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What If Leeds was a ‘tax-take opportunity’ for Whitehall?

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John Baron over at the Guardian Leeds site recently published a quite remarkable dialogue between our new Council Chief Executive, Tom Riordan and elected councillors.  It is a tremendous piece.  It is the kind of openness and transparency that I think offers real hope for progress.  Tom, John and the Councillors involved are I think to be commended.
But it was just 2 sentences from the piece, which I recommend you read in full, that really caught my eye.
We have to convince the people in Whitehall that Leeds is a tax-take opportunity for them if all the jobs we aim to create up here come off.
If we’re going to grow the economy we need the Environment Agency’s new flood defences, we need the Leeds trolleybus scheme, we need our LEP to be the best in the country. – Tom Riordan, Leeds City Council CEO, as reported in the Guardian Leeds
2 short sentences that tell a powerful story.  An every day story of top down strategy.
We have to persuade Whitehall that we are a ‘tax-take’ opportunity to secure the investment needed to create jobs.  Because jobs depend on us getting large infrastructure projects such as trolley busses and flood defences.  And these depend on investment by Whitehall.
It also depends on us having a really smart Local Enterprise Partnership, a group of ‘the anointed‘ who will take decisions and make investments (if they have any money) that will lead to increased gross domestic product in the city.  It will be up to them to realise the city as a ‘tax-take’ opportunity for Whitehall; as an efficient driver of profits for people with the capital to invest.
A compelling story perhaps, but not the only story.  It is a story based on our deficits.  The things that we have not got.
Might there be some other stories we could explore?
What if we imagined that ‘growing the economy’ (or indeed a bolder and braver vision of developing sustainable communities; economically, culturally and socially) depended not on trolley buses, LEPS and flood defences, but on us engaging the intelligence, passion, creativity, aspirations and dreams of the people who live in the city and supporting and networking them to create real power to the create sustainable communities in which more people felt both valued and supported?
We could call this story ‘grassroots, bottom-up and responsive’.  Or ‘person centred’.  Holistic perhaps as it would integrate economy. society and culture.  This is a story that is based on our current assets, the things we already have and how we make the very best of them.  And, no less true for being a cliché, ‘people are our greatest asset’.
Both stories are valid.  Both have truth in them.  Both are necessary.  And I believe that Tom is interested in developing both, even though in this piece only the more dominant current narrative about physical infrastructure gets an airing.
Only one of these narrative receives massive investments of time and money, requires massive budgets and leaves most of us pretty much uninvolved and powerless spectators.
One receives almost no investment by comparison, requires very modest investment and would engage and develop all who wanted to be engaged in creating the future that they want for themselves and their community.
One of them has powerful interests behind it, with deep pockets and powerful connections who can manage and lead discussions in the city.  One of them has no such powerful ‘leadership’.
One of them will primarily serve the wealthy and powerful, relying on trickle down, philanthropy, social mobility, and taxation to re-distribute wealth.  One of them will promote social justice and inclusion.
Now both narratives are necessary.  Of course we need the right infrastructure.  Of course we need good strategy.  Of course we need powerful advocates who can fight our corner in Whitehall and beyond.  But this is only part of the story.  Both ‘strategic’ and ‘responsive’ narratives must be developed and resourced if the city is to move forward in a way that is sustainable, economically, culturally and socially.
‘Responsive’ and ‘strategic’ are the yin and yang of balanced progress.
And if you need any convincing that perhaps the balance is not yet properly struck in Leeds just explore this conference coming up to discuss the future of Leeds City Centre.  Look at who sponsors it?
Attendance at the conference is free.  So I would urge you to attend and make sure that your voice gets heard.  It is the only way that we can find out if anyone is REALLY listening.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
– Theodore Parker/Martin Luther King

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.

What if Leeds carried on as it is..?

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Leeds Architecture

This is an interesting question asked on the What If Leeds.…website (registration required before you can contribute)

The underlying sense is that perhaps Leeds is fine.  We can just keep on keeping on.  Now I am sure that the sustainability crew would have a thing or two to say about that.  Interestingly they haven’t, yet.  As might those who don’t get to share in the benefits of living in the city, the poor and marginalised.

