methods of gathering and dissemination. 

To demonstrate the speed of emergence I can point to Hand Made. Last year it was difficult to find 28 projects or commentary that fell into this type of thinking.  Now we have 40 volunteer editors gathering local stories of making change in a Creative/Collaborative way for what has become the Community Lover's Guide to the Universe.  This is significant enough to call a 'surge' in new types of activity.

Historically we have often regarded grassroots activity in a political context – often focusing on ‘voice’ and opinion.  If we regarded communities as makers and designers – generators of new knowledge and solvers of problems as well then we cannot rely on old ways of doing things. If we also regard that academics, theorists, policy makers and professionals have a rich and indispensible contribution to make to this landscape in understanding, gathering, applying valuable existing theories and knowledge.... we are left with a big challenge which I put to you.

How do we collaboratively create a transdisciplinary approach to people powered change?

‘[t]rans-disciplinarity emerges through a fusion and bridging of disciplines, not merely the bundling of multiple disciplines” Koizumi 1999

How do develop new methodologies of knowledge creation and dissemination which are faster and better? This is one discipline which isn't going to be developed in the office or in the field alone....

How do we generate new knowledge in such a way that we can make this knowledge open-source to communities - rather than proprietorial or commercial?

Is this the Big Society 'curriculum' that Matthew Taylor described in his post yesterday?

UPDATES:  

Brilliant post be Jocelyn Cunningham of the RSA about their experiences on the Peterbough project working in the Creative/Collaborative way...

Fascinating critic from David Wilcox on how the different models play out at the funding end of things....

 

Open publication - Free publishing - More collaborative

Creative/Collaboration as a New Participatory Paradigm?

After 6 months of thinking *very hard* about the more controversial things of life, like democracy, creativity and the future of society, *quietly to myself*, I suddenly find myself almost ready to ‘think out loud’ again and publish some unfinished thoughts for others to consider.  While this can feel very risky at times I consider that collaborative and public conversations around some of these difficult topics holds enormous value – so I invite you to agree, argue and criticise the ideas and suggestions below as strongly as possible – with a view that this process toughens thinking - hopefully making it more robust and useful.

Recap of earlier thinking

In May I wrote a series of posts which promoted the idea of collaboration between citizens and government and other organisations.  The thinking that I put forward was that to adopt ‘pressure’ and ‘challenge’ as the primary lever of change means we are open to the possibility that we remain ‘stuck’ in a cycle of moving power and resources around and that this didn’t leave enough room for innovative research and thinking which could lead to smarter decision making. 

I also argued that the ethics of activism was very important, and that while we might see the immediate usefulness of tactics promoted historically by ideas such as Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals – that this ‘means justifies the ends’ is not only unethical but ineffectual long term.  A combination of indiscriminate activism and poor decision-making can leave us trapped in a cycle which describes the problem rather than the solution You can read these posts here, here and here – as well as links to responding posts from other authors.

Below is the 'thoughts in progress' diagram which I ended up with in May, which attempted to describe these various complex processes - with small amendments.

Open publication - Free publishing - More collaboration

 

Current thinking

To challenge my own ideas and add more clarity where possible, over the last 6 months I have attempted to analyse more fully the current situation and dynamics. I have wanted to do this more thoroughly as a way of understanding where I think the future might lie - particularly in light of all the research we have been doing through Hand Made, Community Lover’s Guide and Social Spaces workshops over the last 3 years - where we continue to believe pretty strongly that there is ‘a new emergent community culture’ ... but we are still trying to analyse and understand the bigger picture as this emergence upfolds.

I found that this further analysis on different ways that people are participating in society helped to do five important things:

1. It established more clearly in my own mind that there is a new participation paradigm emerging which I am calling the ‘Creative/Collaborative’ paradigm.
2. It helped me to recognise the very real differences between this new paradigm and other more mature existing narratives.
3. It helped to show possible reasons why trying to blend these paradigms can prove difficult.
4. It helped to think about why some of the more mature paradigms are static or in decline
5. It helped to show why Creative/Collaborative needs to be a context that is deliberately created - not a strategy deployed in the heat of battle.

