Anger is an energy

Cathy Come Home was a BBC television play from 1966 about the lives of people experiencing homelessness.  Back then, our popular vision of 21^st century living was unlikely to include a society where people struggling to find work are handed sanctions instead of support and depend on food handouts to survive.  But that is where we have got to in the current script for Aspirational Britain. Ken Loach, Director of Cathy Come Home, has called for ‘public rage’ on the issue. 

In 1966, Loach recalls, people who learned a trade could get a job for life.  Now there seem fewer guarantees for working people to be in control of their destiny.  Loach sees it as part of a system of ‘conscious cruelty’.   In a nutshell, the popular image of ‘skivers and striders’ has manipulated the narrative of the ‘deserving of the underserving poor’ to cover up the failures to manage a changing economic system as capitalism enters a new phase of development.  Indeed the ‘politics of cruelty’ feels an apt phrase for a period of modern government presiding over growing levels of division in wealth and assets.  It was symbolic that Loach’s comments quoted in The Guardian were reported on the same day that Joseph Rowntree’s report on Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion    painted a dismal view of a society where significant numbers of young people are being hung out to dry (Four times more likely to be unemployed, 5 times more likely to be on zero hours contract, with the numbers of kids in poverty in private rented housing doubled over ten years). These days, young Cathy’s are being told to F-off as the welfare state is shrink-wrapped before our eyes.

Cathy Come Home’s portrayal of homelessness and poverty on TV in 1966 was quickly followed with the establishment of charities Crisis and Shelter. While public interest never followed through into systemic reform of the causes of homelessness, it set the ball rolling for a wave of innovations, including the introduction of the Foyer Movement to address youth disadvantage, and the Places for Change programme to transform services for people experiencing rough sleeping.  Fast forward from 1966 to 2015, and where is the rage that Loach calls for?  What has really changed in how we ‘deal’ with disadvantage in modern Britain? What would housing campaigner Shelia Mckechnie say, who served as a Director at Shelter in 1985 where she helped to set up the Foyer Foundation in the 1990s? I expect she would have written a far better blog than I can.  She would have certainly written something in the void.

Over the last few years, I’ve met countless people defending the use of negative charity advertising against my critique that it does nothing to engage public consciousness in changing the narrative of disadvantage.  The consequent dangers become very evident in the ‘conscious cruelty’ played out in the reform of welfare and tagging of so-called ‘skivers’. After all, nobody does the narrative of disadvantage better than a Government seeking to deploy austerity to reduce the size of the state and trickle down its debt.  Every exploitative fundraising poster and self-serving campaign only fuels a social consciousness that is unable to see beyond the stereotypes and is increasingly mistrusting of the message.  It is when we are challenged to see other people as we do our own children or our self, that we realise the people we dehumanise as ‘homeless’ are worth investing in with a ‘hand up rather than hand out’.  This is the whole point and purpose of what I called Advantaged Thinking at the Foyer Federation: to understand people as people and thus find the best ways to develop their abilities, skills, resources and connections so they stand a chance of thriving in the future. The real issue is why we can't  create advantage in everyone instead of our obsession with disadvantage.

So where is the ‘rage’ tonight, this week, this month, this year, about what is happening to young people - and what we can do to make a difference to harness the abilities of those in danger of being 'youth labour's lost' (Demos, 2011)?  For Cathy to come anywhere near home now, charity needs to find its capacity and locus of control to inspire meaningful social change.  And by inspiration, I mean the 1% genius type of solutions, not the 99% of fundraising perspiration it has got mistaken for - understandably though, in part, through the current squeeze on resource.  It’s not Cathy who needs a sanction; it’s the ‘conscious cruelty’ that defines what we cruelly mistake for leadership in the politics of our times. 

 John Lydon once sang that ‘anger is an energy’.  Some anger about the lack of an alternative offer might be a good thing.  But the rage Loach is calling for is best defined as the articulate voice of people who give a shit, have an idea, and can focus on the mission to deploy the resource required to actually get it done. 

www.inspirechilli.com -

The Armour of Amour

As the sound of gunfire hit Paris, I received an email with the subject heading ‘love’.  Inside, the words breathed its opposite: someone who decided that my writing about love was a sign of evil.  I had been ‘noted’ it accused – unlike the writer, instantly dismissible among the horrors of the night.

Like all coincidences, receiving an unloving email at a moment of such tragic significance must have a meaning.   Somewhere between young men firing machine guns at a culture they rejected with such profound hate, and our growing mistrust of what is and is not good around us, there will be a connection we need to make about trust, belonging, and love or 'amour' as they say in France.

There is lots to feel proud about in our collective response to Paris. But it can’t remove our focus from an age where the connections between people, our sense of social inclusion, grows increasingly fractured through the economic and social challenges that face us.  The roots and foundations of our social values are shaken on a daily basis in tiny ways that the horror of Friday explodes into consciousness from a different but linked perspective.  While we defend ourselves with the notion that these people we call terrorists were not human, we fool ourselves from the truth that the atrocity committed perpetuates throughout history our dangerous capacity for exclusive extremes.  The question is, how can humans be driven to commit actions of such inhumanity?  The ability to love and hate at the same time, to do and be in entirely different ways, is the darkness within which everything inauthentic, manipulative and deceitful lives in our history.  Exploitative fundraising practices and the policies of austerity might feel a very long distance from suicide bombers on the streets, but they are all on the same tarnished road to an extreme place where our humanity for each other slowly dies.

It would be easy to think that charity has no purpose to offer at a time when missile strikes and security become the order of the day.  But I can think of no other moment when there is such a desperate need for charity to shine out the leadership our age calls for.  The real war is far bigger than a country or cause. The war for our future is as much with ourselves, our concept of what it is to be human, and our capacity to create the conditions to maximise love, trust and belonging in our society and world.  It is not just additional armed guards that will protect us now; it’s also the arming of values and purpose for a better world. The armour of 'amour'.

