Sir William Beveridge initiated the creation of Great Britain’s welfare state with his first report in 1942. He defined an approach to public services that was intended to create an active collaboration between citizen and state. By the time of his third report in 1948 he expressed the concern that the new education, health and social services were encouraging citizens to become passive consumers instead of active participants. Sixty years later Hilary Cottam, Hugo Manassei and Charlie Leadbeater of Participle are looking to change that.
Their mission statement is titled Beveridge 4.0 and you can download it from their site. Participle is now working on a series of projects including ones around ageing and youth. A project called Southwark Circle focused on increasing the quality of life of older people and has resulted in the launch of a social enterprise to deliver new services in a sustainable way.
Hilary showed another project on dealing with the loneliness of older people at Davos done for Westminster Council in London and, as with the Southwark Circle project, it was exciting to see robust business model ideas emerging along with new ideas for services.
This approach to redesigning public services is a great example of design thinking in the social arena and it seems to me it could be applied well beyond the UK even in countries that do not have the heritage of Sir William Beveridge.
Tim, I was listening to a discussion yesterday about the newspaper business and the participants voiced again and again the need to create a new business model to underpin content delivery ( http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R902260900 ). I look at that situation, and those of the auto and financial industries, and it seems like this historical moment is begging for design thinking initiatives. I’m thinking hard about what our community of practitioners can do to help make design approaches to problem-solving more part of the way the US government and business communities are responding to these situations, and wondering what your thoughts on this are?
During a gig in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I was asked to research the impact the boomers will have as they retire. Their political influence will be great, but their economic contribution will not be as substantial as their parents. Their role in their grandchildren’s lives may be greater in order to lighten the burden on their overworked children, which in itself may address the issue of loneliness. The likelihood of boomer’s working longer will also be an issue as pensions dwindle making advancement for their children more difficult. As far as the United States and Canada go, IMHO it will be necessary to increase immigration to create an adequate population to provide boomers and their children quality of life. I think globally, this is actually a win-win-win.
This public sector-focussed work is incredibly important, and relevant to any developed nation where the structure and delivery of social/public services tend to be a generation or two behind the other organizational design and services provision thinking. The Participle effort looks at re-humanizing and decentralizing social services – in other words getting the services back to those who truly need them and giving them a sense of ownership; a no-brainer you might say, but not where public authorities are concerned. The big challenge is that public services are not really for the public anymore. They usually suffer from the “check the box” syndrome which results in poorly structured and inadequately provisioned services that do little to enhance the well-being of the public (which is what public services were supposed to be all about in the first place). Public services are a foundational component of community, and one of the reasons that service provision is so abysmal is that we have lost any real notion of physical and human community, and our responsibility for and to them. Whether the discussion revolves around social or public services more generally, the bigger challenge is how we re-architect community to encourage a renewed sense of ownership and empowerment – people are not going to take ownership for services that are poorly designed and delivered, and if the requirements of the individual and community (user-centricity) are not guiding service design then any new efforts are stymied from the start.
Thanks for the post! The historical perspective here is particularly interesting. When Beveridge first set out his plan in 1942 the UK was already deep into WWII. It seems like a strange time to be focusing on issues like “a new and fairer Britain” when it was still unclear whether the country would be able to defend itself from the Axis. But those times of extreme crisis are exactly when the seeds are laid for new growth. As soon as the war was over the Beveridge plan was put into place and (apparently to Beveridge’s regret) swept over the (now unified) nation.
This story is instructive to our current situation. We are in the beginning of a crisis that will probably deepen for quite a few more years. This goes beyond the current economic crisis and is part of a cycle that happens every 85 – 100 years or so.
But just like back in the 30′s and early 40′s, there is a HUGE opportunity for those that can plant the seeds of what our society should look like after the crisis ends.
I picture it as a solidifying and “liquifying” process. In the US in the 1950′s, everything was solid – we knew what the “American Dream” was and had confidence in that vision. Then the 60′s and 70′s broke down that singular vision into fractured parts. Eventually it got “liquified”, a state we are still in for the most part. Soon another hardening will happen: our society will rally around a small number of ideas and they will be accepted as the direction that society must go. It’s like concrete setting up, and we are at a pivotal point in forming what that concrete looks like. The ideas that are presented with fervor and confidence will be the ones that become the solid foundation for our transformed society. It’s cool that the folks at Particle are addressing this issue head on.
I have been doing research into how these cycles happen in our society on my blog. The post titled “Linear Thinking leads to Cyclical Reality” might be of particular interest.
I like what MShears said.
In many cases in the western world there has been confusion as to who is supposed to jump through the hoops, the provider or the recipient. The provider is supposed to be actively jumping through every hoop the recipient is willing to pay for directly or indirectly.