Colab enquiry – Exploring coproduction in public services in Dudley borough

On 24^th February 2014, people came together from a range of statutory and voluntary sector organisations to discuss the findings from our coproduction report. I wanted to share what came out from the discussions and add some of my own personal reflections from the session.

Firstly, we started the session by asking people to describe one of their greatest assets to everyone in the room. An asset perspective is described by Edgar Cahn in his book, ‘No-More Throw Away People’ as one of four core values of coproduction. He describes in his book that “the real wealth of this society is its people. People are assets and that it’s about time we valued them for what they can do”.

State of the sector – key findings from survey and discussions

In December 2014, Dudley CVS carried out a state of the sector online survey. The time felt right for Dudley CVS to explore:

• The contribution being made by the voluntary and community sector
• The future support needs and priorities of voluntary and community sector organisations
• The impact of the financial economy on the voluntary sector

Once the findings were collected, NAVCA, our National body, helped Dudley CVS to analyse the results. Caroline Beavon then helped us to produce a colourful infographic poster as a creative way to share the findings with the voluntary sector and partners across Dudley borough. You can view the infographic report here: http://issuu.com/dcvs/docs/sots_-_v9/1

On 24^th March, a CoLab enquiry session was held to explore further the results with voluntary sector groups and to dig deeper into the findings.

The survey was divided into the following three categories:

• Demographic data of respondents
• The state of the sector today in terms of demand for services, income, funding, impact, quality and difference
• Focus on the future in terms of priorities, support needs, challenges, hopes and fears

This report presents more detail on findings from our survey and outcomes from discussions held on 24^th March with voluntary and community sector organisations and partners. To view the report click on the link below:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8-GKntyzIXkZldtWGZhOHpwN2M/view?usp=sharing

Magpie

Magpie

This wonderful digital art piece was created by Jason Griffiths following our CoLab Exchange session this week about Making Space(s) for Collaboration.

Thanks Jason, a great exchange. If anyone else has been inspired to create something, or seen art which reflects the themes covered in our CoLab Exchange sessions, share link in the comments (click ‘leave a comment’ above) or email us at colabdudley@gmail.com

 

People-led initiatives and civic ecosystems

During this month’s CoLab Exchange sessions we looked at some of the people-led initiatives which have started appearing around the world, and considered ways that new creative and collaborative forms of participation in society and communities can be nurtured.

Open Hub Wrens Nest launch: exhibition of inspiring projects

 

Here in Dudley we’re actively involved in testing this, through Open Hub Wrens Nest. We’re working with Tessy Britton and her colleagues from Civic Systems Lab. Tessy was recently interviewed in New Start Magazine, below are some extracts from the interview:

Tessy on people’s reactions to hearing about initiatives which are led by citizens (rather than organisations or institutions:

I put together the crowdsourced book Hand Made four years ago. It was a diverse mixture of projects but they really inspired me. I then did the Travelling Pantry and that was an incredible experience going around the country for six months meeting people and seeing if these innovative local ideas had a similar effect on other people. I’ve probably talked to between 4000 – 5000 people in the last four years and see how excited people are by the ideas. All of our work is about these amazing new ways that people are creating things – whether citizen projects or social initiatives. This is a new way of doing things and citizens are doing it outside of the existing participatory systems. Indeed, sometimes the system actually puts barriers in place of it. I’m totally in the grip of this idea and can see there’s something amazing happening.

Tessy on the contrast between traditional forms of participation and what is growing now:

From my own experience I’ve been through traditional routes of participating: I’ve chaired committees and done a lot of campaigning and charity and representation work. What I discovered is that each of these types of civic participation had serious limitations and I recognised that these emerging new projects were showing another route. That was very exciting. A lot of the other means of participation is about repair work but this new type of participation is about building and it’s a lot more creative.