I feel no shame to believe in a sector that should nurture communities of love within itself and those it cares for.  I feel nothing to hide about demanding that youth charity should be shaping communities of greater belonging and authenticity, for which its ability to collaborate, create meaning, harness diminishing resource, and believe in what young people can do, all need to be upped in urgency. 

At the time of the London riots in 2011, the Foyer Federation wrote a powerful analysis about the importance of giving young people a stake-in-society, and the positive effects for us all when young people have something of value they do not wish to lose.  It’s a vision worth holding onto over the winter ahead of us.  While we react to the threat of terror around us, we must also pro-act to create its opposite through an equal intent for good.  How we choose to love and invest in our young people now might never have been so important.

www.inspirechilli.com

Why we are missing one percent

Say ‘one percent’ to someone from a housing association, and the face that will greet you is unlikely to be smiling with energy.  One percent has become the vexed question of how associations can find unplanned savings to fill the sudden hole in the fuselage exposed by the Government’s demand for 1% reduction in social housing rents to restrict the spiraling costs of welfare.  A redistribution in cuts, as one put it to me.  Perhaps the choice of one percent is purely mathematical, but it’s a phrase of symbolic depth that can offer insights into the current drama preoccupying minds and budgets.

2006 saw the heir to the Johnson and Johnson fortune release a film called One Percent.  It was a documentary alerting us to the dangers of a world in which a small group of super rich owned nearly half of the wealth in America.  The phrase stuck, and by 2015 Sam Wilkin was sharing the low down of how we too could join the world’s new elite through ‘Wealth Secrets of the One Percent’. The commodification of the aspiration to ‘make it’ as a member of capitalism’s VIP class had a catchy name in the new evolution of one percent societies.  It’s a trend with many dangers, as outlined in the stats from the Amex-Harrison ‘Survey of Affluence and Wealth in America’ (2012).   The behaviour patterns of the one percent in the survey suggested a sense of increasing disengagement in risk taking activity to benefit others, played out against a society in which the one percent were increasingly vilified by those not in the club (Amex-Harrison, 2012).   Part of the Government’s justification for its ‘one percent’ is that housing associations, with large surpluses, have become part of their own one-percent style club in the ecosystem of social profits.  Only that view is to grossly simplify a more complex picture.  A one percent cut for a housing association in the top deck might in the end be affordable, by reducing services and switching priorities; but for smaller organisations, without the luxury of choice, one percent can mean the difference between running a service and merely keeping it going.  As ever, our approach to distributing assets and deficits across society ends up deepening existing economic divisions.

When the cuts are played out, what becomes evident is that they are the lazy policy tool of a system that has lost an important one percent in its thinking mind.  I refer here to the 1% genius in Thomas Edison’s famous equation of what should drive our 99% perspiration of doing.  A one percent cut is now defining business decisions in a way that lacks good business sense.  We have all the perspiration at the moment with none of the genius.  Sure, savings to the public purse might be made from reduced welfare costs for social rents, but the quality of support available to people in welfare will in some cases be reduced as organisations without capacity cut off limbs to keep crawling.  In the long term, that means social savings today will be stolen back at twice the cost in whatever system we have left to pay for the carnage of future care for those affected.  Why? Because a one percent cut is not a solution to the question of how best to support people through welfare and what happens to them; it’s merely a reaction to the aspiration that we should spend less on doing it. 

The important thing is here is the question of technology.  The one percent cut is a form of economic technology that looks like a hybrid between the Trotter van from 'Only Fools and Horses' and a surgeon trying to delicately reshape the human brain with a jackhammer. It’s as lacking in sophistication as it is in ability to achieve a positive outcome.  I use the term technology here for a reason.  The one percent in Edison’s phrase is very much a different type of technology – the genius to find the source of thinking and action that can transform what we do; or what entrepreneur Peter Thiel calls the jump from ‘zero to one’. Applied in our social context, it should be the one percent that focuses us on the deeper questions of how we do welfare and how we provide people with access to homes.

I don’t think our welfare system requires either a one percent cut or a one percent increase; nor do the housing association social rents linked to them.  What is needed is a different approach to what welfare is meant to be and do; what its outcomes are meant to achieve; what type of society we are trying to create together; and how we can make the smartest investment decisions to maximise our potential.   For that to happen, services need ‘freedom with expectation’ to create the small steps out of our current game of coping with disadvantages and cuts – the type of ‘one percenter’ sprints, kicks and tackles which, in Australian rules football, are known to win games.  Welfare is fast becoming a losing game that needs to be revitalised and strengthened with a different carrot and stick.

Should the Government and social good sector wish to trade in the Trotter van and jackhammer, what and where is the technology to replace it? The technology of one percent inspiration is not easy to source, partly because our understanding of inspiration is wholly inadequate to the task.  Countless programmes, initiatives and organisations use the inspiration label, but few have ever properly researched into the DNA of what inspiration is, how it can be harnessed, and its huge potential to transform current work.  While vast amounts are now written about theory of change logic models, there is little attention to the science and art of inspiration.  Now is not the time to buffer up the Trotter Van for one more drive round the policy block, one more spin in charity’s Nurburgring of funding crashes.  We must  look into and beyond ourselves for how we can find a different technology to reimagine our futures.  I call that the technology of Social Inspiration.  I can’t guarantee it will get you a life of wealth, but I’m 99% sure it will find the one percent we are missing.

The Social Inspirator’s curriculum is due for release in the early New Year at www.inspirechilli.com

Safe to take risks

Some thoughts on risk, energy and inspiration from the UK MassChallenge Awards and Fundraising event

The UK MassChallenge Awards ceremony had the (relatively) easy task last Thursday of handing out 500k to inspiring start up enterprises. The bigger challenge was ensuring its speakers could be heard above the excited hubbub at the cavernous Truman’s Brewery in Brick Lane.

