Category Archives for "Miscellaneous"

0 Community Development Online Christmas Interlude

Community Development Online will take a short break after today and resume in three weeks time on Monday 11 January 2016.  I’m taking a break over a period when people are less likely to read blog posts!

This blog will accumulate into a reference resource and so you could take this opportunity to read past posts.  If you do, remember comments are always welcome, especially if you can suggest future topics.  It also helps to know what you find helpful.

You can explore the blog in two ways.  If you look under resources in the main navigation, you will find a series of cornerstone pages.  These list the blog posts in sequence, with brief introductions.  You can see what sequences are about and decide whether to read more detail.  These are almost up-to-date and I shall add recent posts during the break.

If you prefer a more usual blog, you can get access to it in the right hand column.  You can find recent posts using the calendar or explore the categories.  To help you navigate the blog, I have five main category headings:

So, what can you look forward to in Community Development Online, in the New Year?

On Mondays I shall continue my exploration of the circuit questionnaire.  This will become a resource for people using the questionnaire.  If you follow the link, you will find a summary page covering the posts so far.  This sequence will continue a while longer as I’m not halfway through yet.  I’ve completed the branding element of the questionnaire and I’ve made a lot of progress with Products, Services and Causes.  After that I shall cover the three remaining elements, Propositions, Problems and Markets.

On Wednesdays I shall continue with the sequence about spirituality.  I’m writing these posts with churches in mind but contain some themes that might be of interest to a wider audience.  In the New Year, I shall start a new theme within this sequence, exploring how we perceive communities.  This will be less theological and closer to my posts about community development.

On Fridays – I shall continue to offer a mixture of posts on a variety of topics.  This is where I publish reviews of books and websites.  It is also where I can respond to requests for posts on specific topics.

There is plenty of space for more material and as usual, time is a major constraint.  If you would like to write a relevant blog post or even a sequence, let me know.

I’m going to do some work on the website over the break in preparation for some new initiatives that are in the pipeline.  Keep reading and watching the website to find out more!

0 How to Build and Sustain Motivation

My father was a self-employed sheet metal worker for about 30 years between the 1950s and 80s.  He used to tell a story about something that happened to him, probably during the 70s.

A business contact invited him to fasten two pullies to their cellar head and use them to lower a massive boiler into the cellar.  He did his calculations and quoted them £300 for job.  They clearly weren’t expecting it to cost so much.  Do he said he’d tell them how to save some money.  “Look” he said, “why don’t you tell half a dozen of your men that they’ll get £10 extra in their pay packet if the boiler’s in the cellar by tomorrow morning.  If it isn’t give me a ring and I’ll go ahead, you’ll be no worse off.”

The next morning, my father received a phone call from his contact.  “You’re a miracle worker!  The boiler is in the cellar!  How did you know they could do it?”  This actually did my father’s business a lot of good because his contact told lots of his friends how brilliant my father was!

It seems there was a window opposite the cellar head and they put a beam across and used it to lower the boiler into the cellar.  This was a solution thought of by neither my father nor his contact.

Perhaps the extra £10 in the pay packet was an extrinsic incentive (I’m assuming you’ve watched the video) but I think this story does line up with Daniel Pink’s lecture.  The 6 men had autonomy.  No-one told them what to do.  (I suspect health and safety concerns would be an issue these days.)  Clearly they were practical men who enjoyed a challenge and the task was clear.  Even though £10 was worth more in those days I suspect the men enjoyed working out the solution to their problem.

At a recent training session, “How to build and sustain motivation in your career”, the leader, Lisa Read, a local coach, recommended the Daniel Pink video.  Lisa shared Daniel Pink’s three characteristics of intrinsic motivation; common experiences of many self-employed people and third sector volunteers.

These three are valuable attributes anyone who is working creatively needs to meet.  They apply equally for online and in-person work.  The problem many people find working online is the technical aspects of the work tend to overpower the creative dimension.  Looking after your website becomes a chore and this is often because it is actually working against your organisation’s aims.

