One of the great radical thinkers over my lifetime has died. I have been asked by the Guardian to write about the life of James Robertson, one of the key figures behind the formation of the New Economics Foundation.
It has been a joyful process and a privilege to revisit his life and works, turning out my bookshelves to re-read his writing, including one, Benefits and Taxes, commissioned by me thirty years before.
In 1974, James wrote an article for the Times, asking if we could have a non-profit economy and four years later, for the Guardian, with the journalist Harford Thomas, he created an Alternatives Manifesto as a challenge to the thinking of all the political parties on economic, social and environmental policy.
There are many great insights and ideas that remain fresh. Here is one on ‘efficiency’, a topic which still retains a one-eyed grip on economic thinking today:
Efficiency is measured as a ratio between significant inputs and significant outputs; the greater the output in relation to the input, the greater the efficiency. So its meaning depends on what are seen as the most significant inputs and outputs what inputs are most important to reduce, and what outputs are most important to increase?
In farming and every other sphere it has been assumed efficient to reduce labour. Supposedly efficient farms have produced high profits (output) compared with the number of workers employed (input). Ratios between the calorific value of the food produced and the materials used to produce it, or between the amount of food produced and the area of land farmed, have not been seen as significant. Nor have the externalised costs of water, air and land pollution, soil erosion, impacts on human health, destruction of wildlife and wildlife habitats, and rural unemployment.
The meaning of economic efficiency needs rethinking in all sectors of economic activity.
My thanks in appreciation, and condolences in sadness to Alison Robertson, James’ wife, and his friend Francis Miller, for their encouragement and input to what I have written on his life and work.
As a short ceasefire takes hold in Gaza and hostages are released, I feel sorrow for all those who have worked for peace over time and will feel so adrift as war and violence sets in.
In this context I want to add my own recognition of Vivian Silver, from Kibbutz Beeri, a great peace activist and co-founder of the Women Wage Peace movement in Israel.
She was murdered in the course of Black Saturday on October 7.
Vivian dedicated her life to social action, to the advancement of women, and to pursuing peace. She arrived in Israel from Canada in 1974 and she did everything possible to promote co-operative values, peace and Arab-Jewish partnership.
In 1998, she was among the founders of the co-operative aid partnership Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Economic Development (AJEEC-NISPED). She worked as co-CEO of the organization and even when retired was an active board member until her last day.
I am hearing her news from the great Mully Dor, Chair of the Executive Board of AJEEC-NISPED. He says that:
my friend Vivian believed with her whole heart in the idea of promoting peace. Since we founded AJEEC-NISPED, together with Dr. Yehuda Paz, you could always see the human qualities in her. She could form deep friendships and left a mark on everyone she met, from her friends in the kibbutz COOP to Palestinians and Bedouins.
Within AJEEC-NISPED, Vivian flourished with Amal Elsana, whom she brought on as co-CEO to show that we not only speak about a shared society but achieve that dream together at every level of our organization.
She had a rare sense of humour, resilience, and bravery to persist in her vision. She knew how to bring people together towards the vision that she lived, and she will be greatly missed.
At her funeral, over a thousand people came.
At this, her son Zeigen spoke with heart to say “You were a woman… of big ideas. Now, after your death, we will make a bigger effort to bring the tomorrow you always dreamed about.”
In war and death, dreams end. Only in peace and in life can they flourish.
We launch our Pilotlight report A Call for Climate Volunteers this morning.
My thanks to those who have fed in to my work on this over time, including, with some tears here, the late John Davis, who passed away this Summer aged 99 (author of Greening Business, friend of Fritz Schumacher, co-founder of New Economics Foundation – a life well lived)
It has been a long time in the preparation, involving research with 298 charities and social enterprises active on the climate emergency.