Azmat Yusuf, Founder and CEO of Citymapper, was one of the keynotes whose words might easily have been overshadowed by the drinks and dinner, were it not that his series of throwaway personal reflections had far more gems than bread crusts.  Shining among them was the suggestion that, in the current world of changes and disruptions to our social and economic narrative, it was actually ‘safer to take risks than not to do so at all’.  While this could have been just another Pinkie and the Brain style story of start-ups trying to take over the world, it seemed to touch on something important about what the start-up culture represents.

Speak to most of the audience at an event like MassChallenge, and among the entrepreneurs and investors is an oft repeated focus on the idea of disruptive technology.  Coding and enterprise has seemingly created its own brand of Punk, replacing CBGBs with the city co-working space.  But the fascination with the disruptive  often negates a simpler  truth: that we are by default living in a wider historical narrative that is already in a state of disruption to many of its existing norms – whether it’s pensions, housing, migration, employment, ageing, etc. Most things in fact, except of course the unequal distribution of wealth and our inability to seek a meaningful solution to social disadvantage.  Being disruptive is becoming a state of survival.  It’s not something to be cocky about.  Rather, it’s something to be deeply concerned that the discipline of disruption is not better integrated into the mainstream of the charity and beyond profit sector where social good most needs to flourish.

If our world is truly one where risk and disruption to our social fabric is here to stay, then surely the only safe option is to take the risks that might enable us to gain back control of where our personal narratives might be heading.  In my own humble story, I’ve taken a risk by leaving a brilliant job at a good, respectable charity I care about, in order to set up my own business with a very limited pipeline of work.  My position might be precarious, but on the flipside, it’s meant I have started developing the technology of Social Inspiration that is light years ahead of my previous innovations.  Intellectually and ethically, it’s a risk whose value is greater than the danger of staying in an environment where radical ideas are harder to develop and control. 

Let’s apply the same concept to young people making the transition into adulthood.  The idea of that journey being a transition feels like it has reached its ‘think-by-date’ in modern society.  Transition is a nostalgia for a world where there might have once been fixed positions to move from and to.  The reality is better marked through the shift from being a character in a story to gradually taking on more of its authorship, seeking greater control over the positive risks required to achieve a lived life.  That is not so much a transition in states; it’s more a rites-of-passage rupture from a narrative of greater dependency into the rights and responsibilities that a lived life brings.  Only it is getting harder for the rite to be all embracing as the controls over what Thomas Paine called ‘the rights of man’ are increasingly complicated.  How many of us have control over somewhere to live, or the fruits of our labour? If it’s a shift in risks, it’s spiky and subtle. And it is grotesquely unequal in terms of the greater risks that some people are expected to carry while being pelted as scroungers without grit.  The determining factor better lies in the self-knowledge and capacity to be able to ‘disrupt’ from one identity to another, from this narrative to the next.  We can be heroes, as Bowie sang.  At least, if we can find a way to access the knowledge and capacity.

There are two ideas that might help us shape a different view of the risk and transitions agenda for young people.

The first is the sustainable livelihood’s approach I introduced into the Foyer Federation network, with its distinctions between coping with limited short term risk but greater longer term risks; adapting or building towards longer term stability with higher short term risk; and a thriving state where risks are more positive than negative.  The innovation in the charity sector should be in the middle process of adaption, though far greater resource is spent on the short term-ism of the coping stereotype of charity – the ‘bed for the night’ campaign; or at a management level 'funding for the gap'.  The real crisis is that the crisis management approach to budget control, and crisis-led interventions to young people’s risks, ultimately remove any possibility that charity can solve the issues it seeks to address.    

The second idea is the concept of ‘breakthrough’ led by the work of those such as Youth at Risk, a charity whose purpose is lived in its name.  The young people they are interested might well be ‘youth at risk’ in terms of their position in society and our traditional understanding of personal narratives of disadvantage; but the charity's intent, using the power of transformational coaching, is to put those people into positive experiences of risk where they can breakout of set positions and narratives to make the disruptive leap into a different possibility of being.  It’s an approach I wish could be applied to the charity sector as a whole.  The danger, as we are beginning to see in current closures and mergers, is that charity often can’t afford to be risky enough to create a better world. 

At the end of MassChallenge, I was struck by the power of the boldly branded MC logo and its subliminal reference to Einstein’s theory of relativity.  Is the real challenge the missing part of Einstein’s equation: the concept of energy needed to bring the challenge of positive risks into the mass of the charity mainstream?  To develop that energy requires a significant freeing of the leadership and resource that constrains individuals working within the youth charity sector.  How it might be achieved is exactly the type of mass challenge I am exploring at InspireChilli.  We call it the 1% solution.  99% of people's time is spent on the perspiration required to move between surviving and coping; so what is the 1% inspiration that will drive us to breakthrough the risks into thriving solutions?  Inspiration is not a minor thing to be subjugated to efficient management processes and procedures. It’s the pure, visionary, disruptive, passionate ‘chilli’ energy that can enable us to live the challenge life poses each day - to be its potential.

Charity cannot afford to ignore that we are in a world where it is safer and necessary to take risks. We need to bottle the inspiration to embrace those risks positively, so, as a sector and society, we don’t keep ‘bottling it’ when it comes to young people.

With thanks to the MassChallenge team and community for a great night.

www.inspirechilli.com -
making social inspiration work for good

Building ideas to build housing

My interest in charity as a form of art – see last blog - led me last week to MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  Let’s just say I needed a holiday and got lucky.  New York might have a reputation for the merging of various boundaries, but what caught my eye was the potential in an exhibition title of: 

‘Endless House: Intersections of Art and Architecture’.  

