Note from a network discussion: Beyond command and control

NOTES OF A BETTER WAY DISCUSSION ON 12 NOVEMBER 2019 WITH PROFESSOR JOHN SEDDON, FROM VANGUARD CONSULTING

John Seddon’s latest book Beyond Command and Control explains what is wrong in prevailing models of services to the public: a system of control with budget management at its heart. Those who are employed to provide help are constrained by unit cost controls, eligibility thresholds, specialisation of function, and activity targets.  The consequence is that help is not provided ‘right first time’ and failure demand (a ‘revolving door’ for many users) is generated in huge quantities – comprising 90% or even more of all service activity. This, according to John Seddon, is the true story of why costs are rising in the public sector and elsewhere and why services are failing to improve.  The book looks at examples from utilities, banks, insurance and financial institutions as well as services in other sectors working with people with complex needs.

Managers currently focus much of their time on staff performance but should instead focus on the system as it is this that prevents staff from doing a good job and indeed the job they generally want to do. Digitalisation of services often makes things worse and often drives change rather than supporting it – it should be the last thing to do, not the first. The system of control needs to change and this requires three things:

• Knowledge of demand which can only be gained if leaders study for themselves what actually happens to real people in the system;

• A rigorous focus on the work which produces value for the customer/beneficiary, and cutting out everything else;

• Achievement of purpose in customer terms.

Change requires no plan – change is emergent, the scale and speed of the change cannot be known in advance.  The leader’s job is to study and change the system of control, and when this is done well the results speak for themselves. Workforce motivation and productivity increase when the workforce is given responsibility and flexibility, the services improve, and costs fall.

In discussion the following points were made:

1. Command and control exacerbates and creates inequality

Command and control systems embed and reinforce inequality.  Prescription and standardised forms of service delivery impact most negatively on those who are socially excluded or who have the most complex needs, excluding large numbers of people, and maintaining them at the margins of society.  First, the un-user friendly nature of many services makes it harder for them to access them and, second, when they do their needs are most likely to remain unmet, universal credit being one example. This may help to explain why efforts to tackle service inequality which focus on a presentational shift in staff behaviour and advertising to make themselves more welcoming to the so-called ‘hard to reach’ have often achieved much less than hoped for: the systems of control themselves need changing.

2. Funders, commissioners and regulators make things worse

Funders and commissioners and regulators reinforce the problem when they focus on top-down measures and compliance with standard specifications.  This accounts for the striking examples of institutions failing their users which have nonetheless passed inspections with flying colours.  Characteristically, when services are failing, command and control practices by funders and regulators increases, making the problem worse. 

Measures have value but should always be based on what users of services genuinely want from that service.  The best tactic is to ask how we would know whether we are doing a good job and then measure that.

3. Marketisation of public services is part of the problem

Marketisation of public services produces a focus on targets, unit costs and outputs, often the wrong ones from the service user viewpoint.  This makes it harder to achieve right-first-time services (let alone undertake preventative work).  But this model is showing increasing signs of strain in public service delivery, with well-known failures, and we can push back on this collectively and at operational level by collecting evidence about what is genuinely works best for users of services and about the inefficiency of excess costs caused by failure demand. 

Marketisation has also produced a tendency towards larger and larger service contracts, in the misguided belief that this can achieve economies of scale.  But this does not reduce cost and pushes aside locally responsive services, which are more likely to address need effectively, as was documented in an earlier Vanguard/Locality publication: Saving Money by Doing the Right Thing: Why ‘local by default’ must replace ‘diseconomies of scale’.

4. Command and control can lead to seeing people as ‘other’and seeking to impose norms

Command and control models can reinforce the tendency for service delivery organisations to see people in difficult circumstances as ‘other’, to focus only on their problems and deficits.  Because they push toward standardisation, the operating model can seek to impose ‘norms’ on people who are genuinely different, rather than build in flexibility to appreciate and respond to these differences. 

5. Charities are being pushed away from their mission by command and control

Many organisations in the charity sector have themselves adopted command and control models, and this produces huge tensions between their operations which are constrained by numerical targets and cost constraints, and their underlying values and mission, which at best is informed by user experience and expertise

6. Contracts can be challenged – be brave

Many charities have become complicit in a funding system which insists on compliance with command and control.  If they want to work with the State this is often seen as unavoidable, though it is possible to challenge it, as one of the participants had successfully done, mid contract, by showing how the measures were not working for their clients. 

7. Change to the commissioning model is starting to happen

There are some tentative signs of change in commissioning.  The Welsh Assembly has adopted a policy for working with people whose lives have come off the rails: starting with understanding what matters to them.  In Gywnedd this is leading to changes in commissioning practice.  An instance is given in John Seddon’s book:

Julie, head of adult services in a county council, describes the change as moving from asking “What’s the matter with you?” to “What matters to you?” Asking the former leads the service down the path of prescribing a set of predetermined service-driven solutions to a problem. The latter leads to a conversation about what a good life looks like to an individual citizen. That conversation may take two hours, two weeks or even two years to answer fully, but the important thing is to get a complete picture of the citizen and his or her requirements in their own context. 

We need to build confidence that we can change commissioning for the better – shifting practice away from low cost procurement into commissioning informed by good knowledge and good local relationships, where all parties can be more honest with each other, especially when things are not working as well as hoped for. 

For those in commissioning roles at mid-ranking levels it can be very difficult to challenge orthodox practice.  In the NHS for example a continuing stream of standardised top-down targets and regulation makes it very hard to take account of different local circumstances. 

One tactic would be to encourage curiosity among those in senior commissioning and strategy roles, so that they take time to study properly and see for themselves what is really going on.  We discussed one example where this is working well, partly because of good relationships between commissioners and contractors, and partly because the commissioners had good knowledge themselves of users and the services.  It can be more difficult to influence procurement where the account manager and procurer are different.

8. Ask the question ‘Why?’

These practices are so widespread that they can seem unchallengeable and overwhelming but one technique used by one of the participants in her own organisation is to ask the question, ‘Why?’  This encourages reflectiveness about what the purpose of different actions is intended to be, which then allows you to judge whether this is what was intended and whether the measures to deliver this purpose are working.

9. Seek 'better practice’ not best

We should avoid talking about ‘best practice’, and instead talk more about ‘better practice’ – and remember that this always begins with studying and acquiring knowledge in your own area – simply lifting practice from elsewhere may result in just another standardised delivery process.

10. Community development principles provide a model for listening to users about what works

We should also remember well-established community development principles, such as those advocated by Robert Chambers in the context of international rural development (putting the last first, finding out what people in poor communities themselves suggest and can do, rather than imposing solutions invented and controlled by privileged professionals coming in from outside).

11. A ‘whole systems’ approach is needed for complex issues, requiring collaborative leadership

Single organisations on their own can rarely develop services capable of tackling complex problems, and what is needed in order to develop meaningful responses is an alliance of agencies prepared to work together, and study together, looking at the system as a whole that delivers, for example, health, or homelessness.

12. Shifting the narrative

It is necessary to shift the narrative because the dominance of this model is a major barrier to change. It should be possible to build a direct, powerful story that explains what failure demand is and why it is so damaging, how we could run things differently and the benefits that would be produced. But it is difficult to do so.  Most journalists and most of the media have accepted the command and control narrative as an article of faith. When there are national scandals about public service failure the underlying reasons are rarely discussed, and it is always tempting to ascribe blame to individuals rather than to system failure.

Moreover, the impetus to run things differently rarely comes from rational discussion, and more often from direct personal encounters with what is really happening, which profoundly shake people’s assumptions, and produce the energy needed to make change.

It would be useful to tell the stories of how leaders have tried to move beyond command and control, the obstacles they have faced, and the tactics they have used to overcome them. 

It would also be powerful to tell the story ‘the other way round’ ie not through the eyes of managers but through the lived experience of service users.

13. Influencing the system

The Better Way network has some channels to influence practice at national government level, across the political spectrum, and we should make use of them, starting with the Call to Action for a Better Way launch at the end of November 2019.  At the least we should be encouraging Whitehall to stop doing things which make the system of command and control even worse. 

In his previous book The Whitehall Effect John Seddon documented the public service failures of government, and pointed to remedies, but it has proved extremely difficult to bring about real change at this level.  Having said that, there have been times when profound change has been achieved across government, and the current reliance on command and control thinking need not be permanent.

14. Change starts with us

For some of those involved in the discussion, their focus was on what they can do directly in their organisation to change the system.  For others, there was interest in how to counteract the dominant narrative and a belief that now might be a turning point. We ended by talking about the final Better Way principle:

‘Changing ourselves is better than demanding change from others. The best starting point is what we ourselves can do, putting the common good first and our vested interests last. The more we achieve, the more others will follow.’

We can seek to influence people within our reach, including those ‘just above us’: senior managers, funders, and so on, as well as colleagues within our organisations and networks. In so doing we can use human stories, translate the messages in ways that can be quickly understood, and encourage people to study for themselves.

Note form a roundtable: Collaboration and shared leadership so that people and communities come first

Better Way Roundtable, 5 June 2019

Introduction

 Caroline Slocock introduced the roundtable, pointing out that in the Better Way, we believe in collaboration and shared leadership because that way people and communities come first.  We’ve already started to explore how to do so through a number of essays in Insights for A Better Way, and blogs on the Better Way website, including from:

• Toby Lowe, who has written about how co-ordinated action not only better addresses structural causes, it also matches the complexity of individual lives, arguing for commissioning and funding to support this. 

• Cate Newnes-Smith would like to see more ‘holistic systems leaders’ who understand the real issues in people’s lives and work across organisations and sectors to deliver shared goals. 

• Polly Neate, who says that large charities should not compete against local charities, to To choose not to win, even though they can.

• Kathy Evans, whose organisation Children England created the Declaration of Interdependence, advocates listening to your heart, not the head, if you want to follow a Better Way.

• Audrey Thompson, who says we need ‘social connectors’ who can empower and link up individuals, particularly in disadvantaged communities. 

• Tom Levitt, who demonstrates that big companies are increasingly reaching out and working innovatively with charities toward shared goals. 

Collaboration - a perspective from the homelessness sector

Rick Henderson is CEO of Homeless Link which now has 780 organisations in its membership. Rick described various experiences of collaboration:

• The Making Every Adult Matter (MEAM) coalition was a largely successful collaboration to find better ways to support people with multiple disadvantage – across the fields of homelessness, mental health, criminal justice, and substance abuse, and including MIND, Homeless Link, Clinks and DrugScope (now Collective Voice).  The MEAM Coalition has had significant impact at national policy level, influencing the work of the Lottery, leading grant making foundations, and government as well. There were challenges – the founding partners were of different sizes, and there was for example a big difference between the funds they could contribute to make things happen. But the common purpose was clear and much was achieved.

• Homeless Link adopted a ‘partnerships by default’ policy.  Everything the organisation did would if possible involve at least one partner. The number of partnerships quickly doubled, and there were some gains, not least that more people could be reached. But the rationale was not explained or understood well enough, and practice has drifted back to unilateral work.

• Homeless Link attempted to form a strategic alliance on migrant destitution. This emerged from a ‘car-crash’ conference where it became clear that the homeless sector was failing to respond well to the changing demographic of homelessness, which included a sharp increase in migrants and refugees. Despite a promising start, the alliance failed, when two leading homeless charities decided to work with the Home Office to support repatriation efforts. It became clear that operating cultures were very different – homeless charities tend to be highly pragmatic, doing what is needed to, for example, help people off the streets, while the refugee sector tends to be driven by a particular set of values.  

Let’s not romanticise the importance of personal relationships. Without a clear common objective, and shared values, it is hard to collaborate successfully. 

Collaboration – a perspective from the refugee sector

Maurice Wren, CEO of the Refugee Council, pointed out that the term ‘refugee sector’ can be misleading.  There are around 1,000 migrant and refugee charities/NGOs. Most are under-resourced, especially for policy work.  Many are fiercely competitive for profile and position, and behaviours can be characterised by fear and suspicion.  In 2015, as a result of the Syrian emergency, the landscape changed and existing agencies were unsure whether new actors were allies or threats. 

There are rarely refugee specific solutions to the problems which refugees have. Most successes are process improvements, changes to regulations for example, behind the scenes, so it is difficult to point to a series of positive changes, although things might well have been worse with the work of the agencies.

It has been difficult to marshal and sustain a critical mass of collaboration. It has not been possible to build a movement. Attempts have implied a top-down model of leadership, reinforcing the difference between ‘professionals’ and ‘amateurs’. 

It might be more helpful to think about ecologies or ecosystems, where the notion of interdependence is forefront. This can produce more equality in the relationships, more voices which can be heard and respected.  It shifts the focus away from leadership and towards co-ordination and organisation.

The Detention Forum is a network of organisations working together to challenge the UK’s use of detention. Some of the 30 organisations which came together hold a highly antagonistic view of government; others are prepared to work with the state.  The Forum was however able to draw up a simple shared vision, and build a practice of collective decision making, respecting those who chose not to take part.  It became evident that the strength of the forum was in its diversity.  It was important to think long term, and about systems change. It is not realistic to expect members to change direction, but rather a gradual process of alignment of many years. It was necessary to invest in co-ordination of the Forum, for the larger members to behave in a more humble way, and for all to be willing to listen and be respectful.  The way the Forum worked and the values that were practised were more important than mission and goals.

Discussion

Social sector organisations tend to highlight the importance of shared values in discussions about collaboration, but some of the most effective collaboration can take place across sectors where values can be very different, but there is a well-defined common cause and mutual advantage.

Moreover, we should not assume a single set of values operates in the charity sector and another set of different values operates in the business sector.  Values can cross sectors, although more easily at the individual level, and less so at the institutional level.

Shared values can help to build strong teams within and across organisations, and storytelling produces a re-iteration of values, making them relevant and alive.  Values can stimulate spontaneity (mission does not have that effect, it tends to constrains action).

It takes time to build trust, and establish credibility. The models we use in the social sector make collaboration and shared leadership more difficult:

• The fetishisation of small differences is widespread in the social sector.

• Governance models encourage the primacy of organisations over collaborative endeavour.

• Planning gets in the way of spontaneity.

• There are risks in polite behaviour. If we only look for consensus and avoid conflict, differences are never allowed to surface, and when they do, they become destructive.

Coalescence is necessary to identify and bring about change.  For those in the social sector concerned with change and campaigning, working with others is nearly always necessary. In most cases social change organisations have few resources, so efforts to build alliances and systems thinking come naturally. 

Leadership for social change needs to be more about building relationships and alliances rather than managing resources (although that is still not well recognised in recruitment practice).  For a practice of collaboration to flourish we need leaders who are encouraged to behave as human beings first and foremost, with a willingness to encourage others to develop as leaders. Shared leadership means devolving decision making as close to people as possible, equipping them to become the designers and drivers of change. 

The focus on impact, and in particular the expectation that individual organisations should be able to demonstrate their impact, is damaging.  It is much better to focus on shared outcomes, and on collaboration as a good in itself.