Tessy on what we’re doing in Dudley:

We’ve made a list of over 12 things we need to change in the current system to make this kind of participation become the norm. One of them is space. These kinds of projects don’t need meeting rooms or event spaces, but instead need more functional spaces like kitchens or gardens or workshops.  So we need to think about how we make these spaces part of the common infrastructure. People still use the room rental model but there is such low occupation and that model means that all activity has to be funded. We are working with Dudley CVS on a project at the Wren’s Nest estate in Dudley called Open Hub where their community centre has only 6% occupancy. It’s really well resourced with an industrial kitchen, IT equipment, and every cupboard bulging with something they got funding for. If you take that room rental model away you can create fresh opportunities for more experimental work, for people with an idea to come forward and grow it.

There’s more of Tessy’s thinking and a link to great TEDTalk on apathy on the participation page of our great resources section. Stories of people-led initiatives which are inspiring us are being drawn together through the Community Lover’s Guide to the Universe.

What limitations have you experienced in traditional forms of participation?

What do you think we can do to nurture new ways of participating in society?

Design Thinking – CoLab fun with d.school’s virtual crash course

The highlight of our CoLab Exchange session on creativity was taking part in the d.school design thinking virtual crash course

d.school is the informal name for the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, which runs highly sought after classes and is very well known in the design world.

The d.school is a hub for innovation, collaboration and creativity. Their mission is to help people become everyday innovators, everywhere. The following is an extract from an article about d.school in the New York Times:

“At the heart of the school’s courses is developing what David Kelley, one of the school’s founders, calls an empathy muscle… students are taught to forgo computer screens and spreadsheets and focus on people…

In the eight years since the design school opened, students have churned out dozens of innovative products and start-ups. They have developed original ways to tackle infant mortality, unreliable electricity and malnutrition in the third world, as well as clubfoot, a common congenital deformity that twists a baby’s feet inward and down.”

After a run through of the 90 minute crash course back in the office, Kate Green and I agreed that it was a brilliant introduction to the design thinking process, as it actually provides a way to put it in to practice using a simple example. The activity involves working in pairs, and going through design thinking steps:

The activity is fast paced, but really fun. When we asked what people thought of it they said they liked the pace and they enjoyed doing it. If you’re wondering what on earth all this has to with collaboration or co-production, or the day-to-day work of people who deliver or support local services, for me the connection is around some of the key concepts which underpin a design thinking approach:

• Being user centred– is what you are doing/providing/planning useful to the user and how do you know?
• Co-producing solutions – which brings in different perspectives and  increases your chances for success.
• Prototyping – there is a tendency for people in organisations to want to pilot new ideas. Design thinking processes encourage you to prototype instead – just go out and talk to people, test it out, before committing resources to expensive pilots in which you have already fixed down lots of things.
• Being visual – this is important becuase adults have tendency to fix ideas very early. When planning or designing services it is good to tap in to people’s artistic, playful side and be more visual.

What feels relevant to your work which design thinking can offer?

You can run the design thinking virtual crash course yourself with people you work or volunteer with. All you need to is download a copy of the playbook for yourself, copies of the worksheets for everyone taking part (you need an even number of people), have tables, chairs and some craft resources around (pens, paper, sticky tape etc.) and either stream the 90 minute video or download it to a laptop and run it (don’t forget you’ll need speakers). The playbook, worksheets and video are all here.

Re-designing the gift giving experience – fun in our CoLab Exchange session with the d.school design thinking virtual crash course

 

How do you work with ideas?

During last week’s CoLab Exchange session we introduced divergent and convergent thinking.

Divergent thinking is about generating multiple ideas, solutions, or alternatives. Convergent thinking is about evaluating and selecting from among those alternatives. The terms were coined by J. P. Guilford, an expert on creativity and President of the American Psychological Association.

  image shared under creative commons licence by woychickdesign.com

In a free online course on Creativity, Innovation and Change, Kathryn Jablokow introduces some principles of creative diversity. The first four were included in our last post. The final two are:

• Creative Diversity Principle #5: Everyone both diverges and converges
• Creative Diversity Principle #6: We each diverge and converge in accordance with our respective creative levels and creative styles

So if you know more about a topic, or have more experience in something than the next person (your creative level), you may generate more ideas, and ideas which are more complex or advanced than another person when you diverge. When you converge your knowledge may lead you to developing more advanced criteria for selection.

