A sublime and informative read is Radical Help by Hilary Cottam and one that really needs to be a core part of a new political and social revolution (even taught somewhat in schools, maybe) that shakes up and remoulds the many institutional systems, frameworks, processes and attitudes that hold people and communities back from real and empowering involvement in their own and others’ needs and development.

The state has its place (certainly with enforcing modern and progressive regulation to keep big business in its place rather than endlessly scarring us and our planet for monetary gain and other types of profit) but its traditions and recurrent attitudes, approaches, electoral cycles and many issues often absolve responsibility for long-term change and distract from any form of constructive, adaptable, meaningful and relevant twenty-first century ways of operating.

The majority of citizens get it, certainly when given real, genuine and practical means to engage, learn and grow when invited to and asked during the building of better services, more valid connections and relationships with new faces and communities that actually work with them and listen, rather than just having to be involved because of some queue or form they’ve attended to show a need and the service an efficiency or two to justify its broader funding and political legitimacy with ticking a box to show some ‘value’.

Real power to people should happen by adapting existing frameworks and systems, politically and market-based for starters, to really engage citizens, make their voices, views, experiences and diversity count and allow them involvement in the twenty-first century’s processes, systems and services.

A network of regional and local enterprises and facilities (devolving central government for these kind of things would help and certainly ending the wider top-down approach to nearly all services, government or otherwise) can enable better and more inclusive services to the people, allow them to take more responsibility for their own actions and responsibilities and has been proved by the work and experiments run and talked about in the book.

Read Radical Help: it’s not perfect, but then nothing is, and its author’s and associated processes, people and team’s involved are clearly open to change and growth; discover the societal potential from working differently and actually for those at society’s ground floor as good things happen from there, for all; possibly despair as to why not all the experiments, teamwork and learnings have been taken even further forward across the Union and its political framework that really needs to change its stripes, be more humble, realistic, ambitious and actually lead and demonstrate what is actually possible and achievable without soundbites, electoral cycles and short-term managerialism and other isms.

Share, celebrate and action collaboration, economic and social diversity, relationships and non-market based, non-analytical, non-spreadsheet driven efficiencies, interactions and change.

The cost savings alone will be (and have proved to be in some instances) significant and helpful for freeing up all sides of the societal and political coin to really and humanly interact and escape the theme of the state being seen as a service, not, as it should be, the regulator and enabler that empowers its citizens to productively and responsibly engage, interact, debate, critique, assist and grow their communities and selves.

That’d be productive and useful, wouldn’t it?

Plus, this was actually a real use of the design process (and the meaning of the word design!) as evidenced by the award Hilary Cottam won (albeit with some disgust and dispute afterwards from the design establishment!) for this work back in 2005 and proves that design is for everyone and can really help and empower individuals to own societal change(s) and do a (much) better job than traditional and entrenched power structures, roles and hierarchies.

In conclusion

Hilary Cottam wrote a brilliant conclusion to her book that really gets to the nub(s) of our state’s problem(s) and these parts left a mark on me:

Interdisciplinary work can be challenging. Diverse teams have to find a common language and design provides this: a visual language that can cross the boundaries of backgrounds and fields. It was our form of Esperanto and it enabled us to communicate within the team and to share ideas and concepts with participants in a simple, accessible way. Similarly, our guest experts could share their knowledge with us.

[…]

The design process also acts as a container, a certainty in our foggy world. We might start without a clear idea of where we are going: we don’t know the problem we will address or what we are going to create. But we do have a trusty vehicle for the journey. 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 that are inherent in the messy process of creativity. We know our vehicle judders a bit on steep hills, so we can prepare those riding with us for what is to come.

The design process is about practice: about making, reflecting, taking apart and making again. The creative process of building new solutions mirrors the process of capability growth in people’s lives: the families in Life and the members of Wellogram also made change, reflected and grew again. At each stage of this process – in the creation of new solutions and systems, and in the growth of our personal capabilities – tools are vital. We use tools for research, for prototyping, for simplifying and replicating our work, and we design tools that will be used as part of the ultimate service or solution.

Tools are like props in the theatre: they help us act in a different way and they enable a different form of being and conversing. 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. Tools and new supporting roles underpin a different theory of how change happens: not through commands or new rules, but through practice and collaboration. Tools are limitless in scope – you probably have some of your own.

[…]

The design process enables us to work at a granular level, giving a genuine voice to those who are too often not heard and enabling us to listen in new ways. And it allowed us to go up a level of abstraction: to hold the wider system in view, to track resources and to interrogate current logics of policy and power. Again, this process depends on an interdisciplinary team. Designers are key, but they cannot do this work alone: many forms of knowledge and experience are needed, including those of traditional policymaking. What is required most of all is an open mind, a beginner’s mind.

A good process is democratic. It rejects complicated jargon and through an emphasis on visual methods enables wide participation and the sharing of ideas. The emphasis is on action: on making a difference in the everyday. The process is affordable. The tools I use are cheap; many can be downloaded and photocopied. Like the pebbles in my pocket, they don’t look very much, but used with intent they can create space for both personal change and system change.

And that is the important thing: the intent, the principles behind the process. It is hugely exciting that so many people are now exploring ways of using design. These new participants include the next generation of designers and the big consultancy firms such as Deloitte and McKinsey, who are building their own design capacity. It is to be hoped that these corporations will now use this capacity to cede power and to work for progressive transformation.¹¹ Guided by a vision and principles, the design process enables us to create solutions that are beautiful, human, easy to use – and life-changing.

Hilary Cottam Radical Help

There’s more and it's just as important and considered.