Our world is wired for organisational growth but we need to rewire it for collaboration. We know this is possible; for example, most commissioning makes enemies of friends, but it doesn’t have to be this way; there are positive examples of alliance commissioning in Plymouth, Sheffield and elsewhere.

There is a particular challenge for larger established organisations, and funders, and how they should behave with new entrants and insurgents. Many are wary, but when they do create space for emergence and decide to support newcomers this can make a big difference.

In collaborations where there are inequalities between large and small organisations, we assume that the large ones should be in the driving seat.  But that could be inverted. Local or specialist organisations, which may be closer to lived experience, could be in the driving seat, with any partnership funding flowing through them. One current example is the Health Now initiative, where Lottery funding comes to small charity Groundswell, and much larger national charities Shelter and Crisis are sub-contractors. 

In a competitive capitalist society, size and money matters, and ruthlessness is admired. But in the social sector the most effective smaller organisations are adept at building their power, and those with most resources and in positions of relative power don’t have to ‘act like dicks’.

Note from a roundtable: Organisations without walls

BETTER WAY ROUNDTABLE, 16 MAY 2019

Introduction

Caroline Slocock from Better Way identified the problem: organisations can operate as if they are an end in themselves, erect walls between people and between organisations, hoarding rather than sharing power, failing to collaborate.  They can build a poverty industry, seeing their business as achieving delivery targets, and people as units of production, or as the problem. But of course there are many counter-examples, as articles in our Insights for A Better Way document and blogs on the Better Way website illustrate. Many of these are focusing on building communities not services. At their best they engage all elements of a community and unlock its power.

• Karin Woodley, who reminds us to keep our organisations ‘personal’ and practise ‘radical listening’: communities should be seen as partners, not consumers, and be representative of those they serve.

• Clare Wightman, who demonstrates that people in the community can sometimes provide better support than that provided by organisations and services.

• Ollie Batchelor, writing about how they’ve established a food co-op, rather than a foodbank service, in Gateshead, who says it’s a community ‘where every person matters and brings their own strengths and qualities to the table’.

• Sona Mahtani, who explains how the Selby Centre in Tottenham brings a diverse group of people together from right across the community and ‘unleashes creativity, opportunity and energy people create themselves’.

Radical listening

Karin Woodley from Cambridge House described how our sector has been walking a path towards self-destruction.   We have broken down service users lives into disconnected problems, and as a result have stigmatised users and failed to combat oppression, serving instead the patriarchal requirements of funders and stakeholders.  We undervalue lived experience, and constantly marginalise people. Our models of tackling exclusion have become complacent. 

But a practice of radical listening can help organisations to become authentic change-makers, transferring control back to the people we work with, bringing people with lived experience to the fore, and stimulating outside-in continuous improvement. 

Organisations need to act boldly to change their own composition. At Cambridge House the CEO decided that for six months the only people to be recruited were those who had been in prison, and made it happen.   

To become radical listeners is a real challenge. Our support models imply that service users are not as capable or as confident as us. Our communication is undermined by saying too much. We need to get much better at engaging people we work with in conversations where we listen rather than talk.  

We need to learn, in group and one-to–one meetings, how to place the emphasis on questions rather than propositions. We need to stop ourselves recapping what has been said, making generalisations, categorising, joining the dots, proposing solutions.  Only in this way will we create space for authentic insight to emerge.

We need to develop a theory of change which is based on the agency of the people we work with.  We can only succeed in this if we liberate our front-line delivery staff, stop undertaking short term projects, and see ourselves not as in the service of the state but rather as radical activists for change.

A community not a service

Clare Wightman from Coventry Grapevine acknowledges that formal services are sometimes needed but what people usually need most is what services can’t provide.  Love, companionship, friendship.  Services are limited but what people will do for each other can be unlimited. Clare told us about a boy with Downs Syndrome and his mother.  The boy was locked out of school, left in the playground in the rain, punched someone and ran off.  Services were offered – counselling, a parenting programme – but this help didn’t help. Grapevine connected the boy and the mother to people who were prepared to help as friends, who would be there for them in tough times.  At school the boy had been rejected for the school pantomime, and failed the literacy requirements for the drama courses, but it turned out he had acting skills, and, encouraged by his friends, is now a successful actor and dance artist.  

Coventry Grapevine received funding to help 1,000 people to become physically active.  Rather than a project or a programme, they build a social movement, mobilising people in the community to mobilise other people, leading from the back.  They ignored the targets, in the expectation that the numbers would look after themselves, and they did – and moreover, four of the six initiatives that people set up as a result are still going.  

The difference is this. A service model usually means providing limited help for people who need it, focusing on a particular problem. A community model is fundamentally different. It taps into richness and abundance, with multiple mutually beneficial relationships, producing lots of additional support and activity.

Discussion

Community is what we do and how we do it – not simply a synonym for place.  Community models can enhance accessibility, especially where people are free to act on their own ideas and run with them, rather than fit into a pre-set model.  But we do need to acknowledge that not all community models operate in accessible ways, and some groups can be made to feel unwelcome in some community settings, because of race, or class, or other characteristics. 

Some of us feel that there is an important and legitimate role for government, to help society become fairer, and kinder. Others that government will always be an impediment because it cannot listen well, it always tries to control and direct.

Our responsibility is to be catalysts for change, not produce the change our leaders want to see. 

Radical listening can be informed by the practice of coaching, or of action learning. It requires more than passive listening, for example asking questions in the spirit of inquiry. 

Most forms of ‘co-production’ fall short of radical listening. Radical listening implies a shift away from services, and towards the practice of mobilising people to mobilise others. It implies that design and decision making should be much closer to those affected.  Using techniques such as community organising can make subsidiarity real. 

In the field of homelessness for example, people can become institutionalised by the charities, separated from wider society.  The task must always be to reconnect people to society.

How can we nurture more radical listening, and bring about a shift from services to community? We need a national narrative to promote these ideas.  We need better mechanisms to help people determine the outcomes and benefits which matter most to them, rather than being expected to conform to those established by remote governments. We need to find ways of creating space and time for people to come together to make the difference they want to see.  We need positive ways of dealing with negative community behaviours. We need to reward bravery, courage, the entrepreneurial spirit. We need more charitable trusts and foundations and public institutions willing to think in this way. 

Note from a roundtable: Tactics for Practitioners

Tactics for practitioners

BETTER WAY ROUNDTABLE, 4 APRIL 2019

Introduction

Caroline Slocock introduced the roundtable, which is intended to identify tactics so that people and communities can thrive, not just cope.  We’ve already started to explore how to do so through a number of essays in Insights for A Better Way, and blogs on the Better Way website, which included contributions from:

• Edel Harris, who says that Local Cornerstone is ‘throwing away the rulebook’ and empowering front-line staff so they have space to make time for people.

• Matt Kepple, who says we should create a network of ‘curious’ people and challenges us to create our own version of Wikipedia so that we can share what works and become a collective force for good. 

• Colin Falconer, who explains how the Foyer Federation established Advantaged Thinking for practitioners to ‘build on strengths’ and avoid ‘the branding of disadvantage’.

• Richard Wilson, who explains that good relationships between practitioners and those they work with are key to ‘Good’ and ‘Bad Help’.

• Graeme Duncan, who identifies principles that are more likely to lead to better education than damaging high-stakes targets. 

• David Robinson, who advocates putting ‘relationships, rather than transactions’ into practice and also writes movingly about the importance of the exercise of humanity in services.

• Steven Platts, who shows how at Groundswell the ‘Give a lot, Get a lot’ ethos works, bringing in experts in lived experience to support people facing homelessness.

Advantaged thinking

Colin Falconer pointed out that attempts to redress the balance between meeting the needs of people and developing their strengths has a long history which can be traced back to Aristotle’s notions of a ‘good life’ and in recent years has found expression in Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) and in other strengths-based approaches.

Advantaged Thinking was developed at the Foyer Federation as an alternative narrative about young people designed to inspire rather that to focus on the negative.  Seven tests were developed:

 ·        How we talk about people (without stigmatising)

·        How we understand people (potential, not just problems)

·        How we work with people (encouraging risk taking and trust)

·        How we invest in people (beyond surviving and c0ping)

·        What we expect for people (for them to thrive)

·        How we involve people as their own solutions (so they are agents of change)

·        How we act to find, develop, support and challenge thinking in others (to make all of the above more widely possible)

 Colin encouraged us to consider how we behave as parents, when a child is still crawling. A disadvantaged-thinking parent would assume the child will never walk, and tell the child that they will always have to crawl, and they would put in place crawl-related therapy and similar measures. An advantaged thinking parent would encourage the child to learn to walk, based on a belief that they will walk.

 A social Wiki

 Matt Kepple described his work to establish the Makerble platform to make it easier for organisations to track impact.  The wider challenge he said is how to make best practice more discoverable.  The problem we face in the social sector is that the pace of iteration is too slow.  James Dyson produced 5,126 versions of his vacuum cleaner that hat failed before he made one that worked. We do produce changes and improvements, but if evaluation and dissemination only happens at the end of a programme we are held back. We can de-risk and accelerate iteration by sharing and  building a community of practice, but our primary methods, conferences and training events, only reach senior staff, not front-line workers.  Can we learn from the extraordinary success of Wikipedia and Spotify, for example, to create an on-line library of best practice targeted to outcomes and beneficiary groups, and personalised so that the people using the library get what they need?

Much of the work of the social sector is about helping people and communities progress from a negative position (‘minus one’) to a just about tolerable position (‘zero’), whereas the real prize is to move further, to a positive position (‘plus one’):

Discussion

 In the discussion, the following points were made: 

• An open-source approach to intellectual property is essential to achieve rapid progress in the social sector. The late Jane Slowey, who led the Foyer Federation as Advantaged Thinking was being developed, was always willing to share with anyone interested.

• Models similar to the seven tests of advantaged thinking have been developed in other sectors.  For example the five features of health creating practices developed by the New NHS Alliance: listening and responding, truth-telling, strengths-focus, self-organising and power-shifting.

• There have been examples of successful on-line social sector sharing platforms. One is the Rightsnet system, developed by LASA, which is a platform for thousands of advisers across the UK to stay up to date with the latest social welfare law news and case law developments, to get casework support, to test their ideas and share their experience, and to network with other advice workers. Similary there is a Refugee Legal Group online network.  These have been developed as voluntary communities, where any investment of time is amply rewarded. They require good administration and scale, so that information is constantly refreshed.  

• It is very difficult for new entrants to gain critical mass, and activities such as a festival of ideas may be needed to generate initial content on a particular cause. A feedback loop, even a rating system, can help to build trust and confidence in the platform. But if possible it would be best to use an existing platform rather than invent a new one.

• Do these platforms reinforce a tendency to apply models which do things ‘for ‘and ‘to’ people, rather than to help them to do things for themselves?  Not necessarily, and Colin described how communities of practice have developed in Australia to explore advantaged thinking techniques together and to involve the whole organisation.

• In places, we need better platforms which can help people and organisations to come together to consider what matters and to measure impact.  But we should be wary on imposing systems.

• Sharing platforms can operate best whether there is also an intention to change from above. For example, in Wigan the local authority leadership has decided that asset based community development approaches should be applied to every aspect of the council’s work, and all staff are required to have basic training in the principles. Strategic determination of this kind can create the conditions for a learning community to flourish.

• Social sector organisations tend to hoard their own resources. They are very reluctant to give money to people directly, to investment in them so that they can make change on their own terms. But perhaps much more of this would be a good thing, to build agency and self-determination. A recent book, Utopia for Realists, identifies examples (including work with long term rough sleepers in London) where providing people with money was more effective that providing them with conventional services.

• It is wrong to assume that all social interventions are designed to support people and to help them flourish in their lives. This is not always the case.  As has been revealed recently, the immigration services were designed to create a hostile environment. Much of the benefit system seems designed to control rather than support people. We have set up a childcare system which privileges those in high-income work and disadvantages those on benefits. 

• In such cases it is not enough to introduce better practice (eg asset based models of working). The systems themselves need to be challenged and dismantled. It is sometimes possible to appeal to notions of ‘fair play’, and to build a coalition capable of achieving a change to a national system which is treating people unjustly or holding them back.  In other cases it is possible to find some common ground even where there are significant policy or cultural differences, and make some gains.

• Wherever there are opportunities to build better systems, models like Advantaged Thinking will be needed, and effective communities of practice that can share learning and that can engage users and frontline staff in design.

 There is an excitement about technology-enabled, not technology-led solutions. Tactics so that people and communities can thrive, not just cope, need to be both top-down as well as bottom-up. Our efforts need to build critical mass, and become viral.  In that process we not only move towards ‘plus one’ practice, but also start to change the national story.

Note from an online roundtable: Sharing Power

Introduction

Caroline Slocock from Better Way introduced the discussion topic: how to create opportunities for more people, especially those who are usually overlooked, to participate in setting the agenda.  We need to help more people develop a ‘constructive sense of entitlement’. We need a shift in political life away from command and control behaviours, listening better, and thinking locally wherever possible.

We’ve already started to explore how to do so through a number of essays in Insights for A Better Way, and blogs on the Better Way website, which include contributions from:

·       Sue Tibballs, who asks people to make more use of the immense latent ‘social power’ of civil society.

·       So Jung Rim, who tells how the Social Innovation Exchange is creating platforms that bring in diverse voices.

·       Richard Bridge, who argues that local authorities need to distribute power more equally.

·       Mark Johnson, who writes about how he’s challenged the deep-seated bias against experts in lived experience in the criminal justice system and built a movement.

·       Simon Shaw, who explains how Food Power is creating opportunities for people experiencing food poverty to set the agenda.

·       Sufina Ahmed, who points out that sharing power has to start with understanding power and privilege. 

·       Rhiannon Bearne, who call for a redirection of effort towards making rather than shaping power.

·       Avril McIntyre, who considers how to help others in ways which genuinely empower them.

Community organising

Nick Gardham from Community Organisers described the experience of community organising which listens to people and brings them together to take collective action on things they care about. He explored the concept of ‘sharing power’. This is not the same as giving power, or even shifting power. It implies a sense of responsibility on all sides. It requires trust and this is difficult for institutions and even more so for the majority of people, who do not believe that they can affect change, and are fearful of becoming visible. It can therefore be important to start on a small scale, with lunch clubs, litter-picks for example. Even small actions like these produce stories of personal change. They can and sometimes do also lead to campaigns for wider system change, and generate pressure on institutions to change their behaviour. So the experience of sharing power can produce conflict as well as collaboration. But sharing power does not happen of its own accord – it requires resources. The government funding in recent years to train community organisers is an example of what can and has been achieved.  

