#bekind: The Organisation

Organising the business of #bekind for the purposes of performance and the achievement of results

Social infrastructure according to Eric Kleinenberg is the “physical places and organisations that shape the way people interact”. This is a personal blog about social infrastructure and about how we might organise #bekind to be an organisation that shapes the way we all interact and work together to create tangible results and purposeful jobs.

I’ve written previously about Burslem’s beautiful but neglected Covered Market Hall — a physical space — but this blog is a bit more focused on how #bekind The Organisation could be organised to produce positive results for the folks of North Staffs.

The blog is based on work carried out by Peter F Drucker, a management consultant renowned for his books analysing politics, economics and society. “The basic economic resource — ‘the means of production’, to use the economist’s term — is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor ‘labour’. It is and will be knowledge.”

He uttered these words in 1993 when global warming and climate change were less of an issue than they are today and so by putting ‘new’ in front of ‘knowledge’, we can apply the theory of ‘new knowledge’ to our practical work in North Staffordshire, as we strive to showcase an entirely new business model for local economies.

#bekind The Organisation — its Characteristics

#bekind is currently a not for profit company limited by guarantee. It is transitioning to a community benefit society, an FCA regulated legal entity that can raise capital by selling shares to its community. In short, it’s a co-op.

Common ownership is an important first characteristic of our business. We are a special purpose institution that concentrates on one task: eliminating waste. In this regard, it is single-minded — from top to bottom and the centre to the edge — we all have one job to do.

Results are measurable: in units of time contributed by individuals in pursuit of this task, and are reported electronically, which means that the dissemination of results can serve as a feedback tool for enhanced performance.

All time contributed is valued equally. No one contribution is greater or more important than another.

The organisation is managed to incentivise and reward contributions. A management information system will be developed to assist with decision-making.

What matters to us is the growth rate of contribution. Our job is to ensure that the growth rate of contributions increases at a steady 7% per week, compounded.

The people who are accountable for the organisation’s mission, its spirit and its performance are the board. The board is still being formed but four founder directors have already been sourced. Others have been identified but not approached.

In order to be able to perform, we will remain independent and autonomous of any funders, investors or grant-givers that wish to restrict our ambition.

We will be organised for continuous self-improvement. This will ensure that ‘creating the new’ is baked into our business. We will also be organised for developing and exploiting our successes commercially and for learning to innovate systematically so that the abandonment of the old happens quickly.

Creating our own revenue stream means we can remain independent, autonomous and self-financing.

We will operate across the region as a seven-strong network of teams, one for each of the seven towns of North Staffordshire, with Burslem being the first. The business model will focus on team performance and team results by being able to make fast decisions that will lead to continuous improvement across the network.

We will ensure that each of the management teams are accountable by putting them under the discipline of a weekly compounded growth rate in contribution of 7%.

Continuous personal self-improvement and continuous organisational improvement will increase productivity, demanding we build continuous learning into the job and organisation.

The best way for people to learn how to become more productive is to teach, therefore to obtain the productivity we need for our region, the organisation will become a learning and teaching organisation.

Burslem already has The Burslem School of Art. The Covered Market Hall could become The Burslem School of Catering and Hospitality. The Queens Theatre could also become The Burslem School of Performing Arts and the Wedgwood could become The Burslem School of Business & Economics.

Repurposing our heritage assets for commercial purposes would eliminate the waste of these public resources.

#bekind as a Responsibility-based Organisation

We are not interested in power. Responsibility for the elimination of waste is the principle which informs our organisation. This responsibility is social.

Each town team will take responsibility for the degree to which it eliminates waste. The best ideas will enable cross-fertilisation so that the core competency of our model is the elimination of waste.

The elimination of waste is a specialised task and we believe it is the most important task in society. Nothing matters as much as the elimination of waste.

In this respect, we are self-centred, seeing only this one task, and discharging this one task.

For all the #bekind town team organisation leaders, the elimination of waste is a joint responsibility.

It is the special purpose of our business and it is this specialisation that gives us our capacity to perform.

We will not waste society’s resources, which means that economic performance is our first responsibility. “A business that does not show a profit at least as equal to its cost of capital is socially responsible”, as Drucker reminds us.

This turns the social, economic and environmental problem of waste, into a commercial opportunity.

We have neither legitimacy or competency in politics. We will want things from those holding the political power, but only things that enable us to better do our own job. We are not concerned with political power for ourselves, we are only concerned with function.

As a responsibility-based organisation, we will be composed of specialists, since each of us has our own responsibility to eliminate waste.