 

Open publication - Free publishing - More paradigm

 

So above is the chart which looks at these different paradigms for your critical consideration.  Personally I have acted in all these different paradigms, and my own experience is that when I have been in a leadership position in either the ‘representative’ or ‘challenge’ situation I have tried hard to move activity to the ‘creative/collaborative’ way of doing things … with very limited success indeed … and one of my big questions about this analysis is can you do this…or indeed should you even be trying? Does the vital role of representation and accountability get eroded if you try to operate in the Creative /Collaborative as well? Or does that amount to 'unworkable duality'? I would really like your thoughts on this in particular...

1. Creative /Collaborative as a new paradigm

 This isn’t a philosopher’s dream – it is a narrative being told by grassroots community projects popping up around the world.  These are the people that are teaching us about how to create projects and ideas that connect communities in new and productive ways.  I think this is a new way of participating because these examples I have been studying aren’t ‘representative’, ‘charitable’, ‘consumer’ or ‘challenge’….and largely they have their roots in new ways of thinking and designing… rather than in historical activity.  They are not a progression from any of these other more established paradigms - although they often seem inspired by a very wide range of disciplines and thinking.

So you could define Creative/Collaborative firstly by what it isn't i.e we see activity that doesn't fit the other 4 mature paradigms, and secondly by the two strongest characteristics demonstrated i.e. Creative: they connect many existing resources to make entirely new things, and Collaboratively: they boost this work by collaborating widely.

2. Differences between the paradigms
The different paradigms use different social levers to create change in society: economic, political, power and ingenuity…. This requires different skills and attracts people with different ideas and mindsets.  Although I included the idea of a ‘mode switcher’ into the chart, and I believe that as an individual you can learn to switch and work fluidly in the different paradigms depending on the context, I also think this can be difficult because these paradigms are often whole ‘world views’ in themselves. People can get really stuck, interpreting and responding to situations in a particular way depending on their world view. This can lead to a situation being 'misdiagnosed'... and negative patterns and cycles being reinforced rather than changed in a positive way.

3. Blending these different paradigms can be difficult
Some examples are popping up which present a confusing picture.  One example could be a charity using an empty space to hold a fair, thinking they are working in the creative/collaborative narrative …but in fact aren't changing how the community interacts in any meaningful way. It is also where social enterprise is struggling to define itself clearly at local community level. There are also a few instances where people are swerving recklessly between the paradigms - occasionally by central government itself - mostly because we don't collectively have a good enough understanding of what these mixtures might look like and what effects they might have. If for example you mixed 'Charitable' with 'Creative/Collaborative', which one would dominate?  

Most difficult of all is considering how elected council members in a Local Authority might collaborate with citizens to enable more people-led activity.  If they are firmly in the 'Representative' paradigm, which is vital to democracy, how would they encourage Creative/Collaboration for the good of the communities they serve, whilst still challenging the opposition, holding themselves or the opposition to account? How would they be able to take suitable and ethical amounts of credit for that facilitation and enablement of resident-led activity in order to differentiate themselves from the opposition sufficiently to get re-elected?  

4. Most mature paradigms are static or declining

Participating through the 'Representative' paradigm via democratic decision-making or voting is declining. Volunteering though the 'Charity' paradigm fluctuates by a comparatively small margin ... and all the evidence from travelling the country through the Travelling Pantry project and talking to hundreds of people is that many people don't find participating through 'opportunities' created by other people very satisfying any longer.  They *want* to design their own opportunities to make and shape their neighbourhoods and communities - together with other people. They want to co-produce - not participate. They don't want to struggle with the old, often formal, sometimes boring, ways of doing things - through forums and committees - they want to do things differently.

But, this doesn't just show that old ways don't excite a whole new group of people who suddenly want be involved (and are able) in creating their communities.  It also helps to illustrate that different paradigms suit different people, with different interests and passions, different talents and ideas, that naturally gravitate to the various narratives and work extremely well within them (particularly Representative and Charity), and should be supported and properly appreciated for doing so.  There will always likely be a level where the make up of the population will differ and where economic conditions will threaten the continued expectation that different paradigms will continue to grow in a particular way.

