Tag Archives: social

Learning from failure (and social entrepreneurship)

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Mockeryfailure
I attended a fascinating lunchtime seminar the other week. It's not often the words 'fascinating', 'lunchtime' and 'seminar' are used in juxtaposition, so thought I would share some of the key points from the session. It was called, Trial, Error and the Big Society though it was more 'trial, error and failure in the public policy sphere' in reality (it would appear you're actually not allowed to hold any event currently without the words Big + Society in the title…). Aubrey Fox, who has been working at the Young Foundation, was talking about the lessons from his work at the Center for Court Innovation, and his associated book Trial and Error in Criminal Justice Reform: Learning from Failure

Despite my lack of knowledge about the criminal justice system, Aubrey was thankfully making some points of more general relevance which I was able to make sense of. And I think there are some interesting lessons for both social entrepreneurs and those who support them. This is all in the context of "there is failure in anything you do" and "failure is difficult to talk about":

1) Failure is in the eye of the beholder: a binary view of pass/fail does not reflect the complexity of most project outcomes, nor the experiences of those taking part in it in some way; success looks different to different people, and so does failure

2) Working once doesn't mean it will work forever (or somewhere else): this is a fascinating one for us, because we franchise our model and are passionate about replication that works; but there are countless external factors beyond 'the model', and a constantly changing environment

3) Leadership is crucial: Aubrey made the interesting point that 'boring' leaders are better than 'heroic' leaders; it is also about different stages of leadership for different elements of a project….and how to achieve those leadership transitions (often a point of failure)

4) Work to close the gaps between policy + practice: still these two groups are not effective at working together (I know, shock!); but ways to avoid failure involve a two way street of nudging or incentivising or de-risking or facilitating policymakers to be more creative, and also training, supporting, developing practitioners to effectively run and sustain what they do and not to fall into the trap of…

5) …the 'seductive power of unrealistic expectations': another great phrase, and one that I've termed the risk of "overpromise and under-delivery"; actually, changing behaviours and cultural norms at an individual level (never mind organisational or system level) is very difficult; and there is an assumption (is this correct?) that "projects would not win (public) support with modest results"; but that is a short-term win rather than a long-term success outlook…..

Further points of interest were

– that the consequences for individual failure differ depending on the project or sector (i.e. it's fine for James Dyson to trial 550 different hoovers and throw them out, it's not the same with, say, young offenders)

– that structural leadership (of teams, of coalitions) with agreed analysis and measurement is important

– defining what success looks like too early can put a limit on ambition (aka "sometimes you need to hold your nerve")

– the burden of proof in the sector is often on the new, rather than the existing

– the value of "calculated candour" (a phrase I love), which speaks to the need to be open without being reckless, to being as straightforward as possible about what has worked and what hasn't; because openness builds trust, which builds credibility builds support….

– areas ripe for innovation might be those where the risk (and cost) of the status quo is higher than the risk (and cost) of innovation

– couple of interesting questions; one that doesn't get asked (what is your expected failure rate?) and one that was difficult to answer (what is the motivation for individuals to take risks and to admit failures?)

At that point, brain expanded, and tried to come back to work…learning and failing, learning and failing.

[hat-tip as ever to the wonderful Indexed blog for the image; buy the postcard book via the site!]

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Brief thoughts on the Social Impact Bond (and the future of funding)

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Bond
Yesterday I found myself at NCVO listening (and responding) to draft recommendations from their Funding Commission, which is looking at funding in the sector for the next 10 years. I won't dwell too much on that, but would recommend reading the Emerging Recommendations paper to inform your thinking for the short and long-term.

Social investment and bringing private / commercial / new sources of money into the sector both feature amongst its pages, and the Social Impact Bond (SIB) is also named as one of the financial models that might helpe achieve this. It is an ingenious model, that encourages private and social investment (through social AND financial return), mitigates risk (and upfront investment) for government, and provides that crucial upfront money for the providers in question. And it focuses the sector, quite rightly in my view, on measurement and proving their impact: delivering outcomes they say they will.

Today is the official start of the first pilot, which will tackle reoffending in Peterborough which has been widely covered in the media this morning: nice to hear the sector on Radio, TV and in the mainstream press. And one hopes it is a great success.

At NCVO, I happened to find myself opposite Toby Eccles from Social Finance the organisation behind the bond pilot. So I took the opportunity to ask my main question on SIBs, which I previously raised in our Big Society recommendations paper (pdf), which is "what about the less-easily monetisable outcomes, particularly those (such as social capital, trust, confidence etc) which are crucial to the Big Society agenda?" The risk being that this new money focuses on the easily quantifiable / monetisable stuff (for returns etc), at a time when funding and investment is shrinking across the board.

