What’s a Chief Social Purpose Officer when it’s at home?

A note on the meaning of my job title, life at the coolest university in the world, and the challenge of measuring change.

“Great job title,” my friend said when I was offered the job of Chief Social Purpose Officer at University of the Arts London. “What does it mean?”

As far as LinkedIn can tell me, there are three Chief Social Purpose Officers in the world, and one of them works for a gambling company, so it’s a fair question. I like to think that a small part of my job is helping to answer it; writing a playbook for how to lead a social purpose approach to organisational development.

I’m writing a first version here for three reasons:

- I want to work in the open: share our thinking, our struggles, our unanswered questions, in hope that they might both be useful to others and elicit useful feedback.

- We’ve just started hiring for our new Social Purpose Group, and there’s only so much context you can put in a job ad. I hope this note will be useful to anyone wondering if the roles might be of interest.

- Everyone I meet keeps asking me the question, including my mother.

TLDR: My job is to maximise the positive impact the university can bring about, whether that is through our teaching, our research, our operations or our advocacy on the issues we care about.

If that’s enough for you, you can skip to the job links at the end. If not, I’m going to cover three things:

- Why I’m interested in the Purpose movement

- What purpose might mean in a university context

- What we’re proposing to do at UAL

The Purpose Movement

More and more organisations are describing themselves as purpose-led. At its worst, this is a branding exercise that involves a bit of greenwashing — usually about ocean-bound plastic. But at its best, the purpose movement is a fundamental challenge to what organisations should be focused on: a movement designed to pull us away from maximising shareholder returns to maximising value to humans and the planet.

The conventional wisdom of liberal economics is that organisations can each concentrate on their own self-interest, and the magic of the market will sort out the rest. Adam Smith gave us the image of a baker, baking and selling bread not out of beneficence but to benefit himself and his family: and yet the baker’s self-interest aligns with his customers’ interests in getting a nice loaf of sourdough first thing in the morning.

It’s never been quite that simple, of course: Smith himself acknowledges the need for regulation to protect competition and deal with potential harmful by products of the baker’s activities. But the principle that companies should be focused on maximising returns to their own shareholders rather than society as a whole has been entrenched in law for a long time — supported by the belief that it was the competitive economic system as a whole that would deliver collective value, not individual organisations.

It’s certainly true that markets can create valuable incentives that drive productivity, innovation, and prosperity. But I think it’s increasingly clear that we have got the boundaries wrong about what markets can resolve alone, and that is playing out in widening inequality, climate breakdown and under resourced public services.

As markets evolve, I think we can have less and less confidence that the incentives for the corporation and the individual are as closely aligned as the baker’s and his customer’s. James Plunkett has set out a case for this here — as he puts it “we feel a nagging suspicion that companies are trying harder to trick us than to impress us.” If incentives aren’t aligned then the externalities grow: the benefit to the consumer comes at greater and greater cost.

In an ideal world, externalities — the negative consequences of economic activity — would be regulated away, or taxes would be levied to remediate the harm. In that ideal world, it would be fine for companies to focus exclusively on their self-interest, because regulation would limit harms, and tax would pick up the tab for any that remained. My concern is not just that we don’t live in this ideal world. It’s that we’re not capable of building it.

We’re not capable of designing effective regulation at the micro level to minimise externalities in complex, fast evolving industries. And so much harm is left — from climate change and biodiversity loss to obesity, lung disease and the mental health consequences of unregulated social media — that the tax system can’t catch up. (If you’re not persuaded, I wrote a much longer piece making this argument last year, which you can read here.)

The purpose movement is an interesting response, that says organisations need to take a new approach: they need to insource their externalities. They need to stop causing harm and expect their taxes to pick up the tab. They need to build capital in the systems that surround them, not deplete it. The question, though, is: how? And if you’re not maximising shareholder return (easy to measure), what are you maximising (and how will you measure it?).

In my first week at UAL, the British Standards Institute (the kitemark people) launched a guideline for “Purpose Driven Organisations” that I found enormously helpful. It starts with the following sentence:

“Long-term wellbeing for all people and planet could be the closest we might get to a ‘meta-purpose’ of society as a whole.”

I love this sentence so much I have put it into eight different PowerPoint presentations. I love it because even though the best pathway to this outcome is radically contested in every corner of political debate, somehow the outcome itself is pretty much universally accepted. And that’s liberating because it allows you to try to follow the evidence instead of the doctrine.