Coaching and non-directive consultancy are pretty much the same activity; they are branches of the same tree.  My consultancy service can help you get your organisation or business and your online presence working together to increase the effectiveness of your organisation and your personal satisfaction as maintaining your site ceases to be a chore.  Once you have mastered your site and have a clear purpose, you will have the autonomy to choose how you use it.

0 Return of Community Development Online

Community Development Online Blog

I’m about to restart the Community Development Online blog, after a break of almost 5 months.   I shall continue to build resources for anyone who aims to follow community development principles, particularly where it intersects with local economies.  I’m happy to write about any aspect of community development and one of the first sequences I’m planning is about models of community development.  I shall explore how to extend community development principles from neighbourhood work to online marketing approaches for community and voluntary sectors.

This will work best if you guide me, so please comment on my posts and request posts on topics I haven’t touched upon yet.  I shall respond to all the comments I receive.

If you prefer, you can write for this blog as a guest author.  If you’re interested, leave me a comment or send me an email (my address is in the footer) and we’ll take it from there.

Community Web Consultant Website

You may have noticed changes to my website. Most important, the content is about local economies, see the home page about a thriving marketplace in every neighbourhood as well as introductory material about non-directive consultancy and my approach to website design.

If you sign up to my email list you receive a short introductory email sequence about how to support your local economy and the option to download my ebook, “Community Development is Dead! Long Live Community Development!“.  As before you will receive notice of new blog posts every Tuesday morning, if there are any.

The site promotes two things.  First, a community committed to sharing experiences, ideas and insights about local economies.  This is long-term work, neglected over the years.  The second is my business offer of consultancy services for local businesses owners or leaders of community organisations.  This will take you to my offer of a free consultancy session, where you can test your desired outcome for your business or community group.  There is no obligation to use my consultancy service.

More About the Blog

My aim is to build a resource of information about local economies, community development and how both can be resourced online and in real life.  For the immediate future, new posts will have a somewhat looser structure than before.  I shall aim for a minimum of three posts per week, starting next week.

Local Economy – Online Resources

I  shall review and share some of the resources about local economies I’ve found.  These are mostly websites.  My aim will be to review one website each week.  Unlike the sites I’ve reviewed previously, my focus will primarily be on content and not so much on how it works as a site.  I may point out some design issues en passant but the primary aim will be to open up the site to greater use, if it deserves it.  I’ll focus on the value of its content, opportunities to collaborate, etc.

Community Development Models

My plan is to start by bringing my old email sequence about community development into the blog.  The reason I initially produced it as an email sequence was that it didn’t quite fit my plans for the blog.  The sequence complements the ebook and may suggest approaches to how community development might be revived.  I’d love to help build a professional body for development workers and this may become possible as an online community becomes a reality.  In the meantime I hope to build a resource of ideas to support the work of those who are on the front line.

Needs Assessments

I started to write on this theme towards the end of my last sequence and I’m now I can write about a new approach.  I’m planning to review it some detail and use my work as an example.

Finally, publish posts on topical issues as they occur to me.  This should mean the blog will take on a more spontaneous tone.  So, please read and enjoy.  Tell me what you like and what you would like me to cover.  Don’t forget, I’m open to offers from guest authors too!

1 Community Development is Dead!

This post is your opportunity to comment on my ebook, “Community Development is Dead!  Long Live Community Development”.  Scroll down to make a comment.

If you haven’t read it yet, use the form below to download the 20 page ebook.  There is no charge for it.

0 Community Development Online, Future Developments

Now is the time for the Christmas break.  It is an exciting time because I am at the point where I am planning major developments for this site.  This blog will return in the New Year in a new context.

I am planning to offer support to people and organisations active in the local economy, particularly those who are collaborating in real life and want to promote their joint venture online.  This will allow me to bring together 30 years experience in community development with knowledge of online approaches to collaboration.  There are many ideas out there that deserve wider promotion.  I hope this site will become a hub where ideas and good practice in the local economy can be shared.

