David Burnby

Rewarding Positive Behaviour (by making it fun!)

davidburnby — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:42:40 +0000

My good friend Mark Lonsdale alerted me to this article on the social media website “Mashable”. Ostensibly, the article’s about “viral video” or product placement. It recognises Volkswagen’s ingenuity in sponsoring a series of videos described as promoting “Fun Theory”. The product placement (a subtle “VW” logo at the end of the video) is not what interested me most though. It was the concept of “Fun Theory”.

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. The second video shows 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 site at http://mashable.com/2009/10/11/the-fun-theory/ (seems to need Internet Explorer to work)

The Vexed Question of Indicators

davidburnby — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:16:43 +0000

As my workload around Outcome Based Accountability grows, the importance of selecting indicators (i.e. measures of well-being) which say something of central importance to the desired outcome becomes increasingly apparent. Some indicators are relatively straight forwards and are powerful proxies for the desired outcome. For example, if our desired condition of well-being (outcome) is “All people in our community are healthy” then we know that if people are carrying excessive body weight, then their likelihood of being unhealthy is particularly high. The rate of obesity in a community is therefore a powerful proxy indicator for good health. If we successfully manage interventions to address obesity, we can be relatively certain that more people will enjoy better quality of life and live longer.

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!).

John Chapman

davidburnby — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:28:37 +0000

When I started this Blog, I never for a moment expected to be writing two obituaries for colleagues I’d met through Renaisi within three months of each other. My good friend and colleague John Chapman passed away on the 24th June following the diagnosis of lung cancer six months previously. John and I met through the Renewal Academy programme hosted by Renaisi and worked together for three years designing and delivering a significant part of the Skills for Neighbourhood Renewal Programme.

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.

Responding to the Recession

davidburnby — Sat, 23 May 2009 14:49:21 +0000

This is the first time for a while I’ve had the chance to add something to the Blog part of the site and whilst I’ve not exactly be overwhelmed by cries of outrage over my neglect, I do feel obliged to keep things refreshed to try and encourage folk to come back here from time to time. I’ve not had chance to update things due to an unanticipated surge in work which, given the economic situation, feels almost insensitive to own up to, not least because a significant part of the work is about dealing with the impact of the recession. I’ve been commissioned by NAVCA (the National Association of Voluntary and Community Action) to help local voluntary sector infrastructure organisations (or LIOs as they are now known such as Councils for Voluntary Service or Voluntary Action Centres) plan to improve the resilience of the third sector in the face of the recession. It’s proving to be difficult to measure the impact of recession on the third sector partly due to lack of reliable data, but also because anecdotal intelligence is conflicting. It is clear that the advice sector is facing a huge increase in demand for advice on debt, housing and employment related issues. There is also some evidence that personal relationships are suffering and cases of domestic violence are on the increase with the subsequent impact on child behaviour. There is some new funding on the back of this, but it’s all short term which makes staff recruitment difficult. On the plus side, there are more people looking to volunteer which at one level is great, but in many cases front line organisations are struggling to meet the training and support needs of new would-be volunteers – an area of work traditionally very difficult to fund. Now I must confess to being cynical about writing plans and am always minded of the famous John Lennon quote “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” One thing is clear to me though: the ISOs best placed to deal with the recession are those who understand their role as sector leaders (particularly in adversity). They understand their sector and have established effective functioning networks so they are constantly up to speed with what’s happening on the front line. They are respected by their statutory sector partners and are therefore well placed to advocate on the sector’s behalf. And they are flexible enough to respond quickly to particular situations and ensure that the most appropriate support measures are put in place and that whatever resources can be squeezed out of the system are used to the best effect. This is what infra-structure support is all about, and the local ISOs that will come out best from the sorry mess our friends in the financial sector have dropped on us will be those who’ve been doing this stuff for years. Sadly, too many ISOs have lost touch with the front line, lost the respect of their constituency which in turn makes it difficult to be taken seriously by the statutory sector. Now is a good time to put that right.

Balloon Towers

davidburnby — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 21:23:54 +0000

The Winning Tower

I’ve just recently had the privilege of being involved in a fund raising event at Rudstone Walk in South Cave (one of my favourite local conference venues), for Young Enterprise. It was brilliantly organised by the Early Birds, a group of women so named from their involvement in the Women’s Breakfast Club. The brief I was given was to design a series of team challenges, along with colleagues from other training organisations, for a group of people from the local business community who were sponsored to take part. The challenge I set was very creatively named by the Early Birds “Reach for the Skies”. The team task I set was deceptively simple – build the largest free-standing structure possible in 30 minutes using only balloons and sticky tape. I’ve used this simple team building game on many occasions and the results never cease to fascinate me. Like all team building activity, the success or otherwise of the venture depends on the quality of the leadership. If a clear leader emerges with a vision for what the final structure will look like and if she/he matches their leadership style to the level of skills and motivation of the group, then almost certainly they’re on to a winner.