The Power Project

Steve Reed, Shadow Civil Society Minister, described the experience of introducing a Co-operative Council model in Lambeth when he was Council Leader. There was rapid improvement, but the gains fell away quickly when local policies shifted. It is not enough to address inequalities of wealth, health outcomes, etc, without addressing inequalities of power, which underpin them all. A non-violent revolution is needed, to take power from those who have it and abuse it, and share it with everyone else. This requires actions in different spheres: the economy, in community life, in local and national politics.  Politics is broken.  It is too remote from people. The social contract, that the proceeds of prosperity and growth should be shared fairly, has failed – a minority have accumulated even more. Big data has been used by companies to exploit us. We have failed to respond to the climate crisis. Our social institutions and our current forms of liberal democracy have failed to protect people, and so people are turning their backs on them. Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, the re-emergence of neo-fascism across Europe are all the result in a loss of public confidence in liberal democracy.  But we cannot give up on democracy – rather we need to ‘double down on democracy’.  This will require bottom up political renewal accompanied by change at the top.  We need to give people direct power, forms of democracy which will allow the workforce to take back a fair share. We need to nurture and develop the capacity of people to self-organise, and institutions which encourage this, radical models of devolution and participation. There are many barriers.  For example stasis within organisations – people in leadership roles are incentivised to maintain the organisational forms which have placed them at the top. There is always resistance to the threat that power will be taken away.  Politicians are threatened by the idea of building the capacity of people to take decisions themselves, and ensure that they are kept as outsiders, and people have little choice but to take up placards. We cannot take democracy for granted. Throughout history in most parts of the world the default position has been the autocracy of the ‘strong man’.  However, the appetite for democratic participation is evident. It can be seen in Barking & Dagenham, in Wigan, among climate change action groups, in the digital citizens’ platforms in Seoul.  A new form of politics is trying to emerge. We need a new settlement between citizen and state, more respectful relationships, a break- up of public and private and digital monopolies. The Power Project aims to understand this and too build a movement for a radical transformative type of politics.

Discussion 

In the discussion, the following points were made:  

• Powerless is a lack of connection. Relationships – deep value relationships – are needed to help people build trust, come together, and discover their own power.  Connectedness and solidarity are the antidote to powerlessness. We should consider how to build connection, and therefore collective efficacy, and how those in a privileged place can help with this. We should also consider how to incorporate relationship-friendly design in many aspects of our lives if we are to overcome powerlessness. 

• There were different views about whether it is necessary to take power from those who have excessive amounts in order to increase power among those who have very little, or whether power is potentially infinite, and therefore the task should be to build power among those who have little.  It was suggested that communities are latently powerful because all political power ultimately derives from them. It was also noted that even the most powerful can feel powerless in some circumstances, and that the oppressed can become the oppressor. But the reality is that the somewhat powerless are those who most exclude the completely powerless. If we are to achieve a power shift, people and agencies will need to give up some power, but will usually be resistant to this, or even where the leadership is willing to make a change, they will find it hard to do so.  So we will need measures which support, guide, and reward the shifting and the sharing of power.

• We need to help people understand how political systems work, and to deal honestly with unrealistic expectations.  Concentrations of power are a problem.  Power always agglomerates and perpetuates itself. In this country power is concentrated in Westminster and in the two party system.  We need measures such as proportional representation or sortition (selection of people at random to exercise decision making, as with the jury system) to break it up. Participatory forms of democracy, as in participatory budgeting, and subsidiarity in decision making, are other measures which can resist the tendency towards centralisation of power.  There appears to be an appetite in some parts of government to do things differently, as indicated in the Community Paradigm report from the New Local Government Network.

• Power can operate horizontally (power with) rather than vertically (power over). We should develop institutions and practices which encourage the former and discourage the latter. The funding of social programmes should allow activity beyond formal limits when people have the appetite to go further themselves.  It is possible to build a set of principles and tools, sing for example common good thinking, to encourage people to come together and share power. A lot of what is needed is already known.  For example, a recent Big Lottery Fund report identified what is needed to help people take on power in the context of place:  

o   Know the history, background and context of place

o   Invest in people and relationships

o   Work with others to build a shared vision for change

o   Start small, try different things

o   Allow for variation

o   Be realistic. Accept mistakes and failure, make space for learning and reflection.

o   Keep looking for change.

• If we can create connected, accountable communities we will be better placed to deal with the big national challenges, it was suggested. Forging relationships helps build movements such as MeToo and how people with HIV made change happen by demanding it.

• However local action is not sufficient: locality can be the seat of disempowerment, a bastion of white and male privilege.  It may be that ‘power’ is not the best way to organise our thinking.  A focus on power, and how people can discover their power, tends to side-line considerations of equality and inclusion. People do not start from an equal place.   

• There is a relationship between power and wellness – listening, responding, self-organising, truth telling are the things which make people well, and powerful. 

• Some parts of the public services system are attempting to share power, though co-production, co-design etc, notably in the health services, but institutional change is proving extremely difficult in practice. The NHS Alliance, for example, has developed a model for power sharing.

• A sense of entitlement is well developed among those who have power and wealth. Can we develop a sense of entitlement among other groups, including young people?  Within our educational system we need to do much more to build an appreciation of what it is to be an individual in society. The most vulnerable may not be able to run things, but they still deserve a voice and to be listened to, and responded to.  We need to provide support to help people build their voice.  

• The ways in which power is built and maintained is not only through hard power (coercion, legislation, military and economic systems) but also through soft power (persuasion, culture, values, etc).  We should not underestimate how language, narrative, story-telling can act as a disruptor to prevailing power, or reinforce it.  If we are to shift power we need to communicate differently, to ask questions rather than tell people, to encourage others to speak, to learn how to hear silence as well. 

• In a delta the pilots who live a fragile subsistence life know the intricate waterways and therefore have some power, because the ships which pass through depend upon the pilot for safe navigation. If the delta was to be bombed the waterways would became clear, the pilots would lose power. Do we need to empower people to be pilots, or bomb the delta – in other words work within the existing system, or change the system?

It may be that a shift in power and a sharing of power will require significant internal culture change, resources to make a sustained difference, and the need for both bottom up and top down actions.

Note from a network discussion: What would a Better Way place look like?

NOTE OF A BETTER WAY DINNER DISCUSSION, 26 NOVEMBER 2018  

 Summary of key points                                            

• It is vital to create a sense of agency amongst local people – a kind of constructive sense of entitlement to a better life – to make this work. 

• Building connections between people and within communities is necessary so that change can be community-led.

• Design and social infrastructure matters. Meeting spaces are important and communities can be designed to be inclusive and to facilitate connections, or not.

• Communities do have ‘hidden’ resources on which to build, as demonstrated by the closing down of streets to cars to create play and meeting spaces for communities.  Publicly owned land or buildings are another such resource.  New funds are nonetheless needed to enhance social infrastructure in some communities; but local people can contribute eg through the creation of locally owned energy companies; or community shares; or through business donations to local wealth funds.

• Funding of staff time to make things happen is important too, including funded social connectors, as exist in the Hackney and Hastings examples discussed.

• A Better Way place would work for everyone in the community and be designed through its housing and communal spaces to encourage social connections.  It would have a high street devoted not just to commercial but also community activities and places to meet.  Businesses would be committed to their communities and business rates could be used to incentivise healthy high streets and good employment practices.

In more detail..

Jess Steele opened the discussion drawing on her own experience in Hastings.  Often neighbourhoods are faced with a false choice between gentrification and decline.  Capital gains resulting from regeneration were often lost to the community itself, whereas taking over ownership of a big community building tethered gains to the community.  To make it happen, you needed a group of enthusiastic people but there are people from every background who can do it.  They were now trying to develop a ‘common treasury of adaptable ideas’ to attract other people to Hastings and create a fund of ideas others could use.

 Igniting an impulse to act and a constructive sense of entitlement

We discussed the fact that one of the challenges was lack of time and also, amongst those who had time, such as the unemployed or retired people, igniting the impulse to act.  Creating a space to meet can help.  A sense of personal agency is critical, we concluded, but education can kick it out of us, and many people are just shattered by  the problems of making ends meet and managing the precariousness of their lives, for example, created by zero hours contracts or universal credit.  This sense of agency can be much stronger in affluent communities.  An example was given of a threat to a park in St Albans and how the local residents stopped it from happening, and now run the park themselves.  If everyone had the ‘sense of entitlement’ that these mainly middle class residents demonstrated, local and national government would be challenged far more successfully than it is.

Shared leadership and common goals

It was agreed that shared leadership and common goals is vital to transforming a place.  Although in theory the voluntary sector might play a leading role, at present it tends to be focused on the money and lacks agency. 

 Could collective impact, place based approaches help transform a neighbourhood?  This could create its own problems, especially if finance is linked to it, as in the West London Zone, we were told.  It requires some organisations to give up doing things, which they may resist.  It also depends on common measurement approaches in real time.  Measures are often driven by an external player and there is an underlying lack of power in this situation.  It has happened in the States successfully but family foundations that are financing this are more generous so there is not a problem of scarcity.  The USA is further advanced on measurement.

 Context matters

We discussed how the context in London and the South East and many northern cities was very different with austerity hitting harder in the north.  Many more play spaces had been closed, for example, and finding funds for repairs of buildings was far more of a challenge.  The economy was worse.

 In Newcastle, the choice between gentrification and decline did not exist.  Local charities were going under. One building had been given to a charity on a 99 year lease but this was undercapitalised and went bust.  Even where there was money, a top down approach can undermine otherwise good initiatives.  The Big Lottery had funded a participatory budgetary exercise in one community which led to a decision to reclaim the lanes behind their estate.  But in the end this was undermined by fly-tipping and the local council - without consultation - deciding to use the space for communal bins.  In Newcastle, the answers lay more in bringing services together than community ownership.  There was money in Newcastle, near the centre, but it was a struggle for less advantaged parts of the city to get hold of it. 

 Good design to promote social connections

It is often said ‘get it right for children and you get it right for everyone’.  UNICEF has a framework for creating child-friendly cities through the participation of cities, though this in itself is not sufficient.  Hackney was currently advertising for a post to put this into practice.  The Mayor is very interested in the design of the environment and housing.  It is important that children have safe places to play unsupervised, ideally in front of people’s homes, and this helps build social capital within a community.  In Hackney, they were closing streets for children to play in for 2 hours, funded by Hackney’s public health budget.  London Play have described children as social pollinators, and in Hackney not just children but also adults come out and take up roles like stewarding and making tea.  Importantly, this had happened not spontaneously but by Hackney creating a part-time worker, and equally importantly this was a local resident from one of the estates, who could facilitate peer to peer activity.  Around 50 streets were involved, 30-40 actively.

Building community wealth

We talked about the importance of social infrastructure – not just public services within a community but also its buildings and built environment and the social capital or connections within it.  Social assets are created and maintained not just by public sector resources but also by the community and social sectors and the private sector.  How could we build a social infrastructure fit for the 21st century and also tackle disparities between communities?

 One idea that Caroline Slocock has been pursuing is a national Social Wealth Fund which might draw on public land as one of its assets and might also help seed local wealth funds which could also be supplemented from various sources.  Bristol had established independently managed funds which included donations from local businesses, for example.  There were also many local authorities which had set up not for profit businesses, for example, for solar energy, and some were setting up recycling waste businesses, which could generate funds for this purpose.  There are community share schemes and also wealthy people who had attachment to a community they’d grown up in might be prepared to contribute, to give other examples.

 What would a Better Way place look like?

Finally, we talked about what a Better Way place would look like.  It would be designed around people, with pedestrianised areas and centres in which people don’t just shop but can meet and carry out communal and educational activities.  These communities would work for everyone and be inclusive to people of all ages and backgrounds.  Housing developments would be designed to encourage contact and to get people to work together and would have built in social infrastructure.  There might be communal gardens in addition to private space, car sharing schemes, places to meet etc (nb contrast some new developments where seating is made deliberately uncomfortable and places for young people to congregate are actively designed out). In some countries, ‘parklets’ have been created out of parking spaces and pop up shops have taken the place of cars. Local businesses would be committed to their communities.  Business rates might be used as an incentive eg higher rates for harmful businesses like gambling and lower rates for those that pay the living wage.

Note from a Better Way Dinner: Collaborative Commissioning

Better Way Collaborative Commissioning

NOTE OF A BETTER WAY DINNER, 14 NOVEMBER 2018

Summary of key points:

• The starting point should not be ways to deliver a pre-determined contract more collaboratively but a genuine discussion with partners about what a place is trying to achieve, with the aim of achieving a shared vision.  This should be a whole systems review which also looks at all the resources in a community, not just public sector funds.  This needs time and investment, including investment in training commissioners to see themselves as architects of collaboration.

• Decisions on how to achieve that vision should start from what would best work for a particular place.  A decision tree would help determine whether grants or competitive tendering or other options are best; and - where competitive tendering still takes place - what criteria should apply eg on local knowledge.

• The true costs of competitive tendering should be made clear in that decision-making process.  Many voluntary organisations are devoting considerable and very scarce resources to it which could be much better deployed, for example on helping to facilitate citizen participation.

• Citizen participation is important but needs to be well delivered and properly resourced, especially where communities currently feel disempowered, disenchanted or are divided.

In more detail:

Steve Wyler started by outlining the plans in the Government’s recently published civil society strategy, including a commitment to collaborative commissioning, Citizen Commissioners,  a revival of grant-making, an enhancement of the Social Value Act and a bringing together public and other resources within a community.

Members talked about their experience of some of these things.  In Alison Nabarro’s area, Sutton, Citizens Commissioners already existed and were run by a volunteer centre, and there were also Young Commissioners.  They were brought in as required by commissioners.  On domestic violence, which was a big issue in their area, they were looking at how all the money was currently spent and how it could be used better.  Another model was the process followed for recommissioning the CVS through a competitive process which involved a board including voluntary sector practitioners.  Yet another model of collaboration was Sutton Together, a consortium of 3 organisations for winning advice contracts.

The case for ‘good competition’

We talked about the case for competition in terms of opening up markets, preventing nepotism, providing transparency and ensuring equal opportunities.  There were circumstances in which it was merited. But we also agreed that competition was not always necessary or desirable. Where it was used, the criteria set were very important eg weight being given to local knowledge, as in Hackney on play services.

The costs of competition should be made much clearer

The costs of competitive tendering should be made far clearer to aid decision making on where it was merited and cost-effective.  The Third Sector Research Centre’s longitutinal studies of the voluntary sector have shown just how much voluntary sector bodies have had to invest in the business development function.

Collaborative commissioning

What we thought was really important was not collaborative tendering, where much of the discussion tended to focus, but genuinely collaborative commissioning in which there was an onus to genuinely understand the territory and organisations and individuals were invited to take part in discussing what was required.  Richard Wilson was going to do some work on commissioning and would share it with the group. 

Shared vision and a whole systems approach

‘Never ever start by talking about the money’ should be the maxim.  The development of a shared vision was essential, as in places like Plymouth and Bristol.  Sutton was another example, where they had engaged in collaborative planning, setting up a community development action group.  Time is an essential ingredient, and training may also be useful.  It would be important to start at a very high level ie not just focusing on an existing service but on the whole system and looking at all resources, not just the public sector.

 Training commissioners to encourage collaboration might help redefine their role as the architects of collaboration.  The social sector needs to collaborate more with itself, let alone with others, and this also requires a shift in approach and investment.