The area of frequent concern is the rampant growth of the Consumer narrative - tipping us over the edge of sustainability into unconscious materialism.  We are led to believe that as individual we have an important role to play propping up the economy by buying things - instead of collectively remodelling the systems to work in more sustainable way.

5. Creative/Collaborative as a cultivated, continuous context

One of the things that I was struggling with 6 months ago was that my own experiences had shown that there was an urgent need for ongoing, continuous dialogue to establish the conditions and relationships for real collaboration – particularly between citizens and government.  I realised that people who responded to this assertion with the idea that collaboration often meant compromise or concession, were often coming from the perspective of collaboration in the heat of battle… when a particular serious ‘challenge’ situation is already in play.  And I do agree with this view.  Dialogue is often the only way of resolving a situation, but in an existing challenge situation the interwoven politics and power narrative can be very open to manipulation.

My thinking on this was reinforced by a thesis published by Mariah Thompson entitled ‘The Disappearance of the Neighourhood Assembly Movement in Bueonos Aires, Argentina 2001 – 2004: A Phase of Demobilization”.  The research looks at the dynamics which led to the emergence of about 120 local community forums in a 4 month period (November 2001 - March 2002) in response to a ‘political and economic crisis of monumental proportions’ which led the government to freeze all citizen’s bank accounts - an action know as 'el corralito' - literally 'the little corral' - in an attempt to halt the crash. ‘At their peak one in every three citizens in Buenos Aires had participated in either a meeting or one of the movement’s activities.  Within only two years they had all but disappeared. Today only a handful continue to operate in the capital.’

The thesis is fascinating, the researcher compares the reasons for the  demobilization with theories by Sydney Tarrow.  “Tarrow asserts that the end of a movement is marked by three sets of causal factors. These include 1) exhaustion of movement members, leading to member withdrawal and subsequent internal polarization 2) disputes within the movement over the use of violence, paired with the institutionalization of more moderate sectors, and, 3) repression of the movement by the State along with State facilitation of some movement demands.”  

I won’t go into detail here but I recommend reading the full paper. One of the things that the paper helped to clarify is that when the situation is a big ‘challenge’ situation, that the ‘powers’ can manipulate a movement, separating moderates within a movement from more extreme members, and eventually drawing them back into traditional political paradigms where they feel most comfortable – especially people from more middle classes.  In Buenos Aires this is what happened …. But also the political and economic situation stabilized, the bank accounts were unfrozen…. And collectively this led to the forums fading away.

As I mentioned in my previous posts I have seen this repeatedly in my own experience – people get together to fight something – passionately. But after they win or lose they lose their reason to come together.  This is one of the really big differences I see with projects that fall into the Creative/Collaborative paradigm, the motivation to come together is to collaborate, to create something new, to make something, usually something that bridges and builds community and starts to solve real problems using the energy and imagination and knowledge of a lot of people. Coming together to make, learn or share can be heady stuff, it often sprouts more activity rather than shrinks.

My thinking around all this has been reinforced also by seeing how two real veterans of activism have moved into the Creative/ Collaborative space.

One person is Grace Lee Boggs, a 96 year activist, who has worked and lived through decades of activist movements – including the civil rights movement – who is inspired by the astonishing and fantastic resurgence of people-led community activity filling the vacuum in her home town of Detroit, created by the disappearance of economic viability that has accompanied the disappearance of industry. In the interview below Boggs talks about the Occupy movement saying, ‘you have to move from protest to start becoming the solution yourself’. I am hoping to meet Grace Lee Boggs on the trip we are planning to Detroit.

Grace Lee Boggs' Message to Occupy Wall Street Part 2 from American Revolutionary on Vimeo.

The other veteran is 94 year old Stephane Hessell, author of the French ‘Time for Outrage’ leaflet that has sold over 1.5 million copies. Hessell lived through WWII, was active in the French Resistance, survived concentration camps, was involved in drafting the Declaration of Human Rights, spend much of his life as a diplomat and an active agent of positive change.I wrote in more detail about this work here but his closing statement in “Indignez-Vous!” is: ‘To create is to resist; to resist is to create.”

