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?

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?

Blog survey and free book offer

I am collecting survey responses from the small but growing community of people who visit this blog.

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.

As a token of thanks for your time in completing the survey, here are some offers from my latest bookshelf clear-out:

• 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.

With thanks and best wishes,

John

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?”

How hungry are you?

I have been challenged recently to face the question “How much do I want what I say I want?” There are things I want to happen to me: I would like to publish a book, be famous, develop a new strand of work… but unless I make them happen, the evidence is that I’m not hungry for them.

So perhaps my ‘wants’ are more dreams and visions. Dreams and visions are essential to initiating practical changes. Without them we never start anything; but they need to be followed by other things.  Such as imagining potentials, considering possibilities, generating options – and only then making commitments. Action is way down the line; to use the NLP phrase, before I act, do I create and hold “well-formed outcomes” in my mind”?

I hope I am not alone in thinking there are things I want which in fact I don’t – or only partially – do anything to bring about. I’m left wondering if my wants are as urgent as I believe them to be.

Perhaps, and this is a scarier thought, I don’t actually want them; that what I make happen in fact shows what I’ve really wanted for myself. And that if I’m not satisfied with who I am, I have to want harder.

Now there’s a new year’s resolution: to ask, and to live, the question: What is it that I really want to do? And if that’s what I truly want to do this year, then that’s what I’ll do. And if not…

Learning for effective practice

I was the plenary speaker at Mediation North’s autumn conference in November this year.

My intention was to help staff and practitioners be clear on the difference between monitoring, evaluation, and assessing impact – and to show how mediators can bring in the evidence that services need to show their success.

It was something of a risk to make a plenary speech on the subject of monitoring and evaluation!, so I was pleased with the positive feedback fom the plenary and from the subsequent workshop. If you want to download my powerpoint, please visit the Framework site – this is the link.

My sense was that people welcomed a structured framework in which to think about how they demonstrate effectiveness – and the slightly different mind-sets that are needed when approaching monitoring, evaluation, and impact.

A recent Charity Evaluation Service report stressed the importance of evaluating for learning, not just for accountability. This matches a theme close to my heart. How far can an external evaluation have as an outcome the development of the organisation’s capacity to monitor and evaluate itself?

In other words, how can the evaluation leave the organisation in a better place to continuing its self-assessment and learning? Here is a paper, Evaluation for learning, in which I have put some of these ideas together.

Six universal values

According to a list in the in The Guardian a couple of years ago, researchers have come up with a list of overarching virtues valued across several cultures. The result is a power pack of right-living and right-thinking attributes:

1. Wisdom – Curiosity, love of learning, judgment, ingenuity, emotional intelligence and perspective
2. Courage – Valour, perseverance and integrity
3. Humanity – Kindness and loving
4. Justice – Citizenship, fairness and leadership
5. Temperance – Self-control, prudence and humility
6. Transcendence (which refers to the virtue of escaping the self and its general pettiness) – Appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope, spirituality, forgiveness, humour and zest.

Well, how do you score? Lists like these can be turn-offs in various ways, from “not another survey” to “whose agenda are they peddling now?”

A less worthy form of turn-off, as I experienced on reading the above list, is “I mistrust their methodology and so the list can’t be any good”. In other words, I’d rather not look at myself too closely in case I don’t measure up!

Beyond that fear, however, a bit of reality creeps in.

First, I would like to think that I can do most of these virtues some of the time, although who wouldn’t say this about themselves? I’m reminded of the putdown of Zaphod Beeblebrox in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series: “He was clearly a man of many qualities, even if most of them were bad ones”.

Second, in the two main areas of my life, home and my work, several virtues are my lodestars for action. Love of learning; emotional intelligence, and forgiveness are those I particularly seek to develop. I learn much about forgiveness from my children; my best parenting comes from rising above my hurt and fear to be open to new possibilities.

And in work, a love of learning urges me to discover myself through my contact with clients and their organisations. I am fortunate that at present, ‘the project of the self’ – namely, self-development – is possible through my work. Long may I strive for this to continue.