More on collaborative working

In my previous post, I used the analogy of star-formation to discuss one aspect of consortia-building. I want now to turn to poetry as a means of highlighting another side of working in closer partnership.

Try these lines from an e.e.cumming’s poem (the lower-case letters are the poet’s conventional style):

love’s function is to fabricate unknownness

…

how lucky lovers are (whose selves abide

under whatever shall discovered be)

I understand these lines to say that one purpose of a relationship is to make space in which something as yet unknown may emerge. And having emerged (‘whatever shall discovered be’), how lucky lovers – friends – organisational partners are, whose relationship is strong enough to survive, be strengthened by, and to make use of what they have created between them.

Put this way, the link to consortia becomes clearer: we do not know what will emerge from the process, but the starting intention is to find out if we have a relationship strong enough to hold the fruits of collaboration.

What becomes possible to achieve, may in the end be what no-one chooses to sustain. But if one begins with an adventurous “It makes sense to be in the same room for the moment, let’s see what happens as we continue…”, then I believe the partners will have much greater capacity to abide under – and develop further – their mutual creation.

Framework’s core membership is meeting later this month to explore the world of collaborative working and consortia-building. If you want to know the outcomes of our discussion – or to suggest poetry or other resources we should be paying attention to! – please do be in touch; your ideas would be warmly welcomed.

The poetry quoted above is taken from “love’s function is to fabricate unknownness” in Selected Poems 1923-1958 e.e. cummings, Faber and Faber 1969, page 34.

Star formation and partnership-building

The Reflection Nebula

My current desktop photo is an image of the Reflection Nebula, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The description from the www.hubblesite.org says in part: “The bright, young star left of center gives the nebula its brightness. The gas and dust of the nebula is left over from the star’s formation.”

I love the concept of stars-in-the-making: an ageless incremental process of gradually combining dust together which might eventually gather enough mass to collapse and ignite.

I’m using this image to represent a process I observed last week: the potential forming of a new voluntary sector consortium. In the room were three people from a particular area of service delivery, acting in the belief that they needed to work closer together with a view to winning statutory contracts which may emerge in the future.

As the discussion deepened, they began facing the questions which confront all consortia-in-the-making:

• Are we designing something for our wider network to engage in, or will it be just us? What are our loyalties to other network members?

• What do we do about organisations we don’t want to join – are we an open or a closed group? Are we open to organisations outside the Third Sector?

• What standards should we expect of each other as members?

• Are we in this process for the benefit of service users, or is our main motive to ensure the survival of our organisations?

These are tough questions, and if properly explored would help towards strong relationships between those ultimately involved in the consortia. In Framework we have long experience, in the UK and abroad, of supporting and creating quality relationships. A strong basis for partnerships is open communication, particularly about the issues which are likely to be most difficult. This means risk-taking, accompanied by an inward search to be clear about one’s own motives and priorities.

All this is easier to write about than to embody in daily life. Ultimately, Framework is a one kind of consortia – a network of potential competitors joining together for mutual benefit. Which isn’t to say we get it right internally all the time!; but we’ve learnt never to stop working on the relationships between us.hs-2000-10-a-pdf

The future of the UK third sector

An NCVO Third Sector Foresight policy forum in January 2009 looked ahead to possible public policy agendas in 2014.

Using a range of drivers, and imagining a combination of two “critical uncertainties” – specifically, the length & depth of the current recession, and whether a Labour or Conservative government is in power in 2014 – several fascinating future scenarios were created.

You can see them all in the forum’s 7-page write-up.

Looking across the scenarios, it is interesting to note what elements were common to several groups. These could be seen as the most likely elements of the future, whatever critical uncertainties might emerge.

• A voluntary and community sector that is smaller, yet more diverse and more fragmented
• Local infrastructure organisations (such as Councils for Voluntary Service, and thematic networks) facing significant challenges in representing this more fragmented sector
• Many more mergers, partnerships and collaborations between voluntary and community organisations, with a loss of distinctiveness but greater diversity in local provision across the country. Charities are collaborating not just on similar issues, but around similar users
• Increased user involvement
• Organisations who are not working with mainstream agendas or most-at-risk service users finding it harder to survive
• A more divided UK society generally
• A rise in “localism” – a range of political philosophies which prioritise the local: local production and consumption of goods, local control of government, and local culture and identity (its opposite could be termed “centralism”)
• A greater reliance on a strong evidence base and on outcomes in determining public expenditure
• An increased role for charity fundraisers, and a decreased role for campaigners Campaigning is directed mainly at the local level especially in relation to individualised budgets

Does this match how you’d see the sector in the future?

