YOUR KINDLE NOTES FOR: Radical Help: How we can remake the relationships between us and revolutionise the welfare state by Hilary Cottam Free Kindle instant preview: https://amzn.eu/asIdo0H 427 Highlights | 2 Notes Highlight (Yellow) | Location 104 I wanted to better connect the good intentions and the resources of big institutions with the know-how of those living difficult and complex lives. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 155 Ella desperately needed help, and seventy-three professionals had been involved in just that – trying to help in some way or other. But ‘the social’, as Ella loosely referred to all those in her life who work for the welfare system, seemed to her to be part of the problem. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 177 Trying to support the overstretched professionals are thousands of so-called front-line workers, who labour for minimal pay on insecure contracts. They too are distressed by the mismatch between the care that is needed and the resources and time available. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 192 Our welfare state is not fit for purpose. It cannot support us in an emergency, it cannot enable us to live good lives, and it is at a loss when confronted with a range of modern challenges from loneliness to entrenched poverty, from a changing world of work to epidemics of obesity and depression. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 194 It wasn’t always like this. In the beginning, the welfare state felt modern and visionary. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 201 Everyone suffers in a system where 80 per cent of the resource available must be spent on gate-keeping: on managing the queue, on referring individuals from service to service, on recording every interaction to ensure that no one is responsible for those who inevitably fall through the gaps. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 207 These services were seeing the same individuals over and over again; people who – like Ella – seemed tangled and trapped in safety nets that were meant to support them. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 219 managing the queue will not sort out our problems. Money alone is not the answer either. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 230 The solutions that have been developed are affordable. They cost less to deliver and they save money because they bring about change in people’s lives. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 234 And the emphasis is not on managing need but on creating capability: on addressing both the internal feelings and the external structural realities that hold us back. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 237 At the heart of this new way of working is human connection. I have learnt that when people feel supported by strong human relationships, change happens. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 254 Each of the experiments started in the same way: I published a small pamphlet setting out the problem to be tackled. These pamphlets were an open invitation to anyone who might be interested in collaboration. Collaborators came from government, from business and from communities across Britain. They brought funding, expert knowledge, ideas and lived experience. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 258 We focused on those places where there was broad agreement that the welfare state is not working. Over ten years we created five core experiments, and each one forms a chapter of this book. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 266 In each experiment we designed a solution and tested it with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of participants in different settings. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 274 Modern welfare must create capability rather than manage dependence; it must be open, because all of us need help at some stage in our lives, and when we are thriving many of us have help to offer; it must create possibility rather than seek only to manage risk; and it must include everyone, thereby fostering the connections and relationships that make good lives possible. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 337 War had revealed the defects of existing services, which could not cope with the disruption. Just as importantly, Britons had got to know each other across the divides of class and geography. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 340 The middle and upper classes, many of whom had been brought up to think of poverty as something brought on by laziness, something that only happened to the feckless few, realised they had not seen the full picture. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 355 Beveridge slaying the Five Giant Evils, 1942 Highlight (Yellow) | Location 369 Opposition, then as now, focused on two issues: cost and the role of the state. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 374 In the 1930s, the state accounted for 20 per cent of national economic activity (GDP). By 1945, this figure had risen to 45 per cent. Some of those who argued that this expansion of the state must be controlled were, like Hayek, ideologues implacably opposed to the state Highlight (Yellow) | Location 377 Beveridge became increasingly ambivalent about his own reforms. He had envisaged both a strong role for the state and for volunteer organisations, and he was alarmed to see the state increasingly taking over. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 382 Crisis and division came in the 1970s, when economic growth stumbled and unemployment rose. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 386 The welfare state had been a cross-party project, but economic crisis forced the polarisation of views. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 391 new public management. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 403 sceptics also point out that only large multinational corporations can afford to bid, which distances the providers of services from the communities they are serving. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 415 There are three reasons why our welfare state cannot work for us in this century. First, we are facing big social challenges that were not foreseen when our welfare state was designed. Challenges such as obesity, ageing and the globalised changes to work are not only new, they are different in nature, and need new types of response. Second, we have a crisis of care. We cannot find ways to provide or pay for kind and human care. This challenge is not new, but as our population ages it has grown in scale, threatening to overwhelm the very possibility of a welfare state. Third, poverty and inequality have not been adequately addressed. Over one million people in Britain today are considered to be destitute, and the inequalities between us are greater than at any point since the nineteenth century. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 423 (1) Twenty-first-century problems Highlight (Yellow) | Location 426 The welfare state is an industrial system. Its institutions and services reflect the era in which they were designed. This was the era of mass production, of hierarchy and rules, of command and control. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 430 The NHS functions like a factory, managing the distribution of drugs and patients. The latter move mutely through the system, like any other industrial unit: they are lined up, placed in beds and moved along the conveyor belt. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 436 Modern diseases are chronic – that is they last a long time, often a lifetime – and cannot be cured. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 454 Again, such systems were appropriate in the 1950s. Schools were preparing pupils for a life within similar hierarchies. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 460 Beveridge designed a system to manage what were expected to be temporary disruptions in the pattern of a job for life. But today work is not stable and periods out of work are normal as we move between jobs. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 470 Solutions require us – communities, the state, business and citizens – to work together, drawing on new ideas and above all on each other to create change. But our post-war institutions were not designed to help us collaborate or to come together to sustain changed ways of living. In fact, they were more often designed to keep us out, at arm’s length, where we could be managed. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 473 (2) Who cares? Highlight (Yellow) | Location 477 Beveridge and his contemporaries decided that care would be unpaid, domestic, women’s work. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 480 by the 1960s seismic social change was under way and the cracks were beginning to show. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 487 as the challenge of trying to balance too many competing demands and desires forces parents apart. When our relationships fracture, finding time to care becomes even harder. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 490 Modern work also demands greater geographic mobility. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 491 forced to migrate from communities where social bonds are strong but good work can no longer be found, or where housing has become unaffordable. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 492 a particular challenge when elderly relatives may need many years of support. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 500 while our existing arrangements have helped us to live longer, they can no longer help us live better. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 510 Local governments preside over shrinking budgets and growing numbers of elderly residents. They face almost impossible choices and have attempted to manage the ensuing crisis according to orthodox common sense. Firstly they have tightened the criteria that older people must meet in order to receive help. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 514 local authorities have opened up the provision of services to the market. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 515 Ninety per cent of care in Britain is provided by nineteen thousand private sector organisations that cannot deliver what they promise on the budgets provided. Teams of well-intentioned but often poorly trained and badly paid care workers are allotted ten-to fifteen-minute slots to make home visits in which they are expected to bathe, dress and feed an older person. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 520 Reducing the provision of social care does not save money. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 521 Without support at home older people increasingly find themselves in hospital, often languishing as ‘bed blockers’. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 526 the more we focus on the top-down reorganisation of institutions, the more the answers seem to elude us. