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Ripples Out – Reflections

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First of all congratulations to everyone involved (Lippy Films, Yorkshire Forward, Together for Peace and local residents) in creating a powerful, provocative  film.

I sincerely hope that it helps disturb the comfortable equilibrium in Leeds (and beyond) that exists between the controllers of the public purse and the developers.  There maybe a brief window for reflection while development is ‘put on pause’ by recession – but I am sure that we will soon see business resumed as usual – if only temporarily.  At the moment, conveniently, there is no other game in town.

The likelihood of this will be increased if we focus our time and energies in trying to ‘influence’ the processes of planners and developers.  This will be playing their game – on their terms.  And I have a sneaking hunch about who might win – no matter how articulate and informed those that advocate the voice of the community are.  We also run the risk of further contributing to the dilution of our personal power as now, instead of relying on planners, we learn to rely on ‘our representatives’ to create a better future for us.  Developers and communities can become bedfellows – trading favours, but they are unlikely to become allies – they are seeking different and mutually exclusive goals.

The ‘Planners Analysis’ that says ‘give us time to finish‘, ‘forgive us a few mistakes‘ and ‘we just need to complete our investments‘ essentially says that ‘Planning’ works.  Visions, blueprints, plans and ‘investments’ will lead us to a better world.  ‘You ‘the people’ will be well looked after once we have engineered things fully – but we need more than 10 years – much more‘.

Can I be the only one that doubts this promise?

Am I the only one that thinks they, the planners, don’t really believe this themselves?

But it keeps the Porsches and the Mercedes on the road.  This is an unsustainable and unjust paradigm for progress that we engage with at our peril.  Our best endeavours are perhaps focussed on the search for a new paradigm for progress.

Perhaps the root of the problem is a perception that it is the decisions and actions of ‘others’ that largely determine the course and quality of our lives.  That the quality of our lives depend on decisions about where money is spent and what infrastructure is built.  If ‘others’ make the wrong decision or do their jobs badly our communities will be broken.  This is a dangerous and pernicious myth made even more dangerous and pernicious by an obvious ‘face validity’.  But we have learned that it takes more than PVC windows and doors to ‘renew’ communities.  Physical infrastructure creates profits (on a good day).  It rarely creates sustainable progress.

If we believe that others have ‘the power’ then we are relinquishing ours.

Finance and infrastructure accrue as a by-product of community.  As by-products of people (diverse tribes including inventors, creatives, workers, financiers, developers, mothers, carers, young and old, healthy and sick, bureaucrats and anarchists – you get the picture?) collaborating to make ‘good’ lives and ‘good’ work.  They are seldom the preconditions for it.

And now, more than ever before, what we need to produce is not profit or GDP – but ‘wealth’; that stuff which remains when the money has run out – wellbeing.

Learning to collaborate to do ‘good work’, understanding what ‘good work’ is – learning to use our talents to create (private and common) wealth (not just profits) for our communities offers us a more robust framework for progress.  These are the challenges that require our time and our attention.  Thankfully they are much less expensive than buildings and ‘walkways in the sky’.

If this analysis offers hope we need to allow a new cast to take to the stage.  Architects, planners and bureaucrats must become the servants of community rather than its masters.  Community development workers (not outreach workers paid for by the state to deliver outcomes), and educators (not teachers paid to deliver ’employer’ requirements) perhaps hold the keys to this kingdom.

Perhaps this is a crude analysis.  I do not believe that planners, architects and developers are bad people.  Nor that there is any planned assault on community.  This is cock-up – not conspiracy.  Nor do I believe that vibrant communities can develop without an effective dialogue with planners.

It is just that this is not the place to start.

Tackling Enterprise Head On Is Wrong-Headed

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Most projects designed to promote enterprise tackle the problem head on.

When we say that a community ‘lacks’ enterprise we are saying that we believe fewer businesses are starting per head of population than is ‘normal’.  Typically in a community that ‘lacks’ enterprise you might get 4 new starts per hundred adults per year.  In an ‘enterprising’ community this is closer to 6 per hundred.  This might not sound much of a difference – but this 2% increase could in theory be worth millions in a local economy.  We are usually also saying that fewer businesses are registering for VAT than we would like.  We want more business start-ups and we want more VAT registrations and all of our attempts to promote enterprise are geared pretty directly to these ends.