It doesn’t mean that a purpose-driven organisation should count themselves wholly responsible for delivering long term wellbeing for all people and the planet. It simply means each organisation should be working to understand whether (and how) its activities are contributing to this meta purpose, and whether they could be doing more. It’s about optimising for that contribution — instead of for shareholder return.

I’ve long been a fan of the Japanese concept of Ikigai; choosing your life path by looking for the intersection of four things: what you love, what you’re good at, what you can make a living at, and what the world needs. My friend Giles, who runs the charmingly named purpose consultancy ‘Good Business’ drew me this diagram that makes it even simpler.

Of course, it’s still not simple. It’s as hard to optimise for long term human and planetary wellbeing as it is to optimise for shareholder return — and plenty of companies have screwed up the latter. A purpose driven organisation can’t have perfect insight: but it can dedicate itself to maximising its contribution instead of its wealth.

A quick sidebar about money.

In the past, I’ve made the case that the government should be optimising for gross domestic wellbeing, instead of gross domestic product (aka happiness not income). And the usual comeback is this, delivered in snarky tone: “you can’t cash in your wellbeing to pay a nurse’s salary when you’re sick.”

This is true.

However, it misses the point. If you want to maximise wellbeing, you have to have a decent economy (because jobs give people incomes and purpose) and decent public services (because health care and education help support wellbeing). So any decent plan to maximise wellbeing includes a plan for a strong economy and for healthy tax revenue. It just subordinates them: they are mechanisms instead of objectives.

The same is true for purpose-driven organisations that are not governments. You don’t need to bankrupt yourself to save the world. In fact, if your contribution is net positive, then you have an obligation to maintain your financial sustainability, so that you can continue to make that contribution.

Purpose Driven University

Next I want to explore what a purpose approach might mean for the university sector. Given what universities do, what is the maximum contribution we can make to long term human and planetary wellbeing?

I wrote about this a few months ago in Research Professional News where I argued that universities have been cowed by criticism for too long, and “need to fight back with a much clearer articulation of how, and in what ways, we make the world better.”

But it isn’t simply a case of asserting the case: it’s about building it. In the past, some universities have been complacent about the value they created — or harms they might cause. Complacent about the way in which universities can be engines for transferring privilege from one generation to another instead of engines of equal opportunity. Complacent about keeping even taxpayer-funded research evidence behind expensive paywalls and failing to engage with business and policy makers. Complacently treating communities around universities as outsiders, neglecting the impact our operations had on them.

That has been changing. There is momentum to improve our teaching, our community relationships, our research impact. But we haven’t got it right yet. We need to build a far better understanding of how universities affect the world and do so fearlessly, ready to confront uncomfortable truths where we find them. And we need to bring that evidence together into a more holistic approach that reflects the range of ways universities create change.

My approach starts with trying to map the impacts universities have across all the forms of their existence. My first attempt started with this diagram:

I think this is ok. It’s a reminder that universities exist on a number of different planes; attempts to improve the value we create have often focused on one or perhaps two of them at a time.

• There’s the anchor institution / civic university movement which is looking at how these large-scale organisations affect their communities through their operations, their supply chains, their hiring practices and their efforts to contribute to places where people thrive.

• There’s the OfS and its efforts to improve the quality of our teaching, access arrangements and graduate outcomes. And lots of researchers are using data to try and test whether and how degrees improve people’s incomes — including asking which degrees are worth the most and why.

• There’s lots of work to improve research quality and impact emerging from UKRI; recent years have seen the REF, the KEF and improved innovation funding all drive universities to think about, measure and try to maximise the real work change that comes as a result of their research outputs, even if that hasn’t always been popular with every academic.

• Finally, universities are communities that want to be heard. We have knowledge and insight that is relevant to policy makers and worthy of an audience. We are also full of young people with voices that demand an audience. Some people say universities are engines of wokery — and others wear that badge with pride. Whatever side of it you are on, the debate about Freedom of Speech on campus is predicated on the assumption that the community of a university is important to democracy — and worthy therefore of all citizens’ interest.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that my four circles aren’t good enough, because they keep the four planes of a university’s existence separate. I’m working on a kind of systems map to try to understand how these roles are connected, in order to identify the best intervention points where we can make the greatest difference.

