Author: Lorna Prescott

Be the hedgehog!

Lorna Prescott 2 Comments

photo of a hedgehog on grassWhat have hedgehogs got to do with radical innovation?

Well, as suggested in a Disrupt & Innovate blog post: “hedgehogs symbolise radical innovation because as curling up into a ball – their very successful defence strategy for millions of years – became ineffective when the car was invented, hedgehogs changed their strategy and learned how to run.”

The Disrupt & Innovate project ran a campaign this summer to find civil society hedgehogs. Using a twitter hashtag #BeTheHedgehog, they sought examples of “people, teams or whole organisations that are courageously innovative reacting to changes in the world by changing themselves and the way they pursue their mission…  so that all of us can learn from them and from each other and get better at what we do.”

We are now looking for hedgehogs in Dudley borough, to help us design a programme of support for people in our sector who are keen to lead innovation and transformation* in their teams, organisations or communities. If you are a hedgehog, or know one, please leave a comment below or get in touch with me (lorna@dudleycvs.org.uk / 07501 722255 / twitter @dosticen) so that we can involve you in a conversation later this month.

* What do we mean by innovation and transformation? – you may well ask, as these are buzzwords which have lost their impact through over-use.

Innovation

Innovation can be defined as the act or process of introducing new ideas, methods or devices. In our sector we tend to focus on what is often called social innovation. This is about finding novel solutions to social problems that are more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just, than present solutions. Social innovations create value primarily to society as a whole rather than private individuals.

Social innovations can be described as new strategies, concepts, ideas and organisations that meet social needs – they extend and strengthen civil society. Social innovation includes the social processes of innovation, such as open source methods and techniques and also the innovations which have a social purpose.  (From wikipedia)

Transformation

This could mean changes in how an organisation is structured, how it operates, and/or how it is financed – often in response to changes in the context in which it is working. Examples of transformation we could develop knowledge around and try out include:

Obviously we don’t want organisations to innovate and transform for the sake of it. We are here to connect and inspire people and organisations to achieve positive change so that we have caring, vibrant and strong communities across the borough. So part of our focus is on supporting organisations to be resilient and sustainable. As well as financial sustainability, we are keen to support organisations to be adaptable and develop their leadership and strategic muscles. 

If you’d like to help us design ways that we can provide support around all of these sorts of things please get in touch. We’ll be thinking and talking about ideas this month and getting ready to start doing things next month.

Image credit: Soerfm, shared through wikimedia commons using a creative commons licence

A different starting point

Lorna Prescott 1 Comment

One of the best things I do in my job at the moment is work with residents in Coseley who are leading the Big Local programme, along with my colleagues Neil and Donna. We’ve recently been testing out new ways to support people with ideas who want to start activities. We have worked hard with residents to develop a process which embraces the underpinning ethos of East Coseley Big Local: to start with what is already available around us.

Doris and Vusa live in Coseley and want to start a weekly out-of-school education, recreation and mentoring programme for 8 – 14 year olds. They agreed to help test our new process. A month ago they joined Dudley CVS staff and four residents from the East Coseley Big Local Core Group. We started off by sharing some examples of inspiring projects from other places around the world. Doris was interested in Singledingen, a project started by neighbours in a park in Rotterdam, and Hackney Pirates, an amazing out-of-school learning adventure started by a teacher and local people.

Then we introduced our Ideas Canvas, which prompted conversation about what Doris, Vusa and other members of their team bring in terms of passion, skills, experience and knowledge. Together we identified who they might like to meet to help them get started. Something we asked which was a bit of a surprise to Doris and Vusa was: ‘What could the children bring and contribute to the programme?’ They hadn’t thought about this before, but readily considered ways that children could share their talents with each other, and be supported to take on leadership roles.

