Last Tuesday, I was fortunate enough to go along to the Big Society Network launch at Number 10 (I’ve never been before and, whether or not it should be like this, there’s still an exciting sense of prestige, privilege and recognition that goes with getting the invite, even just for a networking event. I did let myself have a little ‘East London kid done good’ moment – which was actually a nice reminder of the power to just make people feel good that can come from simply being connected to decision-making).
Anyway, I’ve tried to write a blog post on the launch and to say something thoughtful about the Big Society something like six times in the last week and kept getting stuck – mostly because the topic can so quickly spark so many ‘big’ discussions about the nature of government and society, each with no discernible end point, that it stops being helpful. (I’ve just seen a great post that articulates a similar problem and deals with it by sticking to concrete examples. Hat tip to Dominic Campbell for that one). In the end, I’ve tried to sustain a semblance of focus by sticking to the more immediate questions that keep coming up in work-related conversations about the Big Society.
What is it?
The most useful starter I’ve seen on this question is someone asking about what kind of thing ‘Big Society’ is going to be: will it be a set of policies or a strategic memo or a law or a white paper or a something else altogether? (I’ve read so many posts on it now that I can’t remember where exactly this came from – apologies if it’s you going uncredited here). After last Tuesday’s launch event and the things I’ve seen subsequently, I think the thing it’ll be most like is a motto or strapline, a kind of Japanese company style philosophy – like Honda’s ‘man maximum, machine minimum’. A (perhaps deliberately) somewhat cryptic or ambiguous statement to minimalistically sum up and underpin the culture change the Government is trying to bring about. A catchphrase that will be set ringing in the ears of department heads, local authority chief executives, procurement officers, fund managers etc, so that everyone in the civil service and third sector will know that if you can make a case for how an idea is ‘big societyish’, you’ll increase its chances.
It’s impossible to unpack these very high level mantras with absolute precision (that’s part of the point of them) but, if pushed, I’d try something like: an aspiration to leverage the resources* of capable amateurs** to help tackle social issues*** – with the hope of seeing a lot of side benefits along the way****
*could be time, money, ideas, skills, pretty much anything – call it cognitive surplus or whatever name you prefer 
**people or organisations not specifically paid to do whatever work they’re choosing to contribute but able to do it
***as opposed to, you know, defence issues or national economic growth issues
****there’s the possibility, though you could argue it’s remote in most cases, of everything from a sense of community to national finances benefiting from Big Society initiatives.
Is it a good thing or a bad thing?
Firstly, I’d say that I do think it’s a thing (which has been disputed in some quarters). Apart from anything else, I thought the Prime Minister spoke with a perhaps surprising degree of apparent personal commitment about making the Big Society happen and I just don’t see that not resulting in some kind of meaningful action. It is, though, a very high-level aspiration and consequently hard to pin down to particular actions or even success metrics. The criticism that goes with this is that the term Big Society is being kept deliberately amorphous so the Government can pick and choose its successes. I’d say it just shares the same traits of all such high-level statements: it is slightly frustratingly enigmatic and will sometimes seem smugly obtuse or aloof but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong or without use (cf most of the world’s favourite aphorisms).
Which brings me to my second point: I think most things of this high a level can be made to work – Honda, Toyota, Mazda etc all have different big philosophies but they’re all still producing cars. It might not single-handedly dig us out of national debt but it equally won’t single-handedly bankrupt us. So much of how this plays out will come down to mid-level execution and, apart from the Your Square Mile initiative, I don’t think we’ve seen enough of this yet to assess how well the ambition is going to translate into positive action. Of course, there’ll always be disputes about whether the overarching philosophy is optimal, about whether an alternative would have been more or less successful but it’s a bit like comparing footballers or tactics across generations: it makes for an engagingly heated debate in the pub but it’s ultimately hypothesis and conjecture and you’ll never know for sure – and if you’re playing in a match, you need to park the conversation and get on with the game.