 A decision tree for deciding on best delivery options

After this process, a judgement should be made on the actual state of services and what is in the best interests of a place.  Market stewardship should be considered.  A decision-tree might be helpful about which options to pursue in different cases.

 Tools to support collaboration

The collective impact model as used in the West London Zone was one way of creating collective measurement of impact and recognising that no one organisation could achieve an outcome.  Shared data is critical. CVS could play a role in collaboration.  For example, in the past Rotherham CVS had worked with the NHS as a trusted partner and given grants to it that the CVS disburses to smaller groups at its discretion. 

Citizen involvement and participatory budgeting

Participatory budgeting had until recently dropped off the agenda and it was said that it had got a bad name.  We discussed some positive examples.  A BLF-funded Ageing Better programme, designed to overcome social isolation, included a participatory budgeting exercise ran by Hackney CVS: 30 expressions of interest from community groups were voted on by a meeting of 500 residents. In Sutton, Citizen Commissioners took part in expert panels.  There had also been a Fairness Commission in Sutton too.  There were also digital models for engaging people.  Experience suggests that much depends on how these ideas are executed but also history matters.  Some communities are more inclined to engage than others.  Participation needs resources but these could be unlocked by not having to invest in staff and staff time to win competitive contracts. 

Note from a network discussion: Better Way social wealth

Social wealth – note of a discussion among Better Way members, 13th November 2018

In recent years social infrastructure has been depleted as Caroline Slocock has set out in a recent Community Links report for the Early Action Task Force:

‘Britain has a proud history of creating a rich social infrastructure, compared to many other countries. But recently there has been significant disinvestment in the physical assets and preventative services that are an important part of social infrastructure, potentially leading to a further downward spiral.’

This disinvestment has impoverished communities across the country, hitting some especially hard, especially in the poorest places.  This is not only about the dismantling of public services, such as youth services for example, but also about many other things which matter to people in the areas where they live, for example parks, clean air, shopping facilities,  places to meet, and play areas.

We noted that social infrastructure is created not just by the public but also the social and private sectors.  A combination of resources will be needed, including public sector funds (the new post-Brexit Shared Prosperity Fund for example), private sector contributions, and the deployment of land and property, in order to make good what has been lost and to build afresh.  Pension funds might play a role.

A great deal of previous infrastructure investment, for example much that took place in successive regeneration programmes, did not achieve the hoped-for benefits. So how can we create funds which do not simply continue business as usual?  What are the ‘rules’ which might produce something better?  We felt the following principles were especially important

• Local people in the driving seat in terms of design and control (not simply ‘consulted’)

• A core aim of rebuilding cultural and social capability.

• Planning for the long term and aiming to achieve enduring benefit.

We also believe that the best social infrastructure is capable of reducing community divisions, for example those produced by differences in ethnicity, wealth, age.  Conscious and unconscious bias runs in all directions (eg people might be experienced as intimidating because they are wealthy or because they are poor) and this can best be demystified at a human level. However a lot of community initiatives are only appealing to a small section of the population, and this is partly because funding usually requires that activities are targeted on those regarded as in greatest need – but a truly social infrastructure needs to appeal to all sections of the population.

Conclusions

Our conclusions were as follows:

• In some places there are simply not enough community facilities or services, or of the right kind.

• Many traditional community building models are insufficient (they appeal to a minority, and do not connect people enough). We need to promote those models which engage many people not the few.  The Selby Centre in Tottenham is an example - many cultures, one community.

• A bigger focus on cultural infrastructure is needed. The mixing of genres – creative fusion – can attract new audiences and widen participation, and can be commercially successful at the same time

• Finance is often necessary – and there is a strong case to invest in social infrastructure.

• It’s necessary to create a sense of common ownership, mutual benefit and interest in the community. We shouldn’t just look to the public sector to contribute finance, but also businesses and the community itself, appealing to self-interest as well as to altruism (for example helping companies understand that investing in community improvement is a sound business decision as it can improve quality of life for employees and increase property values).  Community shares can be one way of contributing. 

• Funding by itself is not sufficient to produce social wealth, and when poorly applied can drive behaviours which are deeply damaging to community resilience and confidence. Who controls the finance and who controls the infrastructure really matters.  We need more mechanisms which allow spending power to be in the hands of local people, individually and collectively, and digital platforms are beginning to extend possibilities for this.

• Where funds are available, they should be spent locally wherever possible, to create economic and social multiplier effects.

• Funds should be deployed in ways which reduce the tendency for money to be absorbed in the running costs of provider organisations, and instead flow through to energise community life more directly.

Note from a network discussion: Better Way Politics

Better Way Politics – note of a discussion among Better Way members, 7th November 2018

Politics has become a dirty word, and many people don’t want to have anything to do with it.  And yet the ancient Greeks had a word for private individuals who were foolish enough not to engage in the public world of politics: idiotes.  Members of the Better Way are starting to imagine what a different, healthier form of politics might look like, what mechanisms might help, and what might attract more people – including the next generation – to want to play a part in political life.

1.      What is wrong with politics?

We sense that politics as currently practised makes it difficult for Better Way practices to flourish. 

This is partly because the system of party politics at national and local levels means that politicians, whatever their good intentions, feel compelled to demonstrate their effectiveness through command and control behaviours, often peddling false certainties, and trading people’s welfare for votes. 

It is also, more fundamentally, because of the way in which everyday political discourse takes place, policy is formed and decisions are made, with suitably qualified  ‘professionals’ in the dominant role, and most people feeling alienated from the political processes that frame their lives. 

We believe that the politics we have at present generates an ‘us and them’ mindset, and the consequences are pervasive across our public culture and our public services.  We can see this in how systems operate, how things are measured, how people are treated, and the effect is dehumanising.  From the perspective of a ‘service user’ the behaviours which our politics ultimately produce are deeply unsatisfactory, as demonstrated in a blog from Love Barrow Families (which works in Barrow-in-Furness with families facing multiple and severe disadvantage):

‘How can you be expected to build a relationship and come to understand each other if it’s already geared up for termination? The person will know that you’re not truly present and not connected to them. Professionals don’t like words such as ‘relationship’ or ‘connection’. They don’t want to be connected to what they see. You can watch professionals trying to hide their own disgust. They become immobile and take on the appearance of someone who has found themselves in the wrong room. They subtly, without the individual knowing, try and find the room that they should be in. And it doesn’t work. The quieter they try to do it, the louder it becomes. They can’t get past their own history and history is never quiet. Just because it isn’t spoken doesn’t mean it isn’t heard. People create systems for this reason until the systems become fluent enough to manage their own anomalies. Rules are issued. Specialised people are brought in to root out values. Values are for walls, front doors and funders. They’re not for the people who desperately need the service. Organisations don’t want you to belong. They want you for your vital statistics. They want you when the humans come to look at the animals in the zoo. Questionnaires, scales of one to ten. Ticks in boxes and tallied at the bottom. Tables consulted. You are this, you are that. People will look for a diagnosis and willingly take anything. It’s what they want and services give it to them. Then they can go out into the world and say,” I am this”. And the world says,” so what, it’s meaningless”. If you’re set up to only look for the symptoms then that is all you will treat. And they will be back because the central issue hasn’t been addressed. Belonging is clouded by issues in orbit. Services target the issues and not the belonging.’

We can also observe the ‘primacy of pain’ in public policy. Painful stories are exploited by a prurient media, and by politicians needing to make an impact, and by public services (including charities) needing to justify their existence, and so they form the basis of much policy making.  This is essentially a deficit model, focusing on (and ultimately reinforcing) the worst not the best.

2.      What are the alternatives? 

Here are two responses:

• ‘The whole system of democracy needs to be redesigned, with different distributions of power, different means of assigning political legitimacy, devolution of all powers capable of remaining local, extended enforcement of universal human rights. We simply cannot rely on the supreme authority of a single selectorat claiming legitimacy merely by mass vote-casting systems’ (Roger Warren Evans)

• Maybe we could argue for a different kind of approach to policy-making, which is less certain, less media driven, less dualistic, more ambiguous, tentative, diverse, respecting of many different expertises and perspectives, more attentive and listening, comfortable with not-knowing, accepting that success and failure come in many guises. In other words, a non-political (with respect to today's model of politics) policy-making.  (Charity sector leader)

We reminded ourselves that we are not striving towards a ‘perfect’ political model and that all attempts to establish Utopia have ended in disaster. Any system of Better Way politics needs to accommodate imperfection, learning, and change.

Many of us feel that the more that public policy making can be localised, the better. Debate and decision-making among people who know each other, and have some appreciation of the context of each other’s lives, could help build a better form of politics. But this by itself is not the whole answer: we acknowledge that proximity does not necessarily produce connection, trust, or respect, and not all political questions can be determined at neighbourhood level.

Various forms of participatory democracy can create opportunities for many more people to participate in debate and decision-making.  But allowing more voices to be heard is not of itself sufficient – inequalities and concentrations of power can persist within participatory democracy, with some voices dominating over others.

An important starting point is the recognition of one’s own vulnerability. We must allow ourselves to feel our own powerlessness, unknowing and vulnerability in the face of theirs.  Without that first step, little else is possible.

3.      Power

As Elinor Ostrom has argued, in any group there will be a majority in favour of co-operation, but also a greedy minority who will act to take over. Therefore, it will always be necessary to challenge concentrations of power. There are many mechanisms to do so (an independent judiciary, a free media, proportional representation, a second chamber, an impartial civil service, regulatory bodies, the work of civil society agencies, for example), and these are always under pressure from vested interests, who want to remain in control for their own advantage.

However, we felt that a focus on power alone may not be the way to build a Better Way politics. After all, power is not a fixed quantity and it ebbs and flows.  In physics power is the rate at which energy is transferred, rather than something possessed by an entity.  In many senses politicians and political institutions are less powerful than they would like to believe.

While recognising widespread inequalities and concentrations of power, we need a different foundation for a Better Way politics, one which is less adversarial and starts with the notion of ‘humans helping other humans’ rather than the notion of ‘some humans controlling others’.  We shared some ideas of what this might this look like:

• Integration: in the face of increasing fragmentation and complexity a core political goal should be to achieve a more connected society.

• Our practice of politics should be founded upon a shared understanding of the needs we all have, as set out for example by the Centre for Non-Violent Communication (see Annex).

• Those responsible for designing systems of support should recognise that ultimately people want people who are not paid to be in their lives.

• Those in leadership roles in political life should foster adult to adult relationships (not parent to child).

• Political decision-making should be decentralised where possible, according to the notion of subsidiarity, with a willingness to design in local difference (a postcode choice not a postcode lottery).

• We need a shift in educational practice, in order to bring up a next generation of citizens who have an understanding of their interconnectedness as human beings, have positive strategies to respond to conflict, and also have the belief and confidence that they can change things for the better, that it is possible to be constructively disruptive of prevailing systems.   

4.      Sortition

We also discussed the idea of ‘sortition’ (the use of random selection to populate a decision making assembly), and we believe that this can be extended to other aspects of political life beyond jury service, which is one of our few public institutions which retains general public confidence. 

We understand that juries are effective in the criminal justice system for several reasons:

• They enshrine a popular principle (that we are all equal before the law);

• They are associative (a group of twelve people is needed to reach a common decision);

• They have access to advice from people with a depth of professional knowledge (barristers, expert witnesses, judges, court clerks).

We think that if sortition were to become more widespread in political life equivalent mechanisms would be needed to maximise the chance for success. We felt it would be useful to engage those with greater expertise on this subject (eg Involve, Sortition Foundation etc).

Note from Better Way London Cell: Campaigning and Social Change

Note from Better Way London cell 2 – 17 July 2017

We considered the recent discussion by the Better Way London cell 1, following on from the Grenfell fire,  about what generates social change – is it resident-led campaigning, or a sub-set of the elite winning the argument with their class, or an alliance of both, alongside technical specialists, journalists, academics, and others? 

We also considered the observation from the June 2017 Better Way gathering that ‘the role of social activists is to grow the capacity for change making in others, not simply to lead the change ourselves’.

We observed that within much of the voluntary sector, ‘campaigning’ has become problematic. 

• Even the most progressive independent grant makers are finding it difficult to persuade their trustees to fund ‘campaigns’, feeling more comfortable with terms like social change. In the UK, compared to the United States, there is little institutional support, especially in the form of unencumbered grant aid, for the core operations of campaigning bodies.

• Campaigning has become degraded within many charities. Staff with campaigning roles tend to be low status, and campaigning has become at best a function of policy or public affairs, building relationships behind the scenes with the powerful rather than generating mass mobilisation or speaking out against injustice. At worst it is little more than an adjunct to fundraising. ‘Born campaigners’ rarely sit comfortably within a conventional charity structure; their inherent tendency is to challenge and break the rules, not to adhere to a corporate brand. Campaigners are rarely promoted to leadership roles in charities, which tend to value professionalised managerial skills in order to safeguard and grow organisations, rather than to change the world. As a result we have few if any charity leaders who can bring an authentic campaigning voice into national public debates, as for example Sheila McKechnie once did. And we have too many ‘zombie charities’: organisations just concerned with continued existence rather than making a difference, more dead than alive.

• The voluntary sector leadership response to the recent attacks by government and the Charity Commission on campaigning by charities has been weak; it seemed the priority was about defending organisational privilege rather than speaking up for the validity of bold and outspoken campaigning. We seem to lack intellectual leadership within civil society.

Perhaps this is in part a reflection of a dominant strain within the voluntary sector, which sees itself as emerging from a philanthropic heritage, and is therefore naturally aligned with the establishment (unlike in the USA where campaigning was born of the civil rights movement), and cautious about campaigning when it threatens to disrupt the status quo. And yet the voluntary sector and civil society also has another heritage which has evolved in parallel with philanthropy: self-help and mutual aid, stretching back at least to the eighteenth century. This emerged from friendly societies and other forms of working class association, and included union mill societies, corresponding societies, early trades unions, co-operative societies, early building societies and so on.  Perhaps we need to rediscover and celebrate that heritage, and the more radical campaigning spirit which often went with it. 

And indeed there are some signs of this.  A generation of social activists are turning away from traditional philanthropic charity models and using other vehicles: community interest companies, community land trusts, community benefit societies, for example.  They are applying associational methods, crowd-funding, community shares, and attracting large numbers of people into campaigns through social media. There is usually less preoccupation with organisational boundaries and brand, and there is often high energy and optimism. Overall, there seems to be more “fire” from leaders at local level and the change that is most effective is happening outside of charities.  Sometimes this is coming from the private sector.

And yet much of this remains essentially consensual, often assuming that a combination of the many will of itself produce positive change, and is weakened by a lack of ananalysis of power, and how those without resources, or who are systematically marginalised, can bring about change. Social entrepreneurs it seems are not necessarily social activists or campaigners.

In this context it might be helpful to revisit Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’, in which campaigning tactics start from the premise that power is concentrated in institutions which will not easily give it up. While sometimes criticised for adversarial positioning, many of Alinsky’s rules still have resonance today:

1.      Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.

