Matthew's RSA blog

Beginnings...

Freshly back from the bank holiday weekend – and it feels that spring has definitely sprung, and the cobwebs are clearing.

The past few weeks have shown enormous promise and progress in terms of the Newtworks project, and much us this is down to the enthusiasm of Fellows.

With this in mind I hope you won’t find it too self serving if I start this weeks blog with this fantastic contribution from FRSA Tessy Britton.

Six months after the launch of the Networks project I feel more enthusiastic about it than ever. This is not because the practicalities seem easier, but the importance of what is being attempted is genuinely quite thrilling.

The RSA Fellowship is made up of extraordinary people, drawn to the RSA undoubtedly because of the organisation’s uniqueness and breadth of vision.

Where the RSA networks project adds to our Fellowship enormously is the invitation to participate. The shift in paradigm from being an interested but largely passive member to valued contributor is a really significant one.

It changes the questions from ‘what is the society doing for me?’, to ‘how can I contribute?’, it challenges our passions, time, imaginations and our commitments. It even challenges our abilities. It shakes us up, sometimes uncomfortably, to examine how, on a very personal level, we can not only talk about social change, but do social change.

The RSA is now saying to us that it is holding open a new sort of space for our ideas to be heard, to be animated by conversation with others and to be supported in many different ways. This is an incredibly inspiring thing to do, mostly because the long-term success of the developing network is dependent almost entirely on the interest and enthusiasm of Fellows to enter this space.

By these actions and attitudes the RSA is exposing the possibilities that are energised by individual generosity. It is rejecting the reductionist, remedial view of society and humanity and is firmly putting its trust and confidence into our innate capacity for collective good.  What could be brighter or more optimistic?

Take this paradigm out of the RSA into local government for a moment.  Imagine a local council where they put real value into their members – all of them.  What would happen if those members were stimulated, inspired, encouraged and supported to form connections and groups in those communities for positive social change?

It can be hard not to envy the nimbleness that other innovation groups can offer, especially in these early stages. However, the RSA comprises a disciplinary diversity and geographic penetration that is wholly unique – and it is through its determination to create these connective opportunities, these equalities and freedoms across disciplinary, social and regional boundaries that I feel some of the most exciting projects will emerge over time.

While others may surely look for evidence of innovation in the output of social projects already, I am simply delighting in watching and helping the process, which for me is the real innovation.   And it is amazing.

Fantastic goings on in the North East

Saturday saw me heading to Stockton-on-Tees to speak to a joint Durham University/RSA conference entitled ‘There is such a thing as society’.  I heard some fantastic presentations from inspiring people doing great things in the community. 

Iain Caldwell was fascinating about the transformative work of Hartlepool Mind and his reference to the 'human givens' approach to therapy has opened up a new literature to me.

Reverend John Elliston told the story of the 700 Club in Darlington; from its humble origins asking 700 citizens to give or loan £50 to buy a terraced house for emergency accommodation for the homeless to its current dilemmas about how to retain its radicalism and responsiveness while also relying on public grants.

I also listened to RSA activist Patricia (‘Paddy’) Deans who had worked with other Fellows to first persuade and then support her local health practice to build a state of the art, fully sustainable, health centre. Paddy is modest about her contribution but it is clear the RSA was the catalyst, even if the work was then done by the health practice, architects and the North East eco-centre.

I suggested to Paddy that we might develop an RSA Network dedicated to giving Fellows advice and support in seeking to make local new buildings fully sustainable. I’ve put this to our networks team here so watch this space.

Come on(line) everybody!

In a world that is increasingly digitally enhanced, how do we ensure that people can be included in the conversations that are happening on the internet – or even at a more basic level can take advantage of cheaper car insurance (which seem to be available through internet only deals)?

This is true not only for society as a whole, but closer to home, as part of this society.

Roughly a third of Britons are considered ‘digitally excluded’. I’m chairing a conference on this tomorrow which will be looking at how we can reach this final third. No doubt I’ll be sharing my thoughts on this later in the week. But it made me think about what we’re trying to do here with the RSA Networks.

Tonight there will be an RSA Networks Exchange event here at JAS. The event is designed to mirror the experience Fellows have at our growing (and under construction) online platform. They can propose, discuss and support innovative projects. In essence it’s the physical manifestation of the virtual experience.

The idea is that not all the projects discussed tonight will be taken forward, indeed, not all the projects should be taken forward.

In our society we have an aversion to failure. This makes a lot of sense, failing makes us feel bad. But one of the capacities we need to be promoting is that of resilience. The ability to say ‘ok, this idea wasn’t so great, but I’m glad I put it out there, now I can move on and do something else.’

The other point of putting your ideas out there is that you can link to other people who are interested in similar things, and then together you can have even better ideas.

