Message to leaders: let the monkeys get on with it

A while back … was it really last year? … I interviewed Jemima Gibbons about a book that she was researching on leadership, organisations, and the difference that social media is making. With talk of Web 2.0, and World 2.0, Leadership 2.0 seemed a good enough working title. As Jemima said then “… is not about personalities, it’s actually about stepping back and allowing other people to bring themselves forward.”

Last week Jemima and I met up again – appropriately enough at the Tuttle Club, where Lloyd Davis is a strong exponent of letting the members make things up for themselves. We aren’t really members, just whoever turns up on Friday morning. It works, even when the club loses its home, as you can see here. People rally round with new ideas. (read more...)

RSA rebranding: is Twitter the one to beat?

The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has survived my cull of memberships because, although the conventional benefits are thin, it is currently such an interesting place. I’m paid up for another year, and even pondered taking life membership to avoid such vacilitation in future.
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One Click Orgs on the way

Even though the idea of “organising without organisations” is fashionable among social media enthusiasts, there may come a time when you have to get a bank account, pin down how decisions are made, and how to enter into contracts. You may have to incorporate.
One of the ideas pitched to Social Innovation Camp to take the pain out of deciding on the legal structure, and how to tailor it for your enterprise, was One Click Organisations. Although the team led by Charles Armstrong didn’t win, they are pressing ahead with the project:

Time for a cull of memberships. Reflectively.

I’ve written a fair bit about membership organisations and the impact that social media may have on them, and also helped start a project on the subject that’s now been taken forward by NCVO and RSA. The Carnegie UK Trust is also investigating civil society associations. (read more...)

Creating friendly places for the re-emergence of mutualism

The SHINE09 unconference gave me a chance to catch up with Ben Metz, UK director of Ashoka, who I last met in December when he spoke in Lisbon, at a social innovation conference, about the emerging ecology of support for social entrepreneurs.

Since then the landscape has changed still further, and not for the better. The collapse of the capital markets makes things tough for any type of entrepreneur. On the other hand, social media enables organisations like Kiva and Zopa to raise funds in a highly distributed fashion.

This opens the way for a shift in the ownership, governance and management of enterprises with, perhaps, increasing interest in mutualism and cooperatives and more concern for values that profit. I summarise …please listen to the interview, where I ramble around and Ben is admirable clear. (read more...)

Social tech and civil society: not so very different from banking

Are nonprofits really much different from private companies and other organisations in the way they use – or don’t use – social technology? Not as much as they may think.

That’s the conclusion I reached in an interview at the end of today’s UK Carnegie Trust seminar about social technology and civil society associations – which I wrote about here. (read more...)

The disturbing effects of social tech on civil society: arrests

Tomorrow the Carnegie UK Trust is running a seminar on how social technology will impact on civil society associations … and Dan McQuillan has kick-started discussion with a terrific post here, touching on the research undertaken for Carnegie by Suw Charman-Anderson (scroll down posts). Dan notes:

Carnegie’s report on The shape of civil society to come says that “The purpose of futures work is to ‘disturb the present’ and to help organisations understand and manage uncertainties and ambiguities. Futures thinking operates on an assumption that there is not one future but multiple possible futures, dependent partly on how we choose to respond to or create change.”

My take is that the disturbance will come where the faultlines in civil society are most pressured by the patterns and memes of the social web. The Shape of Civil Society identifies key faultlines such as

• Voluntary and community associations lose their distinctiveness due to increasing partnership with the state,
• Traditional political engagement on the wane
• Diminishing arenas for public deliberation
• Marginalisation of dissent

These are clearly on collision course with memes like Openness, Transparency, Agility and the return of The Commons.

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Social media shifts the nature of professionalism

The exchanges I wrote about here – How Twitter can trip up a blogging boss – have led to a far more thoughtful post from Bob McKee, CEO of the Chartered Institute of Library and information Professionals, on how professional bodies have to find ways “to foster interaction between the unofficial and convivial conversations of social media and the formal systems which make up the “official channels”. He says that engaging with social media is actually about rethinking the way we do professionalism.

Common Purpose: the perils of being closed

Some years back I went on a course run by Common Purpose, during which over a year a group of us made visits to schools, prisons, newspaper offices and the like, and took part in discussions all in the pursuit of civil leadership.
It was pleasant enough, and a chance to meet people from different sectors and professions, but I was never clear quite how we became “leaders” (or that I wanted to).
The Common Purpose founder Julia Middleton evidently had strong views on how things should be done, so it definitely wasn’t in my experience a very bottom-up sort of organisation. There was an online system which Common Purpose “graduates” were occasionally exhorted to use, but it was (and is) very Web 1.0 and behind a login.
Back in 2004 I did have some discussion with staff about how blogging might be useful as part of their communications and work with groups … but the open style didn’t appeal. I said I couldn’t see how you could develop innovative projects for public benefit unless you were prepared to engage publicly, and wrote Effective civil leadership won’t develop behind a login.
Last year the then manager of the online network contacted me and others to say the organisation was being targeted by critical bloggers, and accused of being a secret society promoting a whole range of evils. What should they do? My advice was simple – open up, start blogging back. Encourage your staff and graduates to do so. Still didn’t appeal. (see correction at the end of his post)
I’ve just received a note from Common Purpose alerting me to a programme tonight on Radio 5 live (podcast here), with an accompanying article on the BBC site, quoting former naval officer Brian Gerrish, who leads a campaign against Common Purpose:

It’s a secret society for careerists. The key point is that the networking is done out of sight of the general public.
If you actually look at the documented evidence as to what Common Purpose is doing, they are clearly not just a training provider. They are operating a highly political agenda, which is to create new chosen leaders in society.

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How Twitter can trip up a blogging boss

Lessons for any blogging boss of a membership organisation: you can’t be half-hearted about social media. Bob McKee, CEO of CILIP – Chartered Institute of Library and and information Professionals – gets a roasting from Phil Bradley on a post “From the chief executive’s desk” which starts:

There’s some twittering at present (read more...)