Mediocrity and Big Society
If I wrote about myself on the blog in the way that many third sector organisations talk about themselves, you’d probably have the impression that I was a 6 foot hunk with a beach body and sparkling wit and charm.
I’m not all that bad, but I don’t quite match up to that image. But all the talk of Big Society has seen politicians, commentators and sector leaders trot out the same old stuff about heroic third sector organisations, close to the people they serve, dynamic, enterprising, efficient and all-together miraculous. Social alchemists R Us.
Anyone who’s been within moaning distance of a third sector organisation will know that this is a daft caricature. There are plenty of fantastic third sector organisations out there who do great work. I’m lucky enough to be working with one at the moment – HALE – who do health promotion work in West Yorkshire. They’ve recently won a national award for what they do – and it’s well deserved. They have a clear mission, they’re enterprising and they have a positive can-do culture. I bet they deliver good value for health commissioners too.
But alongside the great organisations there are plenty who are good (good enough?) and far too many that are mediocre to say the least. You’ll probably know a few – they tend to have been around a long time, they like having a good moan, there’s never enough funding, it’s always someone else’s fault. And even though things are so awful, they’re convinced that they’re the only people who could possibly improve the lot of their service users. And yes, you can bet they’ll be service users. Such a beautiful term which tells you all you need to know about their relationship with the people they serve.
I don’t want organisations like that running services in place of the State. But if we spend the next couple of years in a Big Society love-in, with a load of hangers-on realising that this is the Next Big Thing (post social enterprise) that they can hang their hat on, then we’re really not going to make much progress as a society.
I’m not looking forward to the next round of cuts. I personally think it’ll be chaos. But amidst the chaos I hope that less funding will result in some of the mediocre and poor third sector organisations, which have survived through rounds of ERDF and the like, will finally get out of the way and give some room to people who might make a real difference.
Great post Rob.
I thought that our new political masters prided themselves on their hard headed, cold eyed realism and pragmatism. Huge cuts needed. No mercy. It’s either that or societal collapse. Etc. Etc. I am suprised that this hard headedness is abandoned when it comes to ’social enterprise’ and the third sector. The nonsense being talked about what social enterprises are like and what they can do is breathtaking.
It is to be expected that those who are paid to promote the greatness of “social enterprise” will continue talking it up and maneuvering for their place at the top table. That’s their job. Whether they can continue to do that without massive tax payer subsidy remains to be seen.
But surely given the pain that is to come from the neo-thatherite coalition’s plans it is time for some truth telling about what ’social enterrposie” can do. If the government is really serious about seeing social enterprises move big time into the bloodied holes left by the coming amputations of public services this poses a real threat to the most vulnerable people amongst us – the very ones social enterprise people say they care about most.
I know well many social enterprises – including some of the best known award winners in the country. I have spent time looking at their accounts, talking to their leaders, really getting my head round them, mentoring some of them, taking anguished phone calls about how close they are to the wall .
Any generalisations about what is a reasonably diverse sector will be unfair but here goes (and I realise the risk I run in being seen to commit that uber-sin of the ’sector” letting the side down by saying out loud what most think, of being ‘negative’) but:
with some exceptions, what marks out the “social enterprise” is financial weakness (low margins, cash poor,lack of revenue diversity); a poorly trained and too often demoralised staff team; rubbish governance (right hand not knowing what left is doing); amateurish marketing and branding; over reliance on a charismatic and driven (sometimes mad) individual with no real business skills or experience; and a lack of tools and options for diversification and growth. Not to mention the hug chasm where evidence based social impact assessment should be.
I am making no moral judgement about them (apart from the mad comment – but it’s true!) – many of the people involved I love – or saying I could do better. In my time in social enterprise I have been guilty of all of the above, wasted a lot of taxpayers’ money, hyped with the best of them, and built a very nice career, thank you very much.
To some extent nothing has changed. Remember Paul from Aspire standing with Tony Blair on the steps of No 10. Young charismatic, passionate, a New Labour wet dream (Paul not Tony!). I knew as he stood there that his business model was bollocks and that he was fast running out of cash. I warned him to keep a low profile until he had six months running costs in the bank. rather he let himself be picked up by the spin machine – like many are doing around the frankly baffling Big Society hype – and Aspire went tits up a couple of years later owing thousands of quid.