Put Hilary Cottam in charge, break a few conventions and barriers (and even get rid of the Houses of Parliament and House of Lords in Westminster!) and then open the floodgates to building a web of meaningful political action, methods, people and attitudes to getting stuff done for a society that votes with proportional representation so that party political colours become somewhat irrelevant, but diversity and different views are more constructively listened to, debated and learned from to get things happening that actually help society.

Democracy is diverse and difficult – it requires thoughtful and relevant care, attention and responsibility to function well and to engage its citizens – that’s its point and its beauty.

Our capability measures were a prototype: they need further development and wider testing. But they provided us with an invaluable compass. For the teams who started to replicate our experiments, the capability measures were like a magnetic north, reminding all involved where to focus. The data also showed us that it was relationships that were making the difference.

We cannot transition if we are held to account by metrics rooted in cultures and transactions we need to leave behind. The head teacher who would not let the children [previously excluded but about to return] through her school gates was caught in a dilemma. It is the school’s ranking in the league tables, which will in turn determine future funding, the stress levels of her staff and thus the outcomes of all the other children in her school. She, like many others, may have a different vision of inclusive education, but while the metrics concentrate on and reward something else she will be reluctant and perhaps unwise to change her actions and admit two children that she perceives will lower the rankings.

Measures can help us learn. They can show us what is making a difference and they send powerful signals about what matters. They hide things too, and have unintended consequences. For example, no one is recorded as dying of old age. Instead we must be categorised by disease: we must die of cancer or renal failure, dementia or pneumonia. This is a measurement system that profoundly influences the way old people are seen: as a set of failing body parts that need treatment rather than as someone who needs care.¹⁵

[…]

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 and try to measure inputs or change as in any controlled scientific experiment. But with human beings context makes a great deal of difference to any intervention. A proven anti-smoking programme will not work for Ella while she is more worried about her housing and what is going to happen to her son. In addition, who or how a service or intervention is offered are all critical, but the who and the how are never measured. People’s lives also move forwards as well as backwards. A measurement system that captures just one snapshot in time is of limited value. In fact, many, if not most, people actually move backwards at the very moment that they are really going forwards: the moment when we really see the challenge and start to take action is frequently an unstable one.

These are difficult, even dangerous, positions to adopt. The systems thinker Jake Chapman has written extensively about the contextual challenges of measurement in social systems, showing the limitations of measurement and attempts at system change based on this evidence.¹⁶ Despite all this, as Chapman points out, ‘so deep is the adherence to the idea that everything can be measured, those who talk about the challenges are likely to be replaced by people who claim that they can control and predict’.¹⁷ Transition will require new metrics and new thinking about when metrics are of value. This in turn will require leaders who are brave enough to challenge the existing frameworks.

Hilary Cottam Radical Help

And, to finish, some even more sensible words.

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 that will guide the behaviour, funding and activities of others.

[…]

It is the state and leaders within the state – politicians and civil servants – who can convene new frameworks and models of investment. The state can signal what will be valued and it can model new behaviours and cultures. Within this framework innovation can be encouraged, ensuring that the modular parts add up to something greater: the new systems we need. This work can be organised along new time horizons to enable the necessary planning and budgeting. Like Plenty Coups [American Indian chief], the state can take a risk, knowing that we are eager to follow.

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.

Transition will involve gradual steps that become radical through their connection to the bigger, shared vision of a flourishing life for each and every one of us. There will be challenges, but we have a new conceptual framework that can help us grow the good work that already exists; we have exemplars of new organisations that can support the work; and we have leaders who can rise to the challenge.

[...a bit further on...]

Our welfare systems cannot cope with modern troubles or support good lives. They are not alone. The British welfare state is a twentieth-century institution, which like its global siblings – the United Nations, the international finance institutions, the global corporation – was not designed to tackle the problems of today.

These institutions find it hard to harness the burgeoning new resources and possibilities that have grown alongside our modern challenges: skilled and educated populations with a desire to participate, new forms of production, of collaboration and making and new ideas from science, academia and the grass roots.

Redesigning the welfare state would not solve all our problems. No welfare system, however great, can ameliorate deep inequality or a lack of decent work. But a new system founded on a vision of good lives and the support for all of us to grow our capabilities could make a significant difference. 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. This is how we share and how we get to know each other, and from these relationships new strengths and a modern nation are created.

We can do it. We know this because we have been here before. The institutions, systems and arrangements we live with were born out of crisis. They have worn out now. But I return repeatedly to the stories of the post-war welfare state because they remind us that new and sweeping change is possible. The British people created the British welfare state. Their expectation of a social revolution and their commitment to creating a new nation informed the Beveridge Report.

The experiments show – albeit on a smaller scale – that we can make similar radical change. Offered a chance to make something new, to be part of a big but practical vision, people joined in. A shift in power, the tools and a possibility of making something leads to radical creative change in our lives. These approaches are not costly. They are generative: we are given a chance to contribute and to create good health, good care and good lives.

[…]

We can also tell stories – they are a critical part of change. Our stories must be broad and deep. They will tell of experience, of travails and success, of small and tender things, of the emotional and the material and of our shared vision. They will keep the human in view so that we no longer talk about units or caseloads, so that the work of help is not the work of a battle front line, and so what we design will change accordingly.

The work requires courageous leadership and many ordinary conversations. Not everyone will be convinced. Not everyone will see the need. Because the spaces between us have become so wide, not all of us at the beginning will be able to see the realities of others. We must get to know one another again.

[…]

Devolution of power to local regions and communities could create the possibility for new models. We have an opportunity to create new frameworks and organisations rather than replicate command and control mechanisms.

Hilary Cottam Radical Help