About Me

Since I was this fresh-faced I have worked with vulnerable people. As a nurse, in Social Services, Community Develpoment, Adult Education and now Supported Housing and supporting people in the community.

I am a middle manager with a charity that works with the most excluded in society. Part of my role is to improve support for those people by working with all the other agencies out there.

I’ve become fascinated by what causes exclusion and so want to try to capture my thoughts about the many things that contribute; money, psychology, the media, society, communication, politics, emotions,  communities.

And sometimes I cycle.

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Motivation

I was fascinated with ‘Drive-The suprising truth about what motivates us’ and it really struck a chord.
Daniel Pink has brought together research about what motivates us and how it could apply to the workplace. Considering some of the research is over 30 years old, it’s suprising it hasn’t become a bigger part of management practice by now.
Pink shows how the 80′s ‘transactional’ style of management-the carrot and stick- is only effective for the most boring, menial tasks. Jobs needing flexible thinking and adaptability need a different approach.
Firstly, he opines that human beings, rather than being full of inertia and needing pushing and motivating, are naturally inquisitive and keen to explore our interests. As examples he mentions the proliferation of open source software, much of which is produced by individuals in their own time who already have demanding day jobs, but produce complex, high quality products which they then give away for free. Pink presents case studies of a number of organisations that have developed policies that give staff time in the working week to develop their own projects. Many of the most successful and innovative products have come from this time.
He states there are two types of motivation;

Extrinsic-the pursuit of external goals such as a good salary, a big house, nice car etc.

Intrinsic-the pusuit of inner goals such as happiness, doing good or something worthwhile.

In a longtitudinal study, two groups of students were followed, one with extrinsic goals, the other group with intrinsic ones. After time those with intrinsic goals hadn’t necessarily achieved their goals, but felt they were ‘on the way’ and reported high levels of happiness and wellbeing. Those with extrinsic goals had often achieved them but reported being less satisfied and reported higher levels of anxiety and depression.

The key to increasing productivity is tapping into what intrinsically motivates them,and giving them autonomy to pursue it, helping them gain mastery over what they do and ability to pursue a purpose or motive.

Pink also states that often we destroy existing intrinsic motivation by defining ‘good practice’ in policy and procedure. By doing so, the danger is that what was once seen as doing good work becomes a tick box exercise.

Have your say on the public pay cuts

It’s time for international bankers to pay something back to society. After the financial crisis and hundreds of billions in bailouts, bonuses and profits are rising out of measure again.

A new proposal – a tiny “Robin Hood tax” on bank speculation – has gathered support from top economists and regulators, and could raise huge sums to stop public service cuts, fight poverty and protect the environment. But this idea faces heavy opposition from a powerful City lobby.

It’ll take a massive public outcry to get our leaders to support Robin Hood and make the banks pay their fair share – go here, then invite everyone to join the merry band!

Fantastic Post

Mike Chitty has got it spot on:
http://leedscd.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/is-your-work-person-centred-really/

We need to have a hard look at the work we do.

Social evil

I have just finished the latest book from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation; Contemporary Social Evils. I was impressed with the breadth of the consultation, 3500 people which deliberately included groups of socially excluded people. It wasn’t suprising that they all shared similar views of what are today’s social evils.
I also liked the historical perspectives of the foreword; we’ve been concerned about the future of society a number of times in the last century.
The following chapters were a series of essays from different perspectives on the findings. These were interesting but I was disappointed they didn’t really offer courses of action as well as analysis.
Ultimately this book could support the need for the views of excluded people to be heard-as they’re not really different from anyone elses, but did little to indicate how my organisation could support this.

Time on my hands

I recently broke my elbow after cycling over some ice.  The bike that had taken me from Lands End to John O’Groats went one way and I went the other, with my left side not cushioning the impact very well.

Being in some discomfort, I’ve only  been able to do things for short periods at a time; bit of time on the computer, bit of reading, etc.

But it did give me the chance to see a dvd I’ve had for over a year but haven’t got round to watching.

Blade Runner is one of my favourite films and always takes me back to my teens when it was one of the first videos I bought for that new fangled VHS player my dad had bought. Whilst he amused himself watching olympic swimming in fast forward (how he laughed! And actually so did I) I was watching Terminator, Purple Rain Mad Max and Escape From New York.

The boxset I have is the ‘Final Cut’ and included a 4 hour documentary on how it was made. As you may know, there were a lot of difficulties in making the film resulting in the infamous monotone voiceover Harrison Ford had to do over the first cut to try and explain it. I love documentaries made so long after the event as noone has to pretend they had a good time.

And they didn’t. Ridley Scott is a perfectionist obsessed with detail. He was difficult to get to know and gave actors little direction, in fact, at times he would go out to make actors uneasy so that came across in their performance.

How strange that something so fantastic can come from something so tortuous.

Nudge the library

I’ve got to praise Kent’s library service.

I worked in an early version of a Gateway (one stop shop) service in Dover a few years ago that incorporated the library and rediscovered it then.

Now the world of ipods and podcasts such as the RSA and The Guardian (as well as Richard Herring’s ‘As it Occurs to me’ which I recommend) allow me to learn new things or have a laugh whilst walking, cycling or driving around, it gives me pointers for books to learn more.

My library will reserve online for a huge fee of 25p and email me when it’s available so I can pickup from the most convenient branch. If they don’t have a book I can suggest they buy it and they email me when it’s ready. It’s a fantastic service that so many forget about.

I reserved and borrowed Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.
The book describes two systems that characterise how humans process situations; the “Reflective System” and the “Automatic System”
The Automatic System is rapid and is or feels instinctive. Instances of the Automatic System at work include smiling upon seeing a puppy, getting nervous while experiencing air turbulence, and ducking when a ball is thrown at you.