Some key numbers are:
around 16,000 charities and social enterprises are working on climate and sustainability in the UK
63% are actively looking for support from volunteers with professional expertise
We estimate that 100,000 skilled climate volunteers are needed to fulfil the sector’s potential to spur, spread and scale positive action for sustainability
For employers, giving staff an opportunity to do something is one way to recognise the rise of eco-anxiety that now affects one in six employees (and one in three for 18-34 year olds).
The core idea is a bold one – that we can speed up climate action by filling a gap that exists for capacity building for environmental charities and social enterprises. The faster and wider we can do this, the more dramatic impact we can have.
The Big Help Out is the volunteering effort tied to the royal coronation. It is designed to do good, so what’s not to like?
Despite the participation of a range of traditional volunteering charities and being backed by public figures such as Tim Peake and Jack Monroe, the initiative has attracted some scrutiny.
Rob Jackson, consultant on volunteering and co-author of The Complete Volunteer Management Handbook, set these down early as a series of question marks.
It is a curious time to be concerned about the state of volunteering perhaps, given that we saw record levels of voluntary action just in the most recent period over the pandemic. Research from the Royal Voluntary Service at the time suggested that over 12 million people volunteered during the pandemic, with 4.6 million of these doing so for the first time. Over 3,000 mutual aid groups were created with the participation of an estimated 3 million people.
Much of this however was informal volunteering, rather than the routines of structured formal volunteering and the level of formal volunteering (albeit with many health warnings about data lags) declined both over the pandemic and it appears since, given pressures on people’s time. In a blog for Pilotlight, I asked just under a year ago: are we past the peak of volunteering?
I see value in initiatives like the Big Help Out, but I also sense some risk in putting effort into one off initiatives rather than what would be of real value, which is a long-term, patient programme of social marketing to promote the habits and practice of volunteering.
My own involvement with this was to work with distinguished colleagues such as Professor Jeff French to help set up the National Social Marketing Centre for the NHS in the early 2000s. Through that, we were able to build a powerful body of evidence on potential for effective social marketing to make a positive difference to people’s behaviours over time. This is not just the famous ‘nudge’ but the application of full marketing toolkit, including segmentation, insight, design and where appropriate, public communication.
Social marketing in the UK has contributed since to efforts to reduce levels of smoking in the UK. There have been a number of social marketing campaigns aimed at reducing smoking, such as the “Quit for Them” campaign and the “Stoptober” campaign. These campaigns have used a variety of methods to encourage people to quit smoking, such as providing information about the health risks of smoking, offering support and resources to help people quit, and creating a social environment that is supportive of quitting.
As a result of these campaigns, alongside of course other tobacco control measures, the number of smokers in the UK has declined significantly in recent years. In 2000, 28% of adults in the UK smoked. By 2020, this figure had fallen to 13.7%. This decline is largely due to tobacco control measures aligned to effective social marketing campaigns.
Social marketing has been used widely for other public goods with proven results, from recycling, sport and activity through to healthy eating.
Two findings that I always find encouraging when it comes to volunteering are that:
the most common reason people volunteer is because someone asked them and
the longer that people volunteer the more they trust other people.
In short, volunteering is a wonderful tool, rooted in relationships and tailormade to nurture and fulfil positive values. I think of our own work at Pilotlight helping employers to facilitate skills-based staff volunteering as a form of ‘empathy accelerator’.
You don’t have to be a committed royalist to applaud the intention of King Charles to recognise and encourage volunteering. What we need though is a well resourced, well prepared programme to encourage volunteering over his reign and not just around his coronation.
Making DEI fun might sound at odds with the stark facts of disadvantage. But laughter can lighten the mood and open us up to new ways of seeing the world.
If it helps us to learn and use that learning for good, then fun is a perfect fit…
Our most recent staff session at Pilotlight was to complete a volunteering activity (production of tactile books) with a Partner Charity, ClearVision Project.
ClearVision Project’s Director, Alex Britton guided us in creating four to five tactile books that can be used by young people in reading groups at Linden Lodge, the school in which the charity is based.
