The Asset Based approach takes community empowerment to a new level.  Rather than seeing communities as being populated by people with needs and problems, and starting the development process there, it recognises that even our most deprived and marginalised communities contain significant assets that are not always realised.  These assets will include individual and collective skills and experiences which together with knowledge and passion for change can be harnessed and applied towards solutions which are far more sustainable than conventional service planning. By ‘conventional service planning’ I mean processes that start with problems or needs, and then look to service providers to fix them (sometimes referred to as a “deficit model”). In this model, people are passive ‘service users’ and will have little or nothing to do with planning or delivering the service.  The asset based approach builds on the assets already in place and facilitates the engagement of local people, partner agencies and other stakeholders to jointly design and deliver interventions. This “co-production” model puts service providing agencies in the role of enabling bodies, helping to facilitate the appropriate level of engagement in the planning and design of appropriate interventions. There is a growing body of evidence that suggests that by starting with assets as opposed to problems, the ability of communities to take an active part in the solutions to their own problems and maximise the impact of partners is significantly enhanced. This is known as a salutogenic model and builds on the understanding that focusing on the factors which enhance health and well-being are more effective than focusing on those that cause disease. This theory is at the heart of modern thinking in public health.

Trevor and I recognised that the ABCD approach is wholly consistent with the Outcome Based Accountability™ framework I use in my training and development work. OBA™ also starts with the positive. Rather than starting a planning process with a needs assessment or a list of problems, it starts by defining the desired conditions of well-being; the outcomes. OBA™ also emphasises that progress towards outcomes can only be made by effective partnership which includes the active engagement of communities.  The common language and common sense values that OBA™ enshrines are key tools in facilitating this effective engagement. 

But just as you think you’ve invented the wheel, one comes rolling down the road and you realise that someone else has been making them for years! In this case, the wheels were being made in the United States through The United Way of Tucson and Southern Arizona. Their Senior Vice President, H. Daniels Duncan, is also a senior consultant with the Results Leadership Group that specialises in applying OBA™ thinking to producing measurable outcomes for communities in the USA.  He recognised the complementary nature of the two approaches some time ago and has published his conclusions in a pamphlet which I’ve included in the Resources Pages (Publications) of this website (CLICK HERE TO ACCESS). H. Daniels talks about how to start an improvement process with the OBA™ “Turning the Curve” process by defining outcomes and indicators and indentifying the partners with a role to play in turning the curve on the most pressing indicators.  In looking for actions to make a difference, he recommends the Asset Based approach as an alternative to the conventional service provision model, engaging residents as co-producers/co-creators of their own and their community’s well being.

 The ABCD approach adds values to an already powerful tool for improving outcomes in communities. I’d be very happy to explore with you what this could mean in practice in your service or community.

When working with groups to develop actions plans to, I task them to come up with off-the-wall ideas to stimulate lateral thinking and creativity. These videos demonstrate that people can be encouraged to change their behaviour positively if you make it fun. So changing a staircase into a functioning piano keyboard makes climbing the stairs a more attractive option than using the escalator – a great idea contributing towards a health outcome. There’s also a second video showing how adding a fun sound effect to a waste paper bin in a park can encourage people to use it, contributing to an environmental outcome. Both show how lateral thinking and off the wall ideas can make a difference. Small initiatives like this won’t in themselves change the world of course, but hundreds of similar ideas will collectively contribute towards improved well being and who knows? Maybe change the habits of a lifetime. Check out the videos here on You Tube. (While you’re there, check out the “Fast Lane” videos by the same producers. The skate-board supermarket trolleys are outrageous!)

Choosing appropriate indicators which communicate well, with the proxy power as described above and for which we have timely and accurate data is essential to quantify the extent of a problem and form the basis for measuring progress in addressing it. But a recent experience working with a local authority looking to address poor mental health in school children has confirmed my understanding of the divisive nature of inappropriate indicators. Data can not only cunningly disguise the nature of a problem, but lead us off on a wholly inappropriate course of action.

If you wanted to measure the well-being of school children in a community, you might well consider that data around the number of “Statements of Special Educational Needs” carried out would help quantify a problem. These statements follow an assessment carried out by the local education authority describing the nature of a child’s special needs and what special help they should receive outside of the school mainstream provision. On the surface, you would expect this to tell you the percentage of children in a given community that have special needs. As a whole population indicator it could be used, by government for example, in prioritising the allocation of resources for special educational needs. Schools could be performance managed on how well they handle the assessment process in terms of timeliness, accuracy and appropriateness. But would this tell us something of central importance to the well being of children in that community? Well probably not actually. Somewhat perversely, the indicator could be telling us how badly a community was at providing good educational services for its children. Why is this so? Because if parents feel their children are not receiving the standard of education they deserve, then a good way of forcing the authority’s hand is to apply for a Statement (which is a statutory document). If schools provided decent services in the first instance, and had the confidence of parents, then the need for assessments would disappear for all but the neediest children. This would be particularly insidious if schools were being penalised for having low numbers of assessments and rewarded for high numbers.

This exposes the vital importance of understanding the “story behind the baseline”; in other words, the drivers or forces at work. We can only develop an effective strategy to address challenging outcomes if we understand the story, and we’ll only do that if we engage effectively with relevant partners including, in particular, parents, service users and other stakeholders.

The same is true of performance measures. A classic example is the call centre that measured the quality of its service by the number of times the telephone would ring before it was answered. On the face of it, a good performance measure. Unless of course no one answered the telephone at all. Managers quickly realised that they’d need to introduce a second performance measure which was “numbers of calls unanswered” to avoid creating a perverse incentive (i.e. if you can’t answer the phone quickly, don’t answer it at all!).

The nature of my work means I come across thousands of people, yet very few have touched me or had as much impact on me as John did. On our first meeting some years ago I found him with little to say, looking slightly uncomfortable with the prospect of working with someone he knew nothing about. Many people who knew John only superficially made the mistake of underestimating him, not recognising his ability as an extraordinarily gifted teacher, thinker, and intellectual. Any reservations about John I might have had disappeared the first time I saw him in front of a class. He suddenly became animated, passionate and won the respect and admiration of students within minutes of his opening remarks. He won my respect instantly, and never lost it. I learned so much from John. He brought learning alive and the time I spent with him as a co-tutor, designing and delivering training around the country was without a doubt the most rewarding period of my career as a trainer.

But it was as my friend I valued John most. Despite us appearing to have very little in common, we were soul mates in many ways. I ridiculed John on one of our very early training programmes together as he turned up clutching a great pile of slippery OHP slides as I plugged in my PC and loaded up the PowerPoint presentation. The slides never made an appearance after that. He became the PowerPoint King stretching the technology to its limit. I recall one evening in a hotel room over a few beers we spent hours trying to figure out how to make an arrow spin in a presentation to illustrate the concept of project cycle management. Into the small hours with the job done, we were like two small children conquering the final stage of a challenging video game. We could never understand why the next day, students were so utterly unmoved by our technological prowess. The arrow looked great though!

I last saw John in St James hospital on Father’s day with his family around him. Though obviously uncomfortable, he never for a moment bemoaned his fate and I am left with such admiration for how magnificently he dealt with his condition and the dignity he preserved throughout his last days. We talked about photography, something John immersed himself in his last few months to help cope with his condition. We had already had one very early morning photo shoot together, and we talked about the next one. I think he knew that there wouldn’t be another one but it was so like John not to let on. The world is a much poorer place without John Chapman and I will forever consider myself privileged to have spent albeit too short a time with him. Rest in peace my old friend.