It comes in three parts. Here’s the first one:

OK: pretty obvious. But it’s an attempt to communicate three things:

1. In charity law terms, the students are not the final ‘beneficiaries’ of the university. The students are the way in which the creative education we provide reaches the world, and makes it better. We need to measure what’s happening on the right of the diagram to know whether it’s working.

2. That means good quality teaching and student experience is central to the contribution a university makes. If students don’t learn the right things and get good jobs, we’re not just letting them down — we’re letting the world down.

3. The impact of the whole system is contingent on what we teach and who we teach it to. If (for example) we were to only teach rich people how to poke poor people in the eye, we’d be part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Our graduate outcomes team (they focus on the third arrow) told me they think of their job as “changing organisations from the inside out.” That’s precisely what I’m interested in: shifting our goals to focus on the impacts our students and graduates can have.

Of course, universities do more than teach. So here’s slide two:

This new box represents a group of activities designed to change organisations from the outside in. Research enables them to do things differently; it can inform policy makers to change regulations; and it can support efforts to change public opinion, too. Crucially, we’re most effective when these two pipelines intersect in the same industries: when our students, trained in sustainability, get into jobs at companies primed to transform their ways of working.

Finally, though I believe every organisation should behave responsibly as an employer, a purchaser, and as an anchor institution, we have to recognise that in a university, these behaviours are (or should be) intrinsically linked to our research and teaching impact pathways.

This one gets a bit complicated but if you add those “responsible business” activities in the bottom right, you can connect them up to the rest.

If students learn about reducing waste in the classroom, and then walk past a skip full of useable material on the way home: what are they learning? If students learn about the importance of diversity but all their teachers are white men, what are they learning? There is huge potential to support teaching outcomes by improving the operational activities of the university : but it will only work if we make sure to connect the two.

Similarly, changes to our procurement, recruitment, carbon reduction and employment practices have the potential to either support or undermine our research and advocacy. There is so much for organisations to learn from one another when it comes to sustainability, diversity and more: so universities need to think like universities. We shouldn’t just change our practice, we should study and analyse the process, and publish the useful results. Far too much information is kept behind closed doors, when it could be helping other organisations to follow suit.

Uh… OK? So the university is a complex system… so what?

Great question!

I find it useful to think in this way for four reasons.

1. It reminds us that our impacts are almost all outside the university. Take climate change: if you’re Unilever, most of the emissions you can affect are in your product lines and their distribution. For a university, the emissions in our classrooms are comparatively far smaller than the emissions our graduates go on to create or destroy, and the emissions our research can eliminate or encourage.

2. The systems map, however, also reminds us that we cannot ignore our own behaviour — because it actively shapes the learning context and our ability to lead change.

3. A systems map is a way of identifying all the levers — or intervention points — we might be able to deploy towards a specific goal. If we aren’t leveraging our teaching, our research, our operations and our influencing capacity then we’re missing a trick.

4. Identifying where an individual activity fits into the system can help you work out what to measure to determine whether it’s working or not: the next link in the logic chain. It can also help build staff engagement if people understand how their activities are contributing to a wider purpose.

It is, of course, much easier to draw arrows on a piece of paper than to create a measurable and actionable framework for understanding impact. We have useful if imperfect measures for student satisfaction and short-term graduate outcomes, thanks to the Office for Students. But those graduate outcome measures focus exclusively on the benefit to the individual: are they in a graduate-level job within 15 months? Nowhere in the regulatory do we try to measure the societal level impacts of university degrees — for better or for worse. That’s partly because of the individual focus of the student funding system; it’s partly because government is not focused (as I believe it should be) on wellbeing outcomes for society as a whole, but on financial ones. If the university sector can find ways to measure the full impacts of a degree-level education — preliminary evidence that it reduces risk of mental health conditions, for example — perhaps we can help move the whole of government to a wellbeing model for human development.

That’s serious, long-term work that needs to be explored not just by UAL but by the whole sector. The sector body Advance HE had been working on a programme to look at integrated reporting for universities, before the pandemic hit. That work is now being brought back into the foreground, and will help promote a real conversation about what our value is, and how we can measure it more effectively.

Social Purpose at UAL

If that’s the big, tangly intellectual puzzle — what’s the practical plan at UAL?

If you don’t know us: we’re one of world’s biggest art and design universities, based in six colleges around London, and ranked second in the world for our subjects. We teach a range of creative disciplines from fashion to fine art; from prosthetics and set design for film and theatre to industrial and product design; from animation to advertising.