Tactile books are used by young children with little or no sight, many of whom have additional physical or learning difficulties. Tactile books are an excellent introduction to the fun of reading, as well as being an invaluable means of conveying ideas, concepts and vocabulary.
Sewing is not one of my stronger skills, but I knew enough to play my part and to help out colleagues with even fewer craft skills. We worked in teams and each team produced a book. Moments of silence were interspersed with moments of conversation and reflection, as if we were on a ramble or perhaps a pilgrimage together. Each team in turn could be heard in laughter.
We ended up with all the tactile books that we had hoped to pull together.
You can see more on our work and approach to diversity, including actions, plans and targets, plus an update on winning a Silver Award from Inclusive Employers here.
The idea that civil society should compete rather than co-operate has taken root over my lifetime.
Those who look at society through the lens of markets prefer a fragmented, competitive array of different charities, co-operatives and social enterprises, because having a choice can help direct resources to where they are most effective. In effect, this is the worldview of most charitable foundations, despite their philanthropic roots.
The drawback is the hidden costs of running a competitive system. As one charity CEO commented in the recent report by Pro Bono Economics, Unleashing the Power of Civil Society, “I think we’ve got 20 funding bids in at the moment, that’s taken hours and hours and hours of work, you may get one or two of those, if you’re lucky…and you have to go through the same things over and over and over again.”
Those who look at society through the lens of voluntarism again prefer to see a diverse and eclectic array of different entities and causes, because what matters most is what people are moved to take action on. The fragmentation of civil society is a symptom of the freedom of a society.
The drawback is that initiatives count more than impact, with cultures of governance – and regulation – that focus on safeguarding the entity above taking the right risks to advance the mission with others.
If we look at society through the lens of values, civil society emerges as more than an adjunct to markets and more than simply a channel for people to do good. Civil society is the way in which people can coalesce most effectively to advance the values that they hold – to build new constituencies for social justice and to challenge those in power to do the same.
With this lens, the key to success is effective co-operation.
When the pandemic hit, those leading the existing infrastructure networks for civil society set rivalry aside and came together, sharing information, providing peer support and taking up common points of advocacy. I joined early, in March 2020, then at Co-operatives UK, and rejoined when I started at Pilotlight in July 2020.
In the pandemic, we were all vulnerable, all in a new situation in which we needed to learn fast and peer relationships helped both in terms of well-being and in terms of knowledge sharing.
This collaborative network has developed far greater trust and co-operation across the voluntary sector through its work since then, including:
tackling the banking sector to improve the worsening service and access of charities to banking services
a peer review of organisations around their work and efforts to dismantle racism and widen diversity, equity and inclusion
engagement with emergency responses for communities under lockdown
persistent and intelligent advocacy, to promote cross-party support and win recognition for civil society, for example in the most recent schemes for support on energy bills for business
The ‘Never More Needed’ and ‘Right Now’ campaigns were among the first attempts to mobilise people across civil society in favour of civil society – something that was a remarkable gap before. NCVO and its devolved sisters act as a voice for the sector, ACEVO brings together its leaders, but perhaps because it wasn’t seen as needed – charities can rest on their laurels – no-one saw before that it was their role systematically to promote the value of the sector.
Co-operation thrives on momentum. If something is moving, people want to get on. If it is static, they fall off or step away. With generous inputs from organisations such as Directory for Social Change, and with a more open style of leadership at other key bodies, the momentum has grown, but without those involved seeking to create a formal organisation in its own right.
The result is the Civil Society Group.
This now has its own website, long after the collaboration started and the reason for setting it up is to allow for transparency, rather than to build a presence and brand. It is an informal collaborative and not a formal co-operative, because it looks to add weight to rather than displace those who are involved.
I have been proud to see values of co-operation that are cherished in the co-op sector flourish in the wider third sector. As Pilotlight we have contributed, with participation in the Strategic Oversight Group, building relationships and steering activity.
