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Big Society: Doing it for ourselves; not for them

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One of the mantras of Big Society is that we all need to find time to do more, to give more, to help others more.

Now we can moan about this being poorly timed, or a fig leaf for cuts or whatever.  But this misses the real point.

Which is that, in my book, it completely misunderstands the nature of community, why we need it and how it helps.  It seems to go against the grain of human nature and millenia of evolutionary biology.  Because for most of us, most of the time what motivates us to act is our own self interest.  How we make things better for ourselves and our loved ones.

Most communities don’t develop as expressions of human kindness and generosity.  They don’t build around some desire to ‘place make’. Or around shared public statements of values, intent and belief.  Congregations maybe.  And cults.   But not real, diverse, vibrant communities.  There are plenty of ‘place making consultancies’ that tell us otherwise, and politicians who really value compliance over powerful communities.  But real communities (as opposed to planners confections) develop as a social response to a multiplicity of self-interests being negotiated.

Real communities develop because they help their members to live the kind of lives that they want to lead.  They are a human evolutionary response to attaining a competitive edge. To help us survive and then with good fortune, thrive. Community helps members to explore their potential and develop their lives as they would wish.

So the starting point for the process of community building is not finding more time to help others (laudable though this is) or philanthropy or some demonstration of social responsibility.  It is a thorough understanding of self interest; of the kind of life you wish to lead and the potential that you wish to develop.  As this becomes clear so to will those with whom you have to make common cause, with whom you have to co-operate and perhaps compete.

And as you start to understand that your self interest can only be met in relationship with others, and they understand the same then the development of vibrant and real community, as opposed to some Orwellian fiction that ‘shapes character to that chosen by the electorate’.

Which is why I advocate, as the starting point for community development, not community organisers, but community coaches, who help people to clarify their own self interest and to build their power.  Which they nearly always do by building their networks and relationships.  And once we have a critical mass of people pursuing their self interest with power and compassion through constructive engagement and association, lo and behold, we have a community with oomph, with enterprise.  We have ‘Big Society’.

Simples.

Access to Coaching – An Alternative LEP Idea

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First of all we should reject the temptation to be entirely strategic.

Don’t try to analyse the economy like it is a game of monopoly where you can understand the roll of the dice, seeing and preparing for an uncertain future.  Don’t pretend that people and their aspirations count for nothing as you ponder the balance between investing in ports, ring-roads, runways or fibre.

Instead learn to compliment strategic development with a responsive approach.  One that engages residents in their hopes and aspirations for a better life and gives them the power and the responsibility to pursue them.  Put your faith and confidence in people.  Provide them with hope, leadership and support.

Dare to be relevant to people and not just ‘the business community’.

A city region of around 3m people like Leeds would require a network of around 75 coaches to provide access to person centred coaching support for everyone that really wanted it.

  • It would engage about 45 000 people in the process of providing direct hands on assistance to their peers.
  • It would provide direct assistance to about 16500 beneficiaries a year, the vast majority of whom would make significant progress in their personal journeys as a result of benefiting from a coaching rather than a coercive approach.
  • I would anticipate at least 750 sustainable business starts from this cohort every year.  I would envisage business survival rates around the 90% rate after 3 years.
  • It would make a very real difference to the perceptions of some 20 000 people a year about the extent to which they feel that they ‘belong to’ and ‘feel supported’ in their community.
  • In addition to traditional ‘enterprise’ outputs I would expect substantial impacts on health and well-being as well as increases in volunteering, cultural productivity, mental health, fitness and so forth.
  • It would help to integrate the dual priorities of economy and community rather than treating them as separate and often incompatible determinants.
  • Within 3-7 years I would expect it to have made a sustained and measurable difference to the enterprise culture in the city region.

And it would cost about £3.75 million a year.

The price of a very rich wo/man’s house.

NB this piece was prompted by reading ‘The Economic Opportunities and Challenges for the emerging Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) in Yorkshire and Humber – Briefing Paper‘.

As far as it goes this is an ok piece of work. Unremittingly strategic, focussing on communications, infrastructure development and targeting support at key industries – all tried, tested and, at best, partially successful ideas for economic development.  One of the challenges it identified is to develop sufficient ‘low skill jobs’ for our low skill economies.   It talks about the structures required to ensure integration of LEP structures across the region.  One can almost hear the creaking of bureaucracy…

 

Some More Provocations on Enterprise

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  • Poverty is not about scarcity – it is not that there is not enough – but that it is not shared
  • The challenge is to give more people the power that they need to play a positive and powerful role in markets; This means accessible and relevant processes to develop individual capabilities and power
  • Development is a measure of the extent to which individuals have the capabilities to live the life that they choose.  It has little to do with standard economic measures such as GDP.
  • Helping people to recognise choices and increase the breadth of choices available to them should be a key objective of development.
  • Developing the capability and power of individuals provides a key to both development and freedom
  • Development must be relevant to lives, contexts, and aspirations
  • Development is about more than the alleviation of problems – stamping out anti social behaviour, teenage pregnancies, poor housing and so on.
  • It is about helping people to become effective architects in shaping their own lives
  • We need practices that value individual identity; avoid lumping people into “communities” they may not want to be part of, and promote a person’s freedom to make her own choices.  Promoting identification with ‘community’ risks segregation and violence between communities
  • Society must take a serious interest in the overall capabilities that someone has to lead the sort of life they want to lead, and organise itself to support the development and practice of those capabilities
  • We should primarily develop an emphasis on individuals as members of the human race rather than as members of ethnic groups, religions or other ‘communities’.  Humanity matters.
  • We need to make the delivery of public education, more equitable, more efficient and more accessible

If we took this stuff seriously what kind of enterprise development activities would a LEP commission?

