NESTA Uploading Innovation

People who frighten me

Tommy Hutchinson — Tue, 29 May 2007 14:46:24 +0100

People who frighten me - I heard one of the London 2012 Olympic committee members speaking last week (i'm afraid the meeting's 'Chatham House' rules prevents me from naming her). After a very interesting overview of the preparations she was asked "What is it that most frightens you?" We all thought she was going to say something like being worried that the stadium wouldn't be ready in time or the swimming pool will leak and flood half of the East End of London, but instead she said

"The people who really frighten me are those who get into powerful positions without developing the capacity to listen".

I thought wow how true and immediately began to run off in my mind all the political leaders (and a few lesser powerful friends!) who fitted this description. It is indeed one of the most worrying aspects that many leaders can be hugely charasmatic, courageous and even inspiring but when it comes to listening to the opinions and advice of others, they become a closed book. A failure to listen usually leads to even the most impressive people losing touch over time and from this, their good ideas begin to break down. Even more worrying, the importance of listening is all too rarely emphasised in places of learning including the best business schools and yet it is essential for continued success.

Our team here at i-genius has been doing a lot of listening since we went Live at the start of the year. We have been listening to what our members have been telling us and to all those who have said they really like i-genius but decided not to join. The reasons why people don't join are varied. Some did not have a business to list when they were filling out the joining page; some were put off by the term ‘social entrepreneur’; some liked our catchphrase 'amazing people doing amazing things' but felt they were not themselves amazing enough to join. "Yes you are!" we quietly screamed.

We are going through a process of adjusting our site and how to best communicate. It is now no longer necessary to list a particular business in your profile (you can be doing great things without having a business); the term 'social entrepreneurs' still exists on our site and its what we are about but we have toned it down a bit because we know people doing good in the world come in all shapes and sizes and it is these individuals doing good which is what’s important, not what term used to describe them (apology to all those academics, institutions/foundations and government officials who make a fine career out of trying to 'define' social entrepreneurs but we just ain’t that bothered). We have also altered our catchphrase to 'meet amazing people' so those of you who feel too humble to describe yourselves as 'amazing' can relax - we reserve the right to continue to think that you are!

We have also started a series of technical up-grades to the site but well......i think you have probably read enough for now. Thanks for all your advice, comments and support - it is having a big effect on how we develop.
http://www.i-genius.org

Channel 4's In the Wild

Creativity, risk, and the audit culture

Graham Jeffery — Mon, 21 May 2007 00:58:42 +0100

This is a (slightly edited) cross-posting from my main blog at generalpraxis.blogspot.com. Sorry it's so long! It was provoked by some reflections following my participation in a discussion about creativity in education on BBC Radio Four's "The Learning Curve". I put it here becuase I thought it might be of interest to some of you thinking about public sector innovation...would be interested in any responses!
On Radio 4's Learning Curve last week the most interesting point made was one that none of us managed to address properly. Loosely paraphrasing, Libby Purves said "in a world in which everything must be assessed and graded in order to keep everyone safe, the less safe everyone feels." A succinct summary of a major problem. Likewise, a number of recent reports are questioning what is the point of all the assessment to which young people are subjected. Is it for their benefit ("assessment is for learning", as they like to say in Scotland), or to keep track of how the school is performing in comparison to others and in comparison to national 'norms'? So who is being assessed? The learner or the institution? The answer, surely, is 'both' - but there is very limited evidence that all this assessment, and even worse, testing, is having much effect on anyone's ability to learn, or on teachers' ability to teach effectively.

So, at worst, does the obsession with measuring student attainment in order to compare institutions (the apparatus of institutional comparison) actually divert teachers' attention from meeting the needs of individual learner ? Who is all the assessment and audit for? OK, so there's a need to know whether public money is well spent, hence the intense scrutiny of public services. But the audit industry around education (and other public services) creates a culture of performativity which certainly feels something like a straight-jacket to those people who are working in it. Creativity in this context is heavily circumscribed by regulation, bureaucracy and hierarchy. This is a tension that creative practitioners have to address all the time.
The literature on public sector innovation doesn't really address the profound tension between the conditions needed for innovation and the conditions imposed by a normative audit culture. But in the business world, some companies do seem to manage to innovate and balance regulation and accountability - the difference, broadly, seems to me to be that the public sector isn't generally very good at learning and that it's not a business - it's not ruled by relatively straightforward goals and objectives. The 'products' of education are complex and contested. The public sector is also very distracted from learning by the huge burden of reporting, audit and inspection.
And is the obsession with 'raising attainment' just creating a culture of conformity? Essentially does it encourage schools to 'select out' the learners that represent the most risky proposition? It certainly forces institutions to compete for the students that they think will improve their position in the output and attainment tables. Why would schools or universities want to admit students who might adversely affect their performance in the educational 'bottom line'? Who might be costly to support and difficult to teach? As I said in my book "a climate of performativity is likely to create a risk-averse management culture in which teachers retreat into standardised and normative versions of teaching and learning."