Modern art has constantly pushed our understanding of its identity and purpose, for which an embrace of architecture seems a natural progression from rooms full of Picasso and Warhol.   Our social dialogue on designing a better sense of place has obvious merit as an inquiry to explore visions of future humanity. What we can do, who we can be and how?  At least, it is when you have the right minds in the room like at MoMA.

I was gripped by the breadth of ideas and imagination on display.  From concepts for mobile home ‘escape vehicles’ to ‘shelter for people living in precarious conditions’, the art and architecture explored deep issues of human psychology and social need.  The creators clearly inhabited a world in which people were still trying to build a positive future of wonder; a world prepared to think in a different language of possibility and challenge. It’s a dying art.

The MoMA's exhibition centred on the fascinating works of Austrian American artist Frederick Kiesler.  In the 1920’s, Keisler began to map out a form of ‘endless architecture’ that merged art and architecture into living forms of infinite creation. Keisler’s explorations led to the Endless House – an organic model for a new type of single-family accommodation that was as much interested in people’s spiritual and physical needs for a form of residence as it was in the concept of a dwelling being a more fluid process of arranging different textures, light and space. Keisler concluded, ‘the house must be a cosmos in itself, a transformer of life-forces’. 

What is in our cosmos? David Cameron’s vow to scrap the requirement to build affordable homes for rent is more likely to find future favour in a shop of horrors than an art gallery.   Yet, it was the announcement today that brought to my mind Keisler and the MoMA. The power of thinking in new directions is a real lack in so much current policy and programmes associated with housing. Are we really asking the deep questions to be able to imagine the right answers?  If we wish to embrace the housing pressures from young people and older people in their different life transitions, then we need to build a different way of thinking about housing, people and communities.  It’s no surprise ‘Endless House’ offers more provocations as to what that might look like than any soundbites from this season’s party conferences.

The Museum of Modern Art promotes itself as ‘a place that fuels creativity, ignites minds, and provides inspiration’.  But you don’t have to go all the way to New York to find it.  At InspireChilli, we believe the source for creativity exists inside organisations and people who learn how to fuel the ‘art of social inspiration’.  It’s the intersection between charity and art where future bold designs for housing will flourish.  Just ask for a hot ticket to make it happen. 

Charity is the art of social inspiration

'Charity is the art of social inspiration'  

From a speech to mark the launch of InspireChilli on my last day as a Director at the Foyer Federation. 

This morning my Ambassador in London handed a final note stating that, unless we heard by 5 o'clock that our government and establishment was prepared at once to withdraw policies of austerity and disadvantaged thinking, a state of creative war would exist between us.

I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently we are at war.

Let me explain to you what this creative war means. 

The charity sector, we are told, faces a 4.6bn financial black hole by 2018, with significant reductions in services. It faces a crisis in trust from the unscrupulous actions of those who continue to reduce the work of charity to the raising of alms instead of the giving of love. We’re a sector with the same turnover of Tesco, but in which 78% of the income is owned by a cartel of brands, and in which more salaries pay for fundraisers than innovators creating solutions to the issues we fundraise for. We call for a Government to redistribute wealth, but have no system ourselves for the redistribution of either wealth or ideas that could create ‘super charities’ fit for the task of alleviating social injustice.

This is a creative war symbolised by the painting of the forth bridge.  Before December 2011, the painting of the forth bridge was an act that required constant annual maintenance. Until, in 2001, a paint was invented that took a decade to coat the bridge in, but gave it, for the first time, a clean bill of health for at least the next 25 years.  In our sector, we talk big campaigns, we talk big programmes, we’ve talked Big Society.  They turn to big disappointments.  Why? Because this sector is not set up to invent the paint that will transform the rusting bridge of hope for young people into a thriving passage to the future. Our modern model of charity requires urgent reinvention; to reclaim its purpose as an open-sourced force for good, with the independent power to free up lives, communities and ideas.  A necessary obsession with economic survival in the face of black holes has shifted the centre of charity out of its natural place as a home for inspiration.

What should we do about it? We need a creative war to explode us back to where the purpose of charity came from. A war that I will call a ‘mindfare’ for the passionate soul of charity; for the resilience, capability and authenticity we have to be ourselves. A mindfare to ensure our future generation has the finesse as well as the finance to access the inspirational capital to build a world that is truly fairer for all.  Mindfare is a warfare to see simply.  To think simply.  To act and do simply. To be simply unrelenting in our pursuit of the future possible.  To be ‘thinkery’ organisations reclaiming a common spirit of social inspiration that has got lost in our brand blindness.

And so, as an advocate for mindfare and thinkery, what can I offer to you that might call you to arms for this creative war? That might give us confidence towards its outcome?

I offer not a dream, not an ideal.  I offer a feeling. A feeling that came to me when I visited the Alexander McQueen exhibition in London this summer, and asked: what have we created in our sector that is comparable to the artistry and influence of his catwalks?  A feeling that charity has a greater meaning to the ones we have grown accustomed to.  A feeling that the fact charity hides within it the word ‘art’ is a symbolic reminder of its special purpose. The Open Talent and Advantaged Thinking programmes I began at Foyer Federation were sometimes misunderstood as another set of strengths-based aspirational approaches, when in fact there urgency lies in going beyond aspiration to somewhere else.

Let me now explain where that else exists.  Aspiration is understood as the driver for social and personal progress.  It’s also associated with the limitations of personal over social gain; with selfish greed; with the growing gap between rich and poor in our society.  People aspire to things that neither they or we need.  Aspiration brings with it a tension that can be seen in our sector’s obsession with the replication of brand over mission; with corrosive fundraising practices and exploitative publicity in the name of good; with self-serving approaches to programme development and colonial-like expansions into other people’s communities and expertise.  Aspiration has become a 21^st century quack, offering the medicine of positivity while turning us into addicts to behaviours and beliefs that are far from charitable.  Our young people don’t want the discredited politics and charity of aspiration, thanks very much; they want something far greater – the politics and charity of social inspiration.