It’s an enormous challenge to plan do something on this scale as a one person, low-budget enterprise.  I want to show what is possible with modest resources, an idea that is at the centre of some of the most inspiring initiatives in the local economy.  Online resources offer opportunities to local businesses and community projects that have never existed before.  This will be one place where they come together.  The challenge will be to get the conversation started.

So, what changes will you see?  I’m planning

• new content for the website
• a new look for the site
• the blog to continue with a new approach
•  more promotion of the site, initially through social media
• new products and services, including free offers.

This will take a few weeks to put into place.  I’ll post updates as I add new features to the site and then re-start the blog when everything is in place.

Watch out for new developments in the New Year!

2 Humour and Organisations

One simple thing I’ve seen over the years is laughter as a sign of healthy organisations.  Laughter is not always a positive.  It can be cruel and discriminatory.  The excuse the insensitive or exclusive person makes, “I was only joking”, rarely rings true. Genuine laughter makes for an organisation at ease with itself.  So, what is a healthy relationship between humour and organisations?

Tedious Meetings

Look at this way.  I have sat through thousands of meetings and most of them are a complete waste of time.  People sit around a table, poe-faced, grinding their way through a remorseless agenda.

From time to time, someone will climb onto their hobby-horse and take it for a swift canter around the table.  Agenda items return time and again because no-one actually wants to deal with them.  Then someone tells a joke that falls flat.  I’ve been told off for not taking things seriously enough.  I do take losing the will to live very seriously indeed.

The Clique

Another pitfall is the clique.  A group of people run the organisation and have done so for years.  They have no interest in opening up to outsiders.  There may be humour as between friends but not the humour of a group genuinely open to others.  People who get on with one another are likely to get the job done, they should be aware though, they may like each other so much they become closed to outsiders.

Hospitality and Fear

To be light-hearted does not mean you don’t take things seriously.  Hospitality is at the centre.  The stranger should feel welcome and valued.  They may not always agree with the organisation but they will go away with a spring in their step if they receive respectful listening.  A group in good humour knows when to stop laughing, how to pay attention and build up even those they send away empty-handed.

Lack of humour is common where there is fear, where the organisation has taken a place in the hearts of its leaders, where they are clinging to power.  The ironic thing is the power to which they cling is illusory.  People who bully to maintain their place in a twopence halfpenny organisation that’s going nowhere in the real world and every which way in its leaders heads, will find they’ve wasted their time.

In a healthy organisation, people know their limitations, they greet an ironic comment with recognition of our common humanity and not as a threat to their oh so important authority.

Yesterday someone shared a dream project with me.  It might work.  I told him one of my rules of community development: “Most things don’t work”.  He could invest in his dream and the likelihood is it will not work.  But look closely at that phrase.  The fact is the only way you can find the things that do work is to try them.  When you try things, most will not work.  Ironic, but somehow liberating.  Perhaps he will try his idea and perhaps when it fails he’ll remember what I said and smile and be encouraged to try it another way.

0 Relationships in Community and Marketplace

This post is a deeper  reflection on a comment  I received in a recent post about needs assessments.  A question raised was about my use of the word ‘client’ and the comment made the point we should be aiming for active citizens and not clients (who have things done to them).

Community

Whilst this post will clarify terminology, there is an underlying issue about the types of relationships we build either in real life community organisations and marketplaces or online.

I want to challenge the idea of community.  It is a word that apparently has over 100 meanings and in my experience its use is generally misleading.

For example, I avoid using “community” when I mean a geographical area, preferring “neighbourhood”.  “Community” implies relationships within a neighbourhood and in my experience these are often ideals projected onto a neighbourhood.  These days I prefer to substitute “marketplace” for community.  A thriving marketplace is evidence of a strong community.  If there is no unstructured place where people can naturally meet, then it is difficult to see how there can be community.

