Getting it Done

 Day 4 of my trip was spent starting to work up the detail on what the 5 areas of Open Talent mean in terms of operational delivery for a new Foyer service. We had a head start from the inspire workshop the day before, and settled in to focus on Opportunity as the one area that connects most with everything else. It’s so exciting to be able to draw out the pathway for a service that is trying to do everything the right way round, and we tried to push the boundaries of what that means through some radical thinking on the entry process. At the same time, we kept a separate sheet to note down any key values that emerged, to form the basis of an overarching set of principles for the service drawn from across the 5 areas. 

As the four of us present drew, talked, typed, walked around the room, and opened our minds, we touched on some fascinating ideas, from creating a game-based approach to a young person’s transition and development of assets, to a ‘Foyerversity’ of short online videos showcasing key skills for and by staff and young people, which could easily be made through collaboration from our current network of services.  Everything is possible.

We spent the day in a room named after the founder of The Brotherhood of St Laurence, Gerard Kennedy Tucker. Shamefully, when I heard we were going to the Father Tucker Room, a childhood of Robin Hood films meant I was getting ready for when the Sherwood of Nottingham might come to get me. I was grateful to be able to read a bit about the man on the walls, and realise that this was a remarkable person about whom it was said ‘He got things done’.  I made a note to reference this in my speech the next day. The ‘getting things done’ included a long list of actions, such as reform of the Landlord and Tenant Act, setting up housing schemes for unemployed men and families, campaigning against slum housing,  establishing the first family day care service, and pioneering a network of Opportunity Shops.  I know from personal experience that there is a only small group of leaders who really believe in ‘innovation’ as a key purpose of charity, and this, alongside a passionate belief in advocacy and social justice, marked Tucker out for me as someone special.  I felt in my heart that he would not only have approved of Open Talent, but probably ask why we were taking so long  to make it happen.  We need to get it done, because we need to get things done too.    Sometimes you have to travel to the otherside of the world just to feel at home in yourself.

When the room rocks

Highlights from day two and three of my Australian visit....

 Day two

I take a tour round a ‘crisis’ project which houses and supports people of mixed ages over a short timescale who tend to be working through drug and alcohol issues.  It’s a building which, although from the early 90’s, looks like a homeless sector dinosaur: a front desk behind a screen, announcements from reception on an intercom like something out of Hi-de-Hi,  dark labyrinth corridors, bare walls.  I feel like Barton Fink. 

What’s different though about this tour is that the manager showing me round has been trying to use Open Talent to change the culture.  Whatever limits the building posed, outside had been converted into herb gardens and recreational spaces, while inside anything that could be maximised as a potential zone for informal activities was being renovated to help develop a different culture of working.  At the same time, a project had been funded as part of one staff member’s time to trial out the Open talent personalised ‘bond’ approach over a 3 month timescale.  Invitations were sent out to clients living in crisis accommodation, transitional housing, those on a drug dependency programmes and supported in outreach.  12 people applied, with 10 selected between the ages of 30 and 47. They had worked to identify a range of aspirational goals, ranging from developing personal skills in writing and music, setting up various original business ventures, and gaining work in the community and homeless sector.  The project was over half way during my visit, with at least 6 of the 10 evidencing clear progress.  There had been a lot of learning along the way, and considering the lack of planning, time and resource involved in the venture, the focus and drive in the project was impressive.  This was a good example of using experiential learning to help create the conditions for Open Talent to grow, teasing out the confidence, trust and belief to adopt a different approach. 

Bur there is one challenge. While the staff are doing a great job of recording what the outcomes and journey is, the paper that is doing the capturing speaks less than the people do. In other words, there is not the system in place to really hold on to the wealth of impact and learning being gneerated. It is this arena that our new work funded by Esmee Fairbairn will be so important, to provide a process to assist staff to do that. 

