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Why IDB is Not So Smart…

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Business Link is built around a proposition called IDB.  Inform, Diagnose and Broker.

Providing access to information, diagnosing problems, and brokering in people who can provide relevant specialist help.

As well as facing some tricky practical problems (making brokerage effective and impartial being just one) there are more significant problems with this approach.  It focuses on problems and weaknesses and assumes that these can best be managed by introducing the owner manager, or the management team, to an external consultant with specialist knowhow.

In spite of some very practical problems in making this work (has anyone got a brokerage platform that really works yet, or a methodology for diagnosing that is used consistently, objectively and effectively by all brokers?); the main problem is the occasional failure to get to the nub of the issue –  the make up of the entrepreneurial team and the managerial imbalance that, more often than not, is the root cause of the problem.

If a business is struggling with some aspect of its development, this is a clue that there maybe a weakness in the management team in that area.  It maybe a lack of knowledge.  Or a lack of passion for the specific activity.  It maybe that the knowledge and passion was never present in the management team (we don’t do enough to help entrepreneurs build a robust management team before they start up).  Or it may have just been lost over time as one, or more,  of the management team becomes complacent or jaded.   More often than not the underlying problem is in the current competence and passion of the owner manager or management team.  But this gets overlooked in our rush to broker in a solution.

A specialist is brokered in and the problem addressed.  Temporarily.  Often with limited success.

Why?

Because of the nature of the underlying problem.  There is no-one in the management team who really cares about this aspect of the business who has the passion and the tenacity to implement the recommendations of the specialists.  Giving marketing advice to someone who is not passionate about marketing is unlikely to lead to a roaring success.

The client often does not need brokering to a supplier of a one-off specialist solution.  They need to be helped to confront the structural weaknesses in their management team that allowed the problem to arise or the opportunity to slip by.

Enterprise Strategy at its Worst?

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4OPFl2Kxhs]

  • Will your ‘dream business’ REALLY be your dream business?
  • IF you start to make money – will it REALLY make you happy?
  • Is starting a business in YOUR self interest or in that of a bureaucrat/government department?
  • Will managing your business REALLY improve your wellbeing and happiness?

Is your work person centred? Really…

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My inbox is rammed with emails from various agencies of the State claiming that they are developing person centred approaches to service design, delivery and development.

Most are not.

  • If you have set up a service designed to promote behaviour change because you have been told/asked/contracted to do so by a policy maker – then your work is not person centred – it is policy centred
  • If you have developed a service that only works on predefined agendas, with pre-defined ‘solutions’ and services, then your work is not person centred – it is service centred.
  • If your service works on a  premise that service users are in some way broken, faulty or otherwise in need of your modification (smoking cessation, weight management, more entrepreneurial, better CV and qualifications etc) then your work is NOT person centred.
  • If you push your services on people without being invited, using systems of sticks and carrots, and large marketing budgets, to promote engagement – then your work is not person centred – it is to some degree at least manipulative and coercive.
  • If you make decisions that prioritise achieving targets over the wellbeing of the people that use your service – then your work is not person centred.  It is target centred.

Person centred work is done:

  • At the invitation of the person – they invite you to work with them – primarily based on their perception of your relevance to them and their agendas.  If people are inviting you to work with them and finding the process helpful then word of mouth will soon spread and you do not need to spend vast sums promoting your service.
  • When the person sets out their agenda and accesses the support that they choose (rather than those that your agency is set up to deliver).  They always have choices and person centred work helps them to recognise these and prioritise amongst them.
  • When interventions let the person decided whether they wish to engage with ‘professional service providers’ and/or with their neighbours and peers – they don’t assume that the solution lies with experts and ‘mainstream’ providers.
  • When the ‘whole’ person is acknowledged and accepted – not when we fragment them according to our service design.  If we have a service that is just designed to promote health, crime reduction or entrepreneurship – then we are not person centred.

This matters enormously.

Once we start to take the ideas and ideals of person centred working seriously we can transform the impact of the so called ‘helping services’.  Instead of a Nanny State we can have an enabling and empowering state.  And people can really start to recognise their own responsibility for helping themselves in a context that is out to help rather than to fix.

Carl Rogers in On Becoming a Person had this to say:

It has gradually been driven home to me that I cannot be of help …by any means of any intellectual or training procedure.  No approach which relies upon knowledge, upon training, upon the acceptance of something that is taught, is of any use.  These approaches are so tempting and direct that I have, in the past, tried a great many of them.  It is possible to explain a person to himself, to prescribe steps that should lead him forward, to train him in knowledge about a more satisfying mode of life.  But such methods are, in my experience, futile and inconsequential.  The most they can accomplish is some temporary change, which soon disappears, leaving the individual more than ever convinced of their inadequacy.

The failure of any such approach through the intellect has forced me to recognise that change appears to come about through experience in a relationship.

…

If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur.

Carl Rogers – On Becoming a Person

So my plea to you: If your work is not genuinely person centred – please don’t say that it is. You will just be serving to reduce the chances of genuinely person centred approaches ever getting a fair crack at the whip.

And if you you want to explore how you can adopt genuinely ‘person centred’ approaches then please do get in touch!

Enterprise trumps Entrepreneurship

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I think that enterprise is much more important for our communities than entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship focuses on encouraging people to move into self-employment or to start, or grow their own business. If instead we focus on enterprise we are encouraging people to think about their current situation and how it might be improved. We are helping them to develop strategies that will move them towards their preferred future.
By promoting enterprise in this way we will of course encourage entrepreneurship. As people become more enterprising they may, on occasion, need to start a new business to get them from where they are to their preferred future.
However our default setting should be to dissuade people from starting a business. If we can easily put them off, then it is likely that they would not have the necessary perseverance to make the business work. If they are insistent that only by starting a business can they become the kind of person that they wish to be and create the kind of future that they wish to have, then, and only then, should we roll our sleeves up and do all we can to help them succeed in their entrepreneurial venture, safe in the knowledge that they have the determination and persistence that they will require to succeed.
By adopting a premise that we should persuade as many people as possible not to start a business I believe that we can significantly increase the survival rate of those businesses that do start-up. As people in the community begin to see businesses that are both well thought through and successful taking hold, more and more will begin to believe that starting a business is not almost inevitably going to end in debt and misery.
However, even in the most entrepreneurial communities it is likely that fewer than 10 in 100 people of working age are ever likely to start their own business.  I would contend that of those hundred people every one of them would benefit from learning how to become more enterprising. That is, how to identify their current situation how to recognise what an improvement might look like, and to put in place plans and actions to move in that direction.

This is why I think that enterprise is much more important, as a concept or a philosophy, for our communities than entrepreneurship. If we wish to have more entrepreneurial communities then we must start by first making them more enterprising.