In this creative war, we must aspire to nothing; but we must inspire for everything.  ‘During periods of adversity’, notes Ashok Kamal, ‘the most valuable currency we can access is the inspiration capital that energises our purpose and confidence’ (‘What’s your inspiration capital’, in Triplepundit, Thursday, Oct 18th, 2012).  Inspiration is about things that touch our minds, hearts and spirits. It’s what ancient society used in cave paintings; it’s what contemporary society looks for in sports and the arts.  It is when lives lack inspiration that society is most impoverished and unjust.  Yet, beyond cultural or sports activities, and those programmes that seek an inspirational outcome, we make little effort to apply the theories of inspiration in the way we work with people.

Alexander McQueen was born, like me, in March 1969.  As I look back on my time in Foyer Federation, I realise that, while I have little sartorial elegance, we shared a common agenda.  At its best, both my role here and the Federation itself, functioned as an inspiratory to influence change.  We created programmes that inspired people in our network and beyond to develop better approaches.  We created the capacity and stimulation for others to be inspired to sustain their own energy and belief.  We offered a visionary fabric that attracted people and gave individuals confidence in their root values and purpose. Perhaps I and the Foyer Federation never appreciated that enough to measure how the ripples of our work flowed out to shape so many beautiful things that we could never have envisaged.  Like everyone in our sector, we sometimes got lost in the delivery and the business required to sustain  charity; we felt hurt when others ran off with our ideas without acknowledgement.  But, we were at our very best when we were the ‘foyer inspiration’, helping others to be inspirational on their own terms; and foyers and their young people and staff were the inspiration back to inspire our world. 

If this was the latent, implicit reality of our work, I now intend with InspireChilli to make it manifestly explicit, with inspiration at the foreground of every operation. What I felt, looking into the eyes of Alexander McQueen, was that, just like fashion, charity and social enterprise are meant to be lead as an art form – meant to inspire us to great things.

Inspiration, in the dictionary, is associated with actions to urge, create, animate, rise.  These are the values for a new vision for charity, whose purpose, like the artist of the age, is to remind us of our human potential to do amazing things. To ensure we really do, ‘give a shit’. Indeed, in the work of the artist, it’s the ability to give a shit for the things that matter to us most, and at the same time not to give a shit for all the things that get in the way of our intent, which is at the essence of social value.  To be artists of a better world, we must give a shit and not give a shit too.  Above all, we must relearn the significance of the lost art of inspiration.

Inspiration is what unleashes and sustain talent and potential.  It’s the source of Advantaged Thinking.  It’s the famous one percent without which 99% of our perspiration has little effect.  So, what would happen if we shaped everything we do in charity and enterprise from an inspiration-first approach?  From how organisations are run, to what they do, to how they measure the impact of their work? 

In 1919, the Bauhaus movement introduced a new guild that broke down the barriers between artists and craftsmen to create a radical community of artistic experimentation. I think charity and social enterprise ought to be a little more Bauhaus.  We need to break down the divisions that exist between sector and community, commissioner/funder and service, beneficiary and provider.  Our version of Bauhaus would create a new community of experimentation made up of people who share the inspirational principles and practices of the artist. An ‘inspirationshaus’ for thinking and action, connecting the different social arts and crafts of charity and enterprise.

Here, I am not interested in art as a subject for programmes, however important those are in the wider offer.  I care for artistic experiment as a method of innovation and organisational being -  an approach to charity and enterprise that occupies the same thinking and doing space of the artist.  What I am describing is a charity of social inspirations, led not by another centralising brand, but by a dispersed band of ‘social extraordinaires’ working beyond profit.

Think about it.  The artist is someone who provokes, questions, answers, looks ahead; who imagines and reimagines; who dreams and concretes; who stirs our passions and thoughts. Most of all, they make things that inspire us. And they are prepared to practice in mixed economies of value to do so – balancing their passion to create with whatever is required to subsidise the free space to create within. They don’t just give up their passion because the money is elsewhere. The true artist sustains their focus because the art is part of them: they can only be themselves.

It is this character, this essence, this energy, this relationship, which for me marks the future for what charity and social enterprise must be. Charity as the art of inspiration: creating communities that create community; inspiring lives that inspire lives. Charity as the creative source for acts of good that move us to the core of our existence. For what could be more moving than the artistry of giving, of transition and transformation?

Writing in the Guardian on 9^th Sept 2015, Clare Heal explored how chillis make the body work better and make us feel good. Through InspireChilli, I want to offer an inspirational approach to make the mind and heart of organisations work better, to make lives better for people they work with. I will pioneer a new set of relationships that can reconfigure the way charity and enterprise works through social acts of inspiration.  A charity that looks and feels more like Alexander McQueen; that brings magic to life, and transforms itself in the process. 

The core of my InspireChilli approach offers one simple idea: to take the ‘inspiration’ based practice and behaviours of the artist, along with contemporary research on the psychological impact of inspiration, and to apply this to the following: how ‘doing good’ is funded, how ‘doing good’ works with young people, how the impact of ‘doing good’ can be assessed, and how ‘doing good’ is influenced and seeks to influence. At a practice level, the inspirations vision will introduce fresh perspectives to develop 1-1 work, youth involvement, wellbeing and service outcomes; while at a systemic level exploring alternative working methods and cultures that will increase our capacity to inspire social change. It is what I will call the theory of social inspiration, with a framework of 5 principles by which the artistic identity of charity and social enterprise can be shaped.

Principle one of this framework is ‘Inspirational Patronage’.