 

Communities with Ooomph…

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One of the things that some people find hard about my person centred and responsive approach to developing ‘Communities with Ooomph’ is the emphasis that I place, initially at least, on working with individuals to help them clarify and pursue their self interest and to build the power that they need to pursue it effectively.  Actually there are three things that ruffle feathers in there:

  1. the emphasis on working with individuals as the starting point for community development – surely we need to work with groups in order to foster ‘neighbourliness’ and ‘cooperation’ on mutual projects?
  2. the importance of helping individuals to clarify and pursue self interest – surely it is shared interests that build community?  And what if their self interest does not relate to our hopes and goals?
  3. and, the emphasis placed on developing power – power is still seen by many as some kind of dark force leading to corruption and inevitable decay

In Support for Working with Individuals

It is nigh on impossible for most people to talk honestly and openly about what is really happening in their lives, what they really need to work on, in a group setting.  It is just too painful, and the risks to confidentiality are just too great.  And when we start working with groups to explore what they collectively want, we usually end up discussing a ‘lowest common denominator’ project.  Something that everyone agrees is a good thing to do, but that will not directly address the specific inhibitors of progress for any of them.  So we end up planting a piece of waste land or campaigning for a children’s playground, getting the graffiti cleaned up.  Now these are good, worthwhile projects, and I am not saying that they don’t have a place.  They help build relationships, common cause and improve skills.  But to what end?  Unless individuals are helped to really explore and understand their self interest and to act on it, many of these projects simply leave communities treading water with people moving from one community project to the next with little or no progress.

In Support of Self Interest

For us to make common cause, I must be clear on my self interest.  So must you.  We can agree to work on an interesting project without this clarity, but if we are to really collaborate with commitment, vigour, creativity and enterprise then it must be in both our self interests if there is to be a reasonable chance of significant purposeful progress.  Otherwise our collaboration may be partial and weak.

So why the resistance to really exploring self interest?  I think because it is confused with selfishness and individualism. Self interest is neither of these things.  It is about a proper and effective negotiation of ‘self’ amongst others (interest is from the latin ‘inter este’ which means ‘to be amongst’, so I am reliably informed).  So the pursuit of self interest is the pursuit of ‘self’ negotiated amongst others.  It is about developing identity in the community.

Exploring self interest, and understanding it, is not easy work, but it is worthwhile.  Self interest is a powerful source of Ooomph.

Self interest is easily misunderstood leading to poor decision making.  Take as an example the relationship between self interest, reciprocity and generosity.

Reciprocity is the act of giving only if there is a reasonable expectation of some reward in exchange.  Generosity is the act of giving with no immediate expectation of return.  But which is most likely to be in my self interest?

An initial glance would suggest that reciprocity would be best.  I scratch your back, you scratch mine.  But for reciprocal relationships to work we have to find an exchange partner who has something that we want and who wants something that we can give.  And finding such relationships can be hard.  This is why we invented money to ensure that reciprocal arrangements could always be made.  Which is fine, as long as you have money, or people with money want what you can offer.  Reciprocity is the language of transaction.

Generosity on the other hand is the act of giving when we are able, without expectation of return.  We may be giving time, money, advice, support.  Opportunities for generosity are plentiful.  If we live in a community where individuals choose to be generous, rather than reciprocal, in their giving it is likely that much more will be both given and received by each member.  Help will be more free flowing in the community.  Generosity, giving with no expectation of return, is actually more in the self interest of each community member than reciprocity.  This is just one aspect of what I mean by fully understanding self interest and how it works in community.  Generosity is a better tactic for each of us in the proper negotiation of our self interest.

In Support of Power

There is a lot of talk in Big Society circles of ‘pushing power down’ to communities.  Of giving them power.  As if power is something that can be gift wrapped and handed over.  Authority may be given.  Even responsibility. But power?  That has to be grown from within, surely. It is strange that policy makers seem to see no irony in their endeavours.

Power is the ability to get things done.

It is correlated with the ability to organise people, money and other resources in pursuit of a goal.  Power itself, exercised wisely and with compassion is a good thing.  It should be nurtured and grown.  Yet many of us are taught that to seek power, to be power hungry are unbecoming, almost pathological behaviours.  Which is perhaps why so many good people are disinterested in the pursuit of power.

Once individuals are clear on their self interest and start to think about the power to pursue it they nearly always have to make common cause with others.  They have to associate and cooperate.

What emerges will be, to paraphrase Mr Cameron, a community with oomph.

So if you want to be a part of one of these start working with individuals, their power and self interest.  Soon enough you will find yourself working with associations and communities with real power.