Tag: Leadership

Social Media and Social Housing

Trust from Joi on Flickr - click image to see the original.

This afternoon I spoke at the National Housing and Disrepair Forum annual conference. 100 or so council officers, solicitors, barristers, housing association types and others worrying about just how much money is spent on compensating council tenants for repairs that haven’t been done. This is a link to the presentation:  Talk is cheap – so use it more.

I was invited by Kate Priest, the head of the legal department at Birmingham City Council that deals with such matters.  Kate had heard me talking about local government, social media and the changing democratic relationship in one of my sessions at the Institute of Local Government.

A £3,000 pound compensation bill for a tenant could mean a £15,000 bill from their lawyers – and all that comes out of the repairs budget. So it’s worth exploring other ways to stop this.

I wanted to get across the idea that this can be thought of as a problem of trust. Lawyers thrive where trust does not. The challenge I wanted to throw to the group was how can they understand this as more than a problem of record keeping, accountability and process? Instead can they involve their people in sincere networks of trust within neighbourhoods.
The presentation is simply designed to offer examples of how and where the social web builds real networks of trust – ones which can make things happen. It was intended to give them a sense that trust is worth hard cash. The tenant who trusts their council worker and so negotiates directly with them could free up thousands for work of public value.  The tenants who are part of a wider network of trust may even be able to help negotiate priorities.

Thank you for a big chunk of input on twitter (image here and here of the 19 comments). Here is what you suggested:

“By presenting an authentic face to tenants which listens and responds to their concerns and issues and by helping to link tenants up to find others in their situation, or who have resolved issues to share experience and connect”  Dave Briggs.

“Listen to people where they are already talking about you (good and bad stuff)” Paul Henderson.

“Any way of improving two-way communication must surely help” Catnip.

“Councils need to improve / review their relationships offline before making a difference online”  Stuart Parker.

“One easy win would be for blogs to be set up for individual estates – the council can keep tenants fully in the loop of developments, the tenants would be able to have their say, but also that blog could help develop & bind the community of the estate itself together. wins all round, for minimal financial investment, really.”  Simon Gray.

“Not a council tenant, but as a private one an answerphone and email address would be a start!” and “I think the question’s wrong: maybe, ‘what are the problems facing council tenants’ and keep soc media in mind when addressing them ” Michael Grimes.

“This is helping in some respects, esp with young people on 1st tenancy https://www.inliving.co.uk ” John Popham.

“If social media is ‘informal’ it will help get over the “stigma” of phoning somone or appearing in person.” Paul Jennings.

“Human face and interaction with two-way content. Would also bring tenants into contact with each other as well as council.” Nicky Getgood.

“I think councils are way off social media. Difficult to control comms leads to degraded service. Also privacy issues and challenge of delivering service using tools and channels that are external. Eg what if Twitter down? Ian Edwards.

“Google alerts for blog posts about “dog sh*t” or “broken paving slab” + their ward, then follow it up. That’s only a semi joke”.  Jon Hickman.

“Blogging for different estates. Would get people to know each other and get them talking about issues that matter to them.”  Antonio Roberts.

“Works t’other way- CLG wants tenants 2 have a role in mgmt- better way 2 engage than endless meetings (although meetings r useful)”.  Nick Drew.

Toronto based Michael Cayley also asked: “ pls share some references used for trust & social capital session aimed at lawyers who defend councils from housing repair claims.

I used very simple examples. I was facing an audience of 100 people, none of whom blog, only one had heard of twitter.  Even though I was amongst many lawyers only a smattering had come across Linkedin.   I needed to show how building networks of trust can help make good things happen.  I used the example of the Birmingham Bloggers group and the Social Media Surgeries. I used the volunteer effort that mysociety can apply to ventures like  fixmystreet (and not a soul in the room  had heard of the site). I also talked to them about the open innovation exchange experiment and how it’s model of open collaboration to pitch for contracts is using trust to disrupt existing ways of doing business and improve the outcome for the public.

Responses were mixed. Some went for the very human (my favourites) such as getting good at saying sorry, takings flowers when you’ve messed up and having street meeting with contractors. Others talked specifically about  procedures and software to track transactions.  One reported how law firms use facebook to recruit people for court cases.