It didnt matter then really that “social enterprise” was largely an aspiration, a bit of a con really. But now it really does matter. If the Eton Rifles are serious about gutting the state and expect social enterprises to step in then we have a real problem Houston. For sure there is much terrible service from the public sector (but also much that is excellent if my experience of the health service,police and schools over the last couple of years is anything to go by)and I know where I’d go with the knife if given the chance.
BUT on a scale of one to ten how convinced are we that “social enterprise” – the real stuff, going on now, not the fantasy football version being peddled – will be so much
better it’s worth taking the risk being forced on the sector by Cameron et al? Three? Four?
Liam
BTW I am a six ft 4 witty and charming hunk. It’s true though I do have a beach body. Trouble is it’s Omaha beach after the D day landings.
If only someone had told me before now that it was all a New Labour fantasy, it wouldn’t have been so painful. Reading Nick Temple I’d begun to wonder if I’d pulled the disaster movie lever on the Social Enterprise Holodeck.
it never really seemed all that joined up to me, with the Guardian popping up all over the place waxing lyrical about the celebrities.
They didn’t like awkward questions either when I’d drawn their attention to government being among the most reluctant to pay.
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/PayonTime/
Their presumption that a culture of ethical business could be established on political dishonesty leaves them with no moral argument when Tories upstage them by offering the same.
Why should inefficient, ineffective lacklustre organisations survive unchanged just because they say they meet an otherwise unmet social need? Of course it’s going to be tough and of course some lovely people will find themselves out of favour if not out of work, but surely in the long term, this is going to work out fine.
I’d compare social enterprise today to that Fair trade movement ten years ago. Then it was radical, marginal, new and small. Now to the delight of many farmers and processors in Africa, Asia and South America it’s a mainstream standard adopted by some of the biggest retailers in the world.
I suspect some complained bitterly about the Fair Trade revolution, although I’d put money on none of them being Kenyan farmers!
Social enterprise is about to make that same transition. The strong will thrive, the rest won’t. Why should it be any other way?
Robert, What I think we’ve agreed on above is that this is not what has happened so far, with government endorsing showcases which fail to meet the messianic impact promised by the PR hyperbole.
Politician advocates have used social enterprise to enhance their own reputation to the detriment of those actively engaged.
Arriving behind them now are the venture capitalist changing their spots to “invent” what’s been public domain for the last decade. Join me on Linkedin for ‘Social Business and For Benefit corporations’ and you’ll see at first hand how reticent these new social investors are to talk to those committed to social enterprise.
We end up with a PR pantomime of franchised social innovation under competing banners, while social enterprise is diluted into comfortable delegated projects which skirt around the core issues they haven’t got the spine to tackle.
Agree with most of what Liam’s saying in terms of the current state of social enterprise.
Recent developments suggest that the coalition doesn’t really think the currently existing social enterprise movement – as opposed to bits of councils and the health service that theoretically become social enterprises – is really the major vehicle for delivering most of their cuts and outsourcing agenda.
Good post Rob. But how can we tell which are the mediocre social enterprises and which are the good ones? And more to the point, how can local authority and NHS commissioners tell, and even if they can, what will they do about it? What I’m picking up is that even good third sector organisations which can demonstrate positive impact and value for money are getting their funding cut, sometimes fatally. I’m really not sure I share your optimism that the social enterprise sector is going to be put through a rational process of strategic analysis and detailed outcomes measurement by local commissioners. “The strong will thrive, the rest won’t”: strikes me as a kind of faith-based social freemarket position. The reality of the shake-out I suspect will be a bit more complicated. I’m hearing complaints of municipal panic, politicking and and protectionism. The good will also fail – and i’m not sure a localist government has the inclination to do too much about it.
Patrick
(Head of society, health and education, The Guardian)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jul/23/charity-cuts-big-society
Now that’s an interesting perception Patrick on the faith based freemarket position that “the strong will thrive”. For us this was in fact a starting point in a critique of laissez-faire capitalism, arguing that it accepts the principle that part of humanity should perish.
I don’t think any of us here are advocates for increasing the number of grant funded social enterprises, rather the deployment of sustainable business which delivers a social outcome. On the other hand, I’ll put my hand up to arguing the case for social enterprise being funded for defence insdustry security clearance as a reasonable alternative to claiming unemployment benefit.
