Podcast: mediation services and our global context

I spoke at Mediation Yorkshire’s Annual General Meeting earlier this month. I’ve been associated with Mediation Yorkshire since I managed a community mediation service in York in 1996. As a freelance consultant I’ve worked several times with them, most recently on supervision skills training.

My talk touches on: trends in volunteering; the contribution that mediation services can make to community development; and how all organisations – not just mediation services – might choose to respond to the global context we all face, of climate change and increasingly limited resources.

I believe we need to collaborate on a far greater scale than we currently do now; and that organisations can play a key role in preparing service users for the societal changes that may soon confront us.

Length of audio: 21 minutes, including an introduction from Alison Crouch, Chair of Mediation Yorkshire.

Protecting the global commons: citizens do it better than economics

The winners of this year’s Nobel prize for economics have rewarded research into effective governance which lies outside traditional economic models.

In particular, laureate Elinor Ostrom has shown how community-driven projects can be more efficient than privatisation or nationalisation. User-managed examples of common property – rivers, woods, lakes etc – derive better outcomes than predicted by standard [economic] theories.

I have long thought this to be the case, but had never thought to wonder whether it could be proven.

Olstrom makes the link between citizens organising to protect an important asset, and climate change: “A lot of people are waiting for more international co-operation … there is this assumption that there are public officials who are geniuses, and that the rest of us are not.”

Links:

Guardian news article

Nobel prize committee citation for Elinor Ostrom

 

New contract published by York Council – closing date 12 June 1833.

Wanted: Scavengers for the sweeping and cleansing of the streets.

A near-universal change in Western non-profit sectors has been a shift from grants to contracts for service delivery. Many Third Sector organisations are working out how – or even whether – to compete against their peers and the private sector. For many this has been a difficult journey; and there is much criticism of the shift to this contract culture and the frequent exclusion of the service-recipient’s voice in setting and awarding contracts.

So I was delighted to see this contract notice in York’s Castle Museum, which shows us the process is not as new or as traumatic as we might think.

What we would now call the Invitation to Tender requires you to present yourself at the Commissioners Office on a Wednesday afternoon, with two sureties – references- to confirm your ability to do the work.

The final sentence now falls well outside good procurement practice: “The Terms will be proposed and Contracts entered into at the same time” – on awarding of the contract.

It’s fascinating to imagine what the scene would have been like on that Wednesday afternoon. How many bidders turned up? Was there competition for different wards? How did the Commissioning Officer make their decision? Were the sureties properly investigated before the contract was awarded?

There have been many complaints in recent years about not enough time given to respond to invitations to tender. But if you wanted to be a scavenger in York, get used to this: The notice was published on 4 June, with closing date and allocation of contracts 12 June – and work to begin on 14 June!

We can be in danger of idolising an ideal past. However, the present – how ever bad it is – is only a past that someone in the future is yearning to get back to. Maybe 1833 wasn’t so perfect after all?

Encouraging sustainable behaviour

What helps people adopt sustainable behaviours?

It has long been known that information is not enough when it comes to campaigns on obesity, smoking, teenage pregnancies etc – and the same is true for promoting efforts against climate change.

Research suggests that some messages work better than others (http://coinet.org.uk/news/2009-10-06/psychology-sustainable-behaviour). By way of summary:

1. People don’t worry about things they can’t see (or even imagine). Doomsday scenarios don’t work. More succesful are messages which talk about pollution, or about the things they care about: their health, their family, their happiness.
2. Sometimes people know they have to change but don’t know how to. Community Based Social Marketing (see also this explainer), created in response to non-effective “information-only” campaigns, identifies a goal, behaviour to support that goal, and situations that will trigger the behaviour. If… then… For example, to change to catching the bus on Fridays: IF it’s Thursday evening, THEN set the alarm for earlier next morning; IF an umbrella is by the door, THEN it won’t matter if it’s raining, etc.
3. Use social norms positively. If people are told that their behaviour is socially approved (rather than simply receiving a pat on the back) they are more likely to continue it.
4. Those who make a public commitment are more likely to stick to it in the longer-term. Even a sticker in a window or on the phone makes a difference. And those who feel supported by friends and colleagues are more likely to change their behaviour than those who try to go it alone.
5. Financial interest can prompt pro-environment behaviours – but it won’t on its own make people be pro-environment at other times if financial reasons are absent. It makes people view themselves as ‘the sort of person who saves money’; they don’t switch to thinking of themselves as ‘the kind of person who acts sustainably’.