Toby rightly pointed out that they had to prove the concept, and do it with a fairly chunk-able, solid area (reoffending is such an area where costs, savings etc are easy to quantify) before moving on to other more complex and nuanced areas in a few years. And that SIBs are only one part of the piece. Which makes a lot of sense to me, and I hope that SSE and others can engage and participate in helping forge + create new SIBs (and other financial models) in other relevant areas of social policy.

The challenge, as I see it, is two-fold.

One is that "in a few years" might be a timescale that doesn't stack up in the current climate for a whole range of organisations, if government puts emphasis on this particular model (which is so attractive in the current economic circumstances). Particularly if the Big Society Bank, as the NCVO recommendations currently say, is primarily used to help underwrite these new models. Because, as the recommendations also make clear, there are also other crucial areas that need investment or attention: financial literacy (including investment readiness), early-stage grants (a la Communities First etc), impact-first investment of other types, increasing entrepreneurialism, skills for scaling/trading, attracting philanthropy and corporate support in other ways, and so on and so forth.

Secondly, therefore, how do we ensure that the various funding initiatives and funders (Big Society Bank, Big Local Trust + other Big Lottery programmes, Communities First, Social Impact Bonds, Venturesome, UnLtd, venture philanthropy, trusts + foundations etc etc) are complementary and meeting as many of those needs as possible, in the toughest climate in years? And in the years to come.

From the recommendations, and those thoughts, I take a few things away: as practitioners, social entrepreneurs and social enterprises, we can: measure impact better (more robustly, transparently, quantifiably as possible), improve our understanding of different types of donors (and the quality of asking + relationship management), increase our knowledge and understanding of finance (and of those we work with), and engage in the conversation about new financial models.

Which should be enough to keep me going for now…..

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SSE Yorkshire graduation video

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SSE Yorkshire + Humber assembled a great group of social entrepreneurs for their first programme. Unfortunately I couldn't make their graduation a few weeks back, but here's a great video by one of the new SSE Fellows, Justine Gaubert, which does as good a summary of SSE's approach from a participant's perspective as I've seen. Enjoy.

SSE Yorkshire promo graduation from Justine Gaubert on Vimeo.

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Social enterprise and entrepreneurship links from August

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Card2028-376x230 Lots to do, lots to read, lots more to do….

My last post-holiday round-up seemed to go down well, so thought I'd do the same for August as I did for July. No particular rationale, just stuff I've found interesting or think might be relevant. Hope it is. Enjoy:

– The big hairy article of the month was in the Economist (I assume by Matthew Bishop), titled "Social innovation: let's hear those ideas" which covers how the US and UK governments are seeking to encourage social innovation and social entrepreneurship. Also includes cogent round-up of Big Society agenda to date.

– If you're interested in working out what the hell is happening with Local Enterprise Partnerships (*entire readership switches blogs*), then this round-up is the best place STILL to do so.

– Some interesting stuff written about the Big Society. Dai Powell of HCT's ("The clock is ticking on the Big Society") and Geoff Mulgan of Young Foundation's ("Can the Big Society be more than a slogan?") stood out for me, along with Craig Dearden-Phillips call for a constructive, engaged response See http://del.icio.us/SSE/bigsociety for more

– Twenty by Twenty: twenty essays on future of social enterprise, charity et al by good (as well as big) names

– Great social media decision-making guide for social entrepreneurs / non-profits from US experts Idealware

– Good piece in the New York Times about a social entrepreneur (don't be put off by the title): What Exactly Is A Social Entrepreneur?

– Giving is no longer a government preserve: interesting piece in the Telegraph touching on social entrepreneurship + big society

– Amanda Jones of RedButtonDesign in Director magazine on the trials and tribulations of raising funding/investment as a social enterprise

– Nice (Canadian) round-up of summer reading for social entrepreneurs which of course you can buy in the SSE bookstore

– Social enterprise start-up: 3 lessons to learn….by Involver

– Worry isn't work: Don't be Anxious! wise words from Dan Pallotta in Harvard Business Review; now if I could just follow his advice…

– Happy tale of a women's social enterprise (minicabs for women only) struggling, thriving and becoming the subject of a BBC comedy show

– Ten tips on elevator pitches; I think the Brits aren't as good at this stuff (myself included); I think we do escalator pitches….so will try and read 5 lessons from 150 start-up pitches as well

– Merger advice for small and medium orgs + collaboration advice from Bassac and others….