Every individual has a lived experience to offer the organisation and each of us knows more about our own speciality than anybody else in the organisation.

There are no “superiors” that know the job of the “subordinates”. Everyone’s task is personal.

Everyone takes responsibility for meeting our objectives and for making their own contribution, which we measure. And everyone controls their own work by feedback from their results to their objectives.

It is the responsibility of all our members to communicate their own objectives, their priorities and their contribution to their fellow workers — up, down and sideways. And it is the responsibility of all members to make sure that their own objectives fit in with the organisation’s job of eliminating waste.

We aim to make people responsible. To make everyone a contributor.

As Drucker reminded us many years ago and The Bennett Institute more recently, the more productive an economy, the greater the equality of income; the less productive, the greater the inequality of income.

CITIZENSHIP through #bekind

The task of eliminating waste will lead to the creation of new productivity services and enterprise software that is aimed at changing the community and at changing the human being.

There is a growing need for continuing education of adults and as such the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (“VCSE”) Sector is likely to be one of the true ‘growth sectors’ of developed economies. We can hope that the continuing need for charity will subside.

We believe that #bekind has the potential to become the new and autonomous centre of meaningful citizenship.

Citizenship is the willingness to contribute to one’s country. It is the willingness to live for one’s country. To restore citizenship is a central need of post-industrial economies and post-capitalist societies like ours.

Citizenship means active commitment. It means responsibility. It means making a difference in one’s community, one’s society, one’s country.

Citizenship cannot be inspired by government because the affairs of government are so far away that individuals cannot make a difference. Neither can they take responsibility, nor can they take action to make a difference. Without citizenship, there cannot be the responsible commitment which creates the citizen. Nor can there be the satisfaction and pride that come from making a difference.

We must recreate citizenship.

There is an equal need to restore community, especially the traditional communities like North Staffordshire. The community that is needed in our post-industrial economies and post-capitalist societies has to be based on commitment, compassion and kindness.

Our individuals need a meaningful sphere of social life, of personal relationships and of contributions outside and beyond the job, outside and beyond the organisation, and indeed outside and beyond their own specialised knowledge area.

The one area in which this need can be satisfied is the VCSE sector. There individuals can contribute. They can have responsibility. This can make a difference. They can begin as volunteers.

The volunteering tradition is being crushed by the state. The places where volunteering could take place, such as the libraries, parks, community centres, youth clubs and so on have been forced to close.

The number of new community churches that are springing up around our urban centres and which are staffed by ‘volunteers’ is evidence of change. These volunteers are no longer ‘helpers’. They have become ‘partners’. They may have a paid manager but increasingly the rest of the team are volunteers. They increasingly run the organisation.

The main reason for this upsurge in volunteer participation is not an increase in need. It is the search on the part of the volunteers for community, for commitment, contribution and kindness.

Everyone who joins the congregation is expected, after attending for a few Sundays, to start working for a church activity — either in the church itself or in the outside community. A few months later he or she will then be asked to take over the management of such an activity. Everyone is expected to be a ‘leader’.

Citizenship in and through the VCSE sector is not a panacea for the ills of a post-industrial economy like ours, but it may be a prerequisite for tackling these ills. It restores the civic responsibility that is the mark of citizenship, and the civic pride that is the mark of community.

The need is greatest in places like Stoke & North Staffordshire where community and community organisations — and citizenship altogether — have been most thoroughly damaged, and in fact, have been almost totally destroyed. Government in these places has not only become totally discredited. It has become totally impotent.

In the meantime, only autonomous organisations in the VCSE sector based on volunteers and releasing the spiritual energies of people — for instance the Cultural Squatters — can provide both the social services the society needs and the leadership development the economy needs.

Every post-industrial economy needs an autonomous self-governing and self-financing VCSE sector of community organisations. It needs it above all to provide the bonds of community and to restore active citizenship. Historically, community was fate. In the post-capitalist society community has to become commitment, and be valued objectively according to standards that employ ‘Generally Accepted Accounting Principles’.

SUSTAINABLE KNOWLEDGE: Its economics and productivity

Knowing that waste is unsustainable and that everything must be recycled, is the job of continual learning. Talent, time, and public resources that are wasted, are symptoms of an unsustainable economy.

At first glance, the economy seems hardly affected by the shift to knowledge as the basic resource. It seems to be ‘capitalist’ rather than ‘post-capitalist’. But looks are deceptive.