And last but not least I wanted to draw your attention to a paper written by Eileen Conn, a long time activist from Peckham in London. I had to good fortune recently of spending an afternoon talking with Eileen and have subsequently read her fascinating paper called 'Community Engagement and the Social Eco-system Dance' currently being published through TSRC Below the Radar. In the paper Eileen describes the Space of Possibilities between the community and external and public agencies.  She also goes into some very interesting detail about how she sees the two different systems 'co-evolving'.  I highly recommend reading this paper.

So there it is ….. 6 months of thinking in 2400 words.  Well, not quite… I have more to add on what I think are the strengths and vulnerabilities of Creative/Collaborative… how we might start to work to deliberately to create the context for this new paradigm… as well as addressing the more complex questions around blending paradigms ….. but I am hoping that I can do that this with the help of  all the Social Spaces ‘thinking partners’  … including the readers of this blog!

And a special thank you to the people who might have laughed at the suggestion in the first line of this blog that I have been thinking about all this *quietly* to myself - those who contributed so much to the evolution of these ideas - and have given me so much time - and continue to put up with my obsessive questioning, talking and struggling to organise and make sense of some of this evolving thinking: Laura Billings, Maurice Specht, Michael Coughlin, Indy Johar, Alice Fung, Philip Colligan, David Gauntlett, Megan Deal, Matthew Taylor, Eilleen Conn, Zoe Hamlin, Cassie Robinson, Toby Blume,Tom Neumark, Jonathan Robinson, Yvonne Roberts, Nat Wei, Nick Booth, Noel Hatch, Karl Wilding, Jerry Stein, June Holley, Dougald Hine, Lorna Prescott, Nick Bird, Andrew Dick... and everyone I have worked with in workshops who have added so much richness and understanding of where things are right now in communities ....

  

Unfinished Business

In the last two weeks a particular quality of community projects and spaces which seem to be working particularly well, has became clear to me: being unfinished as built in quality to engage people.This is counterintuitive to the way we have think about services or our public spaces. They are built around things being in order, sorted out, and meticulously planned out. (Social) Designers are very much consciously aware of this. They have all kind of possibilities of designing in, mostly unaware to us, a particular and desired kind of behaviour. Dan Lockton’s set of card ‘Design with intent’ offers 101 examples of things designers can do to influence our behaviour through design. His set of cards can be found here. Leaving things unfinished isn’t part of his extensive repertoire.

Thinking about changing people behavior through design has recently got a big push through the work of Thaler and Sunnstein on nudging. Their concept of a choice architecture deals with the same thing. Through this design thinking has been introduced to both a more general public and to a much wider variety of domains.

One thing we should remember is that people don’t always use the way things are intended. They deviate from the way things were meant to be used. A nice example in public space is offered by this picture (on the highly recommendable blog Urban Bricolage by Eric Hooge, a collection of people tinkering with urban space)

The caption of this picture reads: 

“A desire path (also known as a desire line or social trail) is a path developed by erosion caused by animal or human footfall. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of the line represents the amount of demand. Desire paths can usually be found as shortcuts where constructed pathways take a circuitous route.”

This deviating behavior already points to an openness in every design for users to explore particular ways of using it. But this deviant behavior is mostly seen, especially from the perspective from the designer or the planned world, as undesirable. But what if this openness is exactly what helps define a good public space or community project? And is keeping things unfinished as a design choice a way of designing in this openness? To explore this first two examples which made me realize ‘being unfinished’ might be a particular quality you could use and could help us explain their value and what it offers different from services.

The first time this became clear to me was while visiting the Arcola Theater during a study trip organized by Inspiring Cities. During this visit Ben Todd gave a talk explaining how the theatre came about and how it operates. There were many interesting things happening at this place, but one remark stuck with me ‘we try to keep the project unfinished to make people feel able to relate to it’. By keeping things open, you give people the opportunity to not only act as a user, a client or a customer. You give them the possibility to appropriate things, make them (part of) their own. From a user you are given the opportunity to co-own something. This doesn’t mean that you do not offer anything. It’s not about offering nothing; it’s about keeping a particular openness for people to relate to objects or spaces in a different manner than consumer mode.