Day three

I have just finished a workshop on Open Talent with staff from a mix range of organisations associated with the 3 new Foyer developments in Melbourne. The exciting thing is that they are integrating Open Talent into the first Foyer design, so it is developed through the lens of advantaged thinking. It will be the first Open Talent Foyer of its kind anywhere.   More than that, of course, it will transform the organisations involved in the process.  Open talent, as DNA, is not something you can just isolate in a box - the ripples reach out everywhere.  I’ve been working with key staff on how to integrate Open Talent and create a manual of practice, so today was the opportunity to involve a broader group in a special ‘inspire workshop’, with a focus on innovation activities drawn from the new TalentS QA model (some of them just written on the flight over).

This was the feedback from the end of day activity, where staff were encouraged to speak into my mobile phone about what they had taken from the day, what they were going to do, and what permission there were prepared to give the senior staff to take Open Talent forwards:

‘I’ve got it… I was thinking from a micro context before, not the systemic of Open Talent’

‘We’ve started the conversation… we’ve started thinking differently’

‘I’m going to create an environment in my team where my thinking is challenged, and I want you to keep challenging us when our thinking is out of line from where our beliefs need to be’

‘I’m going to start being more perceptive about the type of language I use, and to look at other sectors where they use positive language and bring that back to this’

‘What I’m going to do is to reflect on the way we manage our teams and influence their thinking around advantaged thinking’

‘I’m going to audit where we are doing the domains of Open Talent and where we are not doing them and why’

‘Given we have silos in my Government Department called mental health, drug and alcohol, homelessness, it’s going to be interesting to introduce Open Talent'

‘I have a better understanding of the opportunity to present the positives of the sector… and to start to change the narrative’

‘The open learning and sharing was fantastic’

‘We are beginning to create a common understanding, a model that is shared between people’

‘I learnt conceptualising open talent as DNA and what it means appropriating other tools… and how (as a funder) to write and express advantage thinking in my own reports and recommendations, and I want you to hold me account to do that.’

‘I got most excited about the possibilities’

‘The Open Talent tags gives us a direction to build a framework’

‘I’m very heartened that the not for profits have considered a different approach to young people and taken the lead’

Most asked for output from the day: to create a ‘booklet’ of advantaged thinking.  Key priorities for action: to focus on the campaign language, to create a new HR approach, and to integrate the change at a  strategic and Governance level.

Last night there was an earthquake in Australia. Today, the room rocked with Open Talent.  And the best thing of all, everyone involved in Open Talent back home in the UK would have understood each word. It's the beginning of a powerful community of practice.

Arrivals

I'll be writing regularly to document my current trip in Australia over the next 2 weeks, working on Open Talent with Hanover in Melbourne. This is day 1 of the tour...

Arrivals are magical moments. The transition between different cultures, the movement over boundaries between worlds, the entry into a space where even the most mundane act is full of significance. I’ve spent Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday travelling to Singapore (great airport), Sydney (with posters of ‘come to Great Britain for great culture and great country’), and my final destination of Melbourne. It’s winter here – but it feels more like autumn with half-dressed tress waiting for a skinny dip of snow. Along the way I’ve watched far too much from a series of Homeland, scan read a dozen books and articles on innovation theory, written notes on various mad ideas to preserve the concept of Thinking Class travel, and spotted a wonderful advert in a toilet at Sydney airport for Mensheds Australia – who use the concept of men’s sheds to develop community spaces that support health and wellbeing.  Not sure what kind of space the female equivalent of that would be, but I liked the community focus of the concept and the way it was reconnecting public services with those who miss out.  Another Place to Open Talent.

I have always been thankful for working for the third sector during conversations at passport control and immigration, and landing in Australia was another one of those occasions.  After being pulled to one side, it felt certain that the man with rubber gloves who had swooped on me was about to conduct an unwanted inspection of at least my bags, if not more. I tried to explain that I was over to speak at an event organised ‘with the Brotherhood’ but that wasn’t the best way to lessen any suspicion until I stumbled to find the rest of the name - ‘of St Laurence…’ - and began to explain how Foyers operated.  It got me through unscathed.

Then the jet lag finally caught up with me, walking like a zombie round a shop across the road from my Melbourne apartment, searching  aimlessly for a distant memory of shopping ingredients as though the answer of life lay somewhere between a section of chillingly named ‘caged eggs’ and monster size celery.