‘Never mind how you percieve your self interest.  Just start a business.  We will even make it easy for you’.

The assumption is that if we encourage more people to ‘be enterprising’, if we give them access to knowledge, skills and money then surely we will get more enterprise as a result.

In my view this is wrong headed.

I would argue that all human beings are innately enterprising.  All of the time.  It is a part of the human condition.  We create and pursue a set of habits and behaviours that we believe will work in what we believe to be our self interest.  Behaviours that will maintain our self image and help us to get where think we want to be.  This IS enterprise.  These behaviours and habits are a reflection of what we perceive to be in our ‘self interest’, and what we perceive to be our ‘power’.  There are a massive range of ‘enterprising behaviours’ from claiming benefits and watching day time television through to planning a multi-million pound bio technology start up or a space tourism operator.

If our self interest is ‘to maintain the status quo’ then we will get the power we need and our enterprising behaviours will serve this goal.

Ditto if our self interest is ‘to be a millionaire by the time I am 30’.

A thorough development and negotiation of  self interest is central to the kind, and extent, of enterprise that emerges.  If we want ‘more’, ‘better’ enterprise then we should focus our efforts on helping  more people to clarify their self interest and build their power to pursue it.

Chasing More Enterprise

Often what we call ‘enterprise’ (or more accurately ‘count’ as enterprise) is a set of behaviours generated in order to comply with a system of stick and carrots that we have carefully constructed to pursue our policy goals.  This is not enterprise.  It is compliance.  Manipulation.

Helping individuals to clarify self interest – to work out what they want to spend their time and energies doing – is not a trivial task.  It takes a strong relationship (confidential, compassionate, challenging, person centred rather than policy driven) and sometimes many months of introspection and exploration of options.  Helping people to recognise the difference between self interest and selfishness and to recognise and adopt the principles of ‘sustainable’ enterprise cannot be rushed.

But when we get it right we can bet that much more enterprise will emerge.  Not only will the economy benefit but our community will become much more vibrant too.

Enterprise at its best—decoupled from self-interest?

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Julia Middleton has written an interesting piece for the Institute of Directors.  She argues that we need to decouple ‘enterprise’ from ‘self interest’.

Julia contrasts the motivations of the bankers  – ‘primarily financial‘ with the interests of Narayana Murthy, Chair of Indian IT giants Infosys – primarily about a ‘wider social gain‘.

Julia suggests that ‘Bankers’ are primarily motivated by self interest, while Murthy was motivated by a wider social need that ‘transcended’ personal gain.

“Many people wondered why I wanted to take such a risk, to create, at that time in India, a company that would set a new standard of ethics in business. I had a good job, I was married, I had a small child, and I was brought up middle class. It was no easy decision. But all of us are driven by factors that transcend the hygiene factors: money and position. We all want to do something noble and make a difference to the context.”

Julia argues that this view of enterprise is “glorious and grand and is delivered the world over by people motivated not only by personal gain but also by the needs of their communities and countries. It is enterprise at its best—enterprise decoupled from self-interest.”

But Murthy was acting EXACTLY in his own self interest.  He was driven by factors that ‘transcended the hygiene factors’.  He was driven to do something ‘noble’.  He believes that everyone else is as well.  Presumably even bankers?

In my book, both enterprise and entrepreneurship are all about ‘self interest’ and ‘power’.  About taking decisions and actions that work for a self interest that has been properly understood and negotiated.  Not simply in terms of profit, but in terms of sustainability, and wider societal impact.  Some bankers seem to have managed this ‘proper negotiation  of self interest’ more effectively than others.  As indeed have some IT companies.

Perhaps Julia is arguing that good enterprise is ‘selfless’ rather than ‘selfish’?

I would argue that both of these are equally dangerous foundations on which to build an enterprise.  The middle ground of self interest, where my hopes and aspirations (to get rich, to save the whale, to reverse climate change, to do something noble) are properly and sustainably negotiated with the interests of others provides the only strong foundation for a sustainable, progressive and effective relationship.

I cannot be always giving (selfless) nor can I be always taking (selfish).

The point is not that we should decouple enterprise from self interest – but that we should work with people to ensure that their self interest is both rightly understood and properly negotiated with both the present and the future.  That personal perceptions of self interest remain dynamic and relevant (witness Bill Gates journey from techy to philanthropist – all the time pursuing his self interest).