The beauty of the internet is that it creates a place for iterative project development. To borrow from recent speaker, Jonathan Zittrain, it’s a generative process. Together we can create something that is better than any of our individual ideas.

As I’ve said many times, our Networks project is about bringing together Fellows, so that they  can work together on projects which will support social change. But it occurs to me that not all our fellows are part of the ‘digitally included’. Of course with this blog I’m preaching to the converted, but it’s worth thinking about. How do we engage more Fellows in the online debate?

Have a look at this from Clay Shirky, who seeks to answer the question non-digital people always ask which is ‘Where do you find the time’.

We do

Last night we had a great lecture from Charlie Leadbeater discussing his new book We Think. The book has got interest and praise, not just for its content but also how it was written – collaboratively, via Charlie’s website. It may well be the first wiki-book

One connection I made was between Charlie’s thesis and Brooke Harrington who spoke here last week on her book Pop Finance. I asked Brooke whether Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone and the foremost exponent of the breakdown in social capital, was interested in the 20 million Americans taking part in investment clubs.

Brooke surmised that Putman didn’t investigate this on the grounds that investment clubs aim to make money. But, as she points out in her book, there’s no correlation between the financial success of the club and its long term future. There are clubs which make no money but are still meeting and investing, just as there are some clubs which are financially successful, but break-up due to personality clashes. In the final analysis, it’s all about people voluntarily doing stuff together.

I similarly asked Charlie what he thought about Putnam’s thesis. Does the rise of forms of on-line collaboration like Wikipedia and Linux disprove social capital theory.

The answer in part is Putnam was looking at distinct forms of social capital, arguing that the capital communities most need is the type that is declining fastest. So for instance, in deprived communities, what’s needed is ‘bridging capital’; people who are not in work having contact with those who are and thus creating opportunities through networks and connections.

The problem with the simplistic social capital thesis is that it seems to imply that after 150,000 years of human evolution in which we have been hard wired as a social species we have suddenly decided to retreat from the public sphere.

What I take from both Charlie and Brooke is that Putnam was mapping less a fundamental shift in human nature and more was the decline of old collectivist institutions. These institutions – think political parties, think trade unions, think established churches - are characteristically bureaucratic, rigidly hierarchical, and culturally self-denying (‘you have boring meetings to make the world a better place’).

What Putnam didn’t see was that alongside the decline of these institutions what would occur is the emergence of ‘new collectivist’ institutions – like investment clubs and on-line social networks - which are less bureaucratic, more dispersed, more subtly hierarchical, and more self-actualising (or what ordinary people tend to call ‘fun’).

Human beings do still want to do good stuff together, but because our lives and our expectations have changed we want to work together differently. This is what we’re trying to do here at the Society. RSA Networks is one way of doing that, but there will no doubt be others – such as this blog. One way of defining my mission for the RSA is to build on the great traditions of this old collectivist institution, but work with Fellows to turn it into an exemplar of a new collectivist spirit. 

RSA Networks Exchange

A few RSA colleagues went to the Social Innovation Camp a couple of weekends ago. This brought together technologists and innovators to develop new ways to meet social need.

Next month, the Innovation Exchange for the third sector is holding two 'festivals of ideas' that aim to bring together social innovators with commissioners of services in the hope that fresh approaches to old problems will emerge.

In a similar vein, as part of the RSA Networks project, we're now building up to our next big Fellows' event on the evening of 28 April - the RSA Networks Exchange.

This will be a bit like the ideas equivalent of a 'bring and buy' sale. You bring a project; you offer help in developing other people's projects.

We've already had a great response, with people saying they want to talk about subjects ranging from reducing the loneliness of freelancing, to initiatives designed to help people dealing with alcohol and drug abuse get back on track.

There is more about the event on the Networks platform, and you can get involved by registering your interest.

In reflecting on the buzz around these kinds of events currently, two things strike me.

First, the power of new technology to make visible a form of 'gift economy' that has until recently remained fairly hidden. If participating is easy, and feedback is quick and positive, people are willing to give their time and expertise to others and the greater good (a theme that will no doubt be taken up by Charles Leadbeater in his talk here next week). 

And second, perhaps an important reminder for us here, that the fuel of any gift economy is passion. Without passion, people have little reason to give up precious time. So part of what we need to do here is unlock people's passion for social progress, and help them to find others who share that passion.

With those reflections in mind, we've been busy inviting people via the OpenRSA Facebook group and the Networks platform. We'll see how it works, and feed any lessons into our plans for regular events of this kind in London and around the country.

Hope to see you there!

The power of things

We had a fantastic event here at JAS last night as part of our Arts and Ecology dialogues. The audience was lively, up for some impromptu and planned participation, and as inspiring as the speakers themselves – I’d really recommend that you have a listen to the podcast, available on the RSA site soon.