Community arises from the interactions in a marketplace and does not existing independently of it.

Active Citizens

So, active citizens are  equally those found behind the stalls in a marketplace and those setting out their stall by offering products, services or leadership to further a cause.  Voluntary or charitable activity happens in marketplaces, if only because the market is where they find support.

Clients

Perhaps at the other extreme, there is the client.  The client has no direct voice in the delivery of the service they receive.  Usually clients are the beneficiaries of services financed from elsewhere.  Accountability is to the funding body or donors.  Clients may provide feedback but changes to the service must be agreed with the funding body.  Services for clients usually collapse when the funding runs out because the clients are not organised.

Customers and Consumers

Another word used to describe relationships is customer.  This word has suffered from right-wing rhetoric.  First, it is a better word than consumer, which implies the role is to consume and requires no relationship.  Any business person knows the difference.  A customer is a relationship built over time, and a customer will return and make more purchases because they trust the business.  Consumers make one-off purchases and then disappear.  Whilst their money might be welcome, there is no ongoing relationship.

I purchased a suite (sofa plus armchair) about 20 years ago.  I still receive mailings by post from the business who produced it.  I have never responded but at the least it means I remember their name and might recommend them to others.  Presumably some people do respond to their mailings.  They see me as a customer after all these years.

Prospects

Another relationship important to businesses is the prospect.  These are people who have expressed interest but have not committed to a purchase.  They can support a business they like even if they never make a purchase, by spreading the word.  The aim though is to build a relationship and hope trust will lead to the prospect becoming a customer.

Customers and prospects have a say in the business.  Their needs (and wants) are important to the business and the best businesses will respond to them.  They develop new products and services in response to feedback from customers and prospects.  This is not the same as a client relationship because there is direct interaction.  Of course the business is not a democratic organisation.  The owners make their own decisions about the products and services they develop but they depend upon their customers and prospects to inform those decisions.

Consultors

Another word I use is “consultor”.  This is a particular relationship between a consultant and their customer.  Some consultants treat their customers as clients.  They will always need feedback from them but they are there to deliver expertise their customer lacks.  For non-directive consultancy, however, the starting point is the consultor has the expertise.  The role of the consultant is to help them think through their problems.  Sometimes, for example, a problem has an emotional dimension and the consultor needs someone who is not emotionally involved to help them see things in a different light.

So, some of these are roles an active citizen might choose.  They might choose to be a prospect, customer or consultor, because they need to take part in something.  They are less likely to choose the role of client or consumer, although they are roles we might take on where nothing much is at stake.

Do you use other words to describe relationships?  Let me know in the comments.

If you enjoyed this post, you can sign up to my email list at the top of the right-hand column. You will receive a weekly summary of my posts, an email sequence about community development and occasional emails about community development online.

2 Institutional Development

A friend asked me to answer some questions to help him write an essay for his MSc in Development Management, “Why should development managers attempt to bring about institutional development?”  It’s quite likely I haven’t got a clue about institutional development but my response is below and he seems happy with it.  He will combine my reply with others and consider them for  part of  his essay.

The reason I’m reproducing my reply here is because I think it is relevant to the thread I’m writing about the nature of third sector organisations.  Whilst in my answer I refer to large organisations, perhaps it equally applies to small organisations that become bureaucratic.  What happens when small young organisations become institutionalised?

The headings are his questions:

1. What is an institution?

An organisation that is designed to be sustainable.  This means its continuation is not dependent on its leaders in the sense that when they leave there are always people available to step into their shoes.  This implies a high degree of bureaucracy.  The continuation of the organisation takes precedence over staff and clients’ needs.  Check out HMRC’s telephone helpline service if you don’t know what I mean.