Groups tend to adopt broadly one of two approaches to the task. Some groups start without a clue as to how the structure will emerge, but launch into balloon blowing up duties with a view to figuring out what to do with them at a later stage. Each team gets 100 balloons. It is rarely possible to use so many balloons in the time allotted so spending the first 15 minutes inflating every balloon is not time well spent. Groups that adopt this approach end up hopelessly over-stocked with the raw materials (i.e. the inflated balloons); analogous to companies that tie up far too much resource in stock that inhibits more effective investment. In this case, the exercise took place in an old barn so the static generated in the balloons became a magnet for dust which made it very difficult for the selloptape to stick, a most unwelcomed complication. Other groups sit and ponder for a while (while the clock is ticking away), devising a plan and then implementing it. The problem with this approach is that there are a whole range of complexities involved in building things out of balloons. Balloons most inconveniently are not uniform in size or shape (at least the ones in the ‘Party Selection’ from Wilkinson’s aren’t). Sticky tape is a most frustrating building material, particularly when combined with party balloons. The casualty rate for balloons is high and at times it sounded like a firing range in the barn as groups realised how fragile a medium they were working with. So the rigid planning approach doesn’t work either. How many Business Plans do you know wholly accurately predicted the trading environment on which their three year cash flow forecast was based? Once the groups who adopt this approach realise that their plan isn’t going to work (and it rarely does), too much time has been invested in the ill fated design so the last ten minutes is spent in a chaotic rescue mission resulting in a less than impressive final product. (Any of this sounds familiar?)

The most successful structures emerge from the consequence of strong leadership, a clear vision and effective distribution of labour, recognising who is best suited to each task (inflators, stickers, designers). Having a vision doesn’t necessarily mean having a rigid plan to implement it. The groups who end up with the tallest and most stable structures are flexible, adapt quickly to the changing situation, use their resources effectively and appropriately, are quick to praise colleagues and cautious to criticise. Like most successful ventures, building a good balloon tower depends on putting most of the initial effort into the foundations. The winning group spent the first 20 minutes creating a bulky mass of balloons, carefully sorting out the taller, thinner balloons for use later, recognising their value for height, but not substance, and using them appropriately. The structure grew exponentially in the last five minutes, based as it was on firm foundations. At 93” it was half as high again as its nearest rival (which fell over after 30 seconds!) and remained standing long after the participants had gone home. There is much to be learned from this simple exercise, and it’s great fun too (but there again, all the best learning is). You can see the rest of the activities that went on at Rudstone Walk, including Jon Levy’s video, on the Early Bird website.

Lindsay Tripp

davidburnby — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 22:20:33 +0000

It is with great sadness that I learned this week of the death of Lindsay Tripp, the Head of “Invest in Hackney” for Renaisi Consulting. I had the privilege and pleasure of working with Lindsay on a recent contract supporting cultural industries in London in partnership with the Cultural Industries Development Agency (CIDA). We last met face to face just a week before her death which made the news all the more difficult to comprehend. I didn’t know Lindsay well, but well enough to know that she was cursed with cystic fibrosis, a hideous disease that claims most of its victims before their 30th birthday. Lindsay never talked about it – in fact never once mentioned it to me, though the difficulty she experienced taking every breath was very apparent. Colleagues at Renaisi always spoke to me about Lindsay’s talent, passion for her work, commitment and tenacity in the face of adversity. She refused to allow her disability to dictate her life and was hugely respected as a skilled and highly qualified regeneration professional. I will remember Lindsay for the sparkle in her eyes, her enthusiasm for life and the courtesy and respect she showed me throughout our brief working relationship. Colleagues at Renaisi are devastated by her loss and it is clear to me her passing will leave massive holes in many people’s lives. My thoughts and condolences go out to Lindsay’s family, her colleagues and the many peoples’ lives she touched.

Trains (Meals on Wheels)

davidburnby — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 19:15:15 +0000

At the risk of this Blog becoming a consumer watchdog site, I did feel the necessity to share my latest outrage at my good friends at National Express who operate the East Coast main line service. Occasionally, as compensation for having to be dragged out of bed in the middle of the night to catch the early London train, I treat myself to a cooked breakfast in the splendid surroundings of the first class restaurant car. It’s not cheap, but it’s one of those indulgences that makes rail travel so special: where else can you be whizzed along at upwards of 100mph whilst being silver-served the very best quality sausages, fried eggs, bacon, hash browns. black pudding mushrooms and tomatoes; all freshly cooked in the on board galley. Well not any more. The service on my train has been scrapped along with the equally sumptuous evening meals. This disgraceful act of customer contempt will no doubt have been instigated in the interests of cost savings: I see it as another nail in the coffin of what was once a world class public rail network. One bitter customer remarked “well this is what happens when you give a bus company a train service to run”. I couldn’t possibly comment.

I’m a LIA (it’s official)

davidburnby — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 18:19:18 +0000

It’s official. With effect from January 2009 I am a LIA. This most unfortunate term stands for “Local Improvement Advisor” and I’m only sorry that whoever first coined it didn’t consider the acronym more carefully. LIA’s are a group of specialists from a range of disciplines available as a resource to partnerships to help drive up improvement and efficiency. The LIA programme aims to capture the good practice from the well evaluated Neighbourhood Renewal Advisor (NRA) programme hosted by the Department of Communities and Local Government which came to an end in December 2008. I was an NRA from 2002 and during that period carried out over 50 assignments working with LSPs, NDCs and Community Empowerment Networks across the country. Last week, the first tranche of LIAs (almost 100 of us) met for the first time in Birmingham. Whilst it was great to renew acquaintances with some old NRA colleagues,(unflatteringly referred to ‘