Surely the issue is more to do with how risk is managed, rather than the idea that risk can be eliminated completely. Creativity necessarily involves a leap into the unknown. Equally, just talking about encouraging 'risk taking' in an understandably risk-averse public sector culture without differentiating between acceptable and unacceptable risk isn't too smart either. There has to be a clear ethical framework for work with learners. But isn't that why we suggest that public servants should be professionals and employ professional judgement? Isn't that why we maintain the idea of a teaching profession so that there are appropriate values and ethics to underpin these kinds of professional choices?

For what it's worth, this somewhat lengthy abstract gives a sense of where my thinking on the notion of creative partnership is at the moment. Conversations with my partner Jackie about the constraints on innovation within the health sector show up similar issues. There's an article to be written, when we manage to get round to it...On the other hand, perhaps the issue is as much to do with the ways in which individual managers and practitioners internalise the audit culture, and use its techniques to constrain innovation and disempower others, as it is to do with trying to change structures and systems. There's inevitably some tension between the idea of providing a public entitlement, maintaining quality and standards in services, and the need to experiment and take (managed) risks in order to innovate. What is needed is imaginative and intelligently conceived funding and management regimes that don't treat the people 'delivering' public services as technicians to do the bidding of the centre but rather partners - experts - in improving and developing the quality of what is 'delivered.' So professional learning, research and development and professional dialogue becomes critical. Interestingly, even the National Audit Office says in a recent report:"Government departments should build stronger partnerships with local bodies and come to a better understanding of the challenges they face."

The introduction to Bob Jeffrey's recent book summarises some of the issues pretty intelligently: he describes performativity as "a principle of governance that enables strictly functional relationships to develop between a state and its inside and outside environments over and against the older policy technologies of professionalism and bureaucracy, through the institutionalisation of new management techniques and the development of 'mutual instrumentalism' (Ball, 2003). Performativity is a technology, a culture and mode of regulation that employs judgements, comparisons and displays as a means of incentive, control and change."

So my anxiety is that creativity discourse, harnessed to an uncritical performativity culture, constructs learners - and even teachers - as if all they are is individual 'creative entrepreneurs'. It maintains the idea that schooling is fundamentally about the needs of the economy - everyone is then a competitor - and downgrades the social, cultural, civic, interpersonal aspect of learning. What about the education of persons? We need to get beyond the idea that school is just the education of workers. Entrepreneurship should be one component in a balanced educational diet, but not the only ingredient. And even with all the rhetoric about personalised learning, the dominant discourse is still one of the learner (and parents) as consumers of educational services rather than participants...and teachers as 'deliverers' rather than 'designers.'

So where is this debate going? Thoughts, anyone?

NESTA Uploading Innovation

Beers & Innovation 9

Sam Carrington — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 10:24:08 +0000

I just thought I'd add a quick not here to see if anyone was attending the latest NMK networking/panel event "goodness 2.0" on 10/04 at that bastion of cultural excellence, the Trocadero.

How might a 'read/write web' create new and innovative ways for charitable and campaigning organisations to work internally, to communicate and to engage?
http://www.nmk.co.uk/event/2007/04/10/goodness-20

There will be a small posse of NESTA folk along, come and say hello if you are there.

NESTA Uploading Innovation

Pro-am publishing

Steve Moore — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 17:44:24 +0000

I read an interesting preview of 2007 trends in the FT over christmas _which I can't find to link to now - but it predicted that an emerging trend in media would be seasoned professionals working with the crowd and here is a good example of an experiment of what we might see more off. Lee talked at our RSA event last week about the unsatisfactory outocme of The Guardian's Comment is Free experiment. This feels like something altogether more robust. I like the idea of working on the story together rather than commenting on comment pieces..

Policy Unplugged Team

An interesting conference

Steve Moore — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 17:13:57 +0000

Russell Davies has just posted an invitation to his 'TED for the people' conference in June. You are unlikely to receive a nicer invite all year. Register quickly the Conway Hall is big but i doubt it will be big enough top cope with the demand. Such a generous idea..

NESTA Uploading Innovation

Community Conversation

Lloyd Davis — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 23:35:08 +0000

Matt and David led a conversation about community on-line and off-

NESTA Uploading Innovation

Entrepreneurship conversations

Lloyd Davis — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 17:13:56 +0000

Here's a clip of the conversation that Judith Clegg initiated on entrepreneurship.

NESTA Uploading Innovation

Talking about playing with their balls

Lloyd Davis — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 17:01:40 +0000

Johnnie and James insisted (thank GOD!) that there was an element of silliness in the day. Luckily for those involved, I only filmed them talking about one of the silly things they did.

NESTA Uploading Innovation

Interview with Mark Earls

Lloyd Davis — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 16:50:12 +0000

I caught Mark in the corridor after his conversation session for this video interview

NESTA Uploading Innovation

After the conversations, what next?

David Wilcox — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 11:36:25 +0000

It was a terrific event , and I'm sure NESTA will ensure that innovative things emerge ... however, in Beyond conversations and unconferencing I wonder more generally about how important - or not - it is that something evidently happens after unconfererencing.