The 2009 Budget statement gave an indication of the financial future for the third sector. Whilst the NHS and education will remain fairly protected over the next two years, the real pain across all sectors will bite in 2011. Health must find 2.3bn of savings in 2011, education £1bn and local councils £600m. Efficiencies may not be enough to deliver the savings, with fears of further hard decisions about services and jobs.

This is troubling for charities that rely on NHS and local authority funding. It seems inevitable that the marketisation of services will continue apace: commissioning in response to the most economically advantageous tenders, and the roll-out of personalised budgets.

Key messages for voluntary and community organisations must surely be:
• Take responsibility for your own future: the changing landscape is likely to provoke challenges for most voluntary and community organisations
• Increase your capacity to improve your internal ‘business’ processes in relation to resources, people and governance
• Get to know your service users, and become practised in gathering and responding to feedback. In the marketisation of the care sectors, your service users will soon become your customers
• Are you still attractive to statutory funders? Do you need to consider merging or collaborating?
• Does your organisation need to find alternative funding sources? Can you find ways of avoiding the worse excesses of the current funding climate?

I and a Framework colleague, Moira Halliday, have recently researched the state of the third sector in Gloucestershire. You can download our report at www.gtsr.org.uk.

Do you see similar futures as those set out in this posting? Would you agree on the key messages to the sector?

In-store book printing

Now this is a neat idea: a local bookstore-based printing machine that prints on demand from a catalogue of 500,000 titles. And that catalogue is just for starters – it will top a million by this September.

As The Guardian reports, the Espresso Book Machine offers a viable alternative to ordering books online – so long as the price is right.

Once York (UK) gets its own version, I want one that will print .pdf’s from off the web. I baulk at printing off an 80-page document, and anyway there is something profoundly off-putting for me about a lengthy home-printed document. Having a proper bound version instead – £5 per publication sounds fair – would give me a proper-looking document which I’m far more likely to actually read.

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From parenting to management (4): Doing what my parents did

From parenting…

It must be one of the commonest experiences amongst parents, to catch yourself saying or behaving as your parents did; and then comes the refrain: “I sound just like my mother/father…”.

Sometimes my parents did pretty neat things. Other times they didn’t, though of course how much I contributed to the situation is open to debate!

My practice of parenting has a lot to do with how I was parented. I may do the same as my parents, or the exact opposite; either may be appropriate, so long as I act awarely and with choice.

So when I’m angry, or stressed, or tired, that’s when the autopilot is ready to kick in, to make me act without awareness – and that usually means acting without a thought for how I might do it better.

… to management:

Do you remember your first manager? Or the first time you noticed a manager in action, so that you could see beyond the consequences of their actions to actually observing their techniques, their values, their opinion of those they managed?

The experience of being managed is very different from the years-long process of being brought up and the complex emotional relationship that builds up between parents and children.

Nevertheless, I believe that what we learn from managers – especially when we’re new to the experience of being managed – does have the potential to become ‘hardwired’ into us; that if we are lucky to be managed early on in our career by a good manager, we are more likely to carry forward good qualities into our own managerial practice. What’s your experience?

Blog survey and free book offer

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Please help improve your experience of this blog by completing this online survey – the survey has seven questions and should only take a couple of minutes.

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• Letters from Young Activists: Today’s young rebels speak out, 2005, eds Berger, Boudin & Farrow
• Beyond Certainty: The changing world of organisations, 1996, Charles Handy
• Connexity: How to live in a connected world, 1997, Geoff Mulgan
• Hell and High Water: Climate change, hope and the human condition, 2008, Alastair McIntosh
• An Honourable Deception: New Labour, Iraq and the misuse of power, 2005, Clare Short
• and a couple of classics: Ordinary Ecstasy, 1978, John Rowan; and Joy, 1971, Will Schutz

Some of them come with my pencil markings, but they’re all good quality .