First up was Neil Boorman, critic, author, music promoter and all around cool guy, who famously burned all his branded possessions in an effort to rid himself of the tyranny of ‘the brand’. His argument is that we have been conditioned, much like Pavlovian dogs, to desire specific brands because their marketing is specifically designed to appeal to your emotional responses causing us to consume ever more, even if we claim to be brand neutral. Arguably this is mass consumption is unsustainable both economically (re: the credit crunch) and environmentally (climate change).

Daniel Miller, an anthropologist researching material culture at UCL, followed hot on his heels. His forthcoming book The Comfort of Things explores the complex relationship that we have with our stuff, branded or not. He cautions against hope that consumer choices can be a major lever in tackling climate change. This is because our relationship to things is complex. People have to play off the public ethics of buying fair trade and environmentally and the private ethic of saving money for their family or eating healthily. And people are confused: bottled water which largely began from an environmentalist critique of the ‘polluted’ water in our taps has now emerged as a environmental culprit.

Miller believes that we need to allow scientists to work out what the most harmful activities are to the environmental, and for the government to make the tough decisions and legislate against them. This prompted another bit of audience participation – I asked the audience to raise their hands for either a Government Centric or Citizen Centric model for combating climate change, and the results were split about 50/50.

Finally, Michael Landy, the artist who gained notoriety when he catalogued and deconstructed all of his possessions for the piece Breakdown showed his film about the work, and discussed his feelings of elation, and loss. This sparked a debate about whether we should value our ‘things’ more or less – again, the audience voted, and the overwhelming majority believed that we should value our things more.

This reminded me of the famous William Morris quote: ‘have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”. By following this maxim I think that we both value things more and less – our possessions are linked to our memory and to our understanding of ourselves and the world. Maybe we keep them precious to us because we have a desire to feel connected to the material world, because our lives feel so ephemeral in comparison to the world around us.

Two innovation powerhouses

Fantastic night at Lewisham College on Wednesday. The Principal, Ruth Silver (FRSA) had invited me to be the pre-dinner speaker for the College’s annual fund raising banquet. I managed just to deliver on my promise to cover the birth of human rights, brain science, and the need for a new collectivism, to tell some jokes and to land my speech back at Lewisham College all in ten minutes. The fantastic food was cooked and served by College students, for whom it was part of their course assessment.

Sitting next to Ruth – without doubt one of the UK’s great public service pioneers – it occurred to me how two of the less ‘sexy’ of the public services – social care and further education have both become power houses of innovation. In social care the driver was client and carer dissatisfaction with the services on offer which, combined with a rights based approach, led to the work of In Control and then on to the rolling out of direct payments.

Further education will be a crucial partner in the new Diplomas, which look increasingly certain to become the framework for all 14-19 education (including ‘A’ levels). I suspect colleges will find it much easier than most schools to work collaboratively with other education providers and  with employers.

FE is also at the forefront of two key Government priorities – tackling worklessness and improving skills. We are used to debates about the private sector selling its services to the public sector but in adult FE the direction is reversed. Lewisham’s team have become expert at selling to employers the business case for publicly funded and provided training to employers. As they were telling me on Wednesday their opening line to employers isn’t ‘why aren’t you training your staff’ but rather ‘would you like to improve customer satisfaction by a third?’

Social care because its services were failing, and FE because it has had to constantly renew its mission, have become sites of major innovation. Chatting this morning to Fran Sainsbury, who is heading our project on offender learning and skills, we wondered whether prisons could themselves one day been seen as testing ground for new ideas and practices.

There is lots of interesting work on education going on in our prisons and continuing into the community. Yet for various reasons little of this innovation gets noticed or debated outside the prison and probation fields.. This is something our own project will aim to change.      

Oligarchs, the fall of communism and the RSA

For reformers history has a hard lesson. Those who offer the prospect of change can unleash desires and expectations which not only sweep away the old order but make the citizenry impatient with the attempts of those same reformers to manage transition.

This thought was provoked by seeing a full-page advertisement for Louis Vuitton luggage in the FT featuring former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. A man who history will no doubt judge as a great leader and reformer who was rejected by his own people in favour, first of the excesses of Yeltsin, and now the authoritarian nationalism of Putin and Medvedev.

It is, I know, risible to draw comparisons between the fall of Communism and the reform of the RSA. One involves overthrowing decades of central power and exposing an ageing oligarchy to openness and accountability, the other happened in Russia.

But seriously… The RSA has benefited from great leadership in the past. In recent years the decision to develop the vaults showed great vision, making John Adam Street an exceptional venue and helping to put the House on a sound financial footing.  Among other achievements, my predecessor Penny Egan oversaw the development of our research programme and worked with the Trustees to get agreement to our Academy (on which front things are going well). Now, the over-riding reforming goal is to enable the Fellowship to work as a powerful network of civic innovation.