I have taken a huge ‘to do list’ with me to Australia, but there is one main goal for being here: to fire the next stage of Open Talent, hammering out the tools that will sustain its impact both in Australia and at home.  Whatever it looked like might be in my bag at immigration, it’s the things inside my head and heart that pose the greatest challenge to the ecosystem.   The arrival of Open Talent is all about a revolution.  Expect the barricades of thought to be burning.

Doing good is good business / Good business is doing good

How many learning and work experience programmes end up with 100% retention and achievement outcomes for young people from Foyers? Getting a 70% return is typically seen to be a  good result, taking into account the many challenges young people have to navigate through and their prior experiences of training and work which can often be quite negative.  

I’ve seen lots of decent programmes come and go over the years, hitting between 60-80% returns, but I’ve never seen anything quite like the work experience programme we have just completed with Virgin Trains set up through Virgin Unite.  Where every young person was a winner.

The concept was simple enough: Foyers would refer young people to an assessment day with Virgin Trains, and a group of young people would get talent spotted for a 4 week work experience at Euston station and on the Virgin trains with training and mentoring. The work would include serving on trains, in the First Class Lounge, and helping with tickets in the station. The challenges included making sure Job Centre Plus didn’t stop people participating, ensuring that young people could travel in at very early times from distances such as Enfield and Ealing, hoping that nothing from life would get in the way, overcoming some of the negative stereotypes about employability created by ‘the system’ of welfare, housing support and careers advice, and trusting in the Open Talent philosophy that latent potential talent just needs the right places, people and opportunity to flourish.

As I sat in the audience on Friday morning, listening to the young people present back their reflections  from the programme graduation, I realised I was watching one of the most moving experiences I’ve seen for a long time. This wasn’t one of those dreadful disadvantaged thinking events where young people are asked to talk about their negative past, get applauded with a certificate, and the adults go away feeling good about themselves. I’ve had to sit through too many of those over the last decade. Instead, this was pure Open Talent: individuals focusing on who they really are, articulating the joy of sharing a positive experience, telling stories that made us laugh and cry, looking to the future from a position of strength.  Young people talking in their own authentic language.  I found it hard to watch, simply because it is so rare and precious these days. Here are all the young people our sector likes to tag as the disadvantaged, the people with complex needs, the homeless and NEET, and, with very little or no prior experience of the world of work, those same young people had performed presentations that would put to shame many of the so-called ‘key note’ speakers at employability conferences. 

I was fascinated to see how the values of Virgin Trains actually work for young people. This is an employer that prides itself on being fun, on looking out for each other as a team, on being passionate about customer service. You can read about such things on bits of paper and websites, but seeing it in action is something else.  The staff mentors spoke with genuine love and appreciation for the energy and enthusiasm of the young people they had worked with, and their genuine belief and ‘living’ of the Virgin values had clearly made a massive impact. For each young person, the ability to make a customer smile, to give something valuable to someone else, to help and support others, to be part of a real team, to wear a brand associated with positives, had all been life affirming and life changing.  Anyone who has studied positive psychology would recognise the obvious impact: if you focus on doing good, you feel good too. Perhaps the most amazing example came when one of the quietest of the young people in the group shared his first life experience on the programme of interacting with someone who was blind. He had helped the customer take his seat in the Virgin Trains lounge, serve and look after him, and before leaving him,  the customer had said, ‘I wish I could see your face’.  It reminded me of something that Greg Barton from Chance for Change had told me –if you give young people stories to tell, it changes the dynamic of the conversation.

Not only had all the young people completed the 4 week programme and demonstrated their work readiness for an environment thay cared about, Virgin trains had also found a couple of full time jobs to offer two of the brightest stars from the group.  I liked the way that the Virgin Trains philosophy of ‘bottom up’ meant that the mentors on the stations and trains - those with the relationships - were making the decisions. Again, the authenticity of the company’s values is important for the young people to respect and feel part of.  But of equal importance is the fact that the business too had gained from the experience of working with the young people. Both for the mentors and what they had learned, and for the company’s recruitment process by having immediate access to proven talent.

