International Women's Day

Over the last 20 years, I’ve always been able to celebrate International Women’s day on my birthday. It has a deep significance for me.  It lies at the heart of my ‘advantaged thinking’ beliefs. On International Women’s day, I’ve been able to stand with others challenging the institutions and belief systems that divide and discriminate along binary oppositions.  In other words, most birthdays, I’ve spent my time with some remarkable people; enlightened spirits who accepted you as whoever you wanted to be -  as long as you were authentic, prepared to challenge the world around you, and understood the basic principles of equality.  I learnt that the boundaries of human identity were much more fluid and liberating than the sexual biology we are fobbed off at school with. I learnt that the worst thing you could ever say was, ‘I just want the world to accept me as normal,’ in a world where normal is often the status quo's best form of control.

This year is the first I’ve ever been technically excluded from an International Women’s day event.  I could say it didn’t matter – I had planned to be at a conference anyway, so I could talk about ‘advantaged thinking’ in the context of Sheila McKechnie – but the people I’ve grown up with, the ones who always sought to celebrate the day with me, who still fight against the segregation of toilets and the ignorance against trans-identity, would I know feel bitterly let down if I didn’t say something.

So I’m using today to celebrate the courage of the woman who helped establish the foyer concept in the UK back in the 1990’s as a means to provide social justice for young people; and to remember those around the world, of whatever denomination of male/female identity, who are told that they are not welcome.

Inclusion, after all, is one of the key values of the organisation I work for.

I am lucky enough that I can be invited to an event, the CIH South Eastern conference in Brighton, and stand on a stage to mark, in a very small way, what is the 100^th anniversary of International Women’s day. However far the role of women in society has travelled, you only have to look at the institutions of power in this country, representation in the media, and the situation of too many women around the world, to realise how far we have to go.  How much more we need to do.  But it starts with the simple things: whether you see people as individuals, or whether you discriminate them by a biological marker.

I hope Sheila McKechnie would have enjoyed my presentation today about the need to challenge the status quo, the need to use our advantages in the housing sector to transform the system.  1 in 5 young people unemployed is a shameful statistic of our age, a sign that we have we learnt little as a society since the 1 in 10 if the 1980s.  I’m sure she would have talked about that too, with even more passion than I could muster.

I suppose I’m thankful to be reminded what some people must feel like every day: not wanted because of who someone thinks you are.  When someone discriminates against you, the advantaged thinker focuses not on the person, but the cause and the challenge to change.  International woman’s day is something to celebrate, as well as a call to arms.

Dreaming the Future

When you think of the future, few lists would stretch long enough to include the Commodore hotel at Weston SuperMare.   But that’s where I headed on Thursday afternoon, ready to inspire the staff of 'Futures at Knightstone' with Open Talent.

It was an inauspicious start. I had arrived at the Commodore hotel for a pre meet with senior staff, only to be greeted by a keyboard player singing a dubious version of Elvis’s ‘Always on my mind’. It was hard to tell if he was on the mind of his ageing audience, half asleep in the corner.  A few looked up over their coffee cups to wonder if I was the next act. According to the posters, that privilege belonged to Ann Widdecombe later in March.  Whilst I have once or twice been mistaken for John Lennon – despite his well-publicised death – I was clearly no Ann Widdecombe.

I hid for a while in my sunny bedroom, watching a chocolate mint melt on top of the bathroom towels where it had been carefully left to wilt in the heat.  Thankfully, it wasn’t long until I was rescued.  After agreeing details for the conference with the senior staff over a coke in the bar, I slipped out to charge up my advantaged thinking batteries with some friends for the night, creeping back when everyone else was dreaming of grapefruit segments for breakfast.

The staff conference brought over 40 people from services across Bristol, Weston, Yeovil, and beyond my shaky geographical grasp of the south west.  People smiled and looked enthusiastic, with just the odd grimace making me wonder if I should have asked for the Elvis keyboard as well as the projector.  But they, like I, were here for a common purpose; with the same care and commitment to make a change for young people. Open Talent is an easy sale for anyone with a heart and a head, and we had a whole day to read the small print on the deal.