I believe the relationship of funder to organisation, programme and young person, can be recast as a form of a creative patronage that invests in someone’s potential to create inspirational work and life by giving them the ‘benefit’ to do so with.  I want to draw a connection between how artists get funded and how charity is funded, and to pioneer a patron approach that can apply to those able to demonstrate the social inspiration of an artist in the way they work with people and influence others. I wish to create an alternative source of ‘mindfare’ that offers inspirational credits to credit the ability of individuals to inspire social gains.  This builds on programmes proven through Foyer Federation – such as talent bonds – but with a more distinct and progressive psychological methodology to pioneer an inspiration-focused approach to 1-1 work.  The new IP here is not intellectual property; it’s the freedom that inspirational patronage bestows to create infinite returns on its investment through the ripple effect of inspiration. 

Principle two of the framework is 'A Guild for Social Inspiration'.

I believe there is a vital role within the sector for individuals of inspiration to operate outside of a fixed organisation, which can be tested through the notion of an ‘artist in residence’ role (or rather an ‘inspirator in flux’ like myself) who is not affiliated to any one organisation or self-serving consultancy, but has a broader social remit to spread new ideas and influence.  This function can be compared with the role of craftsmen from the medieval Guilds.  Thus, principal two will establish a formal guild of social inspiration, made up of those individuals (consultants, secondments, sabbaticals and internships) who are freed for a set time to create and act on inspiration.  Research demonstrates that inspiration is stimulated by the absences of pressures on competition and objective worth, and thus inspiration is constrained within the current limitations of a charity sector that is increasingly led through competition for funding and narrow outcome measures.  Being freed from a single organisation enables the shaping of a virtual and symbolic work space for individuals sponsored across a group of organisations who intrinsically value the potential to be inspired and to act on inspiration to inspire others.  The Guild will use its freedom to create a process for collaboration that tests out a relational facilitation framework, modelling how to stimulate inspirational ‘social fusion’ between different individuals and organisations to release ideas that are freed from the normal constraints of organisational IP.

Principle three of the framework is 'A Curriculum for Social Inspirators'.

By applying existing psychological and relational research, InspireChilli will develop an inspiration-based curriculum that builds co-mutual relationships of inspiration in frontline practice. The framework will establish a flow of inspiration  (or ‘inspiration loops’) between young people in services and their support workers, support workers and their managers, the service and its local community, funders and wider peers.  The flow will be rooted in new tools that generate inspiration-focused conversations, goal setting, and reflective treasuring, in which each level of relationship is connected back to the inspiration provided by young people and the inspirations offered to them in return.  The flow is built around an ‘inspire me to inspire you to inspire others’ inquiry that breaks out of the limits of our existing aspiration-focused dialogue.  The flow will also look at how we can apply the behaviours of the artist to how young people take control of their lives: how they shape original ideas; develop making skills; communicate through what they do; take risks; collaborate and influence; observe and reflect; maximise their cultural and economic value; have global awareness. Young people will be given formal roles and recognition as ‘social inspirators’ for the activities they engage in to spread and support this flow of inspiration in the environment and ecosystem around them.  The identification, setting and assessment of young people’s support goals will be redefined, using research on the impact of an inspiration-focus to develop young people’s psychological resources and enable them to transform their conception of who they are and what is possible for them.  This inspiratory-approach will be connected with access to inspiration credits that invest in young people’s potential as social inspirators.  In turn, organisations working with these young people will be able to develop their own internal resources and external identity as social inspirators for community benefit.  More simply, the curriculum of social inspiration will free up people to be their own flow, to do themselves, to create their own impact and not just follow the aspirations handed down to them.  As evidence from programmes such as Healthy Conversations shows, it’s when there is a personal connect between an individual’s passion and their goal that magic happens.   

Principle four of the framework is 'Treasuring Inspiration'.

I am sure I am not the only person who finds what passes for evaluation and impact work these days to be like doublespeak from 1984.  We deserve a simple impact tool by which young people and others can properly value and share the inspirational nature of their services, based on ‘treasuring’ the experiences, environments and relationships that stimulate outcomes in their lives. The tool I am going to create will help give services – and their evaluators - greater accountability to young people in the extent to which their practice is truly inspirational. 

Principle five of the framework is 'Inspiration First'.

For me, charity and enterprise should be an ideas-first / funding second sector.  It should nourish the inspirational shoots to shape a better future that attracts the right sources of investment, rather than act reactively stuck in a funder-focused diametric. InspireChilli wants to promote young people as social inspirators to inspire the sector’s collective thinking and action to invest in them.  I propose to do this by developing a ‘catwalk for ideas’, providing a public showcase for social inspirators to explore our understanding of youth challenges and stimulate our collective potential to find solutions.  Inspiration First is about creating the InspireChilli effect of what my friend Carl Miller and I call the ‘good ripple’.   A good ripple is achieved when an inspirational source ripples outwards in new forms and ideas through different people. These ripples are not just echoes of the original splash of inspiration.  The ripples are their own stones, always fresh and new, because Inspiration First won’t simply teach people to inspire - it will make people to be inspirational.  You can’t fake inspiration; you can’t reproduce it; you can only be it.

To put this theory of social inspiration into action, I want to draw on the revolutionary spirit of the enlightenment.  In particular, that famous battle cry of ‘liberty, fraternity, and equality’ which I feel can help us create the type of positive future charity envisaged by those such as 'Call to Action for the Common Good'.

For Liberty: we must make charity open sourced; replace intellectual property with inspiring patronage; rebuild the foundations of what charity was meant to be as an act of love; invent the transformational paint that frees the future.

For Fraternity: we must focus social good on the principles of collaboration and co-operation; foster new systems of trust between the public and our sector; rationalise resources and expertise in ways that maximise the aspirations our inspiration ignites; inspire communities not just with social need but also the potential for social solutions.

For Equality: we must equalise the relationship between funder, provider and beneficiary, with a loop of inspiration connecting each in joint responsibility and recognition; and finally, we must measure and understand how inspiration breaks the inequality deadlock in the politics of aspiration.