The economy will remain a market economy. Criticism of the market as the organiser of economic activity goes back all the way to Aristotle. Most of the charges against it are well founded. But as no less an anti-capitalist as Karl Marx pointed out 150 years ago, the market for all its imperfections is still vastly superior to all other ways of organising economic activity. What makes the market superior is precisely that it organises economic activity around information.

Amazon, Microsoft Alphabet and Meta weren’t around 25 years ago and have as their business the production and distribution of knowledge and information rather than the production and distribution of objects.

Commercial banks no longer make money on the margin between what they pay for money and what they get for it because it is shrinking steadily. Instead they make a living by receiving fees for information. The same principles apply to Uber, which owns no vehicles and AirBnB that owns no hotels.

As the new information-based economy continues to expand and the old industrial-based economy continues to retreat, there is less and less return on the traditional resources, labour, land and (money) capital. The only — at least the main — producers of wealth are information and knowledge.

Information and knowledge that eliminate waste, and which enable unemployed people to participate in prosocial or pro-environmental activities, has in theory the potential to underpin a new and more sustainable economy.

It is this economic theory that is being put to the test in Stoke & North Staffordshire. Can this economic theory put sustainable knowledge — the knowledge to eliminate waste — into the centre of the wealth-producing process?

When the job of an economy is to eliminate waste, it is quite different from any existing economic theory, whether Keynesian, or Neo-Keynesian, Classical or Neo-Classical.

One of the economists’ basic assumptions is that ‘perfect competition’ is the model for the allocation of scarce resources and also for the distribution of economic rewards. But in the knowledge economy, imperfect competition seems to be inherent in the economy itself. Initial advantages gained through early application and exploitation of knowledge (the ‘learning curve’) become permanent and irreversible (‘first mover advantage’).

There is no shred of evidence, according to Drucker, that increased consumption in the economy leads to greater production of knowledge. But there is also no shred of evidence that greater investment in the economy leads to greater production of knowledge.

When it comes to new knowledge — the knowledge to sustain life — there are three kinds. The first is continuing improvement of process, product, service and experience. The second is exploitation; the continuous exploitation of existing knowledge to develop new and different products, services and experiences. Finally there is genuine innovation. These three ways of applying new and sustainable knowledge to produce positive change in the economy (and in society as well) need to be worked together and at the same time. They are all equally needed.

There is no economic theory unless there is a model that expresses economic events in quantitative relationships. An economy that is able to unlock and store the value of a volunteer’s contribution that would otherwise be wasted — and trade it as a social currency on a social stock exchange for something else that would otherwise be wasted (such as an unsold ticket to watch Port Vale FC) — is an economy that can trade its currency with that of another.

An independent economy that is built on the dissemination of sustainable knowledge is a theoretical model of economic and commercial sustainability that is being tested in the post-industrial economy of Stoke & North Staffordshire.

Sustainable knowledge formation within the #bekind economy is an investment which our members make on a daily basis. The exact return which our economy generates on that knowledge remains a job for the region’s research and academic community but it must surely be a determining factor in our ability to compete economically. Increasingly, productivity of sustainable knowledge will be decisive in our economic and social success, and in our economic performance altogether.

Especially when our economic performance is compared with that of others. The productivity of resources has become a central concern in developed economies. It underlies the relationship between environment and economic growth.

Put simply, money capital faces a productivity problem. How much added production does an additional unit of invested money generate? What is the productivity of money capital? What is the difference in the productivity of different types of capital? Money capital versus social or knowledge capital?

Centralisation as we now know from the collapse of the centrally planned economies, impedes the productivity of money capital, and it is money capital that has been injected into our economy in vast quantities, but with very little impact on the levels of productivity. These central bank investments were not centrally planned but they were and still are, highly centralised.

They have had very little ‘multiplier’ effects on the whole in economies that are post-industrial and societies such as ours, that are post-capitalist. They have created few jobs outside of the south east and the bigger cities such as Manchester, but even then the spillover effects in places like Wigan, Oldham and Bolton are less than obvious.

Thus these investments act as a drag on the national economy rather than supplying it with additional investment capital. Which is why we must form our own kind of investment capital — the knowledge and knowhow now needed to make a positive difference, and which is accessible to ordinary people who might themselves be under or unemployed. This is the waste of talent we wish to address.

Innovation, that is, the application of knowledge to produce new knowledge, is not the job of lone individuals in their garage. It requires systematic effort, and a high degree of organisation. But it also requires both decentralisation and diversity, and that is the opposite of central planning and centralisation.