This is what I like to call the ‘ethical talent agency’ approach: the employer invests in working with young people further away from the talent pool, which has a profound impact on the lives and services of the young people involved; and in return the employer gets the chance to spot and develop the talent they want while offering their employees involved some interesting staff development experience. It’s not about CSR; it’s how good business is about doing good, and how doing good is good business. It's getting the deal right.  ‘SBAU’ as they say at Virgin Unite. 

I left the presentation thinking – how many other employers fit the same talent-building profile of Virgin Trains? What other work places have the value base that ‘works’ for young people from Foyers?  We need to do our own talent spotting to find the right employers as part of an ethical talent agency approach. Let's stop trying to put young people into silos they don't fit; let's match their talent potential with the places, people and opportunities where their talent can really flourish.

This programme had no Government funding. In fact, it had no funding at all. It had cost us time and resource to help facilitate, for which we need to find the future funds to support.  So, how can we get people to invest in an ethical talent agency approach?  How can we game-change the way that Foyers, other charities and employers work through a shared agenda of talent?  What can we create togther to give young people a stake in a more sustainable future? It’s time to make doing good business the only business in 'advantaged thinking' town.

Begging for Ideas

Journeys home from work are often occasions to tune back into the silent conversation with one’s inner self, or tune out into sleep and the newspaper’s reordering of our ever complex world. Then there are days when the world performs in front of you and pulls your brain back onto the stage.

Tonight’s show began on the tube from work, with an incident – ever more common these days – where someone had been asking for ‘change’ of the small kind: the 1 pound or 10p that fills a momentary need endlessly repeated.  I might be bored by the lack of innovation in such asks (I want to give to ideas), but I’m also acutely aware that a sector’s encouragement of small change – adverts that ask for pennies to support a life rather than to change it  – is understandably replicated through a social web of diminishing asks, right through to the ‘I just need 10p to buy a ticket home’. At least the latter isn’t the result of a large communications budget, but a more human reflection on the ‘disadvantaged thinking’ that blights our time.

 On this occasion, my attention was grabbed by a gentleman who was prepared to ‘give back’ in a different way: by explaining why, in a welfare state he was paying for that day at work (though that might be seen increasingly as a luxury), he wasn’t prepared to hand out any change, except to suggest that the asker show more manners and respect for others.  It was an unusual exchange. I half hoped we were about to begin a debate on proposals for welfare reform - with visions of future train carriages offering conversational hubs to interact with the evening headlines - but instead the ‘change asker’ bowed out to leave the train with what for me was a poignant apology.  We live in an age when few of our so called leaders are able to say sorry for things that have had a massive impact on many lives, and yet here was someone genuinely sorry for the annoyance he felt he had caused to a couple of homeward bound workers, however worthy or not they were of an apology.  That in itself was worth far more as a 'give' than money can buy. The human factor of care is the greatest source of optimism from which change, and human evolution, will occur. 

I’ve been promising for some time to pick up the notion of ‘real change’ over ‘small change’, so perhaps the above story helps to begin the theme.  At the outset of our writing on Open Talent, back in 2009, I gave it the strap line: ‘A big change for young people, not small change’.  The idea was to help illustrate that just a part of the investment society wastes on deficit interventions could be spent to greater effect by focusing on the real solutions required to change lives and social circumstances. Then, as Open Talent took off, some of the initial early ideas around investment and the meaning of Talent were taken over by others – a polite way of saying dropped or forgotten about. I remember the poet Paul Farley explaining this in terms of how a writer’s first sentence or verse is very often just the engine that launches the rocket, to be expelled into the ocean. Though sometimes I still think the rockets I sweated over looked rather beautiful even as they vanish into history’s shredder.

I was delighted, therefore, to discover during a visit to the wonderful organisation Gwalia in South Wales that someone else had made much better use of the ‘change, not change’ approach, using the stereotype image of a person begging for money to ask for ‘change’ of a different value .  His name is Meek, an Australian pencil artist, who, influenced from his exposure to Banksy in London, went on to produce the 2004 stencil graffito entitled "Begging for Change" in which you can see someone holding up the slogan: "KEEP YOUR COINS. I WANTCHANGE.”  There must be  a radical spirit in Wales at the moment, as I have since noted that the Cymru Homelessness Network use that image on their twitter account too.  