Six hours later, after the exercises, discussions and presentations, there was a palpable sense of potential in the room. The staff had created pitches for wonderful project ideas, accentuated the positive in their services, and outlined plans for activities to celebrate, develop and invest in over the next few months. The discussions had challenged and provoked lots of advantaged thinking, and true to form I had been sussed out as the occasional disadvantaged thinker myself.  We were all looking forward to June, to present back in public the Open Talent story of what Futures at Knightstone is all about.

There had been one decisive moment.  Someone had questioned whether, even in an exercise, staff should think of doing things in their own lives to inspire the young people they were professionally responsible for. The post it notes crowded around the wall suggested otherwise, with ideas for swimming with sharks, running marathons, being more confident, and asking young people to set challenges.  The day the adults cease to lead lead by example is the day we lose our authenticity. And being authentic is what commitment for young people - what Open Talent - is all about.  The room, I’m glad to say, was full of authentic people, prepared to dare themselves.

I was driven back to the station by a lovely staff member from a service in Weston, who chatted excitedly about setting up a shop enterprise with young people. ‘It’s about getting on and doing it, not just waiting for it to happen,’ she said. If I had come with a baton, it had been passed on.

I fell asleep on the train home, woken only by the ticket collector as the train drifted towards Bristol. ‘Day dreaming?’  he inquired.  'No', I smiled, 'just thinking of the future'.

Turning Small Change into Big Change

Last week, I had the chance to meet up with the PenniesFoundation – an organisation which has created an ‘electronic charity box’ for people to donate pennies in private when they make transactions by credit card in retailers linked in to the Pennies platform.

Pennies might be small change for some, but they have a powerful resonance in how we think about things. Just look at the language: ‘waiting for the penny to drop’, or ‘a penny for your thoughts’.  The penny seems to be closely linked to making decisions about something.   Yet, in the world of charity, there is often more emotion than thought attached to how and for what we donate.

The days of people stuffing small change into charity boxes is on the decrease. And in some ways (but not all) that is a good thing: most charities have used the appeals process to perpetuate the ‘disadvantaged thinking’ by which we are traded images of despair in order to secure our donation to the problem.

We are never going to deal with the big issues challenging our world until we can find a different language that engages us in understanding how real future solutions can be invested in.

This requires a change in approach, which is where the Pennies Foundation might help lead the way.

For starters, the Foundation is upgrading the penny box into something more modern in thinking: how we use credit to purchase items for ourselves, and how we can be given the choice to offer some of that credit for the benefit of causes we care about. According to the Foundation, a few pennies a month could add up to millions of pounds for charity. It would take just 8 pence a week (just over £4 a year) from half of the UK’s card-holders to raise £89 million a year. That’s some potential investment.

Of course, just making the transaction electronic doesn’t mean the ‘cruise ship’ charities won’t be lining up their cargo of disadvantaged thinking to trade our credit for.  Small change might still mean small thinking. But the Pennies Foundation is promising to target 25% of revenues on causes directly chosen by its Trustees. In other words, regardless of however retailers promote where our pennies go, at least 25% can be used to grow a new form of giving. A penny for our future thoughts.

 I’m not a Trustee, but I hope and believe that Pennies will show how much smarter it is to invest credit in things more positive, future focused and asset-building, than today’s status quo of deficit stories. That’s what I’d call turning small change into something big. 

Ten Good Things

The extradition of pensioner Christopher Tappin to the United States caught my eye over the weekend. Today he is asking for bail from his El Paso prison, where he has hopefully survived his first few nights inside the brutal gang system that dominates there. Whatever the factuals in the case – and since the American judicial system doesn’t need to provide evidence to extradite someone, we know precious little – my sympathies lie with the man. After all, given that the American Government wins 95% of its prosecution cases, the only thing anyone can do is plead guilty and try to get out of a system whose interpretation of justice is best summed up by Guantanamo Bay.