2.      Never go outside the expertise of your people.

3.      Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.

4.      Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

5.      Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

6.      A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

7.      A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

8.      Keep the pressure on. Never let up.

9.      The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

10.   The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

11.   If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.

12.   The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

13.   Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

We considered what we might learn from successful campaigns in the recent past, eg the dramatic shift in gay and lesbian legal rights and in public attitudes over the last two decades. Reflecting on this we can see that a combination of elements was needed: a cause celebre (the Clause 28 campaign); campaigning agencies (eg Stonewall); determined and brave leadership figures (eg Peter Tatchell); skills to ‘dance with the system’ and win allies within the establishment and media (Tory MPs, Princess Diana, Ian McKellen, Michael Cashman). It seems that a change of this magnitude happens when people in power feel uncomfortable about standing in the way (even if they don’t necessarily believe wholeheartedly in the cause).

We should not forget that not all campaigning is about social change. Campaigning can also be about defending things which are valued, blocking change which is seen as damaging.  Nor is the loudest campaigning necessarily the most effective: Sarah Corbett from the Craftivist Collective speaks up for the ‘quiet campaigners’ which, in her case, means exposing the scandal of global poverty and human rights injustices through the power of craft and public art.

Power, and how it is applied by institutions, is perhaps more complex now and operates in more disguised forms than when Saul Alinsky started out in 1930’s Chicago battling against the venal Town Hall, the corrupt Teamsters trade union, the Catholic Church, and the Mob!  But as we look forward we will increasingly face big ethical questions: what are we for?  And if we are, at least in part, for challenging injustice, and institutions which perpetuate injustice, how far are we prepared to go in pursuit of that?

We concluded by wondering why there was not more leadership in the voluntary secretary, including a leadership of ideas.  The voluntary sector should not allow itself to be characterised just by its philanthropic history.  Potentially Grenfell Tower had created a “teachable moment” and ways needed to be found to use this emotional heat but first we need to sharpen our tools and wake up.

Note from July 2018 national gathering

The Better Way Dinner 2rd July

Caroline Slocock, co-founder of the network, welcomed the guests and introduced four speakers:

• Martyn Evans: CEO of the Carnegie UK Trust, which has supported the Better Way network since its inception.

Martyn, welcoming members to the dinner, reflected on the importance of ‘associational life’ as a key part of democracy.  The state can do some things better than civil society and there are some things only it can do eg provide national armed forces, but part of its role is to enable others in society to do what they do best - an issue explored in the Carnegie UK Trust’s Enabling State project.  In the 21st century, we need to reimagine the state and also the role of civil society.  This issue lies at the heart of the Better Way network, whose origins began in an event he had attended with Steve Wyler, Caroline Slocock and others at Windsor Castle some years ago, which eventually led to setting up the network via an earlier initiative, A Call to Action for the Common Good.  CUKT had helped fund this work.  Like other projects it supports, such as on kindness, the Trust recognised it was exploratory, potentially ground-breaking but also highly risky: none of us at the outset could be sure about what we would achieve, if anything.  He applauded our spirit and what the network together had achieved so far.

• Sue Tibballs, CEO of the Sheila McKechnie Foundation and member of a London cell.

Sue spoke about SMK’s recent report, Social Power, and her related essay in Insights for A Better Way.  She said that civil society was too passive at present, and tended to focus too much on influencing institutional power and delivering services.  But it had enormous social power by virtue of its proximity to people and the relationships it forms.  Government should value the voice of the sector but most importantly we should ‘get on with it’ ourselves in civil society, using this power.  The key message: change starts with us.

• Danny Kruger, a founding member of a Better Way, currently working in the Office of Civil Society on the civil society strategy.

Danny said that the civil society strategy – a draft of which is currently being consulted upon in Government - will not be a set of policies or include major policy changes.  However it would, he hoped, represent a significant shift toward what he described as a ‘gentle revolution’ -  ie moving away from seeing people as individual units and costed transactions to relationships and also in favour of ‘responsible business’.  He said that we should expect to see a shift in language - eg from procurer to co-creator -  and thought it should be seen as a starting point for dialogue between Government and civil society in future.   

• Steve Wyler: co-founder of A Better Way and Panel Member on Civil Society Futures, the inquiry into the future of civil society underway.

Steve gave us some insights into the emerging thinking of Civil Society Futures and the links across the thinking of the network.  Civil society’s role had evolved over time, eg from the alleviation of poverty, to social justice and, more recently, to service delivery.  Against a backdrop  where people are now feeling a lack of agency and as a result of AI we may be facing a ‘us and them’ future, civil society could play a vital role in putting power into the hands of communities and connecting us in ways that humanise how we do things.  But civil society is not yet fit for this purpose, he said.  It is in fact part of the problem, perpetuating a command and control model, hoarding power, fighting its own corner and not allowing others to step forward.  Looking ahead, the Inquiry was now focusing on four areas: place; belonging and identity; work and purpose; and organisations.  The thinking was moving toward a new ‘a new PACT amongst us’, where PACT stood for P: power and participation; A: accountability and access; C: community and connecting; T: trust and transformation.  And it was looking at the ‘architecture’ to push things in this direction including a ‘new social national grid’, connectivity over activity and rethinking the hierarchy of evidence in measurement.  This was all rich territory for a Better Way.

2) Gathering event, 4th July

Session one: what we’ve learnt during the year:

Kathy Evans, a founding member, welcomed everyone to the event and then Caroline Slocock introduced Insights for A Better Way: improving services and building strong communities, which was launched that day. She said the collection of some 40 contributions had fleshed out the Better Way propositions and had helped us deliver on our priorities for this year (which had been identified at last year’s Gathering).  These were:

• Creating stories that move hearts as well as minds, bringing our propositions to life

• Exploring what it means to be a Better Way leader, what we have started to call ‘shared leadership’

• Demonstrating the rich potential of communities, people and organisations

• Finding ways to put the Better Way propositions into action, avoiding lip service.

She added that we had also made some progress on our other priority, diversifying the network, which was reflected in this volume, though there is more to do, particularly in bringing people from other sectors in the network.

She said that the stories and essays shed light on the individual Better Way propositions and showed in many different ways why they were important and how they could be achieved.  They were a stepping stone to our final Call to Action – our goal at the end of the third year of our network in July 2019.  

Some themes were emerging that might be developed in that Call to Action, she suggested, which were as follows, inviting contributors who were present to speak for one minute about what they had written:

1) Shared leadership: (reflecting the Better Way propositions on ‘collaboration’ and ‘changing ourselves’):

• Sue Tibballs invited us to become bolder leaders and recognise the legitimacy and potential of ‘social power’.

• Cate Newnes- Smith had come to see herself as a ‘systems leader’ in Surrey and said that this started with no longer seeing the organisation as the end, actively seeking to collaborate across and within sectors, and creating shared ‘big hairy goals’.

• Audrey Thompson drew on her experience of being a ‘local connector’ in Doncaster to show how it can unlock ‘social leadership’, which is especially important in disadvantaged areas.

2) Relationships (reflecting our propositions on ‘deep value relationships’ and ‘building on strengths’):

• Richard Wilson pointed to the underlying factors that support ‘Good Help’ including helping individuals to find their own sense of purpose and the confidence to act, all of which requires strong relationships.

• Colin Falconer described how he and the late Jane Slowey (to whom the collection is dedicated) invented ‘Advantaged Thinking’, which sees young people as assets rather than focusing on risks and deficits, in a direct challenge to the negative narrative of ‘disadvantage’ that pervades much of the voluntary sector.

3) Better way organisations –(‘organisations without walls’, as we have described them in our Better Way discussions, which bring in or are led by experts in lived experience, engage with the communities they serve and empower front line staff to build strong relationships with those with whom they work):

• Karin Woodley spoke of how we need to keep our organisations personal, praticising ‘radical listening’ which treats communities more as partners than consumers, creating the diversity within our organisations that reflects those served, and shaking off contracts that take organisations off mission.

• Simon Shaw talked about how the Food Power programme is involving experts by experience to say what they want, and how this is changing how they talk and think about food poverty.

4) Better Way places (reflecting our propositions on ‘local’ and ‘prevention’)

• Nicola Butler talked about the positive examples of Hackney Council and the Governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in relation to play. Hackney Council is practising effective local partnership with play providers and the local community and actively values the particular contributions of local organisations in commissioning and reflects the priorities of local people. But national partnerships are also supporting this work in a complementary way. Both are needed.

• Bethia McNeil, who is exploring in a Better Way cross-cutting group how to shift the bias in current measurement away from national to local organisations, explained that we need a shift away from high-stakes accountability and targets toward measures that show whether organisations are delivering on their mission - so that we ‘hit the point, not the target’.

• Caroline Slocock explained that ‘social infrastructure’ – the buildings and built environment; the services and organisations; the social capital within communities and between organisations –builds readiness and resilience, but is being undervalued and cut back. We need to invest more and think holistically.

5) Mass participation.  Providers are very focused on services, but ‘freeing people from services’ could be our aim, a point made during the Better Way visit to Ignite in Coventry in 2018:

• Sona Mahtani called for ‘a Selby Centre in every area’, describing the extraordinary diversity and energy in Tottenham. The simple act of bringing people together unleashes creativity, opportunity and energy that people create themselves.

• So Jung Rim, who had grown up in Seoul and witnessed first hand the social innovation revolution of the Mayor there, explained how she is now working in the Social Innovation Exchange to create different platforms for diverse voices.

Then there were two cross cutting strands in the Insights volume:

6) Better way systems that help make better way leadership, relationships, places, organisations and mass participation happen:

• Toby Lowe spoke about the complexity of individuals, people and systems. The current flawed process model - of individual action by organisations leading to specific outcomes - is beginning to be replaced by collaboration and a growing movement toward funding and collaborative commissioning which genuinely reflects that complexity.

• Graeme Duncan, speaking about schools, lamented the impact of high-stakes targets and the way in which they were leading to the exclusions of pupils and teachers abandoning the very principles that often drew them to teaching. He proposed new principles that could be adopted instead of targets.

• Matt Kepple made a plea for the social sector and others to take up the immense opportunity created by new technology to share data on what works – our own wikepedia – and empower others to improve services.

7) Last but not least: arresting stories, which bring home why and how these things can be achieved:

• Clare Wightman spoke of her experience of putting local people in touch with a vulnerable family in a difficult estate and the unique value of this support network, so much better than ‘services’.

• Steve Wyler told the group of his experience of an elderly neighbour who had been able to make her own way and evade social services through the kindness of strangers but fell ill when finally forced to be under their care, when a ceiling fell in.

• Kathy Evans recalled her own journey toward becoming a ‘thought leader’, battling with ‘imposter syndrome’ and recognising that you need to lead with your heart, not your head, in order to challenge the status quo.

In open discussion, some of the points made in response were:

• We often focus on the ‘what’ we do, but it is the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ that is more important in delivering a Better Way.

• We need to work on language, which is not connecting with the people we serve, recognising that different language works for different communities and there are different levels of engagement and discourse for practitioners, specialists and users.

• We also need to find a different language other than that of ‘delivering services’, which does not embody the Better Way propositions.

• It’s important to employ people from within communities and people with lived experience and to be more self-reflective about what we claim. For example, we are not giving people agency or empowering them, they have it already, we need to ‘give our organisations away’ and give others the space to take power.

• There is a specific job to be done, which some are doing, to engage the voices of communities in articulating what they want.

• Diversity is critical, not an add-on. We need to reflect the communities we work with.

• The relationship between the state and the social sector has sometimes been mutually supportive but the state has now become a generator of harm eg through the ‘hostile environment’ and the punitive nature of some parts of the welfare state. This presents a different problem to simply trying to reform its processes or work alongside it.

• Recognising and protecting human rights, rather than thinking of our core activities as being about the more effective delivery of services, is important.

• We focus too much on institutional power and the provision of services and need to spend more time working with individuals and communities and influencing the public debate (which is often a key block or spur to change).

• We need to engage with politics in the sense of policies and the wider narrative more – this is how systemic change happens.

• Who are ‘we’? ‘We’ should not just be the social sector – we need to widen our network - and we should stop seeing ‘we’ as institutions and organisational interests.

• Seeing ourselves as system leaders and social activists is important.

 Hot topics: ideas others can adopt

The group then broke into the following syndicates to discuss four topics.  Here are some points coming out of these that were brought back to the wider group that seemed to resonate:

Collaboration in action (led by Cate Newnes-Smith, Toby Lowe and Matt Kepple):

• We need to develop measurement to enable learning rather than accountability – note that the airline industry learns from accidents, whereas the NHS holds people heavily accountable for them. Measures need to come from purpose and must include qualitative information. It’s too much about numbers now.

• Understanding the complexity of issues, people and systems unlocks shared leadership. Cate Newnes-Smith and Toby Lowe committed to work in Surrey to help them better understand the systems and issues there and to use local councillors as allies.

• Matt Kepple said that it would be useful to use technology to visualise the complex factors affecting individuals, for example on obesity. This would enable organisations to understand better and target their contribution. It might also allow a person to become more aware of what was available and help in guiding their transitions. An example of where such a map might exist, or could help, was support for older people in Lambeth, where different organisations coming into contact with individuals are signposting help by others.

Building on strengths/deep value relationships (led by Rich Wilson, Karin Woodley and Colin Falconer):

• There was a strong message about the importance of relationships in the Better Way network itself, and the fact that these were under-estimated as a way of facilitating change.

• Some suggestions were put forward for helping to make these relationships stronger – ‘liming’ (where people meet over a drink to chew over an issue, originating from the Caribbean), and ‘home groups’ (where people share personal issues with each other and provide mutual learning and support).

• At the same time we can and should continue to learn from each other about ‘how’ to do things, but also recognise that stronger relationships would facilitate this and build trust.

• One area we could work on the ‘how’ is Advantaged Thinking, which is a strong concept but where we could learn and communicate better how to do it.

Principles are better than targets/local is better than national (led by Bethia McNeil, Graham Duncan):

• We need to work on language, paring it back so it feels more authentic.

• We should focus more on the process (the ‘how’) and less on the outcome (the ‘what’).

• And move away from high-stakes to low-stakes accountability, recognising uncertainty rather than pretending that there is certainty.

• There is a failure to learn because we do not focus on the right things.

Changing ourselves/mass participation (led by Sona Mahtani and So Jung Rim):

• We need to create physical spaces to bring people together – eg community land, ‘commons Treasury’.

• The Mayor of Seoul had a ‘mobile office’ so that he was genuinely out listening to people.

• Community GPs have proved a powerful concept. Rhys Davies gave the example of a retired nurse who acted in a ‘connector’ role, linking up 300 people who would not have done so otherwise.

Amongst the wider reflections on this feedback:

• Time is a barrier and we need to be aware of this. We need time to reflect and invent and space to do something new.

• The hospice movement is one example of where it is recognised that it is the process that matters – death is the outcome but this is not the objective of care.

