“ECONOMICS ARE THE METHOD: THE OBJECT IS TO CHANGE THE SOUL”
This (pretty chilling) quote comes from Margaret Thatcher in 1981 – and ushered in an era that promoted the belief that social progress is achieved through the accumulation of wealth or status.
Earn more, consume more, and you’ll be happy.
The legacy of this is still with us today, with our value to society often seen in purely economic terms.
In the social sector, many of our organisations have been unwittingly shaped by this philosophy.
The less you own the more likely you are to be a problem. The lower your educational attainment, your income, the more insecure your background, the more likely you are to be a drain on services.
This is called deficit-based thinking, and it is rife. Our organisations support it without even knowing.
Increasingly though there’s evidence of a disparity with wealth, achievement and happiness. The UK is one of the richest countries in the world – but also one of the loneliest .
Finland is now top of the world for happiness, according to the World Happiness Report 2018. Nordic countries take four out of the five top spots – and some of the world’s richest nations appear much further down the list.
Finland has a high GDP but also high taxes which fund social programmes. There’s less competition at work and better support for those without a job. There’s a strong culture of strengths-based thinking , and of encouraging communities to identify and mobilise existing but often unrecognised assets. The services that do exist are organised around the user.
As Andrew Humphreys has written – public services in the UK are often compartmentalised along lines that bear no relation to the needs they are supposed to meet or the value they are meant to deliver. If public services aren’t designed backwards from the value that people need from them, then they will have been designed forwards from the aims and objectives of those in charge of them.
It’s nearly seven years since Bromford began its journey from a pretty paternalistic top-down service to focus on strengths and what’s working in our communities.
When we began, one of the most common challenges we had from colleagues was “Why are we expecting our customers to contribute to communities? I don’t do anything in mine.”
Our language wasn’t very nuanced- as people saw organised ‘volunteering’ as the only way someone contributes.
Obviously, this is nonsense. If you live in any community that depends on the interaction with other human beings (that’s all of us – right?), you by definition must contribute to that community in some way.
That contribution cannot be viewed solely through categories of age, health, or wealth.
A few years ago I met an older guy in the Philippines who told me he was the most sought-after person in his village – even though he hadn’t ‘worked’ for over 20 years and lived a very frugal existence.
His strengths were his age, his experiences and his connections which could be brought together to help people. The Fili culture has a word for this mindset – “Bayanihan”. The word came from the tradition where neighbours would help a relocating family by literally carrying their house and contents to a safer location.
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More generally the word has come to mean a communal spirit that makes seemingly impossible feats possible through the power of unity and cooperation.
The term bayanihan has evolved over time – being incorporated in many projects that depict the spirit of a cooperative effort involving a community of members.
At Bromford we are focussing on the ‘irreducible core’ of service that our communities must receive from us.
The services we currently have that replace, control or overwhelm unity and co-operation will become obsolete. One of our organisational design principles is that we should think community first, services last.
There’s a lot of talk of strengths-based thinking but I see comparatively few organisations who are having these difficult conversations and beginning to cede more power to communities.
There are things individuals need and that communities can do that are irreplaceable – that can never be done by organisations or Government.
Building our organisations around communities, around what they truly need rather than what we want them to need, is truly disruptive.
It means moving away from focussing on what’s wrong, taking a very different view of our purpose and being a lot less essential than we think we are.