But this entry isn’t really about the shameful way our country gives up its citizens in the name of  half-baked interpretations of law more akin to Kafka. Rather, the story about Tappin set my mind back a few years to the so-called Natwest Three, the first high profile case following the extradition agreement signed by Tony Blair.  One of those three, Gary Mulgrew, wrote an excellent book about his experiences of living through the nightmare of imprisonment in one of America’s toughest jails. Mulgrew might not be the Brendan Behan or Jean Genet of prison literature, but his writing has a humanity that is all too absent from the politics and justice that convicted him, or, dare one say, the banking world where he came from. 

As Mulgrew recounts the shock of joining a dormitory cell simmering with the threat of violence, he describes some of the mental approaches which, one hopes, Tappin might be using now. They include this:  whatever the difficulties one may be facing, remember the positives of the day and say ‘thank you’ for ten things before falling asleep. One can only imagine how poignant and difficult that might be for someone far from home in such a scary place.  It’s a technique worth its weight in gold though, a simple but powerful form of advantaged thinking.  So often, we get lost in thinking about the stresses and tensions we face, the fears and negatives in our lives, the things that are not working, the faults in ourselves or others, the deficits surrounding us. How much more useful it is, more mentally challenging, to find ten things that one can thank the universe for.  To recognise and celebrate what is good.

If we can do that for ourselves, perhaps we can remember to do so for others, particularly those caught up in the institutions of ‘disadvantage’ where deficits and risks are credited before all else.  Those Foyers trying to make sure that even their handover sheets capture, however small, what positives each individual has shown, are leading the way in shifting the balance of our consciousness. 

If we all did 10 good things each day, if we all thought to identify and say thank you for them, no one would be waking up in the El Paso Prison Facility with fear in their heart.

The Loneliness of the Long Distanced Thinker

People often say I have a great job title, Director of Innovation (my day job). Though I'd rather swap it for Dreams. They ask me, how do you  think of new things? Where do you get your ideas? Who do you read? What's the latest thing? What's in your head?

I have no idea.

 I enjoyed being told once on my arrival at an international conference that I had the worst photo of any speaker. I feel more like Andy Warhol. I'm not a director of anything. I'm just here, trying to find people to direct and innovate with me, rather than trying to innovate and direct people into an output.

The only innovators I have ever met where the young people we are trying to innovate for.

The only idea I have ever had I repeat endlessly, because human narrative has still not changed. We are a generation in the cusp, still feeling for the way out of the cave.

There is a rational approach to being an advantaged thinker.  But I'm not a rational person.  And I don't believe that rational approaches have got the Third sector very far, except to be an expert in the disadvantage that it should have eradicated.  Disadvantaging Industry reports and headlines hold no interest for me, I don't read them.

As an alterternative - what advantaged thinking should always try -  I can offer one of my secret stories.  What it is really like to be the Director of Innovation, atleast for 5 minutes. 

Taking an idea from conception into delivery is like carrying a candle across a waterless swimming pool without letting the light going out. You tread like on rice paper, you stumble in desperation, you nurture the flame like it’s your heart, you ache for the distance to be halved, you lose all sense of yourself in the determination to reach a moment you don’t yet understand, you realise the importance of the process between flowing unconsciousness and the grip of the ledge.  If you get there ever. If the light doesn’t go out first. If, on reaching what you think might be the end, you don’t realise it wasn’t the candle you had hoped for.  The crowd on the side of the pool never clap, will never encourage you on, will never crown you with anything but thorns.  As you crawl forwards, you catch glimpses of the status quo awarding medals to people for not changing the world. But still you continue, biting your lip. Driven not by performance targets, money, the absurd desire to make a difference like leaving a footprint in the sand, need, recognition, none of that.  You are the candle you are carrying. You are the idea you are trying to conceive. And the sooner you realise that the problems you seek to solve are already part of you, were you all along, the closer you will be to authenticity.  The loneliness of the long distance advantaged thinker is that you have to wear blinkers and refuse to listen to doubt; you have to wear thick skin to forget the criticism and ignorance placed around you; you have to suffer being short and long sighted in the same vision; you have to live each second with a remorseless snail-like passion to express something there are no words for; you have to ultimately stand outside of the ego you dress under titles and smart clothes, and hand the candle back to someone else, in the gift of realisation.  You have to dare to do all that, before someone blows you out like a dandelion.