The other system of thought is the Reflective System. This system is deliberate and self-conscious. It is the one at work when people decide which college to attend, where to go on trips, and (under most circumstances) whether or not to get married.
Because of these differences and conflicts between these systems, people are often subject to making mistakes that are the result of widely occurring biases, heuristics, and fallacies.

These include:
Anchoring

a cognitive bias one relys too heavily on one trait or piece of information. An example would be a resident of Chicago who is asked to guess the population of Milwaukee. Knowing the Milwaukee is a major city, but certainly not as large as Chicago, the person would take the population of Chicago (roughly 3 million) and divide it by, say, one third (arriving at one million). A resident of Green Bay (which has a population of around 100,000) might know that Milwaukee is larger than Green Bay, and triple the population of their home city to arrive at a guess (of 300,000). The difference in guesses of people because of their geographical location is an instance of anchoring. The real population of Milwaukee is about 580,000.

Availability

when people predict the frequency of an event based on how easily an example can be brought to mind. The authors state that this could help explain why people think that homicides occur more than suicides, as examples of homicides are more readily available. The availability heuristic can have negeative effects in business and politics, because people will overstate risks, resulting in people purchasing unnecessary insurance, or governments pursuing social goals at the expense of other more fruitful ones.

Representativeness

where people judge the probability or frequency of a hypothesis by considering how much the hypothesis resembles available data. An example would be perceiving meaningful patterns in information that is on fact random. These include false accounts of “cancer clusters” and the common belief in basketball that players can get “hot”. Due to the number of shots taken, players are bound to have times when they score many shots in a row, but basketball fans wrongly believe that a player that has just made a series of shots is more likely to make their next shot.

Status quo bias

this is when people are very likely to continue a course of action since it has been traditionally the one pursued, even though this course of action may clearly not be in their best interest. An example of the status-quo bias at work would be when magazine companies offer trials of their magazines for free, but then, after the trial has ended, continuing to send magazines and charging the customer until he or she actively ends the subscription. This leads to many people receiving and paying for magazines they do not read.

Herd mentality

people are heavily influenced by the actions of others. Sunstein and Thaler cite a famous study by Solomon Asch where people, due to peer pressure, assenting to answering certain questions in a way that was clearly false (such as saying that two lines are the same length, when they clearly are not).

It is these errors and mistakes that human beings are subject to that Sunstein and Thaler endorse libertarian paternalism.

There is a fuller summary here

I found these theories useful in understanding why people behave in certain ways, and it echoed my own experiences. However much of the book is how to adjust default settings in products e.g to compensate for the status quo bias or word campaigns to use the herd mentality.

Although the libertarian paternalism the authors refer to is clearly not intended to be manipulation, much of this book felt that it was about manipulating people rather than using these theories to gain a deeper understanding of individuals and communities.

Theory and process

A post on the RSA’s Connected Communities site made me wonder if there is sufficient thinking about processes as well as the theory of how we function in society.
I enjoy the podcasts of the RSA lectures immensely, but what often strikes me is that the questions often seem more about the questioner displaying their knowledge or ability to critique, rather than genuinely reaching a shared understanding.
Surely it is all about creating the right type of dialogue between the right groups? My experience from my work is that a social ‘getting to know you’ process leads to better professional relationships. Reaching a situation of mutual respect is the ideal foundation for developing better processes.
The difficulty is, there are very few genuine opportunitis for the right groups to come together, in the right spirit. For instance, how often do local government officers get to mix with communities wihout fear of criticism with a view to constructive dialogue and action?

Perhaps this is what we should be looking to – opportunities to build relationships.

Engagement-what’s already out there?

Thinking through the localism agenda I agree that the representation of excluded groups is currently extremely poor. I have given some thought to what a service could look like that encourged greater particiation.
However when I visit council websites they at pains to list the array of mechanisms to allow people to get involved such as local forums, petitions, consultations, contact with parish and district councillors. How far have these mechanisms been tested for their accessibility?

We’re all lonely

The more I read the more I feel the issues of the socially excluded are all our issues.
The attitudes, policies and services I see and work still deal with symptoms and work in silos; mental health, substance misuse, offending, homelessness. The underlying causes are not addressed. We don’t have the knowledge or time to even begin.
We leave so much to ‘services’ and take so little responsibilty ourselves. Often we contribute as little to our community as those that are considered excluded. Maybe we contribute even less.
I consider myself priviliged to work with the people I meet regularly, but sometimes I glimpse things that reinforce my anxieties and fears. I am dedicated to what I do but I still retreat to my home at night and lock the door. How would our communities be if we all took time to really get to know a neighbour or somone in our road we knew needed support? The biggest barrier people with mental health needs or learning disabilities face every day is the ignorance of others and the stigma they face.
In an earlier post I mentioned how discrmination can be overcome by the personal factor – it affects someone we know. Surely this was what care in the community was about? Acceptance and support from your community, not a service.
How different would things be if we all had a mentor, buddy or friend?

Dignity

The RSA lecture from Rown Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, gave me a whole new respect for the man. He acknowledged the positive and negative elements that faith groups bring to the role of community development but urged for a single focus on the goal to be achieved. Rather than aiming to alleviate the symptomatic such as drug and alcohol misuse, offending, a perceived lack of faith or spirituality, what he called for was a focus on the return of dignity to individuals.
We talk of empowering the people we work with, and this seemed to distill everything we are working for. To feel valued and respected is surely the greatest foundation for true change in society.