 



The second recent encounter with the value of being unfinished occurred to me while visiting socialspaces.be at the Media, Arts and Design Acadamy in Genk. One of their researchers, Ben Hagenaars told about a former project of his, Animation Vegetation. In this project he has created 3D jute dolls filled with soil and grass to drop in the public space. Inspired by the graffiti movement, the dolls aim to generate more green spaces in public spaces. What makes this project interesting is that Ben has put a tutorial on his website which enables everyone to make their own. So he gives away a template to intervene in public spaces, thus enabling others to do something with it. Again this is a nice example of the added value of leaving something unfinished.

Leaving things unfinished invites people to engage with things in a deeper, more personal manner. It is an invitation to appropriate something, to make it your own, to add value and meaning to it. Moreover it hands over responsibility, ownership and control to people. It asks them to make something, not out of nothing, but at least make something happen. They can add their skills, knowledge, experiences and dreams. By keeping it unfinished people who join in later can still add something.

So where does this leave us. Should we just do nothing and leave it up to people to fill in all those things which we leave intentionally unfinished. No, that would be pushing it. Instead we should be looking at ways in which we could strategically built in the unfinished. To help me articulate this and finish off this post, I want to refer to a text by Joop de Boer en Jeroen Beekmans. They run a website 'The Pop-Up City' collecting examples of temporary and flexible Interventions in urban space. In the recently published book ‘The spontaneous city’ by Urhahn Design, they have written a text in which they argue that in a sense spontaneity is overrated, or maybe it’s too optimistic a view on how to work with and on cities. Instead they argue that we should not expect things to happen spontaneous by nature, we should try and induce spontaneous action in people. They call it ‘Artificial Spontaneity’. Although a good party has a spontaneous feel to it, it requires a lot of preparation. What this implies for designers is thus that is not about ‘the spontaneity of the intervention, but about giving rise to the spontaneous social interaction’. Leaving things unfinished is one way of creating such artificial spontaneity. I leave it at that, maybe unfinished, but ready for you to take it further wherever you want to. 

 

Social Spaces: In Praise of LEGO SERIOUS PLAY

David Gauntlett, professor of Media at Westminster University, and co-founder of Social Spaces, introduced me to LEGO SERIOUS PLAY as a tool for helping people share their ideas through making. David has been working professionally with LEGO for some time, using LEGO for research and engagement and in helping to think around many of the concepts he wrote about in his important book Making is Connecting published earlier this year.

Thanks to David a year ago LEGO SERIOUS PLAY donated several boxes of LEGO to the Travelling Pantry.   The Travelling Pantry worked for 6 months giving free workshops to people in communities around the country…. Travelling 20,000 miles and working with well over a 1,000 people.  Since the Travelling Pantry project has been completed we have continued to use LEGO in a variety of contexts and settings to a further 800 people (approx) and wanted to feed back some of our experiences.

What is LEGO SERIOUSPLAY?

LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is a methodology that LEGO have developed to use ‘making’ as a way of co-developing business strategies.  From their website:

“The underlying values of LEGO SERIOUS PLAY include the belief in the potential of people, and also the belief that everyone within an organization can contribute to the discussion, solutions, and outcomes…. It is a language, a communication tool and a problem solving methodology”

How we use it at Social Spaces

The LEGO SERIOUS PLAY methodology is well developed in business settings and they have made their work and ideas open source (you can download their paper here). However, with the Travelling Pantry we wanted to take the simplest version of this methodology into communities to see how it would work in this new setting, to share ideas and create a collective vision for communities.  We wanted to see if it worked as part of a set of new activities we had designed which used tangible objects to collaborate and co-design.

We usually do the lego activity early in the workshops. Participants are asked to make a small model of ‘something they would like to see more of in the community’.  This usually takes about 10 minutes.  Participants are asked to share their idea with the group in turn.