The knowledge of how to make a positive difference as a committed and compassionate citizen is a knowledge that has to aim high to produce results. As we have seen over the 15 years since this project first began, the steps are small and incremental. The goal is ambitious because the knowledge of how to make a positive difference is productive only if it is applied to making a positive difference.

Hence the importance of Stoke & North Staffordshire and the importance of creating a demonstrator model that can showcase the art of making positive differences.

Every single step we have taken has been small, but from the beginning we have aimed high. We have always dreamed of ‘showing the world what good looks like’ and now, thanks to Burslem we have found the stage upon which our show can be performed.

The aim is to produce by means of step-by-step improvements a few years later a radically different product, service and experience that in itself, makes a difference to one’s life, and lifestyle.

When reading Drucker it is reassuring to learn that making knowledge productive requires a clear focus. We have that focus in our quest to eliminate waste, but we also have that focus on the location of North Staffordshire where our collective efforts are highly concentrated. He reminds us that “the knowledge effort requires purpose and organisation. It is not a ‘flash of genius’. It is work. He also reminds us that high knowledge productivity — whether in improvement, in exploitation or in innovation — comes at the end of a long gestation period. That it requires the most ‘difficult of all management achievements: balancing the long term with the short term’.

We recognise that the key to making a positive difference is learning how to make a positive difference — whether for an individual, for an organisation or for the entire economy. How to make a positive difference must become learnable. It should be teachable.

There is always so much more ignorance around than there is knowledge.

Economic specialisation in sustainable knowledge gives us enormous performance potential as a region. Because sustainable knowledge is specialised we also need a methodology, a discipline, a process to turn this potential into performance. Otherwise most of the available knowledge will not become productive. It will remain information.

THE BURSLEM SCHOOL

‘The Burslem School’ is just a reminder that education sits at the heart of what we all care passionately about, but also a reminder that our work must be learnable. It certainly is not an institution in the traditional sense that concerns itself with the young who are not yet citizens, not yet responsible, not yet in the workforce. In our world the school becomes the institution of adults as well. It accounts for performance and results.

The West moved into leadership throughout the world between 1500 and 1650 in large measure because it reorganised its schools around the new technology of the printed book. Existing institutions saw in it a threat to their authority because it enables students to read on their own.

The lesson is that technology itself matters less than the changes it triggers in substance, content and focus of schooling and school. These changes are what really matters. Technology, however important, is not the most important feature in our school. By focusing on the elimination of waste, our school rethinks the role and function of schooling and school; it rethinks our content, focus, purpose and values. Technology will be very important; but primarily because it will force us to do new things rather than because it will enable us to do old things better.

#bekind aims to provide universal literacy around sustainability and the opportunity of empowering people with new knowledge that makes positive change an achievable reality. It will imbue students on all levels and of all ages with the motivation to learn and with the discipline of continuing learning. It will open to both highly educated people and those who did not gain access to a higher or further education. It is schooling that we hope will permeate the economy and society with employing organisations of all kinds: businesses, government agencies, nonprofits becoming learning and teaching institutions, and with schools from across our region increasingly working in partnership with employers and employing organisations.

Universal literacy that eliminates waste is the priority. It is the foundation. Equipping individual students with the tools to perform, to contribute and to be employable is also our social duty.

It is in respect to universal literacy that the new technology of learning by experience will have its first impact. Rather than wasting time and energy in teaching things that are best learned rather than taught, that is, things that are being learned behaviourally and through drill, repetition, feedback. Sustainable behaviour change will be a rewarding experience for all concerned.

Learning will be enjoyable and disciplined, immersive and organised. Successful video game design incorporates role playing and opportunities for levelling up already. It isn’t hard to imagine that the same techniques could be applied to an e-sports video game, the mission of which is to eliminate waste.

Particularly as #bekind could supply the in-game currency. “Let the game be the teacher.”

Ours is a school that focuses on practice rather than theory. It will account for results.

Knowledge is always embodied in a person and taught and learned by a person. The shift to the knowledge society therefore puts the person in the centre of the system. Being at the centre of the system helps us to think about a whole new range of personalised services, where the individual is the point of data integration. “Manage my money; Manage my health”: a new approach to consumerism. Personalised learning experiences that improve one’s lot.

A Social Infrastructure Information System and an organisation to run it.

We’re a bunch of on-the-ground practitioners with big hearts and big ambitions, and now recognise the need to buddy up with like-minded investors, funders or grant-givers.

If this is you, then please get in touch.

— Mike