Another surprise was that we were able to help Doris and Vusa to cut their costs for 2 taster sessions by about two-thirds, by re-thinking some activities with them, and by sourcing materials and equipment that could be borrowed from local groups. This was possible due to members of local groups being involved in the Big Local Core Group, added to by the local knowledge of Dudley CVS officer Neil Langford. An unexpected outcome of bringing people together in the way we did was that after also hearing about a children’s holiday club which was planned at Darkhouse Baptist Church, Doris volunteered to help out with it. And in turn she had offers of help for her taster weekend.

Made 4 Kidz, founded by Doris and Vusa, now has a lovely bright website, a Facebook Page and two taster sessions running this weekend at the Rainbow Community Centre. Leaflets have been delivered to households in the area. Please do help spread the word.

Also do let us know what you think about connecting people and resources in neighbourhoods, and any experiences you have of doing it.

Made 4 Kidz Big Opening flyer

A fireside chat and five priorities

Lorna Prescott 2 Comments
Photo of Joel Gascoigne and Nick Holzherr in front of screen with glowing fireplace

Photo from the fireside chat shared by Laura Creaven on twitter

On Tuesday I went along to a Fireside Chat* with Joel Gascoigne, co-founder and CEO at Buffer. Buffer is a really handy software application which you can use for free to schedule posts to social media accounts in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more.  Joel studied in the West Midlands at the University of Warwick, and Buffer was developed and launched in 2010 while he lived in Digbeth, Birmingham. The co-founders moved to Silicon Valley in 2011 and have always been the subject of much interest and attention because of their radically open and transparent business practices.

Buffer made the salary calculations and salaries of each team member public and openly publish revenues from their paid for products. They are fully transparent with email (all team members can see all emails) and they have introduced transparent pricing so you see where every penny (or cent) goes if you subscribe to a paid plan. In Buffer one of their values is default to transparency.

I thoroughly enjoyed hearing Joel share his story and respond to questions which were submitted through twitter. And it got me thinking about what we’re sharing about Dudley CVS. Then I realised we haven’t really talked much about some priorities we’ve developed this year, and now is a great time to share them here because we have just started getting together as staff and board members to take each of them forward.

Our priorities have been shaped in response to what we heard from our sector in a survey we carried out late last year (Kate shared the findings in this post) and also give focus to key areas of activity we have been developing. Here is a run down of our 5 priorities.

Championing Dudley CVS and the sector 

Our survey told us that the top request in relation to support we should offer over the next year was raising the profile of the voluntary and community sector. A group of Dudley CVS staff and trustees met last week to begin collective work around this priority, so you’ll soon be seeing a growing offer to groups and organisations around this. Do get in touch with Becky (smallgroups@dudleycvs.org.uk) if you have skills or ideas to contribute to our work around this.

Enabling and promoting innovation, transformation and sustainability

Our survey also highlighted that people want support in relation to:

  • identifying gaps in local provision, working with new and existing groups to address unmet needs in communities
  • developing groups and organisations
  • ways to diversity income streams
  • innovation and transformation
  • advocacy and leadership of the voluntary and community sector

While we offer support around these areas already, we think there will be some value in us offering a programme of support which people can access in different ways. A group of Dudley CVS staff and trustees met last week and discussed some initial ideas, the next step is to involve people from local groups and organisations in shaping the programme. If you’d like to make suggestions please add a comment to this post, if would like to join an informal ideas session in September please let me know (lorna@dudleycvs.org.uk).

Supporting and enabling collaboration in Dudley borough

Ranked fourth in the list of support people want us to offer is supporting and enabling networking and collaboration. And ranked third is creating the conditions for our sector to influence. A group of our staff and trustees will be reviewing pervious and current work around this and shaping what we can do in the next 12 months. I have already been sharing some examples of activity over the last few years and thinking on collaborative practices on the CoLab Dudley blog. We’ll keep you updated on the work of the group looking at this priority, our first meeting will be next month.

Collaborating and demonstrating impact (using PSIAMS)

Dudley CVS and a number of voluntary organisations in the borough are changing their approach to working with people, and using a tool called PSIAMS to help them manage relationships, communicate and collaborate within and across teams, and to measure the impact and value of their work. We already have a great team supporting the use of the approach and software (Mark Ellerby from Cloudberry, plus Dudley CVS officers James Baggot and Adam Deyes). There will also be a trustee and staff group working on ways that our sector can collaborate and demonstrate impact.