In his article on why inspiration matters in Psychology Today (5 oct 2011), Scott Barry Kaufman wrote: ‘The best you can personally do is set up the maximal circumstances for inspiration. The best we can do as a society is assist in setting up these important circumstances for everyone’.  To make free; to make social; to make equal. This is the cause for which I am fighting a creative war for doing good better.

So, say goodbye to me if you must.  Or say hello, and work with me to develop the art of charity as social inspiration.

C. Falconer, 25^th September, 2015.

(With thanks to all the staff and trustees of Foyer Federation for their support)

Alms for ideas - opening up the budget box to show what we've got to give

When the Chancellor holds up his famous red box to the cameras at budget day, one should wonder if his box is the right colour. Red might signal the authority and pomp of Government, but budgets are increasingly more black box affairs.  In black box theory, the inner components and logic of the system are opaque and not open to inspection, while the stimulus and anticipated response are clear – depressingly so  in George Osborne’s case, when it comes to the future for many young people in this country.  Commentators and politicians will poor over the economic inputs and expected social outcomes of the current budget, but it’s the black box of systems thinking that arguably needs more attention now.  What is the world we are trying to create? What are the best methods to shape the future? Who is trying to answer the right questions?  Where is the debate between generations and classes of wealth on how we can all prosper?

Ironically enough, it was Margaret Thatcher who was most transparent about the purpose of a budget in its 18^th century connotation as ‘showing what you’ve got’ and ‘speaking one’s mind’.   In a much quoted interview with Ronald Butt in the Sunday Times, 1981, Thatcher opened up the black box within the Government’s confrontational approach to the economy:

‘What's irritated me about the whole direction of politics in the last 30 years is that it's always been towards the collectivist society. People have forgotten about the personal society. And they say: do I count, do I matter? To which the short answer is, yes. And therefore, it isn't that I set out on economic policies; it's that I set out really to change the approach, and changing the economics is the means of changing that approach. If you change the approach you really are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.’

All these years later, we seem to be struggling with the reverse challenge – arguably a direct result from Thatcher - of how to create cohesive communities in the context of ‘austerity thinking’, inequality, and the economics of greed.  The challenge of our age is how to harness the potential of all our resources – our people, our wealth, our environment – using instruments and institutions which appear ill suited to the task of social equality.  Just as Thatcher saw we need to change our approach, so we need to change our economics as one means of changing that approach.

Whatever we think about the current budget, it is, in its own way, actively using the levers of economic policy to bring about social changes, whether we agree with them or not.  (And there is a lot to disagree with). What concerns me is whether, in response, the charity and philanthropic sector is as active in using the levers at its disposal to ‘change the heart and soul’ of the nation.  I have a horrible feeling  the impact of this particular budget will be felt in more posters on the tube, more letters in the mail, more phone calls and more people in charity branded outfits trying to tax our consciences.  It’s not just our consciences that need engaging – it’s the heart and soul of our  thinking about advantage and disadvantage.  

  

The problem with the current approach of ‘brand charity’ is that there can sometimes appear to be little method to it beyond its own survival –the economics of asking for more funds to support the sustainability of more things in danger of collapsing; the need to replicate itself as the only possible answer; and the need for theories of change to validate its complex existence.  It is Forth Bridge thinking – a bridge that, until 2011, needed repainting as soon as it was finished.  Where is the method to make the breakthrough in our social system?  Is there a charity budget of ideas to redistribute hope and collaboration?  Has someone produced a theory of change for a better life for all of us? 

In the case of the Forth Bridge, finding the method meant inventing a new type of glass flake epoxy paint that could encase the bridge with 25 years of security, removing the need for its annual refurb.  Conversely, it could be argued that most charities are still operating with funding paints that only sustain in 3 year cycles, and thus need teams of fundraisers to constantly find new replication sources. But the analogy with the Forth Bridge is not about comparing the bridge with a charity; it’s about comparing the bridge with the purpose of charity.   What is inside the black box of charities with large brands and fundraising campaigns to eradicate the social ills they tax our consciences about?   I don’t want to know that 20p could give someone a roof for a night; I want to know the truth of how we can tackle issues of social equality in ways that don’t necessitate the need for more ‘disadvantaged thinking’ as I helped  call it at Foyer Federation.

Which takes me back to the budget question:  whether a box can contain a method to change the heart and soul of how things work.  The answer is yes.  Those who attended my Performance of Ideas at The Cockpit theatre last year will have heard the story of Thomas Clarkson. In the 18^th century, Clarkson travelled around England with a box promoting the talents of those sold as slaves in order to persuade people to see them as human beings that could be invested in for their abilities rather traded as bodies for goods.  It was a charity campaign with a method, changing hearts and minds, and – at the time at least – it led to the abolishment of the British slave trade in 1807. 

Why not, then, build a box for radical ideas?  Not a charity box for small change, but a charity box that asks for big change, co-investing people’s shared talents, thinking and action as the method for a better world.  The type of charity that does not employ innovators to fundraise more cleverly, but uses innovation to change the challenges we face.  A model for charity that runs the best marathon of all: the race for real solutions.

After 14 great years at Foyer Federation, I’m setting up my own little venture at InspireChilli, offering the ingredients of innovation consultancy and innovation products to more people and organisations who want to do good in the world.  I am also building a box at InspireChilli – virtual and physical -  called ‘Alms for Ideas’.  Unlike a charity box, it is not asking for money. Unlike the chancellor, it is not 'doing to others'.  Alms for Ideas is a box offering money and love (the original root meaning of charity) in return for authentic ideas from people  who have  life experiences to shape innovation.  What makes an  idea ‘authentic’ is its ability to offer methods to reach the heart and soul of a world where we can use all our talents for good.  It’s a small box, using my personal savings and resources, but I’m hopeful that those charities and philanthropists and entrepreneurs with bigger chests and brains than mine might be inspired by the example to open up their twin budgets of money and ideas to do something better.  In the face of the Government’s red box, and recent headlines about charities with black box accountancy, the sector must show that we’ve truly got something to give.

