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?

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.

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?

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.

Truth-saying

In Richard Adams’ Watership Down, a group of travelling rabbits reach what seems to be a perfect rabbit warren. The warren rabbits are well-fed, there is plenty of space, and the nearby farmer controls the rabbits’ natural predators. The farmer even carelessly leaves out carrots and other delicacies that the warren collects.

What seems ideal is in fact slavery: the farmer ‘farms’ the warren, and traps and shoots enough rabbits for his own use. Under the farmer’s protection, the warren has developed unusual rabbit behaviours, and they have lost some of their essential survival skills.

When one of the travelling rabbits lays this truth bare, the travellers are criticised, attacked and driven away. Each of the warren rabbits ‘knows’ at some level the truth of their existence, but all but one of them (who escapes to join the travellers) find it easier to live the illusion than acknowledge the truth.

Truth-sayers in human society sometimes face similar responses. Note that I’m using the early Quakers’ definition of truth: not as doctrine or objective fact, but an individual awareness or understanding drawn from inner attention and group reflection. The founder of the Quakers, George Fox, said that everyone “must come to the truth in their own particulars” – meaning, find the truth for you based on your own experience. Your own ‘truth’, provided it has been worked out, can only be tested by others, but ultimately not denied.

Those who challenge an organisation’s culture or behaviours can encounter difficulties too. ‘Wise as serpents, gentle as doves’ comes to mind, along with the courage of course to say something like “it looks to me as though reality may be this way rather than the way we’ve been thinking it is.” Such people need to be open to challenge, and be willing to adapt their own understanding in the light of the responses they get.

Most importantly, they need to think “What would be useful for my colleagues to hear, and how might they most usefully hear it?” Acting on the answers to these questions is a truth-sayer’s responsibility; how others respond is theirs.