• Relationships are a key asset for the social sector but are undervalued. We need to build that asset and our network is part of this.

---

Our priorities for the year ahead:

Steve Wyler introduced this part of the discussion by raising the following questions:

• What are we doing right and what needs to change?

• Should our priorities stay the same as this year or shift?

• How can we develop our overall story of change?

• Where should we put our efforts in recruiting more people to join us?

• How can we develop cross-cell working and spread knowledge across the network?

In response, the points made included:

• An endorsement of the value of relationships in the network and a recognition of the different ways of developing them, including ‘liming’.

• Dinners don’t work for everyone but there was also a strong feeling amongst some that they are still valuable – some members really like the discussions, and the ideas that come out of them are the biggest value for some.

• There were therefore potentially ‘horses for courses’.

• We could do more of bringing individual challenges into the group to ‘chew things through’, with individuals leading discussions. Specific topics of wide interest could be broadcast across the network asking for people to volunteer to take part.

• Sharing email addresses (GDPR permitting) would be very useful.

• There was some interest in buddying/mentoring but this might perhaps happen spontaneously if we did more signposting through a register of particular interests.

• Was this a leadership development network, someone asked– no! We are all social activists, not just the nominal leaders of organisations, and we are all leaders.

• The call to action we have promised for the end of our third year could be a manifesto. It is important for us to think about the political dimension of what we are calling for and there was a strong call from some to move in this direction to influence the wider political narrative. ‘I am dying for policies’, someone said.

• We need to be clear about what we stand for and believe in (our values and propositions). One suggestion for this was: ‘people who care about people’.

• The process matters – the ‘how’. Sharing on how to put the propositions into action might be useful eg to enable greater collaboration and experimentation in a place.

• This could include ways of challenging power, not just about delivery of services. We tend to focus on being constructive but also should be disruptive.

• We could be testing and developing ideas over the next year.

• There was a call for more cells in different places and more travelling to other cells and cross-fertilisation.

• And perhaps some bigger events, joining up with other movements (eg movement for health creation).

It was agreed Steve Wyler and Caroline Slocock would use this steer to work up future priorities and working methods.

---

Participants

• Lynne Berry, Civil Exchange**

• Julie Bishop, Law Centres Federation

• Geraldine Blake, London Funders

• Richard Bridge, Corndel

• Paul Buddery, Volunteering Matters

• Nicola Butler, Hackney Play Association**

• Rhys Davies, Community Catalysts

• Frances Duncan, Clock Tower Sanctuary

• Graeme Duncan, Right to Succeed**

• Kathy Evans, Children England

• Martyn Evans, Carnegie UK Trust

• Colin Falconer, Inspire Chilli

• Andy Gregg, Race on the Agenda

• Athol Halle, Trust for Developing Communities

• Richard Harries, Power to Change

• Sarah Hughes,Centre for Mental Health

• So Jung Rim, Social Innovation Exchange**

• Matt Kepple, Makerble

• Kate Kewley, Social Finance**

• Danny Kruger, West London Zone, Only Connect*

• Toby Lowe, Newcastle University Business School

• Sona Mahtani, Selby Centre

• Bethia McNeil, Centre for Youth Impact**

• Vincent Neate, Relationship Capital Strategies*

• Cate Newnes-Smith, Surrey Youth Focus

• Helen Rice, Advising Communities

• Simon Shaw, Sustain**

• Duncan Shrubsole, Lloyds Bank Foundation**

• Merron Simpson, New NHS Alliance

• Caroline Slocock, Civil Exchange

• Jess Steele, Jericho Road*

• Sujutha Thaladi, The Mentor Ring

• Audrey Thompson, Bentley Area Community Library

• Sue Tibballs, Sheila McKechnie Foundation

• Clare Wightman, Coventry Grapevine

• Richard Wilson, OSCA

• Karin Woodley, Cambridge House

• Steve Wyler, Independent

• Sally Young, Newcastle CVS

*Dinner only

**Workshop only

Note from a Better Way and Place cell 4: Local is better than national

Better Way London cell 4: 8 March 2018: Is ‘local better than national’?

Local and national

We started by considering the relationship between local and national action. The national it seems needs the local, and vice-versa. 

• On the one hand, national programmes require effective local delivery. In the field of mental health, for example, the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health is a national plan, which needs to be locally applied. Moreover, national agencies such as the NHS rely on strong local operations to provide the flow of evidence to make good national policy.

• Equally, for the local to function well, we need local action to be supplemented by a national system capable of sharing and promoting ideas, encouraging challenge, developing common standards, and providing validation. Children’s play is one example, where play activities in neighbourhoods in every part of the country are at risk of marginalisation, and national activity is needed more than ever to promote the benefits of play, to understand and develop play skills, and to promote quality standards.

However, the relationship between the national and the local can be tense and problematic.  In respect of the national plan for mental health services, flexibility in local delivery is in principle allowed, expect in respect of psychological therapy, where highly standardised models of Cognitive Behaviourial Therapy are imposed, and this results in difficulties for both commissioners and providers. Elsewhere, as in Individual Placement and Support services (IPS), assessment systems have been established to ensure local ‘fidelity’ to national models.  But such mechanisms can produce ‘gaming’, with some people (those less likely to recover) excluded from services. Generally, this national framework is producing a growing gap in mental health service provision: those with low level support needs can get help, and so can those with very acute support needs, but the framework makes little available for those in the middle, and this is feeding the rising homeless and prison populations.

At the same time loss of national standards for qualifications on play has meant it is now hard to get funding for training.

There is evidence to support both seeking fidelity to a national model or alternatively setting a set of parameters.  In the end, the group thought principles were better than targets because targets can be gamed.. 

Power hoarding and how to share it

The behaviour of many national organisations can be problematic. Power to achieve social change is not necessarily about growth or size, but many national organisations still behave as if it is, and seek to hoover up work from local organisations, leaving a mess behind.   Many organisations ‘hoard power’.

We explored the idea that most institutions behave on the basis that ‘you can’t trust people’ and design systems and rules accordingly, and that the larger the organisation the more likely this is to happen, as managers become more remote from the people they are serving. 

Some of this may derive from anxiety.  Practitioners and managers may seek to put barriers between themselves and the people they serve as a way of erecting defences against it, according to Armstrong and Huffington (Working Below the Surface: The Emotional Life of Contemporary Organisations, Tavistock Clinic Series, 2004).  One extreme example was when the local council sent its staff home to escape confrontation with the angry residents of Grenfell Tower, rather than sending them out to help.

Public pressure can distort behaviours, where senior politicians, CEOs of public bodies and charities, are held personally to account for everything that goes wrong.  Pointing the finger is perhaps an inevitable accompaniment to public money, but it makes it much harder for prominent organisations to ‘let go’ of their command and control culture. The pressures are perhaps especially intense at national levels (although community leaders can also experience this type of pressure).   This in turn can generate organisational anxiety and defensive command and control measures to try and avoid it.  When leaders are women, the public criticism turns to misogyny, and this can be extreme when women make even innocuous public statements.   A network of peer support can be important.

Devolution does not necessarily stop ‘power hoarding’, it just happens at a different level.  In Scotland, for example, most power is still held at national and local authority level.

Some organisations work in completely different way, avoiding management structures altogether and acting as a ‘network’.  This doesn’t always work well, as evidenced by experience of CND in the past, and the management of non-hierarchical institutions can be very time-consuming.  But it can be a powerful technique for sharing power not just within but outside of the organisation. We heard from one organisation which operates on a national and indeed international basis and operates according to the insight that everyone has power: power is not something to give away from the centre, and the question therefore is how to create sparks and energy and build confidence among others. This however means that the level of organisational visibility is low - a difficult business model, as low visibility and a generous approach to attribution makes the case for investment and funding much harder.

We heard how a loss of national government funding can sometimes produce beneficial consequences.  Government funding can shift the balance of organisational effort in national bodies towards the achievement of relatively narrow contract targets, and away from the activities which actually add most to frontline efforts, for example responding to ‘general enquiries’ and thereby providing bespoke  services, tailored to the actual needs of the front line. 

National organisations are often at their best as convenors and connectors, creating the conditions for sharing to take place across local organisations, helping them learn from and stimulate each other, rather than attempting to determine what they should be doing.   Umbrella organisations should see themselves not as trade bodies but as ‘systems leaders’.

Are organisations themselves sometimes the barrier to social change? ‘Ideas not organisations’ says Charlie Howard, founder of young person’s charity MAC-UK, in a heartfelt blog.  But she goes on to say, ‘The important question is what’s the alternative? How do you grow a team of brilliant people and get the money to be able to pay them, if you don’t have an organisation?’  Should we perhaps formulate the proposition ‘small is better than big’, and encourage large organisations to implement a radically federated model, where the (big) whole really can be more than the sum of its many (small) parts.

Spreading not scaling

Robin Murray, advocate of a co-operative economy, who sadly passed away recently, used to say that ‘spreading is better than scaling’.  We need an organic rather than an industrial approach to building critical mass for social action, he argued, and he focused attention on the need to understand the interface between the grass roots and the system. This is where the most positive change can take place, he believed.  It can be where conflicts occur that the most interesting things happen.

Peter MacFadyen, who founded Independents for Frome and who played a prominent role in the takeover of Council by independent councillors, and the flowering of community life in that town, has published Flatpack Democracy, a ‘DIY guide to creating independent politics’, which is designed to help other communities take a similar approach. One example perhaps of an attempt to encourage spreading rather than scaling.

Leadership that brings about social change is often not about dominating or hoarding power but about creating ideas that others want to follow.  Fairtrade, for example, was a ‘magnetic idea’.  The expression of vulnerability can be a starting point, as it can help create an enabling environment in which people can connect in a genuine way.  This insight starts to change how we define what it means to be ‘professional’.  Safeguarding issues are important but perhaps we should be moving toward a model of kindness versus being impartial and cold. 

Some issues to explore:

• Can we better define the role of national standards or aspirations in a way that supports local activity?

• Can understanding the emotional drivers of organisational behaviour and social change help to stop ‘power hoarding’?

• How can power be better shared and what does this mean for being ‘professional’?

Note from Better Way and Place cell: is local better than national?

February and March 2018

Does place matter any more?

In the age of digital platforms and widely available travel most of us are connected to many communities, but it seems that place remains important. Place and personal contact cannot be replaced by the internet; and it is where the deepest and most lasting bonds are forged. 

Local and national

Our proposition states ‘local is better than national’.  Community life is where human relationships can best flourish, and imposition from the centre rarely works when dealing with complex social problems, as it inevitably produces standardised and transactional behaviours, and reduces the potential for people to discover their own solutions.

But that doesn’t mean that we can or should ignore the national dimension. For the local to function well, we need local action to be supplemented by a national system capable of sharing and promoting ideas, encouraging challenge, developing common standards, and providing validation – with all of this guided and informed by evidence from local practice.

The risks of localism

Localism is not necessarily benign. Local institutions can be guilty of hoarding power just as much as national and international agencies. And communities, at their worst, can be divided and dispiriting places, resistant to change, dominated by elite groups, hostile and oppressive for outsiders and minorities. At the local level, the quality of leadership, especially in the public sector, is generally weak, failing to attract real talent or younger generations.

One response to such problems has been managerial – attempts to professionalise local administration, with armies of paid managers (relatively wealthy) doing things for communities (relatively poor). We have seen a movement away from neighbourhood and community levels towards larger geographical regions, in attempts to create economies of scale, centralising political and executive power most recently with directly elected mayors. But this shift from localism to devolution leaves place behind, replicates the national command and control culture, and reintroduces many of the behaviours which leave people feeling they have somehow lost control.

Places under stress

There are many places across the country where deprivation is high and the local infrastructure is failing to cope, let alone improve things. In a time of austerity this is getting even worse. But while we need a strong and effective local infrastructure, especially where problems are most acute, we should not underestimate the untapped strengths that exist in even the poorest places. The answer is not to send people in to ‘intervene’, but rather to take steps to realise local capability and invest in the people who live in these places and create the conditions for them to design and manage their own local infrastructure. 

Sometimes organisations themselves may be the problem?

Organisations can often ‘hoard power’ and create command and control barriers between themselves and those they serve.  Power can corrupt but it can be important to understand the emotional drivers too.  There may be anxiety about getting too close to those with whom one works, or fear of being attacked when something goes wrong.  They may also suffer from a lack of aspiration and lack of belief that they can make fundamental change happen. Too narrow a focus on targets may lead to a loss of fundamental purpose.

What might Better Way places look like?

We have heard about places where people, including in some cases those involved in the Better Way network, are attempting to operate according to the Better Way propositions. Examples can be seen in Coventry, Taunton, Stroud, Frome, Doncaster and elsewhere.

This is partly about local institutions, including voluntary agencies, doing far more to build contact and credibility with local people over time, doing things ‘with’ rather than ‘for’, and a willingness to operate across traditional sector boundaries, identifying common cause, while recognising that all communities are highly complex, with multiple competing interests. Networked rather than command and control organisations are likely to work best.

Sustained community connector or community organiser activity, as well as activities to build community ownership, and spaces for people to come together to understand each other and make decisions together (such as participatory budgeting), alongside mechanisms to encourage transparency and challenge, all seem essential for real progress to be made.

Democratic institutions would be strengthened and community based organisations would help give voice to local needs and concerns and provide a challenge function. 

We would have a better understanding of ‘subsidiarity’ – of where activity best takes place and how local activity is supported by national and regional actions.

Local organisations would have high aspirations to solve problems, not just service them, and to create stronger communities, and would have the tools to deliver this eg through better feedback mechanisms, ways of spreading experiences and greater front-line autonomy which encourages a ‘journey of discovery’.

There would be a better understanding of where local adds value and of what has been called ‘context’ as well as ‘content’ skills and knowledge.  Community organisations and activists often have lived experience and connections that make them more effective than national organisations.  The concept of ‘professionalism’ would  be reconfigured to include ‘kindness’ and relationship building.

Ways would be found to get more resources for local activity, for example local giving organisations, crowd sourcing and commissioning that recognises the value of local.

 What needs to change?

Big is not necessarily better than small, and often the reverse is true, as large organisations are more likely to become disconnected from their communities and more inclined to self-protection. So we should stop talking about scaling up whenever we see an example of good local practice and talk about ‘spreading’ instead. And large organisations would do well to consider whether they can let go, providing much higher levels of autonomy to their constituent parts.

We need to make a better case for localism and the power of place to drive positive change. Some national problems cannot be overcome without a much greater emphasis on local action (homelessness for example) and agencies working in fields where this applies need to be brave enough to say so, and change their operating model, even if that threatens the current way of doing things.

Some problems cannot be tackled only at neighbourhood level. The challenges of migration and climate change for example need concerted action at international levels. Perhaps the best future will come from greater emphasis on the local and the international, and less on the national. 

That said, there is a still an important role for the national, which needs to be better understood and articulated.

Some issues to explore further

• National ways of measuring quality often underplay the value of local organisations and some of our members are going to explore how to change this in a cross-cell working group.

