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Yorkshire Musician’s Social Media Surgery

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This was yet another event pulled together by John Popham and inspired by the social media surgery format.
It was a great example of a peer to peer support mechanism with everyone getting something from the event.  The Round Foundry who provided the room, got to showcase their wonderfully flexible building and to prove once again how great they are as people.  Social media bods got richly entertained by musicians.  Musicians learned a bit from social media bods. Event sponsors  http://get-ctrl.com get to raise awareness for their service,  local business Out of the Woods get to sell a few platters of wonderful canapés and it seems that everyone is a winner.
No evaluation forms, no sign in sheets, no evidence of GVA created, jobs retained or any of the usual nonsense to be sent to a funder for rubber stamping to release funds.
No event management teams handing out name badges and ticking  lists.
No pop up banners reminding everyone how great we are in providing this service and ramming an expensive, publicly funded brand down their necks.
Just a great experience shared by people who might not otherwise have met, networks built and strengthened, opportunities uncovered, smiles on faces, tunes in hearts and I suspect some really talented people who now have ideas about how to get their music heard and perhaps some more revenue too.  We have known for a long time that conviviality matters.  But mainstream business support rarely manages to achieve it.
No ‘gurus’ or accredited advisers either!  There is a debate about the future of business support in which I advocate for a greater emphasis on peer to peer networks and problem based learning as more cost effective ways to support enterprise than a model based on professional business advisers and brokerage.  And the main criticism of what I am advocating is that ‘we can’t assure the quality of the advice given’.  Well apart from not being entirely true (we use an informal peer review to check out the quality of our work in social media surgeries) it also shows a lack of faith in the ability of lay people to help other lay people make progress.  Information is offered on a caveat emptor, or ‘you might want to think about…’ basis, and people are advised to talk with more than one surgeon to get a different perspective.  In short, people are taught how to get value from ‘would be’ helpers.
And when we look at advisory regimes that are fully quality assured, supervised and regulated – like the finance industry – are we really supposed to think that this is a model that provides guarantees of quality?
Let’s just open every single event with a reminder from Buddha – “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”

Wrong Thinking in Big Society?

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It is an easy mistake to make.  The argument for it goes something like this…

If we want to make Big Society work we have to get more citizens ‘connected‘ to ‘place’ and ‘people’.  We have to encourage civic pride and a culture of helping for the common good.  We need to get more of us running libraries, volunteering and generally being good eggs.  We need more people to be more selfless.

But I think this is wrong thinking.

The primary challenge is not about connecting us to ‘people’ and ‘place’.  This maybe necessary but is certainly not sufficient, and if done without the right pre-conditions will only result in rustling up the usual overburdened suspects and urging them to ‘do more’.

The challenge is to tackle apathy and hopelessness. To help people who currently see themselves as ‘victims of a broken society’ to become active architects of a better one.

To connect more of us to our own sense of self: our own sense of potential, aspiration, vision and possibility.  Armed with a sense of agency and purpose in relation to our own lives then association, mutuality and cooperation, all of those factors that lead to the emergence of community will surely follow, as we realise that our own progress is tied up with the progress of our neighbours.

It is when we have given up on ourselves that we also give up on our communities.

How does this wrong thinking manifest itself in practice?

Well, for example, when we ask ‘communities’ what they need. Almost inevitably they will agree on a lowest common denominator project that makes a little difference to a lot of people but ducks the real issues that really blights lives.  So we get a community group lobbying for a new playground instead of tackling the real challenges that they face – like how to put breakfast on the table every morning, or how to get their children to study at school, or how to escape from violence.  These things are just too painful and personal to talk about in group meetings with well-meaning strangers.

We have to recognise that communities appear when large numbers of individuals are working on what really, REALLY matters to them, working collectively in pursuit of their own self-interest, rightly understood.

When we get the balance right between looking after yourself and looking after your neighbour.

Duck Farming, Enterprise, Big Society and Neighbourhood Challenge

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This morning saw the launch at NESTA of the Neighbourhood Challenge.  A chance to pitch to become one of 10 organisations to be given 18 months and £150k to galvanise communities to respond to local priorities.

Much talk of hyperlocal websites, community organisers, big society, radical shifts in power and areas of low social capital.  All good stuff.  But not the kind of things I hear when I am talking with people in communities in Leeds about their priorities.  These things are not their concerns.  They are the concerns of policy makers and funders.

It reminded me of  the launch of the Local Enterprise Growth Initiative.  A very sage colleague of mine said to me at the time,

Mike, I have concerns about this programme.  These people don’t understand enterprise.  I think if the minister had stood up and said that ‘The future of our communities lies in duck farming, and so today I am launching a major new programme to promote duck farming in our most deprived communities’ we would have had much the same audience nodding and clapping.  These people know how to write bids.  They know how to manage projects. But do they really know about enterprise?

I hope that this mornings audience was more versed in community organising, social capital and community.

And less versed in snaffling up money on behalf of the communities that they serve.

I am sure many communities will put forward bids.  And I expect that people from outside of their communities will sit in judgement and decide.

And there is the rub.

Greed, Anger and Development

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Greed and anger have always been powerful forces for change.

Greed is given more or less free rein in our society. It is incentivised.  It creates wealth and jobs, it provides products and services.  Greed is good.  To those that have, more shall be given.

Unlike greed, anger  is usually discouraged (‘just play nicely’, ‘stop moaning’) and dulled through engagement in bureaucratic process. Anyone who has tried to make anything better by engaging in a committee of some description will recognise that dynamic.  Vision Building process anyone? Participatory budgeting? Citizen’s Panel?

As a society it feels like we TEACH helplessness when it comes to social change.

We design systems and structures that sap energy and will from the angry: that neutralise those who are driven by love or hate.

If we want to see our communities develop then we must

  • raise levels of love and hate about the issues that really matter,  and then
  • provide meaningful and rewarding avenues through which ‘what matters’ can be pursued with power, creativity and compassion.

For me, this means helping people to understand and feel their anger and their love, before building careful associations with like-minded folk.

It is not a question of how we change people, but how we provide a context in which they choose to change themselves.

For me, the most promising answer lies in the provision of effective community coaching using mechanisms such as Local Community Enterprise Accelerators (ELSIEs), supplemented by group learning processes such as Progress School, Innovation Lab and Results Factory.