Ensuring use of our venues benefits local communities 

Over the last few years Dudley Council has been working with Dudley CVS to explore ways to make the most of the council’s underused buildings and land in a challenging climate and safeguard them (or even unlock them) for community use. Asset transfer was a option for one building we looked at, a management move was an option in another. The council is continuing to develop and test new processes which involve community-based organisations taking on facilities. The initial steps with us should help to set the tone and ease this transition for other facilities and organisations.

Dudley CVS are now managing Brierley Hill Civic, and we have staff and a Lunch on the Run cafe moving in to a building on Stafford Street in Dudley Town Centre (the name of the building will be revealed shortly). It is really important to us that we both show that we can make a financial success of such ventures, and that we can do that in ways which support, connect and benefit local communities, groups, clubs and societies, as well as our sector more widely. We have a group of trustees and staff with a diversity of skills and connections who will give time to making ensuring we achieve this.

Do leave a comment or get in touch if you have any thoughts on any of our priorities, and please do share links to information about what your group or organisation is currently focusing on. We’d love to hear about it!

For anyone interested in the Buffer event, I’ve archived some useful links, tweets and pictures from the Fireside Chat here.

*Fireside Chats were a series of radio addresses given by President Franklin Roosevelt and the contemporary spin on this at the event I went to was a backdrop of a 3 hour You Tube fireplace video screened for the entire duration of the talk. It was nearly as mesmerising as a real fire!

From Dudley to Dublin

Lorna Prescott 4 Comments

Last month officers from Dudley Council met with people from local voluntary organisations and community groups. The aim of the session was to begin shaping a plan for joint delivery of the Community Council vision, building on work the council have been doing to date. Council officers shared the poster below (available here as a pdf) which articulates the council’s vision. Discussion focused on opportunities which could be included in a plan for the next year.
Community Council Poster

Following the planning activity, we were invited to share thoughts and ideas on steps to achieve the changes listed on the right hand side of the poster:

  • The council changing how they do things: designing and delivering services with people, reducing red tape, having honest conversations
  • The council knowing local communities: understanding community strengths as well as needs, and making decisions by listening and talking to people
  • The council changing their culture: recognising that communities can lead, being open, honest and approachable, and supporting their staff to embrace change
  • The council working differently in communities: starting with what’s good in communities, enabling communities to make things happen, facilitate rather than control.

We will, of course, share notes and the plan developed from the session on this blog. We’ll also be looking for ideas, inspiration and learning from other places. Such as Dublin.

Two years ago Dublin City Council launched DCC Beta projects, described by Innovation Dublin as:

… a new approach by Dublin City Council to experiment, innovate and quickly test ideas directly ‘on the street’… and to solicit the opinion of Dubliners who walk, cycle or drive around these streets everyday.

The Council is suggesting it as a new way of trialling ideas, away from the realities or pressures of a ‘real’ project. The trials could last days, weeks or months, but generally wouldn’t be longer than a year or so.

While Dublin City Council ‘trials’ ideas all the time, it’s generally as part of a real project (for example the LED lights in Smithfield).  The difference between a ‘trial’ and a ‘beta’ is what the Council call ‘the headache-factor’. If something has to be changed in a beta project it generally wouldn’t (read shouldn’t) cause a problem, whereas in a trial it probably would.

Dublin City Council describe what being in ‘beta’ means on the DCC Beta blog:

Dublin City and Dublin City Council needs to be able to easily and regularly freely discuss ideas and to innovate – and to innovate you need to be able to experiment and to then learn from those experiments, and which in turn enables greater discussion.

We’re calling this overall ethos or approach ‘Dublin City Council beta’.