What we have noticed during these workshops

• Often people are surprised by the request to make something with what they think of as toys. This usually leads quickly to delight and conversations and joking follows while people make their models.  This isn’t just about being offered LEGO, but about being offered any sort of materials to make something with.  Most communities are usually offered only verbal and written tools to communicate their ideas.

• Community meetings often favour boldness – sometimes leaving shyer people at the edges – which is both unhelpful and a waste of creativity and ideas. With the LEGO activity all members have an opportunity to share their ideas, with a visual prop to help them communicate what they mean.

• While people share their ideas, other participants are often surprised at the warmth and optimism of these ideas, which frequently ask for more neighbourliness and beauty in their neighbourhood. People get to know each other at quite a deep level through this sharing process.

• Once the models have been shared participants are asked to place their model on a single table in order to start to build up a collective vision of what they would like to see more of in their communities. This is a very important and positive step.

• Taking photos of individual models with their description cards and loading them onto a spaces on the internet gives the opportunity to share with others not at the workshop some of the ideas in a very visual way.

• Making a model really does reach parts of the brain that other activities don’t. We have also found that doing the LEGO after a short talk on inspiring case studies stimulates the creative process and helps people think about their communities in a different way.

• We have researched and  thought long and hard but haven’t been able to find any other materials which offer such quick access to 3D model making as LEGO, particularly in this community setting.

Most common themes....

So many original, unusual and interesting ideas.... And also tons of wonderful gardens, bridges and community created new spaces! 

You can see all the Travelling Pantry models here.

Points to note 

Respect

Respectful framing of this activity if very important. Communities are often dealing with difficult, complex or emotional situations so it is vitally important that this activity be framed to ensure that the fun ‘methodology’ not be confused with not taking people and their concerns seriously, in effect be seen to be taking them too lightly....

Taping into people’s imaginations

While being respectful of difficulties and concerns we are normally very clear also about the purpose of the activity being to tap into their imaginations and build a positive collaborative vision of the future, rather than cataloguing issues.

Different contexts need different framing

If you are using the activity as a rich research tool  in a consultation, in a focus group … or using it to stimulate ideas and problem solving, we have found that some careful framing is needed in these different contexts.

One example of different context is that following a workshop I did for Forever Manchester, they have been using the activity in their Focus Groups with good effect!  More pictures of their focus groups can be seen here.

If you are a community that thinks they might like to use LEGO to develop their ideas I would suggest coming to one of our workshops to see how it works in practice.  If you haven’t been to one of our workshops but are keen to try it straight away please contact me and I can send you some notes that might be useful. If you are introducing this activity into an an existing group where you are a member yourself, can require some confidence, and having a sound understanding of why you want to introduce it, possible reactions and planned outcomes can be helpful.

And if you are using LEGO SERIOUS PLAY thinking and methods please do give them credit in your activities – it has taken them years to develop this important methodology, they have generously made it open source … and I am sure that they will be delighted to see it used for social good … as well as see it continue to be tested so widely and thoroughly in communities through Social Spaces.

BIG THANK YOU! 

I would like to offer a huge thank you to LEGO and David Gauntlett on behalf of Social Spaces for supporting us and for helping us and the communities we have been working with to get inspired and active in making our communities better places to live!

Agendas vs Emergence

Hello y'all. How's tricks?

So today I was at an RSA Thursday talk on Manavodaya - values based development. And it really struck a chord with what we do at Social Spaces so I thought I'd share a few gems...

The basic premise of this way of working is a belief in capacity. People are the experts - they are steeped in their own experience and know much more about what is going on in their lives and ways to change things than you do. Professionals need to work with humility, understand the limitations of their role, and take care to leave power in the hands of people.

The alternative to this tends to be a pre-set agenda of people's requirements and a planned service. We, the professionals, know what your issues are and we have designed and will deliver the solution to you. Well meaning and often with positive outcomes, but perhaps not sustainable in the long term as it sets up a dynamic of professionals providing services to people with needs. Sounds pretty disempowering to me.

