As I transition to a new job after 15 years in the same organisation, it's good to reflect on key moments. One such moment was a cup of coffee with a police officer. It was a very long cuppa.
I had been presenting on soft systems methodology to a group of local authority and health staff. Their job was to establish the health needs of the communities around Northampton in a Joint Needs evaluation. They were animatedly discussing the implications of the data that they had to hand. My presentation was, in essence, that the data was potentially junk, out of date and inaccurate, and to gain a real understanding of the needs of the population, one needed to 'ground truth' the data, by checking that the data matched the reality on the ground. Let's say, my message didn't go down well, and I wasn't invited back to do more work. But, in the room was a senior police officer, and after the meeting he asked to have a cup of coffee with me. I was more than happy, and it was amusing to meet him a few days later on campus and accompany him to the restaurant which all the students side-eying a police officer in full fig. He was Superintendent Richard James, it was sometime in 2010, and what I relay now is my recollection of how things panned out. I am sure he will be graceful if I have missed out vital elements in my story. Richard was a senior police officer with command of a substantial patch of Northamptonshire Police's territory. It was a couple of years after the major economic crash and austerity economics was trashing the public sector. Richard was being tasked to reduce his workforce by 20% whilst improving his performance outcomes. He also had a few community issues on his hands, and his initial ask was simple 'how do we do community engagement better'? We agreed to collaborate for a bit, and I conducted a rapid evaluation of one neighbourhood team. I interviewed a slice of the team, from the Inspector down through sergeants, to police officers, to Police and Community Support Officers (PCSOs) and members of the neighbourhood. It was very clear that what Inspectors understood to be the case was very different from what PCSOs and community members experienced. It was the difference between statistics and the lived experience. Across the whole force, resourcing and strategic decisions were being made on the basis of very sparse and biased data sets, and did not match up with the operating conditions on the street. This is very common, and reminds me of my environmental management consulting days where pollution was occurring because management thought one thing was happening and operators knew that what they were doing was the wrong thing. In a 'one, two, skip a few' style, I have to miss out tonnes of detail, but 13 years later, one Masters degree, a PhD and over 14 projects together, Richard and I are still offering each other cups of coffee, and are good friends, despite his love of 80s hair rock. I was teaching on the BA in Social & Community Development, and one of my students joined me on the project for work experience. We worked with PCSOs and police officers to explore what PCSOs were doing really well in reducing crime in their neighbourhoods, what went wrong, and what was preventing them doing their jobs. We didn't use any management consulting tools, we just worked with them to help them explain what their lived experience was like. We then devised a training programme with them, and wrote a little handbook called Locally Identified Solutions and Practices (LISP), which was then rolled out to all the neighbourhood teams. They were just told, here's a process, find something to practice on, a problem that you have found challenging, and use this book, Richard and myself, to try and do something different. Amy, the student, went on after graduation to a high powered fast track NHS career). We let the PCSOs get on with their day job, and then researched with them how the implementation went. We didn't interfere or create the usual implementation communication fuss. We were just interested in how they would cope with the new way of doing part of their day job. They did marvellously, and where appropriate found some interesting situations in which a new way of doing neighbourhood policing could be done. Their biggest problem was not being allowed to stick with an engagement long enough. The short-term policing time frame meant that if crime figures dipped very slightly, it was deemed a success, and they were abstracted to another locality. Soon enough, the crime reports bounced back. The whole initiative got snarled up in a major centrally funded transformation project that was focused on big structural changes, so it didn’t really gain momentum. I met a PCSO from that time the other day and she said that she is still using the techniques we developed, but just doesn’t call it LISP. Richard left that force, and we did a number of projects as pilots in that other force, bruising our knees on the pavement, and getting frustrated at the challenges of small scale organisational change. The whole infrastructure and culture of policing was not really fit for nuanced and detailed work at the street level, and progress founder every time there was a change of personnel. In all of the projects we did at that time, we did not complete a 40 week cycle with the same people that we started a project with. Nevertheless, we, and our implementation coaches (including Brendan O’Brien, Dave Spencer, Paul Halstead and Steve Carr) achieved some amazing work, helping the police force to really embed the needs, aspirations and energy of the community into neighbourhood policing. Incidentally, Steve travelled from Cardiff to west Yorkshire to join in with one of our projects. He loved it so much, he brought his police transformation expertise to the team!). Richard and I have both completed high level research degrees with this work, and we are pretty certain that we know what works and why. Richard runs his own business on the back of that experience, and I have moved out of the teaching side of academia into a social enterprise that does management consulting. It’s been huge fun, we have met some mazing people, we have moaned at each other over cups of coffee in random places around the UK. Above all, we have done a good thing.
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Today is my last day with the University of Northampton 05 October 2023.