Instead of urging people to put self interest to one side we should be urging them to put it ‘up front and centre stage’.  We should then help them to explore how their self interest ‘works’ with the self interests of others.  To understand how self interest is served by helping others.  How association, co-operation and mutuality work in pursuit of individual and collective self interests.

Because it is the mutual negotiation of self interests, and access to the power to pursue interests effectively, that provide the basic building blocks of civic society.

Hunger for Inspiration

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Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think this offers us some powerful, but largely ignored, clues as to how we should design our enterprise development services.  We need to offer a service that helps people to seek, find and, crucially, act on their inspiration.

Their inspiration – not our policy goals.

Their inspiration – not ‘our’ desire to get ‘them’ off benefits or back into work.

Their inspiration – not our idea of ‘opportunities’ designed to meet employer demands.

Because the reality is that MOST enterprise development services are not designed to inspire.  They are designed to teach people how to commoditise themselves.  How to ‘fit in’ with the needs of the economy.

Take a good, honest look at your services.  Are they really designed to develop the users agenda – or to channel them into ours?

Perhaps this is why we are continually engaging ‘inspirational’ speakers in the false hope that we can somehow put back into our service a missing essence.  An essence that will always be missing until we change the assumptions around which our enteprise services are built.

The cornerstone of a service based on the hunger for inspiration would be a relationship in which users can be open and honest about their hopes and aspirations.  A relationship, not a workshop, or a series of workshops or advice.  A relationship.

A relationship that recognises that development takes time.  That it will feature highs and lows, lapses and relapses.

Because it is only in a relationship, characterised by compassion, competence, respect, belief, optimism, commitment and skill that people will be open and honest about their hopes and dreams and start to get in touch with what inspires them.  It is only in such a supportive relationship that people will really dare to dream and act.  It is I believe only through a relationship that people can really find inspiration and the resources for transformation.

  • So how would we market such a service?
  • Where would we find clients?
  • How would we pay for it?
  • Who would manage it?
  • What might we expect from it in terms of outputs and value for money?

But the big question that always gets asked here is about affordability.  A genuinely personalised service.  Delivered primarily through 121 conversations – isn’t that ridiculously expensive?  Well no its not.  The numbers stack up well in comparison to competing services.

The real challenge here is changing the mindset of service suppliers and commissioners.  Helping them to recognise that our communities are not full of the feckless and ignorant who need to be fixed.

They are full of people seeking inspiration and the power to act effectively on it.

Full of people who would love to become the kind of person that they know they could be.

As soon as we start designing our services around these assumptions we might get some much more positive results.

Interested?

The End of (Enterprise) Education?

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My eldest daughter came home from school last week with something like 10kg of university prospectuses.  She spent much of the week-end browsing the frightening range of courses available. 

And it got me thinking about whether the compulsory education that she has experienced so far, all 13 years of it, have really provided her with an excellent platform for wealth and fulfillment in her adult life.  And the result of my pondering was:

  1. As a premise I believe that education is at its best when it socialises people into the obligations and freedoms of active citizenship, and immunises them against imprisonment by the gilded cages of consumerism.  So why does so much (enterprise) education appear to be about the development of the next generation of employer fodder/entrepreneurs/snake oil sellers?
  2. Is this because we are failing to teach the real meaning of ‘social enterprise’ now that it has become embedded in what Todd Hannula describes as ‘agency led mush’? 
  3. Have we ever properly taught the notion of social enterprise?  Is it really more the the pursuit of ‘enlightened self interest’ in the marketplace?
  4. To release prodigious human energies and good will we must learn how to help people find powerful narratives that give meaning and direction to their lives.  
  5. We must help them to learn about themselves at least as much as we should help them learn about the world outside of them.
  6. We must encourage them to explore what they love and who they can become in pursuit of their potential.
  7. We must educate them to properly understand their own self interest and how this fits with the self interest of others in a mutually sustainable and progressive community. 
  8. We must help them to become experts in using power in pursuit of mutual self interest.
  9. We must help them to build their power in creating the kind of future that they want to see for themselves and for the diverse communities that live on spaceship earth.

Perhaps consideration of these statements might just help us to realise ‘the end of (enterprise) education’.