Progress has been impressive. The open space day on November 22nd was a powerful launch pad for phase one of the project. We now have getting on for 400 Fellows and invited guests participating on the RSA Networks platform. Last week we had a very positive meeting of regional officers, who are clearly committed to greater Fellow engagement and real world impact.

But I also sense some impatience that the process of change is not even faster. 2008 will be a watershed year for the RSA Fellowship with momentum building as the year goes on. As I never cease to remind people, the 2007-8 budget contained virtually no money for Fellow engagement and organisation, in the year ahead we intend to spend upwards of £250k on Network organisers at JAS and fieldworkers to support Fellows' initiatives outside London.  In a few months we will see the regional websites integrated in the new national website. And as the year proceeds, first new Fellows, then all Fellows in selected localities will be invited on to the RSA Networks platform.

The Fellows' recruitment journey will be re-designed to stress the scope for networking and civic engagement. And I hope that on the Networks platform we will move from a fascinating discussion on how to make RSA Networks work to the development of projects about change in the outside world.

How far and how fast we go ultimately depends on Fellows themselves. Our role is to support the change. But creating the right infrastructure can't happen overnight. It requires a step by step increase in investment and for us to learn and adapt as the change develops. I have a Trustees' away day next week and will be working with them to agree ambitions goals for the next three years.

Transformation is possible as long as we all - Trustees, Fellows, regional officers - are part of the change, enjoying its highs but also working together through the challenges it is bound to present.

Only one problem ....

I spent the weekend on a very intensive personal development course. It was challenging and ultimately inspiring. I am making lots of changes in the way I think and act as a consequence (email me if you want to know more about the course).

So, I was already in a slightly strange place when I arrived to chair an all-day conference hosted jointly by the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Office of the Third Sector. The conference of local authorities and third sector groups had been organised around the announcement of Government’s plans for what are called ‘community anchors’ (cross cutting, community based third sector organisations). Only one problem.  The night before the conference, ministers had pulled the announcement. So there we were, 200 people, including two ministers, to discuss the implementation of a plan that had been shelved! As it turned out the conference was fine, and I suspect many of the ideas that came out of it will be reflected in the plan when it does finally see the light of day.

The plan was pulled because of an unresolved argument about whether central government could specifically earmark the community anchor funds or should devolve the money to local authorities merely with guidance as to how it should be spent. However this argument is resolved, it does at least show the Government is taking seriously its commitment to reduce the funding constraints and targets it imposes on localities. Ministers, interest groups, and commentators tend to speak with forked tongue on devolving power. We attack the Government for centralisation but then protest either at ‘postcode lotteries’ or when money that has previously been earmarked for a particular policy or scheme we favour is made subject to local discretion.

This week saw us recruit our 27,000th Fellow. This is fantastic news and mainly down to the hard work of our brilliant fellowship team. We are also recruiting more Fellows through the recommendation of existing FRSAs so let me also thank all of you who have helped us reach this milestone. Onwards to 28,000!

So what's next?

What an amazing event we had here on 22 November.

Over two hundred Fellows and staff working together all day exploring how the Fellowship, together with the team at John Adam Street, could become a network for civic innovation.

The day exceeded our most optimistic expectations in terms of the energy, ideas and goodwill of those attending. The conversations started that day are now being actively followed up by the team here and continued online.

The challenge now - and the hurdle at which other membership/Fellowship initiatives in other organisations have fallen - is to follow through.

It will take several years, a great deal of commitment and investment (from Fellows and JAS) to achieve but the 22nd gave us a glimpse of the kind of innovative, collaborative, high-impact Fellowship we can become.

The last few weeks I have continued to tour around with versions of my speech about the social aspiration gap (the gap between the people we are and the people we need to be to create the future we want).

The biggest speech was to an audience of over seven hundred at the annual Cornwall lecture.

The positive reaction to the speech and the interest in the RSA underlined to me again that we need to strengthen our Fellowship operation outside London.

Our regions do good work, and many are themselves trying to devolve, but it is at the level of counties, cities and towns that I think we will be most able to articulate the RSA's potential.

How we build this kind of more local presence is a big issue for the next stage of the RSA's development.

Given the turmoil over 'Donorgate' I have being doing yet more punditry lately.

If anyone is interested in my overall perspective there is a piece on the Guardian's Comment is Free website.

That article was written before Gordon Brown's comments at the weekend which seem to suggest that he too is now convinced of the case for more profound reform of party funding.

Given the damage these 'scandals' do to the already low opinion of politics among the public let's hope we can at last drive big money donations out of party politics.