• Can national agencies with strong public brands (and the ability to attract resources on a big scale) reposition themselves to act in service of the local, rather than dominating from the centre?

• How can we get more funds into local activity eg through local giving organisations or crowd-sourcing?

• How can we better promote organisational and professional behaviours that avoid ‘power hoarding’, including by understanding the emotional drivers of behaviour, and redefining what it means to be professional?

Notes of the discussion within individual cells:

Founding cell - 18 February 2018

London cell 2 - 22 February 2018

London cell 3 - 28 February 2018

London cell 4 - 8 Match 2018

Note from Better Way and Place cell 3: Local is better than national

Note of Better Way Cell 3, 28 February on ‘local is better than national’

Local is not always best

Steve Wyler opened the discussion by saying that he recognised that local is not always better than national – we have been told that travellers and gypsies for example had found it more difficult to establish settlements once decisions were made locally.  Local was often preached but less often practiced.  A belief in the value of small communities is at least 200 years old, and yet Britain remains highly centralised.   

One problem in ‘creating villages’ is that people often get excluded, black, Asian and minority people in particular.  For many, the problem is that we have lost a sense of community and sense of ownership of place.  The challenge is to be truly inclusive and give all people a voice. 

The role of national standards

The choice is not always a binary one: even in the context of localism there is often a role for national legislation and government to enable,  or to set universal standards.  Part of this is about fairness and avoiding a so-called postcode lottery. 

It is very easy to get this wrong, and to end up with perverse incentives or gaming – eg in relation to school exclusions.  National standards should not be a blueprint, and must allow for local innovation and discretion.  Principles are much better than targets – one of our Better Way propositions.  For example, there should be a national ambition to safeguard children, but local solutions will and should vary.

There also needs to be a stronger sense of what works best at what level – the principle of subsidiarity – as some things can only be done locally, others nationally, and there is also regional and international action to consider.

Challenging ‘scalability’

We should challenge the concept of scalability ie that small-scale experiments or practices are only of value if they can be scaled up to a size that is deemed to be more economical.  Locality has produced an excellent report on why local by default should replace so called diseconomies of scale: http://locality.org.uk/resources/saving-money-local-default-replace-diseconomies-scale/- Bigger is not always better.

It is values and process that can be learnt from others and adopted more widely, not a single model, and a model that is imposed from on high can end up being a form of national control that undermines local delivery. 

‘Contextual ‘ versus ‘content’ knowledge and skills

Local, community based organisations are often relatively rich in the understanding of ‘context’ – and may have many volunteers and staff who have direct experience of it.  This is why they can be highly effective locally.

But they may be less successful in competing with national organisations for work because they appear to be less well qualified in terms of professional ‘content’ skills and knowledge, and these are given disproportionate weight. Being able to connect with a community and create strong communities should be better recognised in the ‘metrics’ of what makes an effective organisation.

 Sharing learning

Local solutions to problems are important but there are a lot of common challenges, even if the combination of circumstances are unique in each case.  So learning from others should be facilitated.  But how to break away from just sharing best practice?

Experience suggests that such sharing works better when organisations are not in competition.  But other factors are also in play: aspirations need to be raised; and people need access to tools that will help them discover what works best.

Raising aspirations: ‘shifting the dial from minus zero to plus one’

Just as individuals can lack ‘self-efficacy’ – a lack of belief in what is possible and therefore of ambition - so can organisations; and they may not even be aware of this.  

Aspirations may be set only on achieving what others have done; on what the contract requires; or to a basic level of expectation (‘moving the dial from minus one to zero).  It is much better for the ambition to be to move from ‘zero to plus one’ and to do so  it is important to understand and start from the essential purpose, not processes.  So, for example, some voluntary organisations may simply aspire to become even better at ameliorating social problems, rather than acting in ways that would prevent them from happening in the first place and genuinely empowering those with whom they work.  Content and context skills will play a part in moving to ‘plus one’. 

Creating tools that create a ‘journey of discovery’

To achieve this, we need to move away from passive learning to giving people at the front line active tools to innovate.  It is about shifting from training people in how to do the job, or simply giving them knowledge, and seeking to build ‘capability’ – a strong theme in current educational theory.  The Buurtzog model is one example of this, with front-line staff empowered to work in ways that work best.

What practitioners need is not a manual but a feedback loop of information on effectiveness that provides a living process of learning, with access to others who may be on that same journey in other organisations.

The aim should be to facilitate a  ‘journey of discovery’ that puts practitioners in control and gives them an appetite to change.  Learning from others should not become a way of avoiding such a journey but should help it.

Regular information on performance must be part of this, but it needs to be done in a way that avoids the problems with much of evaluation - which can be too late, too narrow in focus and used to find out whether existing goals have been achieved rather than to identify the need for different objectives.   Feedback should be fun, information should come in real time, and should measure the things that really matter, not just what funders require.   Asking people in communities what they and others genuinely value should be a key starting point.   

‘Social accounting’ used by social businesses has arguably been one model in the past and has involved stakeholder consultation about what they thought counted the most.  Makerble is trying to deliver this kind of information in this way. Wazoku develops software to enable companies to learn from their own staff.

 Some issues to explore further:

• Developing a better sense of subsidiarity, i.e. what works best at what level, so that the case for local action is stronger and the right support is in place regionally and nationally.

• Developing metrics, tools and concepts that help create more effective local action, move away from the idea that ‘big is best’, raise aspirations and empower front-line staff; and which help others to recognise and reward how they add value through ‘context’ as well as ‘content’ skills and knowledge.

Note from Better Way and Place cell 2: Local is better than national

Note of Better Way London cell 2: 22 February 2018 on ‘local is better than national’

We considered our proposition ‘local is better than national’.  From a historical perspective, we don’t seem to be winning this argument: we have a highly centralised political and administrative system in this country, and although we have had champions of localism over the last two hundred years or more, it seems that most people put up with ever greater centralisation and seem to accept that the alternative would be worse.  Why is that? Why have attempts to push localism so often failed?

One answer we feel is that the case for localism has simply not been well made. The virtues of localism are often assumed but rarely explained, let alone evidenced.  For example, Locality’s recent Commission of the Future of Localism report has much to say about the ‘what’ (‘radical action to strengthen our local institutions; devolve tangible power resources and control to communities; ensure equality in community participation; and deliver change in local government behaviour and practice to enable local initiatives to thrive’) but says much less about the ‘why’,  and without a convincing message about why localism matters we are unlikely to get very far with any of the actions proposed. We could construct a better case, for example, showing why some national problems cannot be overcome without a much greater emphasis on local action (homelessness for example), and demonstrating that the current model is failing in that respect (very little of the work of homelessness charities is community based).

Another reason for the failure of successive localism agendas is that local government is widely regarded as low quality, ineffective, bad value for money, resistant to change, self-serving and even corrupt.  While there seems to be little evidence that these kinds of problems are worse in local government than in central government, nevertheless there is clearly a problem here – a system can’t be said to be legitimate if people don’t have confidence in it, and many people simply don’t have confidence in political and administrative localism.  In recent times, local authorities have lost power and resources,  and low voter turnout reduces legitimacy, eg for local mayors and Police and Crime Commissioners.

Moreover it is evident that relationships at local level are often dysfunctional, and especially between local councils and independent community action. Some local authorities tell a localism story but never really ‘let go’. Even ‘co-operative councils’ have a tendency to define and impose models of community engagement which they feel able to manage, and block attempts to develop more independent action (an example of one co-operative council’s resistance to neighbourhood planning was given). 

On the other hand we also know that independent community action can be badly flawed.  It can be driven by narrow vested interests, exhibiting the worst forms of ‘nimbyism’ and producing local division, resentment, and injustice.  The idea that local people always know best is no more convincing than the idea that the council always knows best.   

And it is also true that local is not always better than national. One example is the situation for gypsies and travellers, whose representative body has told us that since decisions on traveller sites have devolved to local level it has been much harder to get agreement to new ones. A healthier balance might be what we are seeking rather than one or the other.

So what can be done to overcome these problems and build confidence in favour of a shift towards localism?  We considered the following:

·        Greater powers might produce better quality

A local income tax, and more substantial responsibilities at a local level, could be expected to produce improvements in the quality of people attracted to stand for election and to work in local institutions. This would probably need to be accompanied some form of quality mechanism capable of stimulating creative and effective practice and minimising poor practice, perhaps a ‘community Ofsted’ (but bearing in mind our ‘principles are better than targets’ proposition).

·        Communities could organise themselves better and civil society needs to stand up for their interests. 

For localism to thrive communities need to be better organised and stand up for their interests.  This means local institutions, including voluntary agencies, doing far more to build contact and credibility with local people over time. It is also important to recognise that contest is an inevitable and necessary part of democracy, and especially where democratic institutions are weak, and creates energy. Voice is important.  Geographical communities and communities of interest need to organise themselves, through associational activity, self-help groups, campaigning groups, community organising, and the like – because otherwise they will always be pushed around by those in political power, locally and nationally. New models for doing this may be needed, and one interesting example was mentioned: the Stroud Investigates model of community-based investigative journalism.

·        Facilitation skills for democratic participation can be improved

Cassie Robinson from Doteveryone has described the lack of capacity and confidence among councillors and officers in both scrutiny roles and in championing change. Perhaps it is time for civil society to step up and where we do have good facilitation and community development skills, to be more proactive and generous about sharing them with colleagues in local government.  One idea to broaden political representation and voice was a concept of ‘jury service’.

·        Could benign dictatorship be part of the way forward?

The imposition of powerful elected mayors in local authorities and city regions, as a price of devolution deals, is highly problematic. We felt that they give the appearance that things are being dealt with better but in fact they mimic the problems of centralisation, further alienating people from everyday democratic engagement and community life. And yet when we look at the French system, where local mayors have a great deal of power, there do seem to be benefits – at least it is clear to everyone who is ‘in charge’.  But perhaps one difference is that French mayors are more accessible to ordinary people and therefore more personally accountable.

·        Social change can emerge from place-based action

Social change of national significance can sometimes be driven at local levels. Often this involves a combination of different types of people and organisations, the outspoken types to shake things up and the quiet types to win credibility. But not all local activism will be progressive – the tendency toward exclusion of minority groups can be acute at local level. So measures to build cohesion and solidarity and overcome prejudice will be needed, and sometimes these will need to operate beyond the local levels.

We recognise that localism is as much a challenge for the third sector as it is for the state.  Over time, the concentration of power at national level has been influential in how the third sector has developed, encouraging gravitation away from local and towards national, accentuating a professionalisation of the sector, and an undervaluing of community-based action and the skills that are best suited to that. Reversing this will be painful, but could also help many third sector organisations rediscover their purpose. 

We also recognise that for some things to improve the answer will not come from local action but from national co-ordination: for example across the whole refugee and migrant sector, there are only six people paid to do communication work and this means that voices remain localised and are not heard in national policy and public debates.  Moreover, in some cases we need to organise things beyond national borders, and work internationally (reducing problems created by economic migration, tackling climate change, learning from international practice, and so on).  Perhaps our proposition should be reframed, and what we should ultimately be striving for is a shift away from the national, wherever possible, towards the local on the one hand and the international on the other.

We accept that localism – as with any system - is imperfect, and if we feel there will be gains from a shift in favour of localism, not least because that should allow human relationships to come more to the fore in public life and in the work of civil society, we should be realistic about what we will have to put up with, as a price worth paying.

Note from Better Way and Place cell 1: Local is better than national

Note of the Founding cell discussion on 18 February 2018

Steve Wyler started by pointing out that people have been promoting the importance of place and local activity for hundreds of years, for example in the cooperative movement, and yet Britain remains highly centralised.  Why?  He also said that, of all the Better Way propositions, this one had provoked the most debate and challenge.

What is meant by ‘local’?  Is it a local authority, or is it a community, and how small is that? Often the two were confused, and what was seen as devolution was just handing power to another form of centralisation, albeit below national level. 

Local meant a community, we thought.  But how far are communities  geographical in our digital age?  People used to meet in the pub, but some of that is now happening online.  Arguably, people are citizens of everywhere, and that ability to connect up with others in communities of interest wherever you live brings many advantages, helping to break down barriers, but it can also erect new ones.  We were told that millennials are the most integrated generation racially but the next generation is far less so, as social media and online dating are leading them to only ‘meet’ people from similar backgrounds, interests and political views. 

Geographical communities still matter just as much, the group concluded.  Place and personal contact cannot be replaced by the internet; and it is where the deepest and most lasting bonds are forged. Some communities remain very strong but it is also true that for others this is much less so, especially where there is a lot of movement of people.  In relatively deprived communities, social infrastructure (buildings and the built environment; services; and relationships) is often weak; and the poorest communities have been worst hit by recent cuts.  Promoting social action, facilities and services locally is especially important here.

There is a danger of ‘doing down’ such places and portraying them as lacking in  their own resources.  For example, people in Port Talbot taking part in an RSA workshop complained that they love where they live and are angry when journalists portray Port Talbot as a sink area.  The social sector colludes in this ‘problematizing/deficit based’ narrative as way of fund-raising.  We must push back on it.  Even the poorest communities have strong natural resources, both physical and social, and their internal strengths need to be harnessed, not undermined.   One of our members who had lived and worked in one deprived area of London talked of people streaming out in the morning to jobs outside the area, while white middle class people came in during the day, presenting themselves as ‘saviours’. 

Community led activity helps create strong communities; but one of the challenges has been a recent loss of community capacity, as more women are working, men are being more active in the home, and both increasingly have ‘two jobs’.  There’s less time for civic action, participation and volunteering, it was noted.

Not all local groups are of good quality.  Some are excellent, many are good, but it is equally true that some are sub-standard.  It is important to find a way of raising quality but unfortunately existing ways of measuring this often distort the picture.  This is shown by the fact that national funders often can’t spot the difference by the metrics they use; and in any case these kind of measures can  are being gamed.  National ways of measuring quality often underplay the value of local organisations and a number of our members are going to explore how to change this in a cross-cell working group. User satisfaction should be part of these new metrics, it was thought, and weight needs to be given to the value of building communities and relationships locally that local organisations bring.

One of the barriers to greater investment in local communities and organisations is a lack of trust.  In Denmark, where local authorities delegate the running of children’s homes to voluntary organisations, there is much more social integration and trust across social groups than in the UK.

The group was clear that this Better Way proposition should not be interpreted as being against all national or indeed regional or local authority activity.  We need to sort out more clearly the respective roles of national/regional and local and play to respective strengths.  Sometimes national standards are very important.  One person pointed to the issue of Academies and Free Schools.  They are intended to give more power to local communities but the reality is more complex.  Regret was expressed that they had abandoned national healthy eating standards. 

Ways needed to be found to get more resources to help strengthen community organisations.  We discussed the so-called Preston model, where contractors for public services are asked to spend their money locally, creating local jobs and prosperity.  Similarly, there were opportunities to develop local fund-raising, for example through community development foundations or community shares. Islington and Hackney Giving are other examples of how to do this.  Women’s Aid  is trying to set up a national charitable trust to fundraise nationally for local services. 