We're on a journey

On the flight to Belfast, I catch the sun set bursting orange and peach through a bank of clouds.  I’m thinking what might be achieved tomorrow; wondering what will begin; hoping Open Talent is landing to fresh roots.  But at the back of my mind, all the time I return to a poster on the wall at Gatwick Airport, saying ‘we’re on a journey’ . The poster cleverly informs us that the airport is under-going changes, that whatever gaps in the fabric or annoyances, there is something good to come. We understand the language. Journeys are something we enter into, looking forward to what lies beyond, enjoying the potential of what might come. ‘We’re on a journey’ is a call to aspiration. Hey, we are going somewhere. It’s exciting. Whatever we lack now, think ahead to what might be.

The poster at Gatwick is something we can understood, sympathise with, accept.

How different our perspective can be for the young people society defines as problems.  If you are unemployed, if you are an offender, if you are whatever deficit label , then you are no longer on a journey but a pathway to be supported and nudged along into a dead-end; you are no longer on a journey but someone who has already arrived without potential to be more than you are now.  

It is the responsibility of charities to remind us all that young people, whatever we call them, are on a journey to our future. That it is not a black and white face of poverty to hide away from, but something and somewhere and someone that could be just as exciting as the destinations we wish for ourselves. They are all on a journey – what are we doing to help them get there? Where do we want 'there' to be?

Let’s learn from the poster at Gatwick.  Tell the world that all young people are on a journey with us.

A modern ritual to grow

Since it’s social media week, I’m going to try to squeeze in as much advantaged thinking and tweeting as I can. Life might feel like one hectic highway of meetings and bids, but after a weekend with a cupcake consultation – if you haven’t tried one, seriously, it’s the way forward – I have the advantage of amazing ingredient combinations from Bea's of Bloomsbury in my mind.

Topic number one for today is about the lines of people buying valentine cards and flowers at Liverpool Street station tonight, on the eve of Valentine’s. It’s an amazing achievement: a ritual so strong in the modern public consciousness that even the most stressed out worker drone will break the habit of their path home to invest in those little symbols of appreciation and affection for another human being.  The power of positive gifts and gifting to others is not to be underestimated.

 I’m a strong believer in ritual.  It feels to me, in our modern sophistication, we forget how ‘the right’ rituals can be created and used to stimulate progress in our society.  A good ritual will beat any performance system or Government sanctioned ‘nudging’ to develop human behaviour.  We are sometimes in danger of losing rituals that have lost presence in our lives, without finding their replacement in a new form.

All of which reminds me of Seamus Heaney’s brilliant North poems, where, in the context of the Irish troubles of the 70s, he wrote about the potential for understanding and healing through a refreshed form of ritual and ceremony. 

Is there a ritual that will enable us to change the way invest in those young people we just see as deficits and disadvantaged?  Is there a ritual that will enable us to share with them the same focus of love we hold for our own children’s investments and those of our family?

Some might say that Children in Need’s red nose day is the charity equivalent to a modern ritual for giving, but it’s not what I’m thinking of or hoping for, however worthy the cause.  Children in Need – as the name suggests, Holmes – is  locked into a form of giving a pound to deficits and disadvantage that is part of the system of charity we are comfortable with, rather than a different, more profound ask: about changing ourselves.  About thinking differently of our world and how we can harness the resources within it as assets for good. What I’m talking about is a ritual for investing in the humans we don’t know, with the love and belief that everyone has the talent to contribute amazing things to life if we can get the deal right.  Children with Goals, Children in Talent, whatever brand will do.  That’s not an easy ask, and that’s part of the point. For us to evolve, we need to challenge the potential of our lives to increase the potential of others in the bigger life we call earth. How exciting that is. What a huge flower of responsibility to nurture.

When you are done with Valentine’s in social media week, when the flowers have died, send someone an advantaged thinking tweet, an e-card to open their confidence and ability, a smiley email, anything that connects. Look for a ritual to grow our new consciousness to open talent in all young people.