I find this an interesting list. I could imagine saying: I work with people who are responding to what’s happening in their communities, and in the places they go on holiday to. If you’re interested in reducing your energy use, then come along to our “sharing ideas” event. And so on. There are much better ways than these sentences, of course; this is just a start for me.

I’m also interested to learn whether these type of messages work in other situations too – for example, inviting members of an organisation to engage in a change process or a conflict resolution process (“This is about helping make the office a happier place…”; “Tell us about the changes you’d like to see…”).

Can you comment from your own experience with organisations?

From parenting to management (5): Saying yes or saying no

From parenting …

We have the patter of tiny feet here in the house – not another child, but a hamster in its cage. After four months of sustained lobbying, which convinced us that our daughter would bring the commitment to care for a pet, I gave in and we bought her one for her birthday.

Gave in? On one level it does feel like surrender. I object to inviting more clutter into my life – bedding, food, the smells, and what feels a burdensome task of making a relationship with Isabelle. I resent too that I have participated in an industry which has called this animal into existence with all the associated use of earth’s resources.

And yet, we already see how much pleasure our daughter gets from looking after Isabelle; and we are confident that she will learn from the experience of her responsibilities. It is a chance for her to further her own development.

To management …

How often must managers agree to something to which they only have partial commitment? We might see the benefit to staff or even to the wider organisation, but also too clearly our own personal inconvenience. Examples might include: releasing staff to go on training courses or personal development initiatives; signing up to a Cycle-to-Work scheme; funding an annual staff party; or adapting the running of the office to mitigate climate change.

In all cases, there is a bigger picture – or perhaps more accurately, competing pictures. Short-term disruption against potential long-term gain. Immediate deadlines against strengthening staff morale. Use of resources against increased capacity.

The challenge for the awake manager is to choose between the “big pictures” which confront them. In my own experience, it is difficult sometimes to know how to place a value on immediate outcomes and potential outcomes. But when I was a manager, and I started from preferring my own convenience, or the wish solely to avoid extra trouble or decisions, then I was in danger of not exercising my responsibilities properly.

Measuring change: who decides what’s measured?

I have spent the summer and early autumn helping two organisations improve their ability to reflect on and learn from their experience. Both pieces of work have involved how to measure change in the real world.

The first was designing an impact assessment framework for International Service. They do capacity-building with local organisations in five countries around the world, and they are interested to know more about the difference that this capacity building is making in the lives of their partners’ beneficiaries. That’s quite a long impact chain, from sending a development worker to discerning how (hopefully) improved services are improving individual lives.

International Service is fifty-six years old this year. A much younger organisation, the Newcastle Conflict Resolution Network, is planning its activities over the next twelve to eighteen months, and I have been invited to help design their logframe. Ultimately we’re hoping this will help evaluate their impact, because of the attention they are giving now to:

• What are our realistic objectives?
• What are the changes that we want to see and measure in the future? (indicators)
• Where will we look to find any evidence of those changes? (the means of verification)

My input into these organisations has been informed by the latest CDRA Nugget – if you’re not signed up, these occasional nuggets of insight and information are well worth reading.

This latest nugget I paraphrase here as: those involved in designing impact assessment frameworks (oops! – that includes me…) must remember the most important lesson of all: initiatives work best if they are designed and implemented with those who will be the recipients. Note the word ‘recipients’ rather than ‘beneficiaries’ – let’s not assume that everything our organisations do turns out for the good.

And so I am helpfully reminded that thinking how to assess the effect of one’s work requires you – me – to ask the recipients: what would you value as a positive impact? And how might that impact be measured? That I am not asked these questions as a recipient of local or government services here in the UK does not diminish the obligation to ensure they are asked through the organisations I work with.

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.