When I arrived in May 2008, I was sheltering from a storm. The economic crash that had been building since 2006 peaked in the summer of 2008, just as I was selling two houses in Scotland and moving the whole family to England. I has been applying for a number of jobs, but when I went for interview at the University of Northampton, my biggest question for my interview panel was to be ‘why does UON want a senior lecturer in social enterprise?’. As I walked into the interview room, the question was already answered in the form of Wray Irwin, formerly head of Social Enterprise East Midlands, with whom I had already worked for over 4 years! I found myself immediately on a steep learning curve of developing degree validation paperwork, as I developed and saw undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in social entrepreneurship through to fruition. All that was needed was to tell the world that we had a handful of new degrees to sell. But the marketing of the university was generic, and most people had not heard of social entrepreneurship as a subject, let alone a potential future career. I also soon found myself in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, a place that had been no more than a fuzzy picture on the TV as single protestor faced down the tanks of the mighty state. As I stood there, I was expected to find out about the wonderful new movement of social enterprises in China. My visit showed me that China had already its own long history of social enterprises, that worked as ‘total economies’ educating the workers families, feeding them, providing health care and long term employment. My ‘danwei’ paper was not as enthusiastically received by the Uni as I had hoped, but echoed my earlier paper from working at Oxford Uni on how grit (i.e trouble and failure) makes a pearl in social innovation terms. Without anyone studying BA Social Enterprise, I made myself useful by teaching a class on social entrepreneurship to entrepreneurship students, and also a business ethics class to management students. I secured a little prize money from the millennium charity Unltd, for the best social innovation ideas, and this turned into quite a lot of money. Amongst some amazing ideas, Gill Gourlay and I helped students launch ‘Bag in Bag’ a simple retail social enterprise to give entrepreneurship students real world experiences of the end-to-end of small business creation and operation. We were told that we had to have a permit to trade on campus, but there wasn’t an application form to get that permission! The university wanted social entrepreneurs, but wasn’t acting as a social enterprise, or an incubator. The new vice chancellor arrived. He was hungry for a new identity for the University, something that it would be internationally known for. He realised that there was a lot of social enterprise activities going on and decided that we should be ‘No 1 for social enterprise’. The problem was, there wasn’t a ranking system for this, and nobody else was competing to be number 1. I pitched to him that there was only one organisation that could validate what we did, and that was to apply to become a AshokaU Changemaker Campus. This was a venture created by students I had met at Oxford, and they had launched a global federation of campus wholly committed to creating the conditions for students to become social change agents over their lives. Wray and I led the discovery process, convening a ‘core group’ that represented every activity on campus. A year later we found ourselves in San Diego being interview by AshokaU and become the first and only Changemaker Campus in England. This process led to the University of Northampton rediscovering its foundational purpose ‘to transform lives and inspire change’. This became the University strategy, and Changemaker Campus accreditation showed that we meant it. Any and all activities, programmes and initiatives on campus were filtered through the lense of ‘do this make the world a better place for ourselves, improving their ability to act?’. During this time, I also met Chris Durkin and Sue Kennedy in the School of Health, whom I worked with the redevelop a Social Welfare degree into a BA in Social & Community Development. We introduced social entrepreneurship and innovation modules from first to third year, as well as community development and community organising modules. We also doubled the ‘good degrees’ received by these students, at the same time as doubling the student numbers. I created a ‘Changemaker Handbook’ with students, to be taught by third year students in a second year class. This co-written handbook had some assessment criteria in the back, which I had developed from ‘21st century skills’ rubrics from American Universities. This was picked up by Rachel Maxwell and turned into the Changemaker Learning Outcomes resource. Wray has moved from being a Social Entrepreneur in Residence to head of the Employability service, as well as a range of other student directed services. At this time, students were becoming the primary customer, as funding shifted from block grants to student loans for fees. This put increasing pressure on programmes to show that they created high levels of employability. The students who were getting good results in the BA Social & Community Development generally didn’t want high powered graduate jobs, they wanted to better inform their existing community and health work. They wanted to, and did, start new charities and social enterprises or go back and volunteer in improving charities in their own communities. But, because of ‘poor employment outcomes’, the degree was removed from offer. I was instead poached by Vicki Dean, who had been given the task of getting the Foundation studies offer to work properly. I came in to run one module for all the students, in which I buried research and investigation skills, but oriented towards a social innovation skillset, demonstrating that all degrees involved could contribute to improved capability for students in solving the worlds problems. Working across 150 students in 70+ degree programmes required a certain amount of consolidation, so over three years, all the students, whether artists or engineers, applied their research skills to their own experience, that of student food poverty. This job morphed into revalidating the whole of the Foundation programme into a single year, embedding the social innovation skill set across the whole curriculum. This led to me stepping up as programme leader and line management of the team, having dodged that bullet for 13 years. I finish at UON as a deputy subject lead and Associate Professor with a PhD in social innovation. I came into the higher education sector with a yearning to figure out to get corporations to better care for the environment and communities they operate in. I have developed part of the answer, and have been surrounded by an inspiring group of people, from those in the Manchester Critical Group of UK academics, to the Changemaker Campus academics around the world, to close colleagues and curious students. A lot of people will remember the Changemaker brand, with good and frustrated memories, but beyond that has been a much more constant commitment to take the purpose of ‘transforming lives’ seriously. |
AuthorAcademic, priest, family man and problem solver Archives
October 2023
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