Because we’re a specialist institution, there’s one element of the tangle of complexity I outlined above that’s a bit simpler here: we train people in an eclectic range of skills, but they go into a relatively discrete set of industries and disciplines. So mapping our impacts is a little easier than it might be in a multidisciplinary university that’s training doctors and poets; engineers and historians. One thing I love about those industries and disciplines is how fundamental they are to human wellbeing: creativity is good for you (as the What Works Centre for Wellbeing has evidenced) and it’s essential for the innovation the world needs.

That’s why our excellent 10-year strategy, launched earlier this year, is called: The World Needs Creativity. I can say it’s excellent because I didn’t write it. Under James Purnell’s leadership we’re committed to a slightly intimidating but very exciting programme of change, that builds on UAL’s existing strengths and puts them at the service of the change we want to see.

That strategy has three guiding policies. Two of them are about improving and expanding the first pathway to impact — the student journey:

1. Changing what and how we teach: we’re updating our curriculum to embed climate sustainability and social justice into every course, and make sure our students get the knowledge they need to thrive as the industries they’ll be working for change.

2. Expanding, so far more people can access high quality creative education: our undergraduate and graduate degrees, but also our short courses, FE and online education. We’re pioneering drawing ‘grades’. We’ve got creative skills programmes in prisons; in communities; with refugees; and more.

The third policy is even bigger in its ambition.

3. We’ve pledged to use our creative endeavour to help solve the world’s most pressing problems. This is the second pathway: changing organisations from the outside in, through research and knowledge exchange, through policy and advocacy, and by raising our voices to make the case for climate justice, racial justice and social justice.

My job is to support all three of those guiding policies, while also overseeing our efforts to become a more responsible business and anchor institution.

I’m going to be focusing on:

- Building a new policy team that will use the insights from our world-class researchers to make the case for policy change both for and within the sectors we know most about. We’ll be starting with education and the fashion and textiles business — and expanding to other areas like creative industries and the built environment as we find our feet.

- Improving our approach to measurement, evidence, data analysis and outcomes across every part of our organisation — helping to lead the conversation about the value we create and how we can do better. What courses should we be teaching? How can we maximise our graduates’ positive impacts? What research should we prioritise? How do we increase fair access to all forms of creative education, including our degree courses?

- Delivering our commitments on carbon reduction, biodiversity, and helping us to be even more innovative as an employer and as a community partner.

My role is unusual because at most universities they keep people like me away from the core of the operation. UAL is braver: because not only will be I be working with our researchers and academics, I also have a mandate to work with our operations, people, communications and fundraising teams to change what we do day by day.

To do that effectively, I’m building a Social Purpose Lab to work with me on theory, impact and campaigns. I’ve chosen the word Lab to convey my desire to be experimental — to think like a university, to treat our operations as the basis of a permanent experiment in how to get better, and to share our learning as we go forward. You can read more about this in the job pack for the Director I’m hoping to find to lead that team — below.

And finally — here’s where I ask for your help:

- What have I missed? Are there good answers to the questions I’ve posed about the value and purpose of universities (or other organisations) that I need to read up on? Who’s got answers and ideas about measurement? And are there questions I haven’t asked that I should be asking?

- Who should I be working with and talking to? Can you put me in touch?

- Do you want to be involved? Formally (we’re hiring!) or informally? Drop me a line.

Jobs at UAL

There are loads of great jobs going at UAL, all of which you can find here. Here’s a quick line up of the people I’m looking for within my teams. Drop me a line if you want to discuss any of them.

In the Social Purpose Lab now:

- Director. I’m looking for a senior leader and thinker to help me figure all this out and turn it into practical action and insight.

- Political officer. Working with our Head of Policy and Advocacy to plan out our political engagement.

And coming soon:

- Head of Fashion Policy. Leading work with our professors and research centres to develop and champion policy on sustainable textiles and circular design.

- Head of Education Policy. Shaping a policy agenda for creative education and the university sector.

- Research officers. Working on each of those issues

- Impact economist — Still defining this one, but if you’re interested HMU

- Projects officer (6 months ftc). Working directly with me to monitor and track progress against our climate and other social purpose targets.

In the wider team:

- Director of Communications. This is an amazing role, helping to build our reputation, impact, and community. We’re bringing together teams from six colleges for the first time.

A few more coming soon. We have the time, the investment, and the ideas to make a difference. Get in touch if that sounds like your cup of tea (personally I drink Earl Grey, which you’ll have to forgive me for).