realisedevelopment.net

Just another WordPress site

Breaking the Stranglehold on Enterprise

by

For a few years now I seem to have been living in Groundhog Day.

Not everyday, but enough to be disconcerting.

I will be chatting with an enterprise professional, perhaps a lecturer in a University, an enterprise coach in a ‘deprived’ community, a start-up business adviser or a bureaucrat managing an enterprise project. In our conversations about enterprise we will recognise how it is not all about business. How enterprise can be expressed in a seemingly infinite number of ways.

Sure, for a significant and important minority, it is about commercial endeavour.  Business, profit, and social impact in some combination. In order to express their enterprising soul a minority have to start a business.

But for the majority being enterprising, being proactive in pursuit of a better future, does not mean starting up a business. It may mean making a phone call, having a conversation, calling a meeting or writing a letter. Taking some action that increases agency and power in pursuing a preferred future. It may be taking the opportunity to reflect on ‘The direction in which progress lies’, or ‘What are the next steps that I can take to make progress?’ or ‘What options have I got?’

We will reflect on how some of the most enterprising people we know may work in the Council, or the University, or organise festivals and campaigns in the community. That the enterprising soul finds its expressions in many forms and not just in entrepreneurship.

We will agree that the real point of leverage in our communities lies not in providing start-up advice with those who are already minded to start a business, although of course this IS important. The real leverage lies in helping more people to establish the direction in which progress lies for them and their loved ones and helping them to plan and execute actions designed to move them in that direction.

If we can significantly increase the stock of enterprising people then, as sure as eggs is eggs, we will also increase the stock of entrepreneurial people. And we will not lose so many who are completely turned off by enterprise because of the Gordon Gecko or Victorian perceptions of enterprise nurtured by the reality TV shows and newspaper headlines.

We will also increase the survival rate of new businesses as people make natural progress into entrepreneurship instead of being persuaded to start a business (‘all you need is the idea and the determination to succeed’) when they have not yet gained the real skills or capital that they will need to succeed.

In our conversations we will agree on these things. And then almost invariably they will head off to run another course on ‘Marketing and Sales’ or ‘Business Planning’ or to look at monitoring returns that count bums on seats and business start-up rates. If ever there was an industry that needed to innovate and re-invent itself and its role in modern Britain it is the enterprise industry. If we really want to build a much more enterprising Britain then we need to break the stranglehold that the business start-up industry has on enterprise policy.

Now of course there are a lot of people who like things the just the way that they are.  There are a whole army of ‘enterprise professionals’ out there with ‘start up workshops’, business planning sessions and assorted ‘enterprise = business’ paraphernalia all telling the policy makers that ‘This is the way’.

Yet in decades of trying to increase the business start-up rates things have not changed significantly. Indeed according to Global Entrepreneurship Monitor in the last decade the ‘nascent entrepreneur rate’ (the percentage of 16-64 year olds actively involved in setting up a business in the UK) has dropped from 3.3% in 2001 to 3.1% in 2010.  And this in spite of enterprise and entrepreneurship climbing the policy agenda and attracting significant investment.

Time for the community to reclaim the enterprise agenda from the suits perhaps?

Community – The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block

by

Community – The Structure of Belonging – Peter Block

Peter Block has long been a ‘go to’ writer people who think carefully about the process of change and how best to help positive change happen.  For me, he IS the Consultants’ Consultant.  As the author of Flawless Consulting – A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used; The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook:- Understanding Your Expertise; Stewardship: Choosing Service over Self-Interest and The Empowered Manager he has a 30 year track record of wisdom and knowledge in how to help managers, leaders and consultants create positive change.  So it was with some excitement that I first read Community –  The Structure of Belonging.

It did not disappoint.

Block distils his practical knowledge of change and describes his experiences in applying it to helping communities tackle fragmentation, conflict and disconnection.  He provides practical guidance on how community can be built, how transformation maybe nurtured and how healthy communities can be built.  But he offers few solutions; just questions and processes that help us to tackle our own problems and pursue our own aspirations.

This is Block at his person centred best.  At its essence he describes how to move from preoccupations with deficiencies, narrow interests and entitlements to possibility, generosity and ‘gifts’ through the art of convening:  bringing the right people to the right conversations to tackle the right questions.  By reframing leadership as the art of convening Block lays down an important challenge that many will choose to ignore.