“Beta” and “in beta” are labels used (mainly by the IT sector) to convey that something’s imperfect and is being released early so that it can benefit from some real-world testing and feedback. We adopted this phrase as it enables us to build ‘a brand’ (ie a recognisable ethos) with an associated and established method, whereas a generic phrase such as “trial” might mean different things to different people.

There is more on the DCC beta blog about how the initiative works, and you can find out more about the beta projects on the really lovely twitter feed (@DCCbeta) or Facebook Page: DCCBetaProjects.

What do you think about Dublin’s initiative? What are your thoughts on Dudley’s Community Council vision? Leave us a comment here, on our Facebook Page or on twitter.

5 things I learned from being part of a successful crowdfunding campaign

Lorna Prescott 2 Comments

It’s Day 5 of Small Charity Week 2015, and today is all about fundraising. I’ve offered to write about crowdfunding. There are no shortage of articles, blogs and even whole books about crowdfunding out there. Becky has shared some useful links on the last slide in this presentation. I’m not going to repeat what is already out there. I thought it might be useful to share what I learned from actually being involved in a crowdfunding campaign. A bit of background follows, feel free to skip to the learning points if you wish, and let me know what you think.

How it began

Back in autumn 2013 I went along to some informal pizza suppers and conversations in coffee shops in Birmingham which were open to anyone and shared widely on social media. The sessions were convened with a view to finding people who would contribute ideas and work together to build a community of innovators, creatives and entrepreneurs and create a home for them in Birmingham.

A group of around 15 people emerged as being committed to taking things forward, and we met over a period of months to develop our thinking. 12 months later we were ready to start planning a crowdfunding campaign to help our vision turn in to reality. By this time a few more people had joined the team, crucially some amazing film makers, a designer and one of Birmingham’s best photographers. We aimed to raise £50,000 from our networks, by far the highest target to date for a Kickstarter project in Birmingham.

Kickstarter

#EpicBrum Kickstarter rewards image

Some of our Kickstarter Rewards

We got together for a 48 hour crowdfunding design lab to look at other crowdfunding campaigns, figure out what we wanted ours to feel like, make key decisions, create video storyboards, generate design content and shape our rewards structure to get us to our target. We launched on 4 December 2014. The first two weeks were amazing, then we plateaued at the £25,000 mark (50% of our target) for over a week, way past Christmas, with only 8 days left to our deadline. Something important to consider in crowdfunding is that platforms like Kickstarter are all or nothing. If you don’t hit your target no money is taken from the people who pledged support from you.

We re-grouped just after New Year’s Day and put in a final, monumental effort, reaching out as far as we could in our networks, following up any likely leads, and still remembering to have fun together. (Fun included some guerrilla gardening style placing of plants around Digbeth, where we wanted to make our home.) Thanks to the relentless positivity and effort of the whole team we hit our £50,000 target a matter of days later, leaving us 2 days to try and hit a stretch target of £65,000. Which we did, with minutes to spare! We had successfully engaged a community of 586 backers, all of whom have an interest in everything we’ve been doing since, many of whom are now signed up members of our Impact Hub community and amazing space.

What I learned 

I learned a huge amount being part of this Kickstarter campaign, and below I’ve attempted to draw out 5 of the most important things I learned.

1. You need to invest in your networks if you are going to ask them to invest in you

It took years of investment in relationships, countless conversations and coffees and 3 mind-blowing TEDx events in Birmingham to create a network and team strong enough to do something this audacious. If I was looking to raising just £5,000 through crowdfunding I would spend at least a year building genuine face to face and online relationships. That means saying ‘yes’ to all sorts of conversations and invitations, and thinking hard about how well your existing relationships are being maintained.

Wellington boot with a plant in it and “#EpicBrum" painted on it

Kickstarter campaign plant propaganda!

2. Being ridiculously optimistic definitely helps!

A strong, well networked and ridiculously optimistic team was crucial. Our team used a WhatsApp group to constantly encourage, celebrate, scream with excitement, be silly and talk tactics. Without that willingness to communicate at all hours of day and night and be hugely supportive of each other I don’t think we’d have achieved what we did.