I’m still waiting for the day when someone goes on a tube to ask for social solutions, or holds a bucket out for social networking name cards instead of coins. ‘I just need an idea to help me get home…’ That will be me one day. And when it is, you might like to signpost me to the most advantaged thinking tube line of people to pester... 

All together in the all-together

Last Saturday afternoon I was at the Tate for an exhibition on Kusama, an artist I was lucky enough to enjoy in Japan through her remarkable polka dot pumpkins on the beautiful island of Naoshima.

The Kusama iconography – dots, net holes, eyes, etc - gripped my mind with the power of art as a positive source of disruption to our ‘normal’ way of thinking, way of seeing, way of being.  Kusama’s playful deconstructions show not only how art can de-familiarise perceptions, but how art can give us the permission to accept new ways of living the world.  

Wondering round the gallery rooms, watching the audience interacting with the art, all reminded me of an idea I had to curate an exhibition challenging the disadvantaged images in the language of the media and charities.   Being a fan of puns, the concept was called Art Vantage Thinking – taking a different perspective to constructions of advantaged and ‘disadvantaged’ young people in society.  If the Kuasama rooms allow people to challenge the way they view and experience reality, why don’t we find artists and art that can do the same as part of our campaign to end disadvantaged thinking? Just imagine what the Centrepoint ad might convey silkscreened to distortion.  What young people could do with the power to cut up, graffiti and reimagine the way they are presented by others. What any artist might produce to create that show-stopping moment when people are able to stop and think again about what charity should actually mean as a positive investment in solutions.

I’ve often bored people over the last 15 years or so with my interest in the significance of prehistoric cave art – arguably the first galleries in history, with a special purpose to mark transition, stimulate memory and create community as a means of survival in the tough environment marked by the ice age.  All achieved through the power of art to challenge perception and thinking. Maybe our own ice age is one conducted in the mind – the eternal icing over of our capacity to understand humanity without resorting to the stereotypical and superficial.  We need a modern gallery experience to stimulate the mental behaviour of a more intelligent community.  Advantaged thinking art-vantage thinking that gives us the space and permission to overcome the ‘disadvantaged thinking’ ways we shape our reality.  All together in the all-together, as Kusama might have put it.

On the way out from the Tate, I listened to a snippet from a Damien Hurst documentary, explaining the power and significance of art as a ‘positive’ means to engage with topics, such as death, that we sometimes find difficult to face up to.  Whatever I think about Hurst’s art, his perspective is right: art is a positive life force.  It’s important, I believe, that we recognise art’s advantage, and begin to harness the power of art in our communications just as much as we endlessly bang on about social media. 

Who is up for the Art-vantage thinking challenge? To create and curate a space that stimulates positive, solution-based thinking about where and how we position the image of young people and charity in our world?  To turn the focus of art as a positive life force on smashing through the negative barriers that limit our world?  As always, I’m open for talent.  Let me know if you are...

Open the gates

You may have noticed, I have been on a temporary leave from advantaged thinking over the last month.  I thought about putting a sign up, to say it was closed until further notice. I remember seeing my first sign like that when I was about 6, standing outside a park with my mum, confused by the council sign that had fenced off the green space where I wanted to feed the birds.  In the wonder of childhood innocence, I asked ‘Do you think they will open it when they see that we have noticed that it is closed?’  Nothing my mum could say in answer made any sense. I had noticed, surely that was enough. Why couldn’t they be open?

Not that activity on this blog is the only sign of winning or losing the fight – and I make no apologies to say it is a fight  – to overcome the disadvantaged thinking cell lodged in our social brain.  The domino of advantaged thinking has long since spiralled out into the world to pattern change.  I expect one day someone will explain to me what it all means.