But, change is inevitable, progress is not.  Leeds’ own Max McKeown taught me that.  The art of strategy is about increasing the chances of progress being achieved, because change takes care of itself….
The real problem here is in the methodology that we use to try to think about change and ensure that it is progressive.
The current vision and plan methodology is, how can I put this, a little clunky.  A touch slow.  Impractical.
However if we write it off and do nothing then the usual suspects will maintain power so that they and their friends can order the city as they would like – some would say as  a big investment opportunity to suck disposable income from a city region while providing the promise of good work and jobs for all.
We need a process for influencing strategy in the city that is a)continuous and b) gives everyone a voice and power in the process.
We need a market place of visions where we can choose to work towards as many or as few as each of us personally prefer.  We need to use visions to enable self-organisation, conversation and action.  Not to produce statutory documents.  We need personal visions of what progress means – not just a ‘city’ vision.
We should be thinking about how we continually facilitate a process of ’emergent change’ rather than a vision session every 5 years followed by decades of bureaucratic management in its pursuit.  No-one does strategy like this anymore, do they?
But what is this process really about?
  • Are we giving a steer to the city fathers so that they can benevolently chart our progress to a better place?
  • Or are the city fathers really trying to engage us in creating our own future?
  • Or is this just a necessary/statutory piece of ‘consultation’?
Time will tell.
But Leeds has to change.  The only questions are how, and who will benefit?
I think it is time for Leeds to have a complete rethink about how it organises itself to be a truly innovative city.  And innovation (the prodigal child of strategy) is not an elite sport.
It is very much for all of us.

Good Work – some lessons from Fritz

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“Experience shows that whenever you can achieve smallness, simplicity, capital cheapness, and nonviolence, or indeed, any of these objectives, new possibilities are created for people, singly or collectively, to help themselves, and that the patterns that result from such technologies are more humane, more ecological, less dependent on fossil fuels, and closer to real human needs than the patterns (or lifestyles) created by technologies that go for giantism, complexity, capital intensity, and violence.”

EF Schumacher – Good Work

TEDxLeeds, Ted Turner, Anti-war, MDGs, and Development

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I spent a fairly surreal afternoon in a lecture theatre in the Leeds Met. Rosebowl yesterday afternoon.

We had been invited to ‘take part in’ (actually watch) a live simulcast from the TEDx team in New York, working with the Gates Foundation to look at progress on the UNs Millenium Development Goals (halving poverty, reducing infant mortality, improving maternal care etc).

Surreal because the entire front row was filled with bagels, muffins, cookies and fruit, the lecture theatre was half empty, and we sat gawping at a large screen while some people in a foreign land berated and congratulated themselves in roughly equal measure on their progress.

As the afternoon went by I got increasingly uncomfortable.  A feeling not assuaged by copious bagels and cupcakes, as we witnessed a theatre full of rich folks in New York clapping along to Bajah and the Dry Eye Crew.

But the source of my discomfort was more than just the cultural dissonances.  It was that for me some of the central tenets for good development work appeared to have been overlooked.

Instead of being invited in by communities to work on the issues that mattered to them it felt like we (the great and the good of the west) had dropped into their world to work on the issues that mattered to us, as judged by our moral compass and our self interest.  Not theirs.  And we could do it because we were rich.  We could hustle our way into the game because we had a whole stash of cash.

So we celebrated the fact that through increased access to contraception ‘we’ had succeeded in reducing family size in just about the whole world.  And as we all know reducing the planets population growth is essential.  No mention of the fact that small families in the West use a gazillion times more of the earths resources than even a large African family compound for example.

We celebrated the fact that Coca Cola had a distribution network to flood the 3rd world with diabetes inducing corn syrup based products and that we could use the same channels to flood the same communities with our ideologies of entrepreneurship and ‘progress’.  In my experience the tobacco companies have been even more successful in setting up networks of distribution and influence throughout the planet – but I guess they are just too clearly part of the dark side for happy, shiny people to embrace.  Good old Coca Cola on the other hand….

One of the first principles of good development should be R.E.S.P.E.CT.

Respect for the culture on the ground.  Respect for what local people value and find important.  Respect for how they are trying to shape their futures, whether or not they fit neatly with our ideologies and ideals.   A certain humility and a refusal to believe that ‘our superiority’ means that we have the solutions to their problems.

Good development work should be less about turning the developing world into entrepreneurs who can, and do, control their own fecundity than about helping people find the power to act in their own interests, rather than ours.

Ted Turner said recently “War is obsolete. You end up bombing your customers.”

And at times yesterday I felt as if the whole Millennium Development Goal thing was a kind of ‘anti-war’, the objective of which is to make everyone healthy and rich enough to consume.

A massive exercise in expanding viable territories.  Rather than an exercise in compassionate facilitation of self determination.

As Ted Turner went on to say….’why do you think I gave the UN $1bn? I could have bought a couple of really big yachts with that money.’

Big thanks to @imranali and @herbkim for setting this gig up.  One of only 2 in the UK.  It certainly engaged the heart and mind of this leeds citizen of the world.