3. Our secret sauce: diversity

A really diverse range of skills and experience was our secret sauce. A huge amount of credit is due to Immy Kaur, who convened this diverse team, spotted gaps and knew who to lure in at the right times!

4. Know your talents and step up

You have to step up. When things are this big and bonkers you can’t wait for someone to ask, or give you instruction. You have to know your strengths and talents and use them. For example Verity developed a wonderful photography project which got picked up by the Birmingham Post.

5. Amanda Palmer’s book helped me to really understand what we were doing

I think it is really worth reading Amanda Palmer’s book The Art of Asking. You can get a flavour of what she has achieved in her TED Talk, however the book will give you much more of a sense of what it means to fall in to your crowd and ask them to catch you. In order to ‘crowd fund’ you need to make sure you have a crowd, and they are ready to catch you. Which takes me back to learning point 1 above.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this, let me know if anything surprised you, resonated for you or just doesn’t feel relevant to you.

If you are embarking on crowd building and crowd funding I wish you the very best of luck!

And if you’re interested in Impact Hub Birmingham, the community and collaborative workshop I’m part of, please do let me know, I’d love to introduce you. You can get me on twitter: @dosticen, call, text or WhatsApp on 07501 722255 or good old email: lorna@dudleycvs.org.uk

Voice and influence – a post for #smallcharityweek Policy Day

Lorna Prescott 1 Comment

Ten years ago my work in Dudley was focused on ways that community groups, faith groups and voluntary organisations could influence decision making about local services in the borough. There were all sorts of partnerships of leaders, policy makers and managers creating strategies and plans in relation to regeneration, learning, health, community safety, housing, the environment, heritage and more. It was very difficult to know if our sector was exercising any influence on decisions and plans being made, and what impact we were having.

So we embarked on what was to become a seven year journey with community development specialists changes, contributing to the development and local use of an influence framework for groups and networks. It is called Voice, and it can help small charities to think through ways to increase their influence. (The Voice framework led to three other influence frameworks being developed – see changes website for more about these.)

Ways we influence: whispering, shouting, negotiating, taking action, being part of a bigger network, flirting, shamingWe had lots and lots of conversations with people involved in networks in Dudley borough comprising community groups, small charities and faith groups, as well as larger charities.

We discovered a number of ways that they influence.

  • Which of these have you tried?
  • Can you see advantages and disadvantages depending on your overall goal?
  • What works for your group or organisation?

By working with people from a range local groups and organisations in Dudley borough, we also figured out a useful way for people to what their capacity to influence is, and what steps they can take to increase it. These steps form a crucial part of the Voice framework.

Voice: steps to influenceDo these steps reflect things you have thought about?

Do any of them give you ideas about new things you could try?

Have a go!

There is much more to the Voice framework, and there are a number of people who work and volunteer in Dudley borough who have been trained to work with groups using Voice. I use thinking and activities from Voice in my work all the time because it is so useful. If you would like Dudley CVS to run sessions on influence using Voice please do get in touch.

Further reading

You can read more about Voice in this Handy Guide.
There was a lovely short article about influence and Voice published in NCVO’s magazine.
For anyone with a taste for something more academic, there was an essay on Voice published in the Community Development Journal in 2008.

 

 

Influencing decision-makers

Lorna Prescott 1 Comment

small charity weekAs you have no doubt spotted by now, we are celebrating Small Charity Week in Dudley borough and we have plans for all sorts of support and discussion opportunities both face to face and online. I’ve offered to collect and share ideas, stories and top tips for Policy and Influence day (Wednesday 17 June).

In our most recent survey of our sector the third most important area of support organisations and groups said they want Dudley CVS to provide is creating the conditions for the sector to influence local policy and planning, be engaged, represented and involved in local decision making bodies. Also making it on to the top 10 priorities was support to the sector to campaign for social change.

icon of a loudspeakerAs the Small Charity Week website points out: small charities are the centre of civil society. In the UK 97% of charities have an annual turnover of less than £1.5 million but in terms of impact on local communities here and across the globe their contribution is phenomenal. It is important therefore that the voices of small charities are heard.