Complete the survey, sign-up to receive email alerts of my postings (click the link towards the top of the right hand column on this page), and then e-mail me to claim the book of your choice! Apologies if the book you’d like has already gone – no alternative prizes, I’m afraid.

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John

From parenting to management (4):Theories of parenting

From parenting …

I read somewhere a quote from a child psychiatrist, to the effect that “I used to have five or six theories for bringing up children. Then I had my own children. Now I have no theories.”

This matches my own view of parenting – that there are many models to choose from, but all need adapting to suit the child and the particular circumstances. The title of Bruno Bettelheim’s “A Good Enough Parent” perhaps best describes the model I most aspire to now: doing my best with what I’ve got and what I’m given to respond to. There are times when what I bring works – and times when it clearly doesn’t!

To management …

Theories of management abound too. We may read about them, meet them on a training course, even perhaps encounter another manager endeavouring to put a specific approach into practice. I suspect we all take on elements of all approaches that we encounter – and certainly in my own experience no model fits all.

I seek approaches which release the person being managed: to strengthen their autonomy and independence, so that the creativity they have can be best brought into their work. Much – though not all – of this ‘releasing’ depends on me rather than them: how able am I am to listen properly and intervene where needed.

I find that most people, unless they have been severely squashed by their own circumstances or by how the organisation operates, want to find better ways of doing what they do. But they get stuck, thinking that they don’t know how to change or that the change they want isn’t possible. Managers – and parents – have a role then to help see what might be possible, and what they can do to achieve it.

Taking our lives in our hands

I heard recently of an eighty-year old who had given up his car and who was now doing all his local journeys by bicycle instead. Someone in the discussion said: “He’d better watch out -   he’s taking his life in his hands.”

We all agreed on the risks that the modern cyclist faces. But afterwards, I was struck by the phrase “taking his life in his hands”. We knew the speaker meant that the cyclist was voluntarily putting himself in danger.

Taken literally, however, the phrase actually suggests that he was taking more care of himself than usual. By taking his life in his hands, he was taking responsibility for his own life rather than surrendering it to others. Put this way, the phrase becomes even more incongruous when used to suggest that someone is being careless of their life.

And today I heard the phrase “they had their life in his hands” describing a person in crisis. Again the literal description – of being the person carrying one’s life – differed from the phrase’s usual meaning.

One of the clearest messages to come from the human potential movement has been the need to take more of our lives more often into our hands. We are responsible for who we are, how we respond to what happens to us, and how we cope with the feelings we have about ourselves.

This can be hard to do in organisations, even if we’re the boss. Culture as well as policies and procedures can sometimes chain us down, and create the impression that we have no room for personal choice. External pressures too – not least those of funders – can force the organisation down routes that we would not prefer to take. They even may put the organisation in danger.

If we are very lucky, we each have one person in the world who puts us at the centre of their attention, and who plans all their activities, joys and hopes around us. That person is ourselves. In becoming who we truly are, we take our lives in our hands.

From parenting to management (3): seeing the future

From parenting …

Some of the more unsettling moments as a parent are when I’ve looked into my child’s face and seen what they might look like ten years or more in the future.

Have you ever had that too? It’s as though a window of insight has opened, and I’m seeing the shape of their face, or an expression, which will in time become very familiar.

Though the surprise of seeing them in the future is odd, what’s most unsettling is the accompanying shock of recognition, as if I was expecting what I’m only now just seeing.

I find I’m saying to myself, “Oh, so that’s what s/he’ll look like then”. The shock is of something apparently already known but only now being confirmed.

And then the window closes, and we move on: the child unaware, and me busy recovering and reordering my internal resources!

… to management:

Managers – especially when they are responsible for bringing changes about – need to have a vision of the future. It may be intangible, or incomplete; but they know inside them what needs to be different and how the new order ought to be.

Between the vision and the new reality is the change process. And whereas my insight into my child’s future appearance is strictly for my own internal reflection, within organisations if you’re implementing change then your job is to articulate the vision of the future as often as you can. Clearly, consistently, and frequently. It’s like the promised land: if we keep going, and keep acting to get there, we’ll get there – or somewhere just as useful.

But first there is the vision; an unvisited insight, perhaps, or one worked towards through an awayday or strategic planning exercise. “Oh, so that’s what we can be like. So now, what do I do first to get us towards there?”