Is Cottingham part of Kingston upon Hull? I dare say you don’t care! Me neither! I suspect most people don’t care. It’s unlikely you’ve heard of Cottingham and maybe you’ve never heard of Hull! The people who do care live in Cottingham. I’ve only been there once, over 20 years ago, when I took part in an exercise in participation.
I spent most of the time in a pub, asking that question. I was with a team, we provided pens and flipchart paper, for maps and diagrams, and listened. That evening we cared. And the people we spoke to readily put pen to paper and explained why their view was important.
This was my introduction to Participatory Appraisal. It is simultaneously a tool for research and community building. The key is who holds the pen. Our role was to listen and ask questions, to understand why people in Cottingham care about whether they are part of Hull. They drew maps and diagrams and patiently explained their views to strangers who did not understand why it is important. And once the interview is over, who keeps the paperwork?
Participation in Maltby
I introduced local residents in Maltby to Participatory Appraisal when they wrote their Community Plan. People who’d never drawn a map or diagram in their lives, were mostly willing to have a go. The smallest children who could hold a pen had their views and so too the oldest inhabitants who remembered open sewers in the streets. The only people who struggled with holding the pen were professionals who wanted to dictate while I drew it for them (I stood my ground!)
We finished the plan with an 80 strong public meeting that lasted all day. We used a different participatory method for that meeting, called Open Space Technology. A conference with no keynotes and conceived as a single coffee break, where participants decide the agenda, take notes and make decisions. That’s how we decided the contents of Maltby’s Community Plan.
This experience led me to a qualification in non-directive consultancy. Thinking things through together is immensely powerful and something we don’t appreciate as we struggle with making sense of our lives. These days I use participation in my coaching, I listen to my clients’ problems and help them find their own solutions.
Participation in the Local Economy
It’s hard to conceive of what a breakthrough in the local economy would look like. Neighbourhoods are in constant flux and the outworking of change might take several years.
For most of my working life, I’ve been highly critical of capitalism. I conflated hedge fund managers and corporations with small business owners. In later life I understand there’s a world of difference between businesses that circulate money in the local economy and corporations that take money from it.
The big lie is business is about competition. Believe that and you are a corporation or a failure. Business is fundamentally about collaboration. Businesses selling much the same thing collaborate to extend their potential markets. Shops collaborate to increase footfall. Many find it easier to promote someone else’s business than it is to promote our own.
My personal breakthrough was when I understood participation is the natural stance of businesses in the local economy.
LOCKDOWN POSTSCRIPT
This story is about how I came to understand a key concept, participation. Most things I believe at the deepest level, gradually dawn over several years. There’s rarely a key event, where I instantly see the error of my previous beliefs.
Participation is not an easy concept to grasp but once you see it, it’s hard to un-see it. It is fundamental to successful business, although many business people instinctively take to it. To participate is first and foremost to listen. To make a sale you must listen to your prospects and understand what problems they face.
Many business people set out with a solution in search of a problem. “I have a sprocket and flange system that revolutionises the industry.” “My qualification in SQI means I am a qualified specialist.” Notice how neither of those offers any idea what problems the businesses actually solve.
Most Things Don’t Work
I was a development worker for 30 years and as I became more experienced, I noticed people came to me with solutions, not problems. A request for assistance with organising a public meeting should be met with the question: what problem are you trying to solve?
You can waste loads of time and resources, leaping to the first solution that comes to mind. Businesses are bombarded with solutions to common problems. Some are very expensive and mostly they don’t work because the original problem is not understood.
That’s the point, “most things don’t work”. Why? Because we fail to listen carefully. Yours might appear to be a simple marketing problem but the nature of your business and its context means an off-the-shelf solution is unlikely to work. No two businesses are the same and so what works for me is not guaranteed to work for you.
This is why coaching is important. The coach asks questions and makes suggestions that would never occur to their client unaided. The aim is to find an approach that works for this business owner in this place.
I’ve found storytelling is a powerful tool, that enables business owners to understand their own business at a deeper level.
Why I Am Doing This
Stories rarely remain unchanged, the context in which they’re told matters just as much as the context referred to by the story. I wrote this sequence of 21 stories about 17 months ago. You may have read some or all of them in their earlier form. Reading them now, we perhaps see something different, especially as we consider the role of participation in business development.
As I republish these stories, I revise and polish them. Some need little change, for others the changes are extensive. At the end of each story, I add reflections based on where my thinking has moved onto, especially in the context of the Lockdown.
This is story 12/21. Last Story: Place: Spongy Balls Next Story: Environment: Millstone Grit