Finally, we discussed how local authorities and national charities can better support local organisations.  In Surrey, for example, they were exploring ways of commissioning that supported this. 

Some national charities are also looking for innovative ways to help sustain and nurture local organisations, for example taking advantage of their relative ‘cash richness’ through donations to use these resources to support independent local organisations that are struggling.  It is important to recognise that different communities will need different solutions.  Shelter is looking at this.  Scope is divesting itself of services to focus on campaigning.  Catch22 is acting as an incubator for some new organisations and supporting existing small charities by sharing common services. 

Issues to explore further:

·       What are the respective strengths and best roles for national, local authority and local organisations?

·       How can we develop better metrics to better demonstrate the value of local organisations?

·       How can we get more resources to local organisations, including through commissioning and fund-raising?

·       What can national charities do?

Summary of four Better Way London cells discussions about Leadership

In November and December 2017, our London cells each talked about how to develop a leadership style that would help deliver a Better Way.  This is a summary of the main points, with notes of the individual discussions also available below.

The problem

A command and control model of leadership is deeply culturally embedded in Britain, including in the public and social sectors.  Leaders are expected to focus on the management of their agencies and on the delivery of specified outputs and outcomes, treating their organisations like industrial production units, rather than acting as change agents.  CEOs feel under pressure to conform to (gendered) stereotypes and adopt behaviours that are neither natural nor effective.  Competition between leaders, rather than collaboration, is ingrained. 

However, many of the issues facing society cannot be solved by a single agency, or even by a number of organisations working together.  There are  many factors affecting health and well-being, for example.  A complex system of influences and organisations are important and individuals and communities are critical actors.

The social sector is also not exercising a sufficiently strong thought leadership role in society, tending to comment on the agendas set by others in order to seek marginal changes rather than pointing out fundamental problems in the system and arguing for paradigm shifts.  It tends to talk politics, rather than about what really matters to people.

What is needed is a bigger scale of ambition and more collaboration and shared leadership.

Shared leadership is essential to solve complex issues

Shared leadership is not something simply exercised by people at the top of organisations.  It is about exercising influence and happens when others choose to follow you, not because of a job title.  This is not about becoming a ‘saviour’ or a ‘guru’ but about empowering others to become leaders too.

This kind of leadership is exercised in collaboration and demonstrates the generous qualities which can be summarised as ‘love’.  Qualities of respect, kindness, generosity, nurturing, enabling and empowering are all important.  Such leadership is more about demonstrating the right behaviour and values than setting specific goals from on high.  In one organisation, for example, everyone is encouraged to exercise ‘nine habits’ which include hope and love and to attend workshops with a mix of people at different levels of the organisation to explore how to put these qualities into practice.

The evidence points to shared leadership being far more effective than conventional models in relation to so-called complex issues, as opposed to ‘complicated’ and ‘simple’ ones. These distinctions are drawn from science, which distinguishes between systems that may be complicated, such as computers,  but are man-made and systems that are so complex that we will probably never fully understand them, such as the human brain or a rain forest.  Command and control forms of leadership have their place in relation to simple and even complicated problems and this is an important message. Any organisation is likely to face a mix but in complex situations, leadership is about getting the conditions right for everyone involved to be able to work with complexity. This is achieved, for example, through the creation of networks within and across organisations, and showing leadership by demonstrating core values rather than giving instructions or setting precise goals. It is recognised that the final outcome may be unknowable when the work starts.

Obstacles to shared leadership

Shared leadership is not prevalent and creating it is challenging:

• Lip-service is often given to shared leadership but change will not happen unless it is shown that it works and will be recognised and rewarded.

• Network-orientated leaders often find it hard to access circles of power and for their voices to be heard.

• The versions of shared leadership tried out in the collectives of the 1970s and 80s were often chaotic and often led to factional dominance.

• Community development, including community organising, is intended to grow bottom-up leadership but there is a danger that citizens themselves end up adopting command and control leadership models.

• Often people do not see themselves as leaders and do not recognise the power and resources available to them. They lack self-efficacy.

As well as making the case for shared leadership, we need to have a better sense of what it means in practice and how best to embed and promote it.

Context matters, and culture and systems are important too

Better Way members recognised that leadership does not work in isolation. Culture and systems are important too.  Indeed one member had come to the conclusion that it is systems change that brings real change, not individual leaders.  The Sheffield Microsystem Coaching Academy, for example, trains coaches to work in the health service to redesign services, involving patients in the process.  A RSA report identified three forms of power important to leadership – personal agency; the power of shared values and norms; and the hierarchical power of expertise.

Context matters too.  What might work in a start up industry would not work in the culture of the public sector.

Some issues to explore further

• What are the leadership behaviours and practices that we want to promote and how can we best articulate and embed them.

• How can we convince others that a change is needed and would work? Can we deploy the complex/complicated/simple issue paradigm to persuade more leaders to adopt this thinking?

• How can we build more self-efficacy and belief in those who do not see themselves as leaders?

• How can we encourage greater thought leadership in the general media around the Better Way principles?

Notes of the discussion within individual cells:

Founding cell, 15 November 2017

2nd London cell, 29 November 2017

3rd London cell, 4 December 2017

4th London cell, 13 December 2017

Note from Better Way London Cell 4: Leadership

Building Better Way Leadership, London cell 4: 13 December 2017

In complex environments when we face ‘wicked problems’ a command or management model of leadership is never effective.  We need a leadership approach that recognises that a single agency will not produce desired change, that what is needed is the engagement of different agencies willing to work towards a common goal, and that leaders therefore need the skills necessary to bring many people and agencies together to work for a common cause.  Keith Grint has written about this, making the following distinctions:

Command―critical problems―physical

Management―tame problems―rational

Leadership―wicked problems―emotional

Social sector organisations are usually dealing with ‘wicked’ overlapping problems, where multiple categories can apply in any one instance (eg homelesssness, mental health, offending, family breakdown).  The need is to go ‘above and beyond’ such categories but leaders, whether acting as commissioners or providers, constantly collude in ‘officialising’ social behaviour. They adopt managerial practices which fulfil contracts and give the appearance of outcomes but simply don’t work for people, who end up receiving multiple interventions at many points driven by many leaders, all claiming they have created change, when in fact they probably haven’t.

In certain contexts we do need leaders able to fulfil command and management roles, they do sometimes need to have the influence and authority to get people to do hard things. But we should beware of people who feel too comfortable in such roles!

When we see leadership only in terms of command and management we tend to associate this with physical qualities, tall men in particular, and these forms of leadership tend therefore to become excluding and can have intimidating effects.

The RACI or RASCI models are widely used (implicitly if not explicitly).  This identifies different roles in any change process:

R - Responsible - who is responsible for carrying out the entrusted task?

A - Accountable (also Approver) - who is responsible for the whole task and who is responsible for what has been done?

S - Support - who provides support during the implementation of the activity / process / service?

C - Consulted - who can provide valuable advice or consultation for the task?

I - Informed - who should be informed about the task progress or the decisions in the task?

This approach can be useful for simple managerial processes, where distinct functions can be allocated, but can become problematic when dealing with complexity, where the distinctions are sometimes unhelpful. In many social organisations we expect our senior staff to prioritise managerial tasks, and fail to distinguish between management and leadership, and as a consequence our CEOs spend too much time on the former and not enough on the latter.

Indeed, social sector leaders often present themselves as directive leaders, capable of strong centralised management, in order to win contracts and appeal to funders, even when they know this is not good enough.

So what are the alternative forms of leadership more suited to dealing with complex social change? 

A shift towards shared leadership perhaps? But truly shared leadership is very difficult to achieve. Looking back, those who experienced collectives in the 1970s and 1980s found them ultimately unsatisfactory.  Often chaotic, they would wear people down, and in fact usually created conditions for factional dominance. Looking forward we should not be complacent that new forms of organisation will necessarily generate a shift towards shared leadership: many social entrepreneurs and tech entrepreneurs are highly directive and controlling in their behaviours.

We can sometimes see a more distributed and networked form of leadership in smaller, local, neighbourhood based community organisations, where there can be a much closer connection with beneficiaries (‘they could so easily be my daughter or my grandpa…’), where managers and staff and volunteers can have a high level of day to day interaction, and where leaders can be more likely to lend a direct hand in service delivery. 

Network-oriented leaders, who are very good at working with people, rather than telling people what to do, can be effective in such settings, but they often find it hard to gain access to circles of power, and when they do gain access, to be heard. This applies both to external gatherings of ‘sector leaders’, as well as internally where people who are less directive in their behaviours are often left out of key discussions.

As Toby Lowe from Newcastle University argues, we need to understand that organisations don’t produce outcomes, but that whole systems do. Good leadership therefore means avoiding the impulse to claim outcomes for a single organisation, but instead requires the skills to build a distinctive role within a wider system which produces change, and explain the value of ‘what we do’ in a very different way.

At a local level, it can be easier for everyone in leadership roles to get to know each other, and build system-wide working relationships, although it is also striking how often this doesn’t happen, and it is often the case that local agencies are not aware of each other, or if they are, they have a poor relationship.  

The role of funders can be significant in this.  Funders who are closer to whole systems are better able to support concerted and meaningful social change. The Big Lottery Fund for example struggles with this, because distance make it difficult to understand what added value a particular agency can bring, whereas local funders are, at least in theory, more able to build relationships and make the connections necessary to support whole system change, and support the models of leadership which allow collaborative working to flourish.

Note from Better Way London Cell 3: Leadership

Note of Better Way discussion in the third London cell, 4 December 2018

The group was discussing Better Way leadership, and was opened by some thoughts from Peter Holbrook, reflecting on the literature.  It is said that a leader ‘knows, goes, and shows the way’ and that leaders have an ability to empower others and to do the right thing.  Leaders should seek not to take the credit but be willing to take responsibility.  Various styles were recognised, including coercive; authoritative; affiliative and democratic.  Sometimes leadership was there but people do not recognise it in themselves.  It can feel hard to lead the cavalry when you don’t feel comfortable on a horse. 

One could get lost in the advice from the literature but ultimately one should treat others as one wished to be treated.  The qualities of respect, kindness, generosity, nurturing, enabling and empowering others are important.  Personal values matter and one should keep on learning and reflecting and act with love.  This point resonated powerfully in the following discussion.

Love – warmth and accessibility - was not much talked about in leadership but was undoubtedly important, it was agreed.  In the Oasis network, they seek to practice at all levels and in everything they do ‘nine habits’ which include joyfulness, patience, peace, love, self-control, hope and perseverance.  Leadership requires ‘followship’.  Their hope is that through this approach they are supporting lots of people who can be influential.  It is about creating the right culture.

Generosity of spirit and the practice of love was not, however, the dominant model, the group reflected.  Co-operation was talked about but competition was more common and the qualities that were more often rewarded were self-importance, lack of humility and ruthlessness.    Leaders were often expected to grow an organisation and were judged on its financial stability.  Under pressure, people often defaulted to a more primitive way of operating.  It was argued that there is a need for more honesty amongst CEOs about leadership and what worked. 

We argued for a bigger scale of ambition amongst social sector leaders and to look beyond one organisation.  Gay rights had been achieved by more than one organisation and not by making minor adjustments to the status quo.  Partnership was essential to achieve this kind of change. 

We explored the model of ‘open sourcing’ in IT, which can make commercial sense.  Resources are freely available but free input is also gained.  At the same time companies like Google are knocking out competition and allowing no scope for plurality.

We reflected on the fact that sometimes people feel powerless to achieve change when in fact there are many resources and levers available to them.  Leadership was partly about belief in ones own efficacy.  Community organisers can help here and are another example of leadership.  It would also be great to see more confidence from staff at all levels to push for change and believe in themselves as leaders.

The two questions from the group  that could be explored further by the network are:

• How we can embed a style of leadership that embodies collaboration and the generous quality of love.

• How to create a sense of self-efficacy to unlock leadership amongst those at all levels of an organisation and in all communities who do not currently feel ‘comfortable on the horse’.

Note from Better Way London Cell 2: Leadership

Note of Better Way cell discussion, 2nd cell, 29 November 2017

The topic of discussion was a Better Way leadership and it was introduced by Richard Wilson who said that he had come to the view that it was system changes, rather leadership, that drives through real change. 

One example of this was Sheffield Microsystem Coaching Academy, which hopes ‘to create a culture of sustained patient-centred continuous quality improvement’ within health services in Sheffield and trains ‘coaches in the art of team coaching and the science of quality improvement to work with front line teams to help the redesign the services they deliver….  It encourages coaches to deeply involve patients in their micro-system improvement, to help group members understand the value to the customer, drawing on tools including patient interviews and stories, patient representation in microsystems, and fictional patients. ‘ 

Richard said that this approach had really worked and as a consequence he had become really interested in geographical and issues based approaches.  Harthill Consulting, which has worked with banks to encourage staff to think about their values and really apply them, is another example of this kind of technique.  Some other examples of systems changes would be to give staff radical control over their pay and hours.  At an aeronautics company, Matblack Systems they had a highly distributed model of leadership in which everyone had their own company.  This was not going to work in the public sector, though.  Context is key.  Different contexts require different structures.

NESTA’s 100 days rapid response programme was considered as an example of trying to achieve systems change by bringing leaders together to explore radically different ways of doing things within a 100 days.  It was a great idea but one experience of it in a local government context was that it was chaotic, involved few people working in the area and engaged no users of the services, and was too driven by a narrow and pre-determined view about the solution. 

We talked about the problems of delivering change in local government.  One issue was that if one leader who is sponsoring change moved on, things no longer progress.  Or local authorities expect the voluntary sector to pick up innovations rather than carrying them through themselves.  It could be very difficult to implement asset-based approaches when a top down approach is deeply ingrained.  Systems changes could help guard against these problems.  The Early Action Task Force talks of change only happening when three things occur:  leadership and culture and systems change.

One type of systems review is carried out by Vanguard Consulting, which Locality had used to create its report, Saving Money by Doing the Right Thing, which identified how money was being wasted by the public sector by not sorting out problems early on and moving people on to multiple agencies who were unable to resolve their issues alone.

We discussed the idea that leadership was multi-faceted.  A RSA report had found three forms of power were important to leadership – personal agency; the power of shared values and norms; and the hierarchical power of expertise. 

It was certainly the case leadership does not necessarily take place at the top of organisations.  Leadership can equate to influence, which can happen at any level.    It is sometimes a question of finding the people who know how to make things happen.

If problems are complex, the literature in this area confirms that this always requires distributive leadership.  This is not the case for simple problems, which can require a top down approach, nor for so-called ‘complicated’ problems.  This analysis was powerful and chimed with the experience of the group that context mattered hugely and that no one leadership style was always appropriate.  However, when it came to complex issues, on which both the voluntary and public sectors were often engaged, collaboration and partnership was critical.

The group was very struck by this last analysis and suggested that we further develop it in the Better Way network, as it could unlock fresh thinking about how to change services for the better.