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Ripples from the Zambezi – Introduction

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Sirolli introduces his book as the results of years or practice in the art of economic development through person centred development or facilitation.

He describes the growth of Enterprise Facilitation™ through word of mouth advertising and client testimonials.

He describes how current interest in entrepreneurship has made the work of spreading his methodology more straightforward. As more women join the enterprise market and more people become interested in flexible and home working through self employment the market place for Enterprise Facilitation™ in just about any community seems to be a growing one.

A Diverse Client Base

Clients come from a wide range of backgrounds and one of the founding principals of the methodology seems to be that help is available for anyone living or working in the community. Building social systems that ensure that a diverse client base is:

A) Recruited, and

B) Provided with a high quality and relevant service, is perhaps a key Sirolli lesson.

He describes the client base as “in the market right now looking not just for employment but also for a way to make a living without compromising their need for dignity”.

How does this description fit clients for your enterprise services?

What about people who are not ‘in the market’ but who already make a living through benefits and/or the gray economy?

What options do they have ‘to make a living without compromising their need for dignity’?

Indigenous Growth

Sirolli also claims that ‘civic leaders are accepting much more readily the notion of indigenous growth’.

What does he mean by the concept of ‘indigenous growth’?

How does it contrast with other approaches – such as:

  • business attraction/inward investment or
  • developing social infrastructure to attract the ‘creative classes’?

Sustainability and Human Scale

Sirolli also makes the point that 1000 home based business in a community ‘cannot even be seen’ while a factory employing a 1000 people will ‘change the physical landscape, even the air a community breathes’.

How is this a compelling reason for person centred economic development and indigenous growth?

Ubiquity of Passion, Intelligence, Self-motivation and Energy

This is one of the founding assumptions of Enterprise Facilitation™. That in every community there is the passion, intelligence, self motivation and energy to plant the seeds of economic development.

Many of the communities targeted by economic development programmes appear to have lower levels of passion, intelligence, self motivation and energy than their more prosperous neighbours.

Why else might levels of ‘enterprise’ be so low?

Are these human qualities somehow missing from economically failing communities – or have they just gone underground?

What are the mechanisms that cause some people from these communities to hide or apparently lose their passion, intelligence, self-motivation and energy?

What can be done that might help them to re-connect with these qualities?

You can can comment on any part of Ripples from the Zambezi by joining the Enterprise Reading Group.

Building the Social System for High Performance

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Whenever you see an organisation doing something consistently well, you can be sure that there is an effective social system behind it. The social system is made up of both a hard and a soft landscape. The hard landscape is that of meetings, information flows and decision making processes. The soft landscape is to do with behaviours, attitudes, values, respect and commitment.

Effective managers recognise their role in developing both the hard and soft landscapes of the social system – but recognise that it is the soft landscape – the way people and teams work together that really drives culture and performance.

When trying to initiate change, less effective managers work on the hard landscape. They change the organisational structure, replace key people or alter what is measured and rewarded. While such changes maybe necessary, they are NEVER sufficient.

It is the interactions between people that need to be changed, the information flows and the decision making processes. If people are not having the right discussions or behaving in ways that drive values and performance then the managers’ job is to influence them to adopt different ‘value creating’ behaviours.

In most cases this can be done using feedback. In other cases it may require more concerted efforts at coaching for the desired behaviours.

Recognising and shaping the behaviours that drive values and performance is the hallmark of an outstanding manager.

The social system changes and enables the organisation to perform consistently well because managers use mechanisms that ensure that the right conversations happen consistently and frequently. These conversations improve the quality of decision making and encourage behaviours in people’s every day work to accomplish the elusive goal of culture change.

Arts, Crafts and Enterprise

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I recently spent a day touring some of the enterprise development projects being supported by LEGI (in whole or in part) in Leeds.

The variety in the physical spaces that we visited was incredible:

  • an old warehouse that had been converted to shared work spaces rented by the hour by aspiring artists (screen printing, wood working, jewelry making etc)
  • two ex middle schools that have been refurbished and are about to opened as mixed use incubator/work spaces with restaurants, bars, gyms etc
  • a brand new modular building with funky furniture and desk space in one area and what looked to the untrained eye like a very well planned and equipped building training environment on the other
  • and a couple of generic office spaces that have been rented in the community to provide drop in space for potential entrepreneurs and administrative bases for outreach workers.

What struck me on the day was how some of these places seemed to ‘fit’ with the local community that they were situated in – and for whom one could see a demand. Indeed they seemed to have evolved as a natural consequence of local peoples passion, skills and interest (in jewellery making, screen printing, etc).

In contrast some of the others appeared to be quite out of context with the immediate environment (you know how you recognise the ‘new build funded by the public purse’ in the middle of a run down estate) with funky furniture and expensive fittings that on on the one hand send a clear message of valuing local people (YOU DO DESERVE THIS) but may provide easy targets and ammunition for the cynics as well as making them quite intimidating to some local residents.

Underlying each of the projects there is a strategy based on a set of assumptions about how enterprise development will work in the locality and with a certain target group.

I personally believe that much more work remains to be done to clarify these assumptions and strategies so that they can play an effective part in project development.

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Success Built to Last

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Success in the long run has less to do with finding the best idea, organizational structure, or business model for an enterprise, than with discovering what matters to us as individuals…For the most part, extraordinary people, teams, and organizations are simply ordinary people doing extraordinary things that matter to them.

Success Built to Last – Porras, Emery and Thompson

cited in Make the Impossible Possible by Bill Strickland pg 120

Demos Enterprise Report

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Demos have just published a collection of essays on the future of enterprise from contributors such as:

  • John Bird
  • Tim Campbell
  • Peter Day
  • John Elkington
  • Gordon Frazer
  • Howard Gardner
  • Peter Grigg
  • Martha Lane Fox
  • Jim Lawn
  • Raj Patel
  • Carl Schramm
  • Simon Woodroffe

As DEMOS say in the blurb for the report:

Enterprise is all too often associated with making money. Yet, there is so much more to it: enterprise is about creating a culture of initiative, creativity, risk-taking amongst young people and adults. It is about using entrepreneurial energy to drive change.

Britain is doing well when it comes to enterprise.

More people are trading on Ebay than ever before and TV programmes like the Dragons Den and the Apprentice are extremely popular. Small firms and individual entrepreneurs also greatly contribute to the British economy and dynamism.

But is there more to it?

This collection argues that a successful and thriving enterprise nation will have to go much further than that. The future face of enterprise is one that will need to start at home and at school; that will be found in basements and small offices as well as in big corporations and the web. It will require new skills and new talent to answer to the challenges of tomorrow. There is already a strong desire among young people to use their ideas for change, but more needs to be done to cultivate the mindsets and foster the support that tomorrow’s entrepreneurs will need if young people are not to be discouraged from trying.

This collection of essays articulates some of the key features of the future face of enterprise. Progressing this thinking into ideas for action is the next challenge.

You can download the report here.