A couple of weeks ago saw the Foyer Federation’s Dickensian policy event, exploring how to turn current ‘Hard Times’ into ‘Great Expectations’ with and for young people. It was a great day, with brilliant presentations from the young people and staff at Bridge Foyer in Chester and Crewe. My small contribution was a few minutes outlining the dangers of being ‘addicted’ to deficits in our current way of work. I began this by a rather fortuitous connection between Dickens and Hamlet, one of the key subtexts within the Great Expectations novel. Like Hamlet, we face a fundamental choice of being – ‘to be or not to be’. We can either face up to our role to confront and reform the status quo, or accept our place to perpetuate its injustices. For an organisation like the Foyer Federation, this is a ‘no choice’ choice. We were established to ‘be’ – it is our role as a charity to fight for a better deal for young people by challenging the status quo.  We don’t take prisoners. But like Hamlet, we’ve learnt that to ‘be’ takes time.  To confront the world we wish to transform requires a fleet-of-foot mind.  Transformation will not come about by simply ‘revealing’ disadvantaged thinking like at the end of a Scooby Do cartoon, or logically proving the case for its advantaged thinking antithesis in a court room drama.  So what is the solution?

Just before the end of March, I had a fascinating conversation with someone who told me a story about a housing association. They had worked with him to choose between their existing model of supporting people, entirely deficit based and limited in its impact, and a new more exciting advantaged-thinking approach that would achieve thriving outcomes. After long deliberation, understanding all the facts, they chose to stick with the current system.  They chose ‘not to be’.

It was if, we pondered, the organisation had behaved like an addict. We know we shouldn’t, but ‘we can’t stop the deficit’.  (And if anyone is reading this looking for an idea to jazz up a Village People hit, that was it.)

Addicted to disadvantage.

It felt like a revelation. We are so used to thinking and working in disadvantages, nothing is going to just open us up to change things on the strength of a convincing argument.  It’s actually experiential-based policy that brings about lasting personal and social change.

Working with Open talent over the last 3, I’ve come across 4 main types of ‘addicted’ behaviours.

1)      ‘We’re already doing it’ – Those who are in such self-denial that they are unable to ‘come clean’ and face up to the prevailing deficit-based assessment, support, outcome and HR models that require reshaping. Typically, they will claim to already be ‘opening talent’, and will just ask for the funds to continue what they already do.

2)      ‘You’re thinking what we’re thinking’ – Those who have turned self-denial into a sophisticated form of disadvantaged double-speak, who will use all the positive rhetoric of aspiration but will preface that with a belief that ‘Britain is Broken’ and young people are best described under the usual disadvantaging stereotypes. Typically, their ‘new’ solution will actually just replicate existing models that don’t work. This lack of authenticity is often seen in politicians, policy makers, and some of the more forward thinking charities who have adopted the language of positive ‘being’ but have not confronted the responsibility ‘to be’ a true advantaged thinker.

3)      ‘Give it to me, just let me do it’ – Those who want a quick fix solution and believe that change is just a project that you do and deliver rather than a set of behaviours and beliefs that you live. Open talent and advantaged thinking are not 1 page bullet points you put into a policy and move on with.  You have to become the change you believe in.

4)      ‘Disadvantaged thinking works for me’ – Those often living in communication and fundraising departments, and organisations who have lost their soul, for whom disadvantaged thinking is a way of creating co-dependent relationships. They perpetuate disadvantage through the images and language of impoverished stereotypes that solicit funds and public support to keep the whole sham going on and on.  It’s a virtuous circle without any virtue in it.   They cheapen charity to the shake of a tin.

Over the year ahead, The Foyer Federation is working with those who want to break out from such addictions through a process of experiential learning together, to create a community of practice to shape and lead a more advantaged thinking world. Where ever you are in the spectrum of to be or not to be, I urge you to join us in the movement for justice and change.

Everyday, we can live this choice: to leave something behind, to let go of a disadvantaged approach, and to grow something ahead, to build an advantaged jigsaw piece in our larger world.

Young people often remind me of the park I saw when I was 6. Places full of talent, with the gates artificially closed. Well, we are taking notice to open them.