– ….and, for balance, an argument on DSC against merger: Total efficiency is the enemy of freedom

– Pollgate: the results of the storm in our own particular UK #socent teacup; but gratifying nonetheless!

– Freeing the Social Entrepreneur: a piece in Stanford Social Innovation Review well worth reading, covering founder syndrome, leadership and much more

– Great video on the Homeless World Cup and its impact: warms the cockles and all that

– The Social Intrapreneur: a field guide for corporate changemakers…. ; well, those MBA-ers had to come up with something :0)

– Alex Nicholls says Social Entrepreneurship Is Growing Up on Dowser.org. Which I would heartily endorse. So I'll end with the good professor's words. Cheers:

”We're moving into a period of much more critical analysis of social entrepreneurship. We've ridden a wave of consensus; we're all hugging each other and patting ourselves on the back. There's been lots of money pouring into this and support from governments. I think all that's changing. We've had an economic calamity, governments are looking at austerity, foundations are pulling back, the media and others are getting more critical. I think we're going to have a critical decade for social entrepreneurship, and that's great. It's high time we looked at the stuff that's useful and does have impact and the stuff that has no impact at all, and I think we're going to have a big reality check. The hero-worshiping, self-congratulatory period's over. I don't see that as a challenge; I see it as a sign that we're growing up.”

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Is a Social App Store just Toolkits 2.0?

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AppstoreI was inspired to write by the latest issue of Third Sector magazine this week. Not a sentence I've written too often, perhaps, (tend to rely on it for news, rather than inspiration…) but there were three thought-provoking pieces in the current issue.

The first was what is probably the best interview I've read with Nick Hurd, the Minister for Civil Society, on the Conservative approach to the sector. There are some good challenges  here for naysayers and cut-watchers alike, and a good summary 'progress report'.

The second was by John Kingston of Venturesome asking "How can we increase supply of capital to the third sector?' I'll cover that in a forthcoming post on Big Society Bank / social investment

And the third was a great challenge from Craig Dearden-Phillips to move away from just complaining politely about cuts (and doing so ever more loudly) and to think radically about how to react, survive, thrive and reconfigure in the current context. To be constructive about the Big Society agenda.

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To that end, I've been reading up on one initiative bubbling away in the affiliations of the Big Society Network: the concept of a Social App Store. David Wilcox, arch social reporter, suggested this as an idea and it has begun to be shaped and formed online by the contributions of others. His outline of it is here, and you can read the subsequent discussions here. The concept is summarised as follows:

It will aim to offer online users simple navigation to easy-to-use
content and tools for social action – some free, some paid-for. It will
offer developers of how-to materials for social action the opportunity
to showcase their existing work, and work with others to develop new
offerings. By creating a substantial market place it will provide
developers with an incentive to develop or re-purpose materials in
formats easy to use by those new to social action.

In principle, I like a lot about this: making ideas accessible, thinking radically about how we can scale up their take-up, a commitment to openness, the potential largeness of reach, democratising design / co-production, utilising new tech to connect, providing a real product (or even 'shopfront') to what big society is and means, financial transaction / trading element and so on. Much to build on and work with here.

My constructive questions or concerns are: is the language alienating (does it smack of metropolitan smart-phone-owning tech-savvy people etc)? Others, including David, have noted this already though, and suggested alternatives. More substantively, it is the communicated sense that this type of social action can be 'downloaded and installed' (to borrow the terminology) so simply. Implementation of such work is not one-click and instant, but, often, achieved with hard slog and determination over the long haul. And it is often challenging and difficult and messy. Where I can get up and running with an app or MySociety website cleanly and instantly, other social projects and tools need support, capacity, confidence and persistence to put into action.

The associated risk, therefore, is that this is just toolkits 2.0: everyone in this sector knows there is a toolkit or a resource for everything from community planning to social impact measurement, and also that creating the content after the project (because you wrote it in the bid) is often the easy bit. An online store of these won't change that. (see Richard's recent post on SE Toolbelt for a similar take). Materials, by definition, are only the substances out of which things are made.

So my suggestion is to think and proffer questions about what offline support might look like: who the store workers or shop assistants might be, and where they might be located. Are they voluntary, app-ointees, connected to existing local networks? Are they located in actual stores (as David Barrie suggests in his response in the group discussion)? Where are the learning loops or support networks for those 'downloading' from the store, and what might those look like? Or is there a phone hotline to talk through problems? (the equivalent of e-mailing the app developer?) Will there be any quality control or measurement of success (app-raisals?), or is it genuinely radical in its devolving of trust and, possibly, resource?

Much to ponder, but also much to build.

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