Which brings me to my final point (of this section :s): I think, like effective tactics, a lot about the Big Society message is certainly timely and makes the most of the moment. (This is why you’ll see it mentioned alongside a lot of ‘social chronicling’ stuff like Clay Shirky’s ‘cognitive surplus’ chat). You can attribute that to faddishness or insightfulness and give credit or not accordingly but I’m not sure it hugely matters. Timeliness in aspirations of cultural change like this would seem to me to be a key attribute and I do think there’s something in the ‘perfect storm’ talk that I keep hearing: we have systems that are big enough to be small again, a lot of opinions on how things can be improved, a lot of resource at our communal disposal and, yes, no money left. A lot about the Big Society thinking also seems to me to be a necessary sense-check to the chronic risk averseness that was becoming predominant; a move back towards ‘benefits offered’ and looking to what can be done, rather than a continual concern with avoiding what mustn’t be allowed to happen.
But?
I’ve mulled this over a fair bit and every time I run through the above, I realise it’s one of those sentences building up to an inevitable ‘but’. There are obviously lots of ‘but how will x play out?’ questions at the moment but my major concern with the Big Society initiative is simply that it potentially opens up cracks for people to fall down – that by looking to boost the opportunities for people to deal with things locally, in a decentralised way, on their own initiative, we lose a comprehensive safety net or universally coordinated way to help those who need it (I realise that to some extent this goes against the risk-averse and systematisation mentalities which I’ve earlier said I think are largely unhelpful – but, hey, I’m raising questions here, not answering them). To their credit, both David Cameron and Paul Twivy touched on this in their speeches at the Network launch, which is probably about as good a starting point as you can realistically hope for at the moment – but it remains a ‘but’ in my mind for the time being.
OK, so what’s the work going to be?
I find the ‘time (front-line work) – productive time (work done to improve the efficiency of front-line work) – super productive time (work done to enable the efficiencies to scale, or self-generate, or be created automatically)’ idea a useful way to think about the Big Society.
Time: at the moment, this needs to be described in general terms of activity – ‘get out there’, ‘get your hands dirty’, ‘get stuck in’ etc. Beyond that, the specifics of this activity look like they’re going to be determined locally and by each individual’s available resources and capability. There’s going to be lots of requirement for local problem-solving and all that comprises: identifying issues, doing work to help address them, innovating new solutions. Much of this will be essentially volunteering – unpaid, pro bono stuff – but perhaps one big difference will be the degree of self-organisation, and I guess maybe the flexibility to pick up and put down different issues.
Productive time: I think this is where the most innovation will be seen, and perhaps the most immediate surge of new activity. At the moment, I’d put Your Square Mile down as a ‘productive time’ initiative – working to make it easier for people to start doing work towards social issues in their area. Certainly in the digital field, I’d expect to see a lot of efforts to create ‘enabling’ systems/apps/sites, with an emphasis on self-service (a la Fix My Street).
Super-productive time: to be honest, I think this might be lacking in the short-term. There appears to be more of an appetite for ‘think it, do it’ at the moment, and a pendular reaction against the seemingly incessant systematisation of everything. That might be appropriate for getting the initiative off the ground – it will help move from the abstract concept to concrete examples quickly – but would become risky if left unchecked for too long.
I think super-productive time is also where things could start to get really interesting because, if it works, Big Society will be an organic thing rather than a mechanical one and will need accordingly different skills and mindsets to make it flourish – more biochemistry and gardening than engineering and workflows (metaphorically speaking, of course). Again, looking at digital specifically, I think this is why open source (bottom-up rather than proprietary) and app stores (micro opt-in rather than broadcast-push) will become prevailing metaphors/language of the Big Society.
Right, and what exactly are you selling in all of this?
Now, there’s a question We’re still all about using the internet to better connect people with decision-making so I guess it’s a question of how that best shapes up in the context of the Big Society; we think that, to better connect citizens and government, it’s important to consider both sides of the equation – how government decision-making works as well as how citizens want to get involved. Given that, there are two broad things of which I’m pretty certain:
- Even if the Big Society vision is realised with unimaginable speed and reach, I think there’ll still be government decision-makers who need to run consultation, engagement and participation processes. We’ll keep working on online apps to support specific, common processes and augment their work.
- Alongside this, there will be a lot about closing the gap between people and decisions to the point where they’re empowered to do things for themselves. This could open up some fascinating opportunities to look at some of those productive or super-productive time sites/apps/systems I mentioned above. We’ve always looked to run these kinds of innovative custom projects as part of our mix of work and there’ll almost certainly be some interesting new problems to solve for people in the coming months.
Phew. And in conclusion?
Basically, I think Big Society is still waiting to grow into its full form and pretty much anyone has opportunity to help shape it – but (ironically, given this mammoth post) more by action than words.