In contrast, the asset based / values based / social design approach seeks to make an initial connection on a human level, with no agenda. Well ok. Perhaps a bit of an agenda to help improve a situation or offer support, but an openminded manner in how this could be approached and the belief that the answers are to be found along the way together rather than provided at the start. Great things can grow from small beginnings. In this case, a conversation and a connection. ( Free pie anyone?)

Which leads me to a few questions...

If we think that collaboration and human scale connections are the way forward, how do we redesign our 'service' industries to facilitate this? Charity, public sector, education...

If funders need to be sold on positive outcomes and targets, and want to know where the money's going, how do we prove if the open ended approach is more fruitful in the end?

If we don't know precisely what the outcomes might be, how do we measure impact and share what works? How do we quantify the qualitative?

If people need to come to their own conclusions and definitions in order for change to be effective, how do we create a shared vision and work towards it? How do we tap into the amazing capacity and knowledge in each one of us?

Let's talk....

(You might have guessed I do have a few thoughts on this... but I'll leave that for another story.)
Pic: community asset map in production. Boothtown, Halifax.

I 'heart' London

I'll admit it, I was getting a little tired of the rush and bustle, the concrete and the mess. Then I took a little break away carting the Mindapples tree round to festivals (more shortly) and came back home to find my local shops boarded, windows broken, fires being started. Hmm. Didn't help my urges to jack in city living and join the circus...

Then something special happened and I remembered why I love it here, and why it's still home.

Incident 1: Passing Clouds, Dalston.
Passing Clouds is an artist / musician owned venue in east London and Saturday night was a glorious 8 piece African drumming band which I went to with a friend from FARM:shop that I started volunteering at this time last year. We had our faces painted by some lovely ladies wearing head-dresses made from recycled plastic bags and danced til we dropped with new friends.

It's also home to the People's Kitchen on a Sunday - food by the people, for the people - using food surplus that would otherwise go to waste. Turn up from 3pm and help chop, peel and wash. Or come for a communal dinner and film in the early evening (for a donation.) Last time I was there I was so bowled over by the feast I forgot to take photos! So you'll have to do with the one I found above. We had soup and bread, salad and veg stew, fruit and yogurt, banana milkshakes, plus an amazing plum crumble from a mirabelle glut over in the park. SCRUMMY!

Incident 2: Bethnal Green Superstore
THis is my local mini-mart on Bethnal Green road and I've been shopping there for 7 years. Hassan let me walk out with £15 of shopping when I forgot my wallet once. I went last week to check his shop was ok in the riots and he was one of only two still open in the evening. And we had a giggle on Saturday when I did my shopping at 3am on the way back from Passing Clouds still covered in swirly blue face paint.

Incident 3: Love in a Cup
So then to Sunday. I went to the FARM:shop to help at Grow Sunday, then cycled back home via  Broadway Market and bumped into Christian from East London Furniture, and met Cash from Love in a Cup. This morning I popped in on my way to Mindapples HQ in town to say hi. Not only can I highly recommend the special with a curl of orange peel (which makes a flat white taste like a chocolate orange - YUM!) but the guy is a one man community making machine. He'll remember your name, your favourite coffee and your last conversation. I was there for less than 15 mins before 3 regulars dropped in to say hi and chat. "Hey Dom, double flat white with brown sugar? And did you find something for your mother's birthday present?"

And here's my point (finally!). London feels like home when you know people's names. When you walk or cycle the streets and stop to say hi. When you can join the dots. I've read 'Watching the English' by Kate Fox recently, and got rather downhearted about the analysis of the English social inadequacy and how we need props in order to talk to one another. Got me thinking what 'props' we already have we could use as an excuse. Cups of coffee? Communual meals? Buying your shopping?...

This is Community: Why the Clean-ups Are So Important

The analysis in the media of why the UK erupted in street violence last week have offered us a buffet of reasoning across the political spectrum.

We've been offered: greed, gangs, the recession, unemployment, bad parenting, cultural disintegration, harsh policing, lax policing, slack sentencing, attitudes, social norms, the media scandal, the banking scandal, the expenses scandal, government cuts, professional incompetence, social contagion, opportunism, backlash.  

We've seen the argument swerve dangerously (usually in the same programme) from individual responsibility to state responsibility - depending on which political party you are supporting. 