2.  What is institutional development?

The big headache in institutional development is changing organisational culture.  It will tend to be highly stable and difficult to change.  I worked for an institution that had a complete change in top management at the same time.  Six managers left (were slung out actually) and were replaced by four new managers with new job descriptions.  This made no difference whatsoever to the institution and the new managers soon behaved in similar ways to the old ones.

3. What is the purpose of institutional development?

This rather depends on what you want to achieve.  A business may need to respond to its markets and can lose its way if the market changes and the institution can’t change with it.  HMV is an example of a business that had difficulty adapting to downloadable music and videos.  HMRC on the other hand does not need to change the way it does things as we’ll always need taxes.

4.  What activities does ‘doing’ institutional development involve?

Banging your head against a brick wall!  You’re not going to see rapid change.  Effective actions might take a long time to take effect and if the long time is longer than the lifespan of the person leading the change, then the policy might change before the previous policy had an effect.  Any proposed change is likely to be resisted.  Superficial changes can go through because they don’t touch the culture of the institution.

5.  What management skills does institutional development require?

Listening – to staff and especially junior staff rather than managers.  Many junior staff are likely to have been around for a long time and they understand how things work.  Many will have been around longer and understand more than the managers.

Listening to customers or clients – complaints and complements can be helpful and where appropriate good complaints procedures can help.  But also in-depth interviews with typical customers or clients might help.

Patience – it will be slow work!

So, what do you think?  Can small young organisations become institutionalised?

0 Can You Sell Spirituality?

The question “Can you sell spirituality?” came up in conversation recently.  The person who asked it plans to provide an online spiritual direction service and worried that asking for money in exchange for her services would in some way be immoral.

I’ve given this some thought and my answer is no you cannot sell spirituality because it is not yours to sell.  It is the same reason “Money can’t buy you love” as the Beatles put in many years ago.  Spirituality and love (are their others?) are of the heart.  They are my responsibility and no-one can sell me a solution to my existentialist angst.

The Wrong Question

Moreover, “Can you sell spirituality?” is the wrong question.  Lots of people have spiritual directors and most of them charge for their service.  I’m not sure how many make a living out of it but it is legitimate to make the charge.  Why?  Because you are selling your time and experience as a service.  It is your time and service that is for sale, not spirituality.

The important thing is integrity.  You need to be clear about what you are selling.  Services such as spiritual direction are obviously open to abuse.  Most spiritual directors are accountable to some sort of support network.  It may be someone selling a course online might not have any accountability and that could lead to exploitation.

But it’s like everything else, if you have put in time and effort to produce something worthwhile, there is no harm in charging for your time and service.  Whether you charge to make a living or to make-a-million is a matter for your conscience.

1 The Immortal Leader

Two weeks ago I wrote about mortality and how it is essential to good community leadership.  We all know we’re going to die.  We may believe it will be in the distant future but it is a future that will perhaps arrive sooner than we think.  We all know this.  So what do I mean by the immortal leader?

The immortal leader lives as if they are never going to die.  Ask them and they will readily concede they will one die one day.  But in practice they are there forever.  Here  are some signs of immortality?

Immortality is a spiritual issue.   A theologian called Walter Wink has written a three-volume book about the Powers (the first volume is to the left).  For Wink demonic possession is where someone allows an organisation to inhabit their being.  In first century Palestinian cosmology, every organisation has an angel that can be healthy or sick.  Sick angels are demons.  We normally read these texts through the twin filters of Medieval demonology and modern horror films and so miss the sophisticated cosmology of this period.

Healthy organisations empower their members and others.  Sick organisations can embody humanity’s vilest tendencies.  Organisations are in principle immortal.  With succession in place they can continue for centuries.  The churches are a good example of this and so are governments.  They have powerful structures in place so when key personnel unexpectedly go missing, the organisation is not threatened.  They can to a degree accommodate their immortals because they are not dependent upon them.

But identification with an organisation is never healthy.  It distorts vision and undermines rational thought.  Immortals never listen because they have already made up their minds.

How might immortals appear online?  Does the Internet extend their power or threaten it?