Principles-driven work | Example #3: Radical Help

In the TED talk below, social entpreneur and designer Hilary Cottam shares stories of some of the people we meet in her excellent book Radical Help.

The book is described online as follows:

How should we live: how should we care for one another; grow our capabilities to work, to learn, to love and fully realise our potential? This exciting and ambitious book shows how we can re-design the welfare state for this century.

The welfare state was revolutionary: it lifted thousands out of poverty, provided decent homes, good education and security. But it is out of kilter now: an elaborate and expensive system of managing needs and risks. Today we face new challenges. Our resources have changed.

Hilary Cottam takes us through five ‘Experiments’ to show us a new design. We start on a Swindon housing estate where families who have spent years revolving within our current welfare systems are supported to design their own way out. We spend time with young people who are helped to make new connections — with radical results. We turn to the question of good health care and then to the world of work and see what happens when people are given different tools to make change. Then we see those over sixty design a new and affordable system of support.

At the heart of this way of working is human connection. Upending the current crisis of managing scarcity, we see instead that our capacities for the relationships that can make the changes are abundant.

We must work with individuals, families and communities to grow the core capabilities we all need to flourish. Radical Help describes the principles behind the approach, the design process that makes the work possible and the challenges of transition. It is bold — and above all, practical. It is not a book of dreams. It is about concrete new ways of organising that already have been developing across Britain. Radical Help creates a new vision and a radically different approach that can take care of us once more, from cradle to grave.

I’d highly recommending borrowing a copy of Radical Help from your local library, or buying it from an independent bookseller or online from Hive Books (who will help you support your high street and local booksellers with your purchases). It’s a thoroughly engaging read.

Part I canters through a history of the welfare state, which was fascinating to me as I’ve never studied this. Part II is the bulk of the book, which introduces us to people and challenges they face which pressured local services struggle to mitigate, let alone support people to move on from. Through five fascinating experiments, new ways of providing services developed through an application of design mindsets, approaches and processes offer hope and a point clearly to how lives could be transformed.

Part III of the book kicks off with a set of six core principles which represent a shift from 20th century welfare and services to a 21st century model of radical help. These are as follows, with descriptions drawn from the chapter:

• Shift from fixing the problem to growing the good life |To create change we need a guiding vision, and the vision we must aim for is lives well lived.
• Shift from managing need to developing capability | Traditional approaches focus on what is lacking — food, money, work or health — and cast people as dependent, arguing that all these things are available in society and so those who don’t succeed somehow lack agency. This ignores the structural inequalities that influence in ways that are sometimes invisible;e: who has access to opportunities and who does not. The capability appproach asks what real possibilities do people have to earn, to find work, to live healthily and so on. The factors that enable us to seize opportunities around us (or not) are the factors that make up the notion of a capability.
• Shift from a transactional culture to above all relationships | Building on relationships enables the growth of further capability: supporting us to learn, contributing to good health and vibrant communities... It is a principle of the new system that we can design relationships into every human interaction and into every intervention in our physical environments.
• Shift from auditing money to connecting multiple forms of resource | When we talk about money we move inexorably to discussions about our existing systems. We can’t start here. If we think instead about the vision and the capabilities and then ask what wider forms of resource are available and how we can connect them together in new and productive ways, we begin in a different place.
• Shift from containing risk to creating possibility | [Managing risk] encourages us to focus on what might go wrong rather than build towards what could go right… The experiments show ways in which we can be alive to risk whilst focusing on possibility… Moreover, with the cultures of open trust that grew through our focus on possibility we were able to uncover cases of real but overlooked risk in families, with young people and the elderly.
• Shift from closed / targeted [services] to open: take care of everyone | The Beveridge welfare state was designed as a universal system: open to all… Today, with the exception of core health and education services, our welfare systems are open to ever-smaller numbers who must first navigate the labyrinthine and costly systems of assessment. In these systems, everyone suffers. The new systems are open: they take include everyone and they take care of everyone, those who are seeking help as well as those whose role it is to offer help… Through the creation of new and shared cultures we were able to bring about change and create the working conditions for continued good practice… This is radical help: where the capabilities of all are fostered and we take care of everyone.

Part III of the book continues to provide an overview of the design process which informed the five experiments, and offers thoughts on a transition “from a system that manages us to one that encourages us to flourish”.

The principles outlined above feel like a lovely worn in pair of slippers to me, and no doubt others in the CoLab Dudley team. We’ve been applying them along with and design processes in the context of participation. It’s heartening to imagine that services might transition further to working in these ways… it would help to create a much more fertile edge between our work growing the commons, and the work of others in the state and local services.

It’s also interesting to note that the principles for radical help are framed against their counterprinciples of 20th century welfare. As our lab team are moving ever closer to an initial set of GUIDEing principles for CoLab Dudley, Jo Orchard-Webb has been sure to articulate what would be the opposite, or counterprinciple; as advised by Michael Quinn Patton in Principles-Focused Evaluation: The GUIDE

See more inspiration on principles-driven work we’ve been drawing on:

Example #1: Impact Hub Birmingham Maker Manifesto
Example #2: Place Lab’s Ethical Redevelopment
Design principles for an inclusive participatory ecosystem

Let us know if you’ve explored principles in your work, or would like to chat about princples-driven work or principles-focused evaluation with us. We’d love to know your reactions to the principles for radical help above.