Some of the ways Dudley CVS helps small charities to be heard is by:

  • supporting networks which bring together and amplify the voices of small charities
  • working with small charities to get press coverage
  • giving staff time to support small groups at social media surgeries so that they can communicate and connect online using free tools
  • representing small charities and the wider sector on a range of strategic boards

We’d love to hear from local small charities about your…

  • success stories  – what or who have you influenced and how?
  • learning – what worked and what didn’t in your efforts to influence?
  • top tips for other small charities who want to influence policy and have their voice heard

Just leave us a comment below or reply on Facebook or Twitter.

And in the meantime, here is a brief but very useful piece of advice about influencing decision-makers on the Campaign Central site. Let us know what you think of it.

Storytelling for Change

Lorna Prescott 4 Comments

Image saying “the story is what’s going to get people excited"A key finding of our recent survey of local voluntary organisations, charities, community groups and social enterprises was that they would like support raising their profile. We are also looking at ways that we can raise the profile of the work we do at Dudley CVS. We’re starting to think about storytelling – both how we can improve at it, and support others to use it as a tool.

A few Dudley CVS staff are signing up for this free online course, Storytelling for Change. The idea is that by the end of the 7 week course we will:

  • Be confident in using stories, especially personal stories, as a part of our communication toolkit.
  • Know how to tell stories and use a specific set of storytelling skills so that we connect with hearts and minds.
  • Have developed, rehearsed, and received feedback on one personal story as a replicable model so that we can build a personal ‘library’ or ‘back pocket’ of stories that can be used in different situations.
  • Be able to use a 5-step process to integrate story into presentations for change, work or many other situations.

The course organisers recommend groups of 2-6 people going through the course together. If anyone would like to join our group, or would like us to help co-ordinate additional groups from people in Dudley just leave a comment here, or get in touch via twitter (@DudleyCVS) or email (lorna@dudleycvs.org.uk). The course starts on 8 May, and ends on 25 June. You need to register by 22 May. If you’ve never taken an online course before I can highly recommend it. It’s great to work at your own pace, at times that suit you, in places that work for you. I haven’t yet done an online course in a group, so I hope that will add a motivating factor.

Do let us know if you’ve taken any great online courses or are interested in knowing more about them.

Image credit: Walter Lim on Flickr , shared under a Creative Commons licence

Helping people to get ideas off the ground

Lorna Prescott 2 Comments

Imagine you have an idea for an activity in your community, something open to all, that people could take part in every week. There are often lots of things which get in the way of getting such ideas started, even simply to try them out to see if they work. Rooms for community activities cost money to hire (understandably). Funders need groups to have lots of paperwork in place. And they often assume you know everything you need to at the beginning. There isn’t much scope for learning from experience and adapting things as you go. It’s easy to see why lots of great ideas never get off the ground. And why lots of rooms in community venues often sit empty, without these amazing activities taking place in them.

Which is why it is so exciting for Dudley CVS to be working on something which is re-thinking how things usually work. Our starting point is discovering all sorts of amazing things in Wrens Nest which can support projects – rooms and resources in a the community centre, skills and talents people have and want to share, ideas of things people want to do together. Open Hub is the name given to this platform we’re creating to nurture local projects and enterprises.

On the 2nd of February this year two mums from Wrens Nest Estate took part in an Open Hub project co-design session. In just over an hour we shared visions for the community, discovered all sorts of skills and talents we each had, looked at some projects started in other parts of the world, and designed a Stay & Play project. The first session took place 3 days later and has been running weekly since. Promoted through Facebook and word-of-mouth to begin with, 8 families (that’s 13 kids) joined in during in the first 5 weeks.

On 24th of February five local residents took part in a session to co-design a cooking project focused on healthy eating and trying out recipes from Slimmers World. A week later 13 adults and 4 kids got together to cook their first meal and eat together. They have been getting together to cook and eat each week since.

