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.

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