Those in financial difficulty will naturally be constrained in their social impact, yet they still contribute a social function, when compared say to an anti-social enterprise like human trafficking with an overall negative contribution.
We can to some extent qualify the intent, for example with qualification criteria such as those of ‘SEE What you are buying into’ where anti-social enterprise can be filtered out, but not the extent to which we’re better at doing it than any other, if indeed any other is doing it.
In the Bill Gates perception of Creative Capitalism he sees the demand for a business being a reflection of the social outcome, yet as we all know those with the biggest PR budget will flourisn by this token.
Even the no loss no dividend approach proposed by Yunus may not be the most effective in what it achieves, but then it can’t really do that much harm either unless perhaps it undermines other grassroots economic development.
What I’m fearful of is that impact measurment become some form of freemason ring, as a closed circle, ‘doing good on your behalf because we’ve agreed that we do it best’
I’m not a fan of social enterprise in healthcare. We’ve already got a local case under investigation by auditors and with an organisation already having a 100% commitment to social outcomes, it’s difficult to make the case for this to be diminished for the sake of freemarket ideology, where perhaps 35% might be returned to private investors.
Patrick,
I certainly agree with you that massive cuts in public spending are going to take out loads of good social enterprises as well as loads of less good ones.
On the ‘how can they tell’ point – this is another reason why it’s a big shame that the Social Enterprise Mark was not conceived as a proper kitemark providing commissioners with meaningful information on a social enterprise’s ability to deliver services.
It’s not too late for the Mark team to reconsider and turn their project into something that’s actually useful to social enterprises.
I largely agree, Rob. We all know of third sector organisations that don’t deliver, don’t prove their making a difference, are utterly dependent, ineffective and so on. I’d be happily rid of some of them, and we encourage everyone going through the SSE programme to not be over-reliant on one source of finance, to prove + measure their impact, and to under-promise and over-deliver (not the other way round, as Liam highlights often happens), to sort out what they need from a team / board and so forth. Liam’s generalised analysis is not far off the mark, albeit with a fair few excellent exceptions, and we’ve got to try and help change that situation across the board. I’ve banged on about the reality behind the rhetoric for some time now.
The real challenge in the current climate, from what we are seeing and hearing, is what Patrick highlights: that there’s no (or little) rationale / strategic analysis behind those who are being cut / being chosen.
Jeff – thanks for being such a valued and regular reader, though where the “disaster movie” stuff comes from, I’m not wholly sure.
Do let us know how P-CED are contributing to tackling the core issues on the ground, as opposed to all those PR merchants? Be fascinated to learn about the UK activity.
Nick, By “disaster movie” I meant some of the operational problems including attempts to hijack our work. First from an aspiring politician and then by an oligarch. The real horror however being the plight of disabled children who are dumped into homes where as much as 80% of state support is siphoned by ‘private interests’. When the first hijack attempt was thwarted a lot of rather unpleasant commentary was published with the author’s identity protected by a UK barrister.
The strategy paper delivered in 2006 was to produce several positive outcomes including the doubling of adoption allowances and a promise of 400+ rehab centres. Our proposal was to help leverage US support if government would demonstrate a commitment to social change.
Rather than supporting the social enterprise investment fund however, US response came in the form of a new foundation which attempted to promote CSR activity which would deliver the rehab centres. They don’t seem to have been very successful. We meanwhile continue to lobby US government for funds that would enable around 10 model homes/rehab centres. Why the British Council have shown up recently isn’t all that clear. We’ve developed a network of local activists on the ground who for their own safety in the increasingly authoritarian environment, can’t be identified.
What we do in the UK is generate 100% the core operations funding from software development and maintenance together with smaller scale community development work. It’s been frugal but we’ve kept it going for 6 years.
Pretty much all of this can be found on one of our web pages, describing services. I’d posted a link to this here, back in July, but the post is still awaiting moderation.
Jeff
OK, so the UK arm is a PLC software devt firm, which dividends any profits to a) local UK projects and b) the original project trying to re-start in Ukraine? That’s helpful and a bit clearer, Jeff. Cheers.
Nick, Essentially all surplus revenue remains in the company or is used to fund the Ukraine mission. Work in the UK, so far is investment of surplus labour.