We’re still in the middle of lots of learning and testing of how to create these completely new ways of working, and we will share this in due course. In the meantime we’ll be making all the individual project designs and resources we’ve developed open source, so that anyone can borrow and build on them. To find out more contact me (lorna@dudleycvs.org.uk) or add a comment right here on this blog.

One meeting that changed everything

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photo of a big top with blackboards around in the shape of letters spelling COMMUNICATE

Image credit: Simon Huggins, shared through Creative Commons on Flickr

At Dudley CVS a common and constant challenge is that of effective internal communication. It’s a perennial topic of discussion at our staff away days. Over the years we’ve tried noticeboards in the hallway, staff meetings, various ideas involving email, a brief flirtation with Yammer, team leader meetings and more. We’ve never really got it to work.

Which is what made this morning so blindingly brilliant. Thanks to some sensible colleagues we’ve started 2015 with dates in for quarterly staff meetings with required attendance, and monthly staff meetings in intervening months which are optional. I wasn’t particularly supportive of this, I have found staff meetings in the past to be less than inspiring, and personally I much prefer deeper one-to-one conversations with people to find out what they are up to and thinking about.

Flipchart with heading 'Agenda' and list 1. Exec update, 2. Interviews, 3. AOBI think we were all a bit surprised when we saw the agenda for this morning’s staff meeting (right). So after an update from our Chief Officer, Andy, on what our Board is focused on, we moved on to ‘interviews’. Andy asked someone to set a timer for 5 minutes on their phone, then he started choosing staff members at random to ask questions of, until everyone had been subjected to this!

Terry Gee from our Integrated Plus team was picked on first, he was asked by Andy:

  • What achievement in the last 2 months are you most proud of?
  • What is the biggest challenge you face in the next few months?
  • What was your nickname at school?
  • What is the biggest bit of work you are getting your teeth in to next?
  • What do you want to be written on your Dudley CVS epitaph?

These are great (and fun) questions, which clearly I noted down so I could begin to prepare my own responses. But as Andy moved on the the second round of questioning he changed the questions! Then Terry, who by now could relax, started to scribble questions down and slid them across the table to Andy. I loved this natural and welcome disruptive behaviour and we were also all enjoying hearing about each other’s work in a different way.

Then it got even better. Andy asked Nicki whose work she knew least about. She looked at me. He asked her what she was going to do about it. So now Nicki and I are meeting next week for coffee (in a cafe, of course) to catch up on our respective projects and work. Given we haven’t managed to arrange something as simple as this for 5 years I really welcomed the nudge.

Then it was my turn to be interviewed. I think Andy really has a sense of what his staff need at any given time, so amongst other things I was asked to identify a colleague who could be a listening ear to support me around some challenges I am struggling with. This was just brilliant. I looked around the room at these familiar faces in a completely new way, with a different pair of eyes. Suddenly they had shifted from being people who are busy and do great work that’s not much to do with me, to a hugely rich pool of skilled, experienced and supportive friends and mentors who might give a bit of time to listen to what I find difficult. And though I was asked to choose one colleague on the spot, I have already approached a second and got a time to meet next week. I hope that I will continue this, as there are so many different perspectives and ways of thinking and doing among our staff that could really help me to have insights in to my work, I would be daft not to ask for a bit of time from everyone. And yet I don’t think I’ve ever really asked before.

Lots of pairings were made through the meeting, and we even had the most constructive conversation I think we’ve ever had about creating useful and effective staff meetings, so now we have clear topics for the next two optional staff meetings. This makes them feel much more appealing and likely to be attended. Might we have nailed it?

We’d love to know:

  • What internal communication strategies or activities work well for your group or organisation?

And invite you to reflect on the following:

  • If you could have coffee (or tea) with one of your colleagues who you don’t know so well, who would it be and what’s stopping you?
  • Who in your organisation could be a great listening ear and source of support when you are facing challenges? What would prompt you to ask them for half an hour of their time?