The book will help anyone who cares about the wellbeing of their community – whether that is an organisation, a neighbourhood, a city or a parish.  However it is neither an easy nor a comfortable read.  As Block says the ‘sole purpose [of the book] is to provide a path toward creating a future very different from what we now have.

So, if you are comfortable with the status quo, steer clear.

The Abundant Community – Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods

by

The Abundant Community – Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods – John McKnight, Peter Block

McKnight and Block are, for me at least, a development ‘dream team’.  John McKnight is a pioneer of the asset based development movement and Peter Block is widely regarded as the consultant’s consultant; one of the very best facilitators of transformation and change.

“There is a growing movement of people with a different vision for their local communities”.

On this side of the Atlantic we might be forgiven for thinking that those with the vision are Cameron, Wei et al, the would be architects of Big Society.  But McKnight and Block recognise that the people with the power to make the transformation happen are not the politicians and the civil servants, but the people that live in community and want it to be a place that they can love.

Central to this transformation is a rebalancing of community away from consumption towards a paradigm of production.  A paradigm where we spend less time earning to pay specialists to provide products and services that we could choose to make ourselves.

There is little or no talk of place-making, regeneration and ribbon cutting projects.  Just people, relationships, skills, interests, passions, associations and what it means to be a competent community.  A place where people learn to support each other and make good thing happen. Of their own volition. Not that of their elected representatives.

The Abundant Community provides powerful and practical insights into how the work of building a competent community can be sustained – even without generous handouts from a benevolent state.

Stylistically the Americanese can be off-putting,  but get past it and you will be generously rewarded.  For me this is one of the most important books of recent years.  Unless of course you make your money from the glass, steel and concrete approach to place-making.

The Future of Your City…?

by

All the debate about the kind of city we want to be and how we get there is, on one hand, just a lot of hot air, but on the other hand is a series of conversations where people develop and test ideas and possibilities. Meaningful action starts with a conversation – not a plan. Or a vision.

However it really is a tiny minority who are interested in ‘co-designing our city’. The vast majority of us are just trying to get through our own lives, the best way we know how. And while the professional place shapers and planners will continue to do their darndest (more retail opportunities on the way), and try to ‘engage us’ along the way, it is the decisions and actions of the vast majority who have a much more personal interest in Leeds life that will really shape the future of the city.

The development of a city can be supported in 2 broad ways, which are not mutually exclusive.

Firstly we can shape the city to make it attractive to certain groups and types of people. We can build a compelling cultural offer and a good commercial base to attract the wealth creators. This is deficit based development. We do things to attract people who have skills and know how that we do not.  Or we turn ourselves into a theme park and rely on wealth being created elsewhere but spent in ‘our’ economy.

Secondly we can shape the city to make it more attractive and supportive for people that are already here. We can base the development of the city on the development of its people and communities. It is an approach to development that honours who we are, where we have come from, how we can change in order to shape our lives and, as a corollary, the city in pursuit of progress.  It values education and the emergence of identity rather than its imposition.

I have been arguing for many years that in Leeds, as in most UK cities we favour the former approach excessively over the latter. It is placemaking orthodoxy. It involves big ticket ribbon cutting projects, international exchange trips, hob-nobbing with money men and women and the trappings that come with it. It ticks the boxes for the politicians and allows ‘investors’ to have a sporting chance to make a good return. At its best it makes things better for everyone. But it also widens the gaps between the rich and poor.

The second approach involves sitting and listening to people talk about their hopes and fears for the future and slowly building their power to create change. Starting from where they are at, working with what they have got. Forging relationships, shaping projects. No glamour, little money and progress that is organic, potentially transformational and sustainable but that seldom offers the opportunities to cut a big ribbon. At least not quickly.  This is the work of the community coach.

But I hope that the future of Leeds features more of this kind of development – We are all Jim, Cultural Conversations, Progress School, Leeds Salon, Bettakultcha all shaping the present and the future – starting from where we are, working with what we have got.

NB: This piece started of as a comment to a piece by Leeds Salon Organiser Paul Thomas over on the Culture Vulture blog