InspireChilli  and its ‘alms for ideas’ open for business from 1^st October. 

E: hello@inspirechilli.com / Tweet: inspirechilli / Linked In: inspirechilli  

PeopleToo - a Dream for Humanvation

At InspireChilli, we have one simple but powerful belief: that innovation really works when it works for people  - by people - with people.  It’s a vision for innovation that resists the cults of personality guru and process fad for a democracy of talent in which everyone has their place together.

Imagine the best dance party in the world, and note how the space and sound enables the people within it to create the unique rhythm and colour and connection of the moment.  The identity of the party, how the experience is designed, how its energy is influenced, represents a different type of innovation.  The DJs, the bar tenders, the party host, the personalities, the mix of styles and passions integrating in the moment, all represent how innovation should be carefully shaped through and  around the architecture of the people.  An innovation in which everyone seems to play an active role.

The future is shaped into positive energy when we build machines that people can not only drive but learn how to re-engineer into possibilities from which they and society can benefit.  This is not the innovation of monolithic, one dimensional products for mass consumption.  This is not the creation of shiny goods built by people who can’t afford to own them.   The future we want is a talent machine for all that creates a sustainable world.

How do we craft this grand design?  Innovation.2 – ‘humanvation’.  Put the lab within a lab and turn the disruptive, hot, amazing building power of innovation onto its own identity. The dream team for the talent machine should not be an array of modern business terms from ideation to process management.  The specialist competencies and tools within these areas are critical to learn from, but their current positioning as roles and types is part of an organisational logic-scape that has reduced the art of human innovation into the cogs of an engine driving us down roads that run people over.    The language needs breaking and remoulding into something closer to our hearts - the innovation we are all born with: our self.  How ‘humanvation’ works and does not work holds within it the secrets of the talent machine code.  The processes of how we learn to identify, develop and express who we are, with each other, through the complexities of the human ecosphere, holds within it the magic code for innovation to copy.  Life, as well as work, are the joint mirrors to harness and hone the development process until we become the Picasso of projects and programmes.

I’ve spent the last 20 years thinking through how to do ‘humanvation’ in various forms, trialing out approaches to build the talent machine, working with different skills types and resources to degrees of success and failure.  The secret I have discovered is not the next Prince2, but the new PeopleToo: how individuals can find within themselves and between themselves the ingredients to make innovation work for both people and the social/organisational structures they are part of.  The success equation is that the way we innovate must be held in equal relationship of purpose to what we innovate.  Nothing is in isolation. The challenge that social good needs to embrace is taking greater responsibility over the quality of space and music that entrepreneurs can create for people to dance their magic through.   Innovation is the opportunity to heat up our lives to 'humanvate'. 

At Inspirechilli, the dream is a future where everyone can control the talent machine. 

Making the incredible credible

InspireChilli was set up this month with a registration number from company house ending in 007.  We might be pushing it to make an early claim as the James Bond of thinking, but we share a common purpose – to kick some arse in the world.

We live in a society that has not learned how to fully harness its resources for good.  Whether it is young people dealing with homelessness, 30 somethings unhappy in their work, or elders isolated in communities, our life transitions seem endlessly disrupted from paths of full potential. 

InspireChilli has a license for innovation to break through these ‘same old’ limits. We are not a hero with quips, fast-cars, gadgets, or fancy hairstyles.  We want to focus on the source of what can make innovation work for and with others, particularly within the charity and beyond profit sector.  That special ingredient is what we call the ‘inspire chilli’.  It is the hot secret that brings zing and zen to help innovation make the incredible credible again.

There are five rules to making the incredible credible:

1.  Innovation must be about solutions, not raising funds and profile for existing ideas that haven’t solved what they claim to address.   There are more jobs for innovators in charity fundraising than there are in charity thinking and action. That is symbolic of a misbalance in our universe.  Making the incredible credible is to focus on the 'hot chilli' of what our real purpose and impact should be and how to make that happen in everything we do.  
2. Innovation must be more than smoke and mirrors. You don’t need an expert to do it for you.  You shouldn’t need to buy a dictionary to understand what ‘innovators’ are talking about. It’s a mindset and skill with a set of tools that can be taught and acquired through guided experience.  Making the incredible credible is to focus on the 'hot chilli' of what you can learn and do to be the innovation in your own life and work, and how to bring that to others.
3. Innovation must be the new status quo.  Rather than treating innovation as an external force to disrupt the system, the real opportunity is to reconfigure our systems to be driven by innovation.  Innovation is not a staff away day, a project team, another pilot, a brainstorm. Innovation is the energy that can be built inside an organisation or system and the people who work within and through it. Making the incredible credible is to focus on embedding the 'hot chilli' of innovation into what and how you do things all the time.
4. Innovation must be something we can treasure.  We treasure things that have meaning and value to us, through our personal experience, learning and language.  When the impact of innovation requires another bunch of consultants and processes to capture and explain it, then its credibility is artificial.  Making the incredible credible is to tap into the 'hot chilli' of how we understand our lives and then connect that forward to what we do in our work and relationships.
5.  Innovation must be an equaliser.  It’s a special jazz where the players listen and respond to each other’s rhythm.  Innovation that does not involve all its parties in an active process of co-creation and collaboration lacks meaning.  The language of beneficiaries, users, creators, deliverers and managers has a false dynamic.  Innovation is the fusion of experiences and talents into new potential.   Making the incredible credible is the art of bringing everyone into the 'hot chilli' space where real breakthroughs are made together.

These fives rules form the manifesto for what and how InspireChilli wants to 'do' when it parachutes from the sky in October this year. If any of them pull a chord, why not connect for a conversation...

Hot ideas for social change begin here:

www.inspirechilli.com

@inspirechilli