People known as adaptive thinkers like structure, and make use of structure when diverging. In the process of finding the best filament for the electric light bulb he invented, Thomas Edison took a systematic approach, trying out ideas one by one. People who use less structure for diverging are called innovative thinkers, their approach might look haphazard and is far more tangential. Leonardo da Vinci is an example.

Inventor Thomas Edison in his laboratory. Image from wikimedia commons

When people who have different creative styles think convergently you can spot different uses of structure. An adaptive person might use careful reasoning. An innovative thinker might go for the most unusual idea. Kathryn Jablokow says:

Neither one of these general approaches is better or worse than the other – they are just different … each with its own advantages and disadvantages.

Remember that no place on the spectrum is better than any other. Every style of thinking is needed for our species to survive. These patterns are a result of a thinking preference – something that is hard-wired into your brain when you are born and which doesn’t change throughout your life. But you can learn skills that help you think in different ways when you need to, if you’re willing to put in the extra effort to do so.

It’s important to open your mind to the possibilities of someone thinking differently than you do – and how valuable that can be. Sometimes we see a person who is more innovative than we are “jumping” from one idea to another, or we see a person who is more adaptive than we are focusing on the details … and we think: “How silly! How can he or she get anything done that way?” Or we see someone who is at a different creative level – either greater or less than our own – and we think: “Those ideas aren’t important” or “they don’t make sense”. In the context of the right problem, that person’s thinking may be just what is needed.

Can you shift your thinking to welcome their input instead of rejecting it?

What is your way of working with ideas: do you tend to diverge in a more adaptive (more structured) way or a more innovative (less structured) way? What about converging?

What is your creative level and how does that impact the way you diverge and converge?

When do you find your preferred way of thinking (both level and style) to be an advantage for you?

When is it a disadvantage?

Creative Diversity – uncovering your creative identity

Everyone is creative!

In our recent CoLab Exchange session we considered creativity and why understanding more about it is crucial to collaboration. We used ideas from a free 6 week online course called Creativity, Innovation and Change to promote discussion.

In an introduction to Creative Diversity in the course, Kathryn Jablokow says:

Creative diversity is one of the most powerful and practical tools I know to help you understand an appreciate how people think, act and make decisions differently. We have to learn to collaborate, we don’t do it naturally. The principles of creative diversity will help you work with others more smoothly and effectively and at the same time make sure your ideas are being heard.

In the video below Kathryn presents and busts myths about creativity, such as: only some people are creative and only certain kinds of ideas are creative. She introduces 4 principles of Creative Diversity:

• Creative Diversity Principle #1: All people are creative.
• Creative Diversity Principle #2: Creativity is diverse.
• Creative Diversity Principle #3: Creative diversity is described by four key variables (see below)
• Creative Diversity Principle #4: There is no ideal kind of creativity

The four key variables of creative diversity are:

• Creative level – your knowledge, skill and experience
• Creative style – how you prefer to approach change
• Motive – what motivates you to solve problems and bring about change
• Opportunity – which opportunities interest and inspire you most

Have a look at the video to prompt thinking about your personal ‘flavour’ of creativity, which will help you to develop your own creative profile. Let us know what you think about the ideas in the video by clicking ‘leave a comment’ above, or tweeting us @colabdudley.

The Power to Create

This week in our CoLab Exchange session we considered creativity. I shared some thinking from Kathryn Jablokow and Darrell Velegol of Penn State University which forms part of a great free online course called Creativity, Innovation and Change.

Some of the ideas we considered are at the core of this 4 minute animated talk from the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce).

What do you think about the ideas Matthew covers in this video?

RSA Shorts – The Power to Create from The RSA on Vimeo.

(If you’d like to know more about the work of the RSA or how to get involved in the RSA Fellowship do get in touch with me, as I’m the Fellowship Councillor for the West Midlands region. My email address is lorna@dudleycvs.org.uk)

CoLab has left me thinking seriously about what I would achieve if…

Andy Wright

Andy Wright is Head of Corporate Policy and Research in the Chief Executive’s Directorate of Dudley Council. He came along to our first CoLab Exchange session in which we explored co-production. Below are his reflections on the session and thoughts following it.