Overall I tried to emphasise that I wanted people to go away not so much thinking about the internet, but appreciating that whatever they can do to build trust should ultimately reduce their need to fight fruitless court battles with the very people they exist to help.

We’ll see what comes next.

Do Muslims have a sense of humour?

islamickittehborder.jpgThat’s one of the questions asked on the site of a new programme being launched in Birmingham on November 7th.  The full question on Heard and not Seen is

I want to ask, “Do Muslims have a sense of humour?”.
I ask as the media portrays them in a negative way; extremism, fundamentalism etc etc. Where do Muslims go to relax and have fun as I understand they don’t drink either. I’m just curious…

One answer can be found on the site below the question, whilst I think an even better one comes from here in the form of the islamic lolcats you see on the left.

Heard and not Seen is run by Friction Arts (who’ve just shifted their own website over to wordpress) and is best described as askthedriver for Muslims.

If you also want to go to the launch and ask some questions details are here.

Do you Strip?

Courtesy of Dr Craig on Flickr

If you want to people on side and working together, less is always more.

Tom Steinberg knows that. He runs MySociety, the very successful charity which punches above it weight using the internet to help people collaborate to improve civil society.  Among tips on how to build websites for social good he includes this one:

Take whatever your first website plan is and remove 90% of the features you want. Then build it and launch it and your users will tell you which features they actually wanted instead. Build them and bask in the warm glow of appreciation.

It is easier for people to add than for them to take away. Provide a solid platform and others can innovate on it. Not only that, they all have a clear sense of shared aims.  Offer endless choice or demands and we get confused and wonder off to pastures more edifying.

Bob Sutton also knows this.  Here he describes in some detail how a small charity again used clarity and simplicity to achieve far beyond what we might expect of them.  I’ll quote at length.

We analyze an astounding effort by a small non-profit in Boston called The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) to lead a campaign to reduce medical errors in U.S. hospitals.  Their goal was to stop over 100,000 preventable deaths in hospitals over a one year period. And, although there is some controversy about the campaign’s effects, it appears that they ultimately involved hospitals that included over 75% of the beds in the U.S. and exceed their goal by about 20,000 lives.

You can get the article here at the McKinsey website (it is free, you just have to register) or here is the pdf:

Download the_ergonomics_of_innovation.pdf

Even if you get the pdf here, I suggest poking around the McKinsey site as they have lots of great free stuff.

We call this article “the ergonomics of innovation” because the IHI staff did such a brilliant job of designing the campaign so that it reduced the cognitive and emotional load on their tiny staff (about 100 people) and, especially, on the thousands of hospital staff members who participated in the campaign.  For example, IHI focused everyone’s efforts on six relatively simple behaviors that had been shown to be big causes of preventable deaths in prior research.  They developed very concrete guidelines that hospitals could use to stop these causes — which reduced load on everyone because, although the list could have contained hundreds of evidence-based practices, instead, it helped people focus their efforts and also made it more efficient for hospitals to share what they had learned because they were working on a limited numbers of problems.

Of course the whole article is worth reading.  This is about putting in effort early to make good decisions about what is needed.  The rest is a question of clear communication and naturally enough, stripping.

Image courtesy of Dr Craig. Hat Tip for thought son MySociety and also the wonderful neologism of decrementalism Public Strategy. I first published this over on the Caret blog.

Seth Godin’s First Law of mass media:

Organizations will work tirelessly to de-personalize every communication medium they encounter.

Email used to be honest interactions between consenting adults.
Facebook pages (and Wikipedia, too) were built by people, not staffs.
Twits came from real people, and so did instant messages.One by one, the mass marketers have insisted on robocalling,
spamming, jingling and lying their way into our lives. The pronoun
morphs from “you” to “me” to “us” to “the corporation” …

The public works tirelessly to flee to actual interactions between
real people, and our organizations work even more diligently (and with
more leverage) to corporatize and anonymize the interactions.

Fascinating observations found here. At this stage I am working with organisation try to persuade that social media is about the individual and the personal. I’ve not yet thought that if/when I win that battle there will still be substantial forces of de-personalisation trying to undermine that work. I’m hoping that the right way will be so liberating and so transparently useful that only a lunatic would want to go backwards. Umh….

Hattip. See also.