Finally the arguments ended the week  in a horrible intellectual heap of ridiculousness at the doors of David Starkey.

I offer my own brief observations with some understanding that a week on we have all pretty much had enough of the analysis and political point scoring. So I am sticking to some person thoughts from my own experience... and reflecting on things that have been helpful this week.

A great many young people involved in the riot activities in the last week will have been 'known to the authorities'.  It is unusual to go from a stay-at-home teenager to looting in one step.  If the are 'known' at all, they will have been on the system of several agencies, possibly including youth offending, social services, the police, education teams, employment schemes.  Having worked for a short period in a Youth Offending Team (YOT) I can assure you of the tightness of these processes in steering a young person through a system.  There is hardly a crack through which any small degree of anti-social behaviour can slip through.  There are endless rounds of meetings they must attend.  If they miss meetings they are back in court for further measures.  They are sent on courses, their parents are counselled, they go on restorative justice programmes, they do 'community service'....  Seriously, there is very little not deployed to reform and shape a young person's behaviour to a more pro-social way of living.  

The government has made cuts to Youth Offending Teams - and probably this is one of the many reasons why the violence erupted... but the professional practice of YOTs will not have altered much with the change in government.  

But my own experience of YOTs work, as valuable and important as it is, is that it does not compensate for what a caring community could do for young people.  Most kids with ASBOs are shunned by the community in which they live, the families are shunned and likely to schools exclude those children.  I wrote about these experiences in more detail in this post on Protective Factors, Systems Thinking and People Power.

The main point here being that communities can do for young people that no amount of services can do for them.  These services cannot give them a feeling of belonging, a feeling of importance, a sense that their talents and contributions to society are valued and valuable.  These services cannot help them build relationships with helpful adults, build their own social capital and empower them ultimately into economic independence and civic participation and contribution. There are things that only communities can do for each other.

The citizen-led clean-ups that happened across the effected areas in the days that followed the riots, lifted our spirits and gave us back a bit of hope that society hadn't quite unravelled in the way much of the press seemed happy to promote.  But they are much more important than simply extending hope.  They were statements of ownership across those neighbourhoods.  They were statements about the strong feelings of anger that local residents had towards the violence and the destruction of neighbourhoods.  

And the Local Authority clean-up squads couldn't send that sort of message.... and instinctively these local folk knew that the message was as important as the clearn-up and the message could not be delivered by the local authority.

I wrote recently about a programme in Chicago called CeaseFire designed by an expert in the spread of infectious diseases called Gary Slutkin who has used the power of community outrage as part of a detailed strategy which has reduced violence by 45%  - 75%.  Every time there is violence the community demonstrate against the violence. Note:  They don't march against the authorities to stop the violence, they march against the violent behaviours from their own community members.  They express a collective rejection of these behaviours.  As Slutkin says ‘for these communities violence is simply normal – we work to make it unusual’.

The Peace Rallies which have started to emerge this weekend are further really powerful examples of how citizens see this need to make social expressions of peace.

And this is essentially what these clean-ups have done, with the addition of showing pride on where these residents live.  And perhaps all rolled up that is why we have found them so heartening, and why more than likely they have contributed to the riots reducing. 

Now all we need to figure out is how to make young people get more of their sense of community from the clean-ups teams and less from their gangs - and thankfully that small detail is very much in our hands.

[For a more detailed and academic exploration of encouraging autonomy in young people I wrote this RSA article in 2008 following my own research.]

Pic: Notice board in Peckham where people posted messages of peace and tolerance.

 

Social Spaces: The Wrinkles of the City

We have blogged a lot about the work of photographer JR.  Many of his works address issues of gender and culture as he pastes giant sized images of people on buildings (and the top of trains also) around the world.  

I can't choose a favourite - but I really do love "The Wrinkles of the City' work he did in Los Angeles (Pic above) We can shout  or grumble about ageism - but doesn't this image do such a better job of adjusting attitudes to beauty?

Below one of my favourite photographs of all time.  I am not surprised JR got the Ted Prize last year - are you?