This was a really useful and thought-provoking workshop and thanks go to Lorna Prescott for presenting it!

Maybe the overall impression I took away from this was: coproduction sounds absolutely wonderful, and should be easy to achieve – but maybe not that easy to achieve, especially if one works within the structure of a large organisation.

Coproduction is a certainly refreshing concept. The way it gets people to think about what we have that we can use, instead of what we do not have, and all the reasons why we can’t, etc., is quite empowering. Clearly, the examples referred to during the afternoon, culminating in Incredible Edible, just show what can be achieved – not just about the idea itself but also about that ephemeral concept of “well being” in communities – something generations of policy makers have struggled but largely failed to manage to do.

The questions exercise we did – about marking oneself, ones project and ones organisation in terms of various facets of coproduction – I and a few others found quite difficult. Maybe that’s because inevitably you revert to marking your own personal aspiration (“I like to think I would score well because…”) rather than your performance, because – certainly within the Council – whatever I might like to do cannot be done without reference to the organisation itself, and all the various permissions that have to be sought first. Therefore, anything I get done is advanced or limited by the structures within which I operate.

As was pointed out at the workshop, the concept of removing all the familiar and comfortable structures can also be scary as well as empowering; and it probably applies not only to the large public agencies but also to community organisations, especially those that have evolved a kind of dependency relationship with their local Council.

It makes me ask the question: how can we take this forward as a large, public sector organisation? Probably the (relatively) easy part is by recognising that Councils occupy a valuable position as facilitators in a host of ways – sharing the physical space of our assets; “lending out” specific knowledge, skills and experience, especially when there are procedures that are unavoidable; and so forth. So far, so good. But that seems to place the Council on the fringe. What about initiating things? What about building, or helping to build, the platform itself?

One problem that is hard to avoid is the reality of public sector agencies being in the public eye, and accountable for spending public money – as should be the case, and never more so. So while Councils should be a lot more open to sharing, and supporting experimental innovation, they also risk the inevitable negative public reaction when they get it wrong – and that accounts in part for the cautious stance they often take.

But what if it’s not actually the organisations’ fault at all? What if it’s me? What CoLab has done for me is this: It has left me thinking seriously about: trying to imagine what I would achieve if all those barriers melted away…if I really could “just get on and do it” – and actually how many of those barriers are my own self-limiting beliefs?

Flexibility – it’s brilliant!

Thanks to a tweet from Sandra Perry I realised I missed out something really brilliant in last week’s post on reciprocity.

The CoLab Exchange sessions this autumn are drawing on learning and ideas from a number of sources, key among them though is The Civic Foundry incubator and accelerator programme running in Birmingham. Sandra and her daughter Cassie were two of three participants from Dudley borough in the 10 week Field Work phase of The Civic Foundry (the other was Liz Stuffins from Dudley Council).

In mentioning The Civic Foundry in the evening session of the first CoLab Exchange I asked Sandra if she would mind sharing her experience of it. I then realised I could access the presentation that she and Cassie had given on the final day of the Field Work, as The Civic Foundry team used Yammer really effectively to enable connection and conversation between sessions and to hold files including every single presentation made over the 10 weeks, including 18 made by teams of participants on the final day.

So without prior preparation Sandra generously gave a presentation on the idea she and Cassie had developed during their time in The Civic Foundry Field Work, and which they are working towards implementing in Dudley: Log Cabin Living. Sandra also talked about great connections she had made with people through The Civic Foundry, including a group of young people involved in Black Country Make in Heath Town, Wolverhampton.

Neither Sandra or I had planned that this presentation and the following great discussion would be part of the CoLab Exchange session. But that sort of flexibility was us putting into action learning from The Civic Foundry around Platform Thinking. Below are the slides on Platform Thinking I used, slight adaptations from slides developed by Joost Buenderman for The Civic Foundry.