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 532 the challenge of caring for an elderly population within our current systems and services seems so huge and so expensive we appear to be paralysed: Highlight (Yellow) | Location 534 How we can care for our small children is no less of a dilemma. There are parents who need or want to work. There are others who want to care for their children and feel bewildered that this fundamental role no longer appears to have any value, Highlight (Yellow) | Location 542 The answers proposed are always based on low wages for carers and as many little children as possible allocated to each carer. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 549 Caring for each other is not about efficiency or units of production. It is about human connection, our development, and at the end our comfort and dignity. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 552 (3) Modern poverty Highlight (Yellow) | Location 553 The welfare state has not eradicated poverty. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 556 In fact, poverty in Britain is persistent and growing. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 563 Today, most people who are poor are in work. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 564 23 Contrary to widespread perceptions, 1 per cent of the welfare bill goes to support the unemployed (£3 billion a year) and over 30 per cent (almost £70 billion a year) goes to support those who are in work but who are paid too little to survive.24 The fundamental contract on which our welfare state is based – that work is always a route out of poverty – is broken. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 569 the dramatic and growing gulf is between a small elite pulling away at the top and an increasingly isolated and marginal group to be found at the bottom, the so-called precariat. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 572 spiralling inequality is transforming the nature of British poverty. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 574 The elite not only enjoy high incomes, they are further cushioned by high savings and high house prices. Their lives are distant, not just in terms of wealth, but also in terms of who they know, the things they enjoy and where they live (mostly in the Home Counties and certain parts of London). Highlight (Yellow) | Location 579 Living in this unequal world makes all of us anxious. There are those who are not ‘poor’, but whose incomes are declining. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 584 Money does not equate to the good life, as Aristotle told us thousands of years ago, and in this increasingly unequal world it seems that even the well-off do not feel that they have enough. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 587 There is the psychic pain of feeling inferior, the frustration at not being able to stand on one’s own feet, the lack of autonomy endemic in modern low-wage work. All of these exert physical effects: they lower the immune system, make us feel ill and lead to shorter lives. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 590 the need for the right phone, the right suit, the right teeth, in order to take part socially or to succeed at a job interview. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 591 And while the welfare state can hand out money, it has little help to offer those facing the increasingly complex social and emotional effects of modern poverty. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 601 This particular school shared a boundary wall with one of London’s top prep schools. On the prep-school side of the wall was a swimming pool. The longing, it turned out, was not so much for a pool, but to belong on the other side of the wall. To be one of those expensive-looking pupils with expensive-looking lives full of hope and promise. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 604 Modern poverty is about money and about a breakdown in our social fabric, a rent in our relationships and our shared experience. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 608 education can no longer compete with the structural transfers of wealth between generations. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 609 Income transfers – the benefits paid to working families – might prevent starvation, but they also build resentment. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 614 Our welfare state might still catch us when we fall, but it cannot help us take flight. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 627 New public management has been presented as a neutral theory of administration merely concerned with efficiency and technical adjustments. But, with hindsight, we can see that this is a programme of far-reaching cultural change. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 639 We are encouraged to rate our doctors or our bin collectors much as we might rate a film or a visit to a restaurant. Nobody feels part of an important shared project. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 647 In 1946 Beveridge published a report on voluntary action, in which he voiced his concern that he had both missed and limited the power of the citizen and of communities. The people’s William didn’t like the way citizens were prevented from contributing time or money to the cost of services; Highlight (Yellow) | Location 650 he was increasingly aware that communities, rather than distant, cold and hierarchical institutions, are often much better at identifying needs and designing solutions. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 666 Participation cannot be seen as something special or unusual that must be celebrated. We need to create systems that make participation easy, intuitive and natural. And to do this we need to start in people’s lives. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 726 The gap between the idyll that Ella imagines others are living and her own reality is a source of anguish. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 730 There is also a lingering sense that Ella is to blame. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 734 ‘I bet they all have iPads and massive TVs,’ people respond when I say where I am working. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 736 Ella sees her problems as rooted in personal failure. She continually blames herself Highlight (Yellow) | Location 757 family breakdown is estimated to cost the taxpayer £48 billion a year, a sum that is almost double the budgets allocated to families with complex needs. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 761 So money is an issue, but it is not the only one. The parents’ own childhoods is another significant factor. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 776 For every problem a service had been suggested, but nobody had sat down with the family and looked at the cause of their suffering and the connections between their difficulties. No one had a plan, and Richard and Emma were in freefall. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 781 We also stay alert, listening and watching for the good things that might be covered over, the threads of hope that would help us build a way out. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 798 I am struck by the way the families and the professionals mirror each other in the ways they talk and act. The professionals alternate between attempts to rescue the families and heated, angry responses born of their strain and desperation. Enforcers, with their authoritarian commands – ‘you need to change’ – are met with aggressive responses from the families. ‘Change – how?’ the mothers yell back. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 803 Professionals complain that the families are not honest and open, but the families say there is no safe space to ask for help. Both sides are terrified: Highlight (Yellow) | Location 805 The families fear that honesty and seeking help will lead to the removal of their children. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 835 I am struck by the fact that there is no discussion, no talk of what could be changed. There is just the recording of facts, the processing of problems. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 837 what is recorded as ‘face-to-face’ time serves only to distance Ryan from Tom. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 854 We invited everyone who worked with Ella’s family to a meeting, and we asked all these professionals to help us map their work with the family. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 867 Constant intervention was keeping the family locked exactly where they were: stuck in the eye of a storm. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 868 It would not be accurate to say that Ella and her family cost the state £250,000 a year. It is the running and maintaining of the system around Ella that is costing a quarter of a million pounds a year. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 870 Not one penny of this money was being used to build opportunities for the families or to invest in their development. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 880 In a remarkably brave step, Swindon’s leadership agreed. Front-line workers would step back. They would stop offering their existing menu of services. Instead, we would ask the families to solve the conundrum. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 886 To get started, we needed to find those who could help the families make change – those who would be courageous enough to offer support, but let the families lead. To build capabilities, you need support. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 888 We set up an interview panel and asked Ella and Karen to sit on it, along with members of our team. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 889 Rule one: an inversion of time. Eighty per cent of the team’s time would be spent by the side of the families, and only 20 per cent on administration. Rule two: an inversion of power. The families would drive and lead the change. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 899 The mothers were looking for people who were real, who were intuitive. The families won’t choose anyone that will talk down to them. They won’t choose anyone they see as soft, either. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 902 A team came together: eight people from different backgrounds and departments including housing, social work and the police. We gave our experiment a name – Life – and they called themselves the Life team. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 907 one thing was clear: to break the gridlock of misunderstanding, the families would need to be able to really trust the team and this would mean getting to know one another. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 916 Gradually, very gradually, over a three-month period, the families began to open up to the team, Highlight (Yellow) | Location 918 Within the first twelve weeks there were changes in all six families. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 920 one child about to be removed into care was able to stay Highlight (Yellow) | Location 921 two children no longer needed monitoring Highlight (Yellow) | Location 922 a neighbour stopped her and thanked her for moving Tom out of the home. ‘It’s made such a difference to our lives.’ But Tom had not been moved anywhere. He had gone back to school. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 924 The families argued less and had time to think and remember how much they loved their children despite the challenges. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 932 With a greater sense of calm, the families began to grow their ambitions. For Ella that office job she had felt foolish to even mention started to seem like something she could realistically aim for. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 934 The families also started to offer help to one another, sharing experiences and making new connections. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 935 These small early successes had a similarly galvanising effect on the Life team. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 937 Now they were remembering what they were capable of as professionals and growing in confidence. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 948 Life has four broad stages. It starts with an invitation to participate. Families who accept the invitation spend time getting to know the team, gradually opening up and building the confidence to really look at the challenges they are facing. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 950 In the second phase, with relationships established between the team and the family, the work turns to the families’ futures – to building a plan. ‘Help me to help myself make things better and live my life,’ one mother has written Highlight (Yellow) | Location 955 the purpose of the plan is not to have a tool to measure the families by. It is the process of plan-making that is important: in weaving together a new story, families have a purpose and a reason for building their capabilities. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 957 In the third phase the work starts to build capabilities. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 960 The shift in power is inherent in the capability approach: Highlight (Yellow) | Location 962 We had a simple framework that emphasised the four capabilities we believed all of us need to flourish: the capability to work/learn; to be healthy; to be part of the community; and to nurture relationships within the family and beyond. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 966 they also started to interrogate why we emphasised four capabilities. ‘You need to talk about love,’ we were told more than once. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 971 we expanded our health capability to include internal worlds and how we feel about ourselves. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 974 In the fourth phase families start to exit the programme. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 977 it helps to have some sort of structure, but the programme is not linear. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 978 it took an average of eighteen months for a family to progress through the programme, but families of course move backwards as well as forwards. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 990 it is not logical to concentrate all our efforts and resource at the beginning. Imagine a first date: you feel a little apprehensive, you want to get a sense of the other person and you are unlikely to divulge what you really think about your own family or any other inner secrets. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 997 Not an order, or a command – an invitation. Would you like to work with us? Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1003 The message went out: you can trust these people, you will be in the driving seat, they will stick with you. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1004 neighbours and wider family members started asking us if they could participate. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1005 Participle responded to requests to set up Life in three different locations and in one of these places the programme did not work. Here, leaders of the services could not genuinely embrace the invitation phase. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1013 But for Life to ‘work’, it is not just the families that must change. Professionals must change, Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1015 Local leaders must create room for the new approach and, in the early days, work tirelessly to champion work which might look too different or too risky to some. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1027 There is a premium on being dispassionate, on keeping our distance. Detachment is prized. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1028 The Beveridge bureaucracies emphasised cool neutrality and the importance of treating everyone exactly the same. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1037 systems put in place to mitigate these difficulties were in fact exacerbating the stress and anxiety of the nurses and leading to lower job satisfaction. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1042 professional remoteness was causing stress: it was disrupting human relationships with colleagues, with patients and with families. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1045 nurses were not working at their full capacity since all parts of the system were distracted by the pervasive sense of impending crisis caused by a lack of humanity and strong supportive relationships. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1055 Taking care of the team was as important as taking care of the family. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1079 All our experiments were expressly designed with this double purpose in mind: to bring about change both in individual lives and within the wider welfare systems. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1094 Both Ella and Karen were able to leave the Life programme ready to contribute to the wider world. Ella’s children reentered mainstream schooling and Ella herself completed her training course and found her office job – her first job. She may stumble in the years to come and, given her family history, she is likely to experience tough times, but her life will not be the same, because she has experienced how it is to live in a different way, Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1106 Life costs £19,000 per family. This figure is based on a family working within the programme for eighteen months, of which six months involve deep, intense activity with the Life team.14 The most significant cost is staff time. In addition, a small sum (£100 per family per month) was allocated for each family to use at their discretion to support developmental activities, such as Ella’s training or Karen’s son’s Outward Bound course. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1114 Life saves money not because it manages people more effectively within the system, but because it spends on a programme that can remove families from the system, Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1121 we wanted to know next was whether we could open these approaches up to greater numbers; Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1129 Unicef had produced a shocking set of statistics which showed that young people in Britain were amongst the unhappiest, the unhealthiest, the poorest and the least educated in the developed world. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1136 For every problem there will be a service, was the implicit message. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1138 as austerity started to bite, many of those same services, including SureStart, were dismantled. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1140 Where services remain, the criteria for entry are ever more stringent: only those facing the greatest of risks will be considered. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1143 One in ten young people in Britain between the ages of sixteen and eighteen is not in employment or education, and it is conservatively estimated that this costs the state £12 billion a year.5 But far more important is the human cost, the loss of potential and possibility that results from not taking care of young people. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1149 As adolescents we put down the foundations for good lives and we also have a vital second chance if things have gone wrong in our early years. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1154 there is another, darker reason behind the rationing, and the investment in increasingly expensive and complicated gate-keeping. It is about control. I had made a critical error in imagining that something open would be seen as a good thing. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1183 Gradually he persuaded Melvin and his friends that they could do something much bigger to honour his son: they could start to help other younger boys, to make sure that they would not, in turn, lose their lives. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1186 For Melvin, the deepening relationship with his friend’s father led to a connection with the church that Melvin describes as his new surrogate Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1191 Mo, unlike Melvin, does not have colourful stories to tell, nor is he on anyone’s radar. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1196 Mo is getting by, but he is not thriving. Melvin has been at risk, but he is now flourishing. Why is it that some young people prosper against the odds and others do less well? Youth services – like most welfare services – are designed around the identification and management of specific risks: Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1209 Sociologists differentiate between what they call ‘bridging’ relationships – those that connect us to people and experiences different from ourselves – and ‘bonding’ relationships Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1211 Bonding relationships can be useful. These are the ties that lead to strong neighbourhoods, where we look out for each other and drop in on the lonely person who lives next door. But bonding relationships can also serve to keep others out. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1216 He still has ties to childhood friends, many of who are not doing as well as he is. He also has newer bridging relationships that have enabled him to create distance from his more negative experiences and find a new path. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1223 Upper- and middle-class parents are more involved than ever in their children’s lives: organising clubs, helping with homework, ferrying their children back and forth. On the other side of the divide it is a different story. Poverty and the need to juggle many low-paying jobs, often in time-poor single-parent households, means there is no bandwidth to make sure teenagers do their homework, much less become involved in projects or sit round the dinner table. As one mother told Putnam, ‘We ain’t got no time for that talk-about-our-day stuff.’ Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1230 relationships protect middle-class kids from the ordinary risks of adolescence. His datasets show that richer children drink more and take more drugs, but their families and communities are like ‘airbags’ protecting them Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1235 One of the most striking aspects of Putnam’s work is the way in which he frames the role of school. School is seen through the lens of relationships. It is who you go to school with that matters: Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1268 The family is £3500 in arrears with their rent and also paying back a pay-day loan. All of these worries narrow Rose’s horizons still further: she has to live from day to day and cannot think beyond the present. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1272 Together in the youth centre, Megan and Rose can shut out their problems at home and at school, evading the need to make other friends, face their challenges or grow in independence. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1276 Neither of the girls is at risk of physical harm, but they are each being lulled into a false sense of security that offers no real way out. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1279 The risk-free adolescence is a strongly gendered idea. The girls who are at home caring or in the youth centre are not causing trouble, they are seen as having been ‘saved’ – and this is considered to be enough. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1291 The challenge is not one of how to contain, but rather how we can open up. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1299 the team asked the groups to make short films – to show us what a good adolescence might look and feel like. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1300 In every film young people connected themselves to the wider world. Yet our public services emphasise youthonly activities and spaces and so they break the natural links through which young people learn and flourish. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1304 We went back to the streets and we knocked on doors: shops, hotels, a waste management business, art spaces, market stalls, a cinema, the doctor’s surgery. We asked everyone we met if they could provide a young person with an experience – for free – and almost every single person said yes. More than that: most were clearly thrilled to be asked, to have the chance to do something for their community. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1344 We called the experiment Loops, because we expected young people to go round and round again, broadening and deepening their experiences and their relationships. This was not a service with a target and an end point: the loop expressed the continual nature of our development. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1358 When we design the experiments we combine our on-the-ground experience – listening, observing, making – with academic research and ideas we borrow from other places and contexts. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1374 without a space to pause and reflect they could not internalise what they might have learnt. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1377 The reflector is not a coach. They are not attempting to teach or guide learning. The role is more like that of a psychoanalyst, who encourages their analysand to do the learning. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1390 We found reflectors within the community: Laura’s mum, Amelia’s dad, youth workers who loved what we were doing, and other young people like Melvin, who had grown through their own experiences. We offered a short training: an introduction to how to be a mirror and guide, and how this might differ from the behaviours of teaching or coaching, Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1407 Some adults found the role of reflector difficult: they wanted to be in control, to point things out or to tell the young people what to do and how to be. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1416 am drawn to focus on those at the margins, those that policy-makers call the ‘hardest to reach’. But I have learnt that too narrow a focus is a mistake. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1422 people from middle-class homes had problems too: the pitiless pressures of many schools; parents who were working long hours and were rarely at home; the anxiety of keeping up with peers. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1428 Loops had to be young-person-led. Ensuring young people informed the culture and collaborated in the running and continual updating of Loops would be essential for authenticity – we were asking young people to grow and take on new roles. And Loops would need to be built to multiply: we wanted all young people in Britain to have a chance to be part of Loops. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1437 I would call this new form of organisation relational, because it is characterised by relations between peers rather than through the control of traditional management hierarchies. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1443 Loops is the experiment that failed. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1452 we could call Loops a £52 investment in every young person since, rather than containing young people or fixing their problems, we were investing in their potential as active and participating citizens who would have the relationships, capability and resilience for their future lives. Providing Loops to every young person in Britain would cost in the region of 2 per cent of the budget spent annually on those who fall out of school and education. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1459 they were calling their supervisors to report young people mixing with others who were not always their own age, doing things apparently unsupervised in other parts of the city. The young people were at risk, the project was a risk – how could this be contained? On that morning in a sun-washed workspace the possibility of human connection and development confronted the culture of risk and management – and lost. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1481 I also learnt that change cannot – for now at least – be so radical. I needed to find ways to bring the same ethos and values closer to existing systems. Perhaps we could do this with one of the pillars of our welfare system: services to support those out of and looking for work. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1497 Work brings money and a sense of purpose. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1501 Two-thirds of those in any Jobcentre are going round again for the second, third, perhaps the fifteenth time. The system has a 66 per cent failure rate. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1504 Finding work is not enough: we need to find good work, and we need to find new ways to progress in work. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1508 In this century the links between work and a good life have been broken. For millions, work equates to drudgery and poverty. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1534 Your adviser must do their best to persuade you to take the first job available to move you along the production line and off benefits. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1566 They had not been consulted and they felt vulnerable administering the same hated systems in environments that now left them with no protection against their frustrated and angry ‘customers’. Today panic buttons are back under the desks, biros are retractable to make sure they cannot be used as weapons and security guards are on the doors. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1575 Universal Credit – an attempt to replace a number of benefits with one monthly payment that can taper gradually as an individual’s income rises – sounds logical. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1580 a system that still very much resembles that of the 1950s in its core offering – advice and benefits – but which, with its more specialised production lines, is now so complicated that few can comprehend it. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1588 This is the problem: the reformers, deep in their mathematical models, are not attuned to social realities. They have become – like those using the services – lost inside the system. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1594 It is worth repeating that a far greater proportion of benefits are paid to those in work on low wages than to those out of work, Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1598 We are in the early throes of a Great Restructuring: technology has changed the jobs available, the conditions within which we work, the places where we work and the distribution of incomes.15 Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1613 Health services and universal education allowed for the required workforce. Employment services and cash benefits eased the path for those in between work or unable to participate in the new economy, while decent unionised wages ensured mass demand for the goods produced, so creating a virtuous circle. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1619 The economist Carlota Perez has been studying the links between technology and broader social change for decades, as she seeks to understand and explain what she calls techno-economic paradigm shifts: the seismic changes in how we produce, consume, live and work that are driven by changes in technology. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1624 we can move beyond an obsession with individuals and how to move them into work. We can see instead the wider patterns of change and we can think about the systems that would better support us in navigating these rapid, deep shifts. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1633 the truth is that eight out of ten jobs are not advertised. Today, most jobs are found through personal connections and word of mouth. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1642 LinkedIn was the first of many companies to realise that job advertising and executive search was a thing of the past. They have built an online, networked approach to employment Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1648 It turns out that the best route into work is something completely invisible to our twentieth-century welfare systems: our relationships. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1656 a tangential approach is important. No one wants to be forced into a low-paid job with no prospects, but everyone wants to do something interesting, something we can see as part of a bigger story about our own lives. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1678 Work would be a way to get much-needed money. But more than that, work would be a route to meaning. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1683 And good work keeps us healthy and living longer. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1684 broader view of work used to be integral to economic theory. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1685 For Smith (who drew on Aristotle) it was not just about work, but the right work. Deskilled work, he wrote, would produce ‘stupid and ignorant’ creatures incapable of good judgement or full participation in society. Smith argued it was the role of the state to ensure good work and that we have the chance to develop the human abilities we are born with. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1690 Graeber coined the term ‘bullshit jobs’ in 2013 to describe roles that are demeaning or exploitative, and often unnecessary.23 The sociologist Richard Sennett draws on pre-industrial models of craftsmanship to suggest that good work must include a degree of autonomy, the chance to develop skills and exercise judgement. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1717 Firstly, there is the fundamental importance of finding personal motivation: uncovering the dream. Secondly, we need relationships: the connections to new experiences and support. Thirdly, a modern approach must put as much emphasis on progression as on finding an initial job. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1736 With Backr, like Life (experiment #1), we learnt to provide a semi-formal path without expecting every individual to participate at the same pace. Through the weekly sessions participants learnt about networks – how to use and build their own Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1738 Practice is at the heart of Backr: sitting face to face with others who are not like you and practising talking about what you want to do, what experience you have, sharing connections and ideas, and through this process developing self-confidence, self-awareness and capabilities. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1755 It was a pattern: we found most members needed to come to three meetings, and find confidence through practice and overcoming a personal struggle, then something changed. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1759 It is very different to do these simple exercises in a group setting, where other participants have ideas and connections or ask you questions that make you realise something new about yourself. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1783 Inevitably, people became tired and tried to push back. ‘Can’t you just do my CV?’ A learnt dependency crept back in. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1811 while relationships play a critical role in getting good work, few of us are either conscious of this or can admit to it. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1825 Technology makes low-cost expansion possible. A simple digital platform makes it affordable to run a network that includes those out of work, those in work and those in-between. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1834 Backr is a social solution enabled by technology, not a technology solution. The distinction is important. We have to design for people who are not functionally online. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1860 Currently, most of those predicting an end to work are focused on policies to provide a universal basic income. Bill Gates, for example, has suggested a tax on robots to help fund this idea. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1863 I do not see basic income as the answer. Predictions suggest the income will be low so most of us will still want and need to work,34 and while a basic income might provide welcome time in which to learn, care and create, it will not resolve personal challenges, nor will it deliver the bigger vision and purpose we are searching for in our lives. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1872 With a few notable exceptions, such as the work of Carlota Perez, the emphasis is on analysing the disappearance of roles as opposed to the harder task of tracking the appearance of new roles. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1884 Some had momentum and needed connections to grow, some needed support to make a plan and others were stuck. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1894 just as in the Industrial Revolution, we need to reinvent a wide range of organisations, including the unions and the further education sector, and we need to connect different spheres of the economy in new ways. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1908 An independent evaluation of Backr by PwC showed that 87 per cent of its members made measurable progress: Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1914 Backr cost one-fifth of the sums currently expended by the providers of Welfare to Work services. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1917 is easier to find our purpose and to make change when the challenge is seen as collective and the systems are designed to make collaboration and new connections easy and part of everyday lives. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1927 It is thought that half of British adults live with pain Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 1930 the Hola veveesito Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1948 Instead of focusing on how we can ‘fix’ the NHS, I want to ask how we can prevent and address the illnesses that affect most of us today Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1953 Wellogram emphasised the idea that chronic conditions are part of everyday life. Wellogram did not focus on the specific condition but the wider social context and what could be changed. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1985 A pivot is not just another word for change. The pivot is a special kind of change that involves a new vision, a different solution and a new business model.10 The pivot offers transformation, the potential for something much better and more successful. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2028 A modern health system cannot treat us; instead, it must help us to make change in our day-to-day lives and – even harder – sustain those changes, often over decades. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2038 As we have seen, Beveridge became anxious that the welfare state was eroding people’s sense of their own potential. And ideas about personal responsibility are increasingly part of the debates about our health service. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2044 alone, people cannot make change because they have no control over wider economic and social structures that play a part in determining diet, income, housing and other factors critical to our help. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2046 The search, then, is for a model that can embrace these wider structures and help people to support themselves. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2067 The Peckham Experiment was an early social business and the founders were committed to an ethos of financial sustainability, based on the membership subscriptions. It was this last principle that eventually led to the Experiment’s demise. The designers of the National Health Service were not prepared to include co-payment models. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2080 Wondering how we could make room for change in a life governed by illness, I invited all of Anne’s doctors to come together and talk with us about her case. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2084 They also considered all but one of her specialist doctors to be unnecessary. They developed a care plan, and in effect made themselves redundant. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2090 We would offer no formal programme, but instead each person would be assigned a Wellogram guide and together they would come up with a plan of action. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2093 Open listening is an important part of helping someone, because the sense of truly being heard is empowering. It encourages story-telling, and when you can tell a story about yourself you can start to make change. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2100 we listened without an agenda and we encouraged participants to practise new things. We were willing to accept imaginative possibilities: Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2122 Experience has taught me that we need to turn this logic on its head: we need to do first and reflect later. When we see the change in our lives, we can accept the rationale for it. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2148 Relational work is a little like this: it can blend the new and the old and bring into the centre things that were once considered to be of little consequence. What is different – the crucial pivot – is that the purpose is not to patch up another’s needs but to foster their capabilities. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2162 True help is an art. The founders of the Peckham Experiment recorded that their biggest challenge was finding health professionals who could manage the anxiety of not intervening. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2206 In the barrio, where emotional entanglements were at the heart of everyday conversation, there was a popular saying, ‘un clavo saca al otro’: Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2208 To pivot we need to withdraw from the doctor, and to do this we need to connect elsewhere. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2212 constant comparison may be a source of our illness: Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2219 Illness – from back pain to obesity – spreads through social networks in ways that are incontrovertible but hard to explain. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2223 Could we spread good health in the same way? Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2224 we asked people to find someone in their existing network to ‘hold them’ to a new health behaviour. Sign up to do something positive – walk further, or eat your five a day – and find someone who would either join you or keep you accountable. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2227 We had several problems. Firstly, participants found it hard to focus on something concrete Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2228 difficult to get the sustained engagement of those who were fit and healthy; and thirdly, when it came to asking someone else to be involved most people felt too embarrassed, or just didn’t bother. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2239 people who make change with others are able to make bigger changes and to sustain them. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2240 relationships are never designed into any of our solutions. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2244 The tool has four quadrants: work/learning, health, community and relationships, Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2252 Some participants genuinely could not imagine how reaching out and involving others could help. In other cases the participant was embarrassed to share their request with another, sometimes because they simply could not think of anyone else to include and often because they were ashamed to admit the depth of their loneliness – that there really wasn’t anyone else. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2258 we need to know when to accept the opinions of others and when to try to persuade with knowledge that needs to be more widely shared. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2272 There are two factors that do make a long-term difference: interventions that touch on relationships and those that reach into the more spiritual side of our lives. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2316 Today approaches like Wellogram cost less and improve clinical outcomes, but they rarely have an impact on the wider system because the frameworks governing what is provided and what is funded are not changing. These pilots cannot get the investment to grow and the resources remain locked in old systems. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2334 A twenty-first-century health system needs to do four things: work with the best science; integrate the best care; prevent where possible; and foster a culture within which professionals can flourish and do good work. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2360 These systems have helped us to live longer, but now they cannot help us age well. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2378 We are suffering from an epidemic of loneliness. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2380 loneliness is a bigger killer than a lifetime of smoking or obesity, and perhaps a root cause of some other diseases such as Alzheimer’s and dementia. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2407 Our phone service was small and cheap: we just needed a coordinator, phone lines and volunteers to host. It ran with support from the local council for six months. During this time we learnt that with a light touch we could foster bonds between older people who were alone and isolated and that a very small intervention could Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2423 Some of the older people I work with have a cleaner and almost all of them value the company of the cleaner more than the quality of the cleaning. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2459 There is a coherent, simple and shared vision of what a good third age would look like. Three things are needed: someone to take care of the little things – to go up a ladder and fix the light bulb before you fall over in the dark; good company – people who share your interests and with whom you feel at ease; and a sense of purpose and the support necessary to make the shifts into different ways of living as our interests and life phases change. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2467 A Circle is part social club, part concierge service, and part cooperative self-help group. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2475 While the idea of a life coach appealed, the reality was found to be too abrupt. A much better route, it turned out, was to make some new friends with whom to mull things over at first and then try things out. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2491 We were to learn that checking someone gets home safely is a small but vital act of kindness that allows members to go out and do things they want to do, safe in the knowledge that they won’t return to a dark and empty house, to a life where no one actually knows whether you made it home or not. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2499 How things are done matters as much, if not more, than what is done. The ‘how’ is particularly important where relationships are concerned. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2538 front-line workers who see the personal reality choose to refer to a more expensive, specialised service rather than leave an individual without support. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2548 services designed on the back of a war economy took on the character of their age. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2550 at the very stage in life when we are most dependent on the state, we become dependent on a set of institutions and arrangements that not only lack resources but somehow have the culture of lack imbued within their every action. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2554 jam-jar economy: a jar for the shopping; a jar in case the boiler breaks down – a big fear this one; a jar for bills, and so on. Just as the state locks down resources in tightly boundaried pockets, so older people do the same in their homes. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2559 Circle, in contrast, is a model of abundance. It is designed to unlock people – their capabilities and relationships – and to unlock resources – the skills, support and money needed to live a rich third age. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2567 Each Circle was underpinned by a simple piece of technology: a CRM (customer relationship management) platform. This widely available technology helps businesses of all types manage their customer’s needs: it records what they like, what they use and want and, in our case, what they can give. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2576 If a lift to hospital is required, the platform tells you who can provide it; if a space is needed to get together, the platform tells you whose home is available or what public space is suitable Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2584 Shared Lives, for example, is a social business that has successfully encouraged young and old to share homes to mutual advantage, creating housing for the young and companionship and light-touch support for the old. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2596 We want to find the local sources of energy and ideas, and also to make sure we are not stepping on the toes of local community organisations that might already be offering elements of what we do. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2599 Each Circle was financed with a start-up grant from the local authority or, in the case of Rochdale, a housing organisation. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2601 Future revenue would be generated by membership fees and payments from local councils for services that Circle could do in a more efficient and personal way Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2608 In every location leaders were apprehensive about whether their communities would really participate and contribute. ‘This will never work here,’ we were told. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2636 Circle blends the traditional boundaries: of who is helped and who is helping, of what is social and what is practical. It also blurs the distinctions between different forms of resource: time and money; personal money and state money. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2638 For those who take a more traditional view of the welfare state and believe that services must be provided for free, Circle can look like the introduction of co-payment by the back door. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2661 120,000 new relationships were fostered; and the unnecessary reliance on formal services was reduced by 26 per cent. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2684 there are six core principles that constitute this new framework. Each represents a shift from our current practice to a new way of thinking and doing. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2686 1. Vision: the good life Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2687 vision we must aim for is good lives well lived. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2692 Beveridge’s vision of a better, fairer Britain created a broad and shared ambition. The Beveridge vision no longer holds. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2701 People need meaning, Aristotle argued, and they need support to grow and develop. Aristotle spoke of eudaimonia, which is often translated as happiness, but he was not in pursuit of an individual’s elusive happiness. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2705 Eudaimonia is better translated as flourishing. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2714 2. Capabilities Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2715 current welfare state has become an elaborate attempt to manage our needs. In contrast, twenty-first-century forms of help will support us to grow our capabilities. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2724 These internal factors and the wider webs and structures we are part of determine what real possibilities we have in our lives. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2725 People who starve are almost always close to food. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2726 The capability approach was pioneered by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen and developed by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2738 The factors that enable us to seize opportunities around us (or not) are the factors that make up the notion of a capability. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2760 we started instead by asking families what sort of life they would like to lead and then we supported individuals in taking charge of their own lives, their own growth and development. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2771 Martha Nussbaum says that too much government policy fails because it reflects the biases of society’s elites. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2779 The capability approach shifts the way support is offered. A capability cannot be done to you. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2782 what capabilities matter? We chose four: learning: the ability to grow through enquiry and meaningful work Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2783 health: our inner and physical vitality Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2784 acceptance of our minds and bodies and a commitment to good habits; community: being part of and contributing at the local and planetary level to a sustainable way of life, working alongside others Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2786 relationships: a supportive and close network with others, some of whom are similar to us and some of whom are different. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2791 3. Above all, relationships Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2795 they are what Martha Nussbaum calls ‘architectonic’.6 Building on relationships enables the growth of further capability: Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2822 We must design ways to encounter and get to know those who are not like us if we are to flourish. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2828 4. Connect multiple forms of resource Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2830 when we talk about money we move inexorably to discussions about our existing systems, what they cost and how they should be fixed or curtailed. We can’t start here. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2831 think instead about the vision and the capabilities and then ask what wider forms of resource are available and how we can connect them together Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2836 The experiments created resources. Circle, for example, made visible different forms of wealth: knowledge, time, skill, a car for lifts, a room for meetings, personal money and funds held by different government bodies. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2842 the sense of having something to give is part of the process of change. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2843 there is money but it is in the wrong place: Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2850 5. Create possibility Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2851 Each of the experiments started from possibility. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2862 6. Open: take care of everyone Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2865 a principle of inclusivity was at the heart of our twentieth-century systems. Today, with the exception of core health and education services, our welfare systems are open to ever-smaller numbers who must first navigate the labyrinthine and costly systems of assessment. In these systems, everyone suffers. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2867 The new systems are open: they include everyone and they take care of everyone, Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2882 Each of the experiments in this book was devised using a design process. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2903 What we hear depends on the questions and who we – the questioners – are perceived to be. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2911 If the subject is difficult, personal and perhaps shameful (as most issues of welfare are) the conversation is likely to be much more honest if people do not have to look directly at each other and have something to do while they talk. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2919 first step in building trust, showing we have come to listen and learn not to instruct or order. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2945 In the first wave we understand the problem or the opportunity. In the second, we create a solution. Each wave diverges – at first the thinking is wide and generative – and then converges as ideas are sifted and consensus is built. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2948 Moving through the two waves takes about nine months. Within these two waves are four broad areas of work: framing the problem/finding the opportunity; idea generation; prototyping; launch and replication. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2952 Setting up Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2953 partners who would fund, Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2956 design process is participative from the outset, so we also needed to find people to design with. We start with small numbers Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2963 We want to learn from those who are flourishing and those who are not. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2964 if we can design something that works for those who are hardest to include and those from whom we have the most to learn, then we will have something that works for everyone. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2966 We think from the very beginning about groups – families, friends, neighbours – rather than individuals. Those who know each other cross-check and prompt each other’s stories, adding depth. We also start to draw in professionals Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2971 Frame the problem/find the opportunity Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2980 This first stage is like an archaeological dig. We find unexpected things, we gently dust them down and we keep excavating. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2982 asking ourselves, is this a root cause or just a symptom, Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2991 In this first phase of work we are spending time in people’s lives, chatting and doing everyday things together: Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2996 We are not yet concerned with costs and business modelling, but like magpies we are always looking for what might be to hand to help our work. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2997 The design process differs from other participative processes of social enquiry or research because problems are framed in relation to opportunities. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3018 Idea generation Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3021 We want to hear what professionals and workers at all levels would like to do differently. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3027 We combine this research with our own insights and ideas. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3029 We have what Tom Kelley, one of the founders of IDEO, would call ‘focused chaos’. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3030 Above all, we try not to flatten stories. We don’t want to weave things together in a way that looks neat but no longer represents anyone’s reality. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3034 In the second wave of work the prototyping process described below generates further ideas. We are looking at this stage for practical ideas around implementation and business modelling. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3036 tracking money and other resources that may frequently be abundant but currently inaccessible because of the way they must be managed and accessed. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3040 Prototyping Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3044 A prototype is not a pilot. In a pilot, a new idea is tested at small scale: it runs at arm’s length and then the results are analysed. Prototyping is a verb: it is an active process – we are in there, observing, playing roles, taking apart and remaking. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3050 Prototypes allow us to start small and to tinker, to fail early and cheaply and then to incorporate what we have learnt in the next version. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3059 When we take a prototype away to rework it, there can be a sense of loss. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3062 Disappointment evaporates when everyone can join in and be part of the changes. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3066 Go live/replication Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3081 We: the team Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3081 Participle team was interdisciplinary. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3087 Wherever possible our funding and hosting partners were also integrated within the team. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3097 We know which parts of the process create anxiety and which parts create friction with the existing system, and so we can anticipate the emotions and conflicts Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3100 Tools and roles Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3106 Some tools are borrowed; others are created by the participants in the process. They are democratic: they can be used with ease by the team, families, social workers, children and the elderly. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3112 Active listening means listening in so far as is humanly possible without judgement and without an agenda. We cannot put all our preconceptions to one side, but we can be aware of them. We are also listening for silences Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3121 we ask them to take pictures and make videos. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3124 Story-telling is one of the most important tools we have. We tell stories about what matters to us and we can talk about things we long Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3129 As participants rehearse their stories they too begin to see things differently. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3133 focus groups often suggest improvements to the existing system: more youth centres, better meals on wheels, rather than radical alternatives. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3137 Segmentation Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3190 Tools to facilitate capability growth Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3191 generally a distinction between the tools we use to design the solution or service and those that are to be used as mechanisms within the fully developed new solutions or services. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3197 Sticky steps works backwards. For example, if Earl wants to be a chef he has to say to himself, ‘In order to be a chef I would have to … have a qualification and experience, in order to have a qualification I would have to …’ Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 3215 This Quiero ir a 234 sólo Jiménez UIT Hola WWE Gobierno Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3221 Roles Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3227 We experimented with numerous roles. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3228 men were often happy to join Circle as helpers, but not as members Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3229 in the beginning the creation of this role helped define Circle as a place that both men and women were willing to join. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3230 New roles developed in the experiments include the reflector and the relational worker. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3233 Design and technology Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3245 The welfare state was a building programme: houses, schools, clinics, prisons, community centres and more were constructed. And just as we try to fix our post-war systems, so too we are tempted to pour resources into rehabilitating post-war infrastructure. With the exception of housing, we should resist that temptation. Health, learning, caring: in the twentieth century these activities were organised around buildings. Infrastructure was the destination. Today infrastructure is the route, the spine along which we link to and share the things we need. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3255 Ultimately it is not the gadgets, the hardware or the software that matters, it is the technology mindset. This mindset thinks of sharing as a norm; it asks how to do it, not whether to do it. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3278 ‘It’s great, but can it scale up?’ This is the question I am often asked Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3282 scaling is the wrong approach. Scale is a process of industrial roll-out. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3284 question is better positioned as: how do we create the conditions for growth? Scale is a linear process, but growth is modular: Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3290 We learned that success was dependent on three factors: a shared vision, local leadership and a commitment to core values. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3298 The experiments require support both from the top and from the grass roots. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3305 when corners are cut, the change process is weakened and transition cannot happen. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3306 Where families are mandated to attend the Life programme rather than invited to come, the programme fails. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3309 The key thing is that core values are maintained: Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3322 There are three challenges to switching: the conceptual, the organisational and the political. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3337 Resistance can be forceful and overt: we could not continue with Loops. Or it can be small and surreptitious: a programme takes on the new language, but it is only speaking in new ways to veil the fact it is still fixing in old ways. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3342 Resistance can be presented as a technical problem. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3351 larger organisations feared that the success of Circle would be interpreted as a critique of their own approaches and might also limit their future funding. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3369 Transition involves protecting the work long enough for change to take root. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3379 New work is ‘allowed’ while the numbers are small and we appear to be amateurs. Innovation that does not encroach on the existing system and can be contained as an interesting pilot, or published as an inspirational case study, is usually celebrated. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3384 usual that whispered conversations happen in corridors, and very often the issue is personalised. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3395 We tried in vain to explain that more money was not needed, nor were new professionals required. What was needed was permission to free those at the front line to work in new ways – ways in which they want to work. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3401 Financial incentives are a modern version of command and control. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3402 we could not persuade central government to think differently. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3436 Times of transition can enable new thinking, new ways of organising and collaborating. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3439 On the side of success Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3440 New organisations Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3461 Spanish co-operative group Mondragon, the biggest industrial federation in the Basque region, splits after reaching a certain size, reproducing like a cell, at once growing its influence and its stability through a continued sharing of infrastructure in the form of knowledge, resources and finance. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3463 We can imagine a national network of Circles growing in this way Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3465 Economies of scale concentrate on the growth of organisational infrastructure. Economies of cooperation share a purpose and grow through people and relationships. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3473 Ivan Illich described the good institution as one where the components can be taken apart, re-used and reassembled. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3478 Growth reduces the challenges of transition. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3479 New measures Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3484 we tried to get round this problem by measuring our work in three ways. We are pragmatic and so we measured cost and a set of established, existing outcomes. We also designed a set of indicators that would measure capability. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3488 The experiments were designed, expanded and often replicated with partners facing draconian cuts to their welfare budgets, so they had to be cost-effective. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3493 Usually the problem is more mundane: those in charge just don’t know what things cost. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3501 Then it gets really complicated and highly political. Existing services that may no longer be needed become visible. Overlapping services are also visible. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3504 by the time the experiments yielded the data – it was informally agreed that they cost less – no one dared verify our findings. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3508 those who flourished stayed and supported others who needed similar help. These families and individuals contributed to the systems and solutions we designed, but these investments and contributions were not captured. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3510 The second tool of measurement is to benchmark our experiments against the outcomes of the formal system. In this case, the process is to ask partners what existing measures they value most highly and to compare the equivalent outcomes from our own experiments. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3515 Thirdly, we measure capability. Capabilities are hard to measure. We need to plot points on a journey, not an end point, because with capabilities we hold important the idea that we are continually developing through the course of our lives. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3521 Two factors help us measure capabilities. First, restricting the capabilities we are focusing on to four and collecting a defined set of indicators for each capability. Second, technology simplifies and reduces the cost of collection. All our experiments rely on a digital platform for coordination, and data can also be captured by this platform very often without having to directly ask members for information. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3534 Capability indicators needed to be both personally relevant and true to the approach, and comparable. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3550 Our measurement systems are mechanical and linear. Their instruments for tracking inputs and outcomes reflect an industrial mindset and they carry a number of assumptions that are complicated and sometimes misleading when it comes to thinking about human beings and social change. They ignore context Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3564 Leadership Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3570 Peter Senge, a systems scientist, has for many decades led research at MIT into effective system leaders. He finds that these leaders share common traits: they know how to let go; they create space within their organisations for change, for reflection and for others to grow.18 ‘The great leader,’ wrote Lao Tzu, the fifthcentury Chinese philosopher, ‘is he of whom the people say, “we did it ourselves”.’19 Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3587 In Britain there is a public expectation, often mingled with distrust, that politicians will fix things for us. ‘The Minister will see you now,’ I am told, and with that magnificent phrase I am ushered into another plush room full of expectation. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3591 To transition we are going to have to accept that we trap politicians with our expectations: to command change, to be seen to be doing, to never be learning but to have all the answers. And we are going to have to ask our politicians in turn to stomach more risk, to invest according to principle, to dare to extend the timescales to allow new work to take root, to learn new skills and to be a little more heroic. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3595 Many of these politicians were also convinced that any attempt by the state to become involved would ‘kill it’. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3600 The work at the front line is to be alert, to know when and how to step forward. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3603 Welfare re-stated Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3605 The debates about welfare have been dominated by discussions as to whether the state or the market should provide services and at what cost. I am suggesting a new relationship between people, communities, business and the state. Everyone has something to bring to radical help. But the state – whose purpose is the development of its people – has a particular and unique role. Only the state, our leaders and political actors can create the pivot we need, developing the new framework, supporting the vision and nurturing the principles Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3620 From space travel to the internet, it is the state that has created the primary conditions for change in economics, technology and research. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3627 The state’s role can no longer be that of pulling the mechanical levers of power. Instead they must be like a head gardener: setting out the design, planting, tending, nurturing and, where necessary, weeding. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3635 An Invitation Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3640 Each of these experiments started with an invitation: would you like to work with us, would you like to try another way? The invitation is open to all of us. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3649 Creating a shared project in which we can all participate is in and of itself a good. Participation in the welfare state is not an expensive activity that we should try to limit, but a core part of our national identity that we must encourage. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3659 Beveridge told a story: about a Britain in which everyone could flourish and play a part. Like all the best stories – the ancient myths, a Victorian novel or an African fable – Beveridge’s story had elements of struggle. Beveridge did not promise that everything would be provided; he talked about the importance of help and of selfhelp. We were all on a quest to build a better country and be part of that country. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3667 Firstly, we can identify those existing initiatives and experiments that are true to the principles I have described. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3671 Secondly, we can continue to grow practice and practitioners. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3672 We must also find new ways to support professionals. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3673 We need new career structures that recognise the importance and prestige of doing and supporting change, Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3676 Thirdly, we need to invest in the new. We must prioritise funding for those models that are being run according to the core principles of radical help. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3678 We can also tell stories – they are a critical part of change. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3682 The work requires courageous leadership and many ordinary conversations. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3695 boundaries between those ‘helping’ and those needing ‘help’ blurred and the capabilities of all involved deepened. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3703 Our existing welfare systems are not designed for collaboration and so sometimes we start to believe that people do not want to participate or share. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3710 Devolution of power to local regions and communities could create the possibility for new models. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3717 And could we design around social networks rather than the individual? We could. Bring your friends and family, we suggested Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3732 What I could not see at first, and had to learn through practice, through observing, listening and through the new forms of measurement we designed, was that relationships are the element that matters, the foundation of a new system,