The three strategic goals of the Civil Society Group are to:
To use our collective power to influence the governments in all parts of the UK and to engage key stakeholders.
To promote and support programmes of beneficial change within the sector.
To maintain a mechanism for cooperation, communication, data collation and dissemination.
This is work in progress. As the co-op sector has long recognised, you need to recognise and invest in the skills of partnership and co-operation, rather than simply assume that people know how to do this. There is an emerging vocabulary around systems change and collective impact, but we have further to go to embed these as a core set of competences for hard-pressed non-profit leaders.
To do more for our world, rather than compete with each other or go it alone, we are choosing to organise. The pandemic helped us to see the value of co-operation.
What do you think of other people: are other people… more compassionate or more selfish?
Before I share what the researchers tell us, ask that same question of yourself. Are you more compassionate or more selfish?
So the research on this is by Tom Crompton at the Common Cause Foundation, a specialist on people’s values.
Three out of four people (74% of respondents) place greater importance on compassionate values than selfish values. This is the case irrespective of age, gender, region or political persuasion.
So we believe that we are more compassionate, more ethical.
At the same time, just over three out of four people (77% of respondents) believe that their fellow citizens hold selfish values to be more important, and compassionate values less important.
We believe that others are different, that they are more selfish, less ethical.
Plainly, one way or another, we are wrong. Either we are more selfish than we say, or others are in fact more like us, more pro-social than we would admit.
And it makes a difference.
With this inaccurate belief about other people’s values, people are significantly less likely to get involved – joining meetings, voting, volunteering. They feel less responsible for their communities and they report greater social alienation.
The converse is true for citizens who hold more accurate perceptions of other people’s values.
I think this is a profound cultural disorder. It creates division, and drives a sense of private good, public bad, even among people who personally are motivated to be kind to others.
Because they fear that others will not return their kindness.
Because others are out for themselves, winner takes all, dog eat dog.
Colleagues in the charity sector, led by the team at Reach, have started a campaign, Change the Story. The aim is to change how we see the world, by recognising that others are more like us than we fear.
Reach helps people to find roles as trustees in charities, just as Pilotlight supports people in business to give their time and skills to charity.
As research by the late Professor Johnston Birchall on people helping out in public services showed, volunteering helps to make citizens – and not just consumers.
This is a theme echoed by a range of practitioners, who have formed a network to learn from each other and raise awareness – the UK Values Alliance.
So, ask yourself this: do I ever feel a bit lonely, a bit different if I care about my community, about social justice, or about what we are doing to the environment?
If you do, then it is not because you are alone. It is because you are made to feel alone.
As Tom puts it “We live in a world in which the narratives that dominate in society and the economy are rooted in values that tend to marginalise ‘intrinsic‘ values of co-operation, fairness and sustainability.”
It is only by changing the story that we recognise our true place, as people who live in a moral community.
Ursula Lidbetter, the first female Chief Executive of a UK consumer cooperative in modern times, is stepping down from her role this month at the Lincolnshire Co-op.
She asked me to say something at her retirement party in Lincoln. And this is what I said…
I have two things to say to Ursula this evening.
First, that you have lived up to every best hope one could have for a co-operative business leader.
And second, that I and others of us who have also worked with you in the cooperative sector have been lucky to know you.
That could be the shortest and most succinct retirement speech you will hear, but given we are in Lincolnshire, bold claims need practical back up and I should go on to justify what I say.
A cooperative is a business that is owned in partnership by the people involved in the business.
That sounds wonderfully participatory and it is.
But easy to lead? It is not.
Ursula joined the society in 1985 – and yes, Lincolnshire Co-op is a society and not a company. Every auditor, every banker and almost every lawyer seems to trip up over that.
The language of co-operation with words such as society, mutuality and friendship and providence says so much of the different purpose at work in the founding of the enterprise.
When she joined, nearly half of all sales came from the co-op’s car dealerships, dairy and department stores.
When she became CEO in 2004 her first year was spent selling the dairy business and extricating the co-op from the collapse of the Rover car brand. The department stores took longer to resolve but are now all gone.
Over the last few years, she tells me “we have turned our old dairy site into a mosque, Lidl and houses. Our last two department stores are now a cinema site being developed by a district council in Gainsborough and in Lincoln our own development of an M&S opened a couple of years ago and an ALDI due to open on Thursday (part of our philosophy that we give communities what they want..)”
Over eighteen years, she has grown annual sales by two thirds, the annual surplus by over a third, doubled the reserves, and grown the number of food stores by a third and pharmacies by a half.
Leadership under Ursula means being honest about challenges and entrepreneurial about opportunities. I have visited pharmacies where she has championed experimenting with giving space to libraries and volunteers.
To save the local library facilities, a volunteer run library opened up in a Lincolnshire co-op pharmacy ten years ago and is still going strong today.
Leadership has been about the long-term – who else was working with the university to grow the supply of pharmacists, who else was developing a cinema in the pandemic, who else has collaborated with so many for the redevelopment of Lincoln, the city?
I say, who else, but we know who else. Everyone else. Hands up who is a member of the coop?
300,000 people. I remember Ursula telling me of the Lincolnshire Co-op having difficulty doing market research in the county, as you could find members to talk to, but it was very hard indeed to find the control group, of people who were not members.
The co-owners of the business and the magic ingredient of the best leaders in a co-op, which is the number of willing followers.
When everyone is aligned, a co-op under a leader such as Ursula is like a northbound train, everyone is going in the same direction. There is no more powerful model of organising.
And when everyone has a different view and a sense of entitlement, nothing moves. It is the worst form of organising, with no fallback margin to tell people what to do.
And that is what Ursula stepped into when she became Chair of the Co-op Group.
There were others of course, but I say simply that without Ursula, the Co-op Group would have failed and we would have lost all the potential that we can still see in the form of a dynamic and ethical national convenience retailer.
I don’t know that the co-op sector, politicised as it can be, has learned the lessons of that debacle. But for me, one positive was to have seen the worst of co-operative leadership transition to some of the best. Ursula made that happen.
But this may be distant to the Ursula you know.
Where do you tend to see her? I have seen her in her office, round the Board table, at the bar in the early hours at co-op conferences, and of course in her cars.
This went with the job, you understand.
The society used to run car dealerships including British Leyland/Rover and her first first few company cars were those left behind by ‘departing’ managers. The Morris Ital was a pretty bad example. Another was a diesel Nissan Primera which she tells me “I hated every minute I drove it.”
She then drove a wonderful Jaguar coupe and what she describes as her perfect car “my favourite convertible XKs , the prettiest car ever”.
To conform with Jaguar’s rules she had a new car every six months, but if a customer wanted to try the demonstrator it was whipped back to the dealership with a day’s notice and sometimes never returned.
The rule had always been that the CEO and other senior managers drove the demonstrator vehicles as they had to be on the books anyway and could therefore be charged into head office costs. I did say she has an entrepreneurial mindset.
She now has a convertible BMW of her own – great engineering but she says it doesn’t touch her heart like the late lamented Jaguar XK.
So how will you remember Ursula? I will place her in a fast car.
From a different age, of horse and cart perhaps, an early commentator on the world of consumer cooperatives, Beatrice Webb, chalked up their success coming out of Rochdale to the character of ‘cussed Lancashire folk’
Lincolnshire Co-op is by any measure a world class co-operative and it’s success over time is down to effective governance and sustained leadership.
In short it is down to the character of cussed Lincolnshire folk.
Those Rochdale cooperators though also knew a thing or two. In their advice to Co-op members, published in the nineteenth century, they cautioned “choose your leaders carefully … and give them your trust.”
Ursula, but not just Ursula, as she has always had a first class team around her to help her lead.
I want to thank you for your friendship Ursula.
I always felt brighter and more full of solutions when we were together and I can see that this is one of your gifts. You make others feel when they are with you that they are more bright and more full of solutions.
So to those assembled, I hope I have given you some evidence to back what I say – the two things I have to say to you, Ursula this evening.
You have lived up to every best hope one could have for a co-operative business leader.
I and others of us who have worked with you have been lucky to know you.
This time of year, newspapers tend to carry recommendations and of course there are so, so many I have missed and that I would love to read. Perhaps I will have more scope in future years – I used to spend more time on trains, cycling to work has been good for me but it has cut my time to read.
But one book that I have enjoyed (and one that I didn’t find in the Financial Times review list or elsewhere as yet) is The Purpose Upgrade by Paul Skinner.
Paul is a mercurial brand entrepreneur and creative. I was pleased to work with him in the co-operative world and coming to Pilotlight, making links a second time through his own pro bono work via MarketingKind.
Purpose is in the air in business and we are not short of ways of articulating and promoting this as a cause, whether through co-ops, B-Corps or social enterprise more widely. But The Purpose Upgradeis a cut above and the writing is in general profound and illuminating. Here is Paul debunking neo-liberal thought in two sentences for example:
“In Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith showed how self-interest can lead to a greater good as a by-product. A higher level of success, however, has now been shown to come from putting a greater good first and deriving self-directed benefits as the by-product.”
Bringing purpose to life is one of the great experiments in business at present. Polly Mackenzie has an article on the role of the Chief Purpose Officer, her job. It reminds me a little of my own writing on the idea of a Chief Values Officer – a practical post which was taken up by a leading independent co-operative, Midcounties Co-op, through the work of Pete Westall. Values and principles have always been important in co-operatives and this is a way of building capacity and accountability for this in practice.
Purpose can carry us through tough times. I have been reflecting on what I am reading in conversation with our Pilotlighters – business experts who support charity leaders through our impactful programmes.
“It has been easy for corporate employers to project feigned solidarity with their people, but inequalities of power and pay make for a shallow culture. During a recession, these inequalities come to the fore, which heightens tensions. Employee engagement will need to reinvent itself for this reality.”
Born at the Hospital for Mothers and Babies in Woolwich in 1924, Vera lived close by me, on Westcombe Hill.
When she died in early 2020, only four people could attend because of COVID restrictions. This weekend, a huge crowd gathered at St George’s Church, our local, to remember Vera – an extraordinary friend, neighbour, volunteer, fundraiser, jumble sale organiser, girl guide leader and great grandmother.
At this, we exchanged memories and here is one that came to me.
Perhaps it was her living so long on a hill, perhaps it was her going to church on a hill. Either way, one hill that we climbed together, up the very roof of the O2 to the pinnacle and back, was one Vera accomplished with seeming ease.
It was a shame that we hadn’t sponsored her to do it for Christian Aid, because this was a sporting achievement at her sprightly age to match the parachute jumps, mud wrestling or marathon runs of younger generations. We could have raised as much as an evening round she’d lead in May, knocking on local doors. Or even as much as an evening and a half.
It was December, and a cold, cold day. We were climbing to sing carols on the roof of the O2, the St George’s Choir, robed when we reached the top and with enough strong singers for the rest of us to join in, our voices lost in and melded with a wind-swept ensemble of carols high above the Peninsula.
There was a photo to memorialise the occasion. The image was no doubt a short-lived, instagrammable moment for the marketing team of the giant property developers, with whom St George’s and allies across East Greenwich had tussled over time for a space for faith and prayer.
The image remains though. It is up on the walls of St George’s as you walk in, as a reminder. It is an image of Vera and her church friends. Indomitable. Timeless. Up for anything that could do some good.
There was no hill in life that she could not climb – and see us hope to follow.
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