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Hunger for Inspiration

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Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think this offers us some powerful, but largely ignored, clues as to how we should design our enterprise development services.  We need to offer a service that helps people to seek, find and, crucially, act on their inspiration.

Their inspiration – not our policy goals.

Their inspiration – not ‘our’ desire to get ‘them’ off benefits or back into work.

Their inspiration – not our idea of ‘opportunities’ designed to meet employer demands.

Because the reality is that MOST enterprise development services are not designed to inspire.  They are designed to teach people how to commoditise themselves.  How to ‘fit in’ with the needs of the economy.

Take a good, honest look at your services.  Are they really designed to develop the users agenda – or to channel them into ours?

Perhaps this is why we are continually engaging ‘inspirational’ speakers in the false hope that we can somehow put back into our service a missing essence.  An essence that will always be missing until we change the assumptions around which our enteprise services are built.

The cornerstone of a service based on the hunger for inspiration would be a relationship in which users can be open and honest about their hopes and aspirations.  A relationship, not a workshop, or a series of workshops or advice.  A relationship.

A relationship that recognises that development takes time.  That it will feature highs and lows, lapses and relapses.

Because it is only in a relationship, characterised by compassion, competence, respect, belief, optimism, commitment and skill that people will be open and honest about their hopes and dreams and start to get in touch with what inspires them.  It is only in such a supportive relationship that people will really dare to dream and act.  It is I believe only through a relationship that people can really find inspiration and the resources for transformation.

  • So how would we market such a service?
  • Where would we find clients?
  • How would we pay for it?
  • Who would manage it?
  • What might we expect from it in terms of outputs and value for money?

But the big question that always gets asked here is about affordability.  A genuinely personalised service.  Delivered primarily through 121 conversations – isn’t that ridiculously expensive?  Well no its not.  The numbers stack up well in comparison to competing services.

The real challenge here is changing the mindset of service suppliers and commissioners.  Helping them to recognise that our communities are not full of the feckless and ignorant who need to be fixed.

They are full of people seeking inspiration and the power to act effectively on it.

Full of people who would love to become the kind of person that they know they could be.

As soon as we start designing our services around these assumptions we might get some much more positive results.

Interested?

PMN on Twitter

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I have just set up a dedicated twitter account for PMN.  You can now follow me on twitter @PMNUK.

Check out the twitter stream at http://twitter.com/pmnuk

This account will be used to provide regular ideas, inspiration, reminders and nudges about effective progressive management.

I also tweet on @mikechitty – where the focus is more on my work in enteprise and education.

Hope this makes things better for you!

Mike Chity

What Inspires and Transforms Us?

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I have had several conversations with a range of professionals in regeneration and enterprise in recent weeks to explore what specific skills, qualities and behaviours are likely to help to ‘transform’ or ‘inspire’ a client.

I am interested because:

  • I have witnessed the power of personal and transformational relationships myself and think it would be useful to understand the recipes (if they exist)
  • Many claim that their mission is to ‘inspire and transform’ yet their methodologies are based on transactional consulting –  data collection, analysis and advice/recommendation.  These can be useful but I do not think they consistently (or even occasionally) inspire or transform.
  • If we are seeking to provide relationships through which others can inspire and transform their lives then perhaps we ought to have a little more organised insight into what makes the process work.

I have read a lot of the theory and it has its merits.  However I am interested now in the experience of those who have been inspired or transpired:

  • What skills and qualities were present?
  • What behaviours were used?
  • What made the inspiration/transformation happen?
  • Was the relationship face to face – or mediated through a book or other media?
  • Was it intentional – they were offering to transform and inspire an dyou were looking for it)?
  • Was it accidental – unplanned, spontaneous?

All insights welcomed and I will of course share the results!

The End of (Enterprise) Education?

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My eldest daughter came home from school last week with something like 10kg of university prospectuses.  She spent much of the week-end browsing the frightening range of courses available. 

And it got me thinking about whether the compulsory education that she has experienced so far, all 13 years of it, have really provided her with an excellent platform for wealth and fulfillment in her adult life.  And the result of my pondering was:

  1. As a premise I believe that education is at its best when it socialises people into the obligations and freedoms of active citizenship, and immunises them against imprisonment by the gilded cages of consumerism.  So why does so much (enterprise) education appear to be about the development of the next generation of employer fodder/entrepreneurs/snake oil sellers?
  2. Is this because we are failing to teach the real meaning of ‘social enterprise’ now that it has become embedded in what Todd Hannula describes as ‘agency led mush’? 
  3. Have we ever properly taught the notion of social enterprise?  Is it really more the the pursuit of ‘enlightened self interest’ in the marketplace?
  4. To release prodigious human energies and good will we must learn how to help people find powerful narratives that give meaning and direction to their lives.  
  5. We must help them to learn about themselves at least as much as we should help them learn about the world outside of them.
  6. We must encourage them to explore what they love and who they can become in pursuit of their potential.
  7. We must educate them to properly understand their own self interest and how this fits with the self interest of others in a mutually sustainable and progressive community. 
  8. We must help them to become experts in using power in pursuit of mutual self interest.
  9. We must help them to build their power in creating the kind of future that they want to see for themselves and for the diverse communities that live on spaceship earth.

Perhaps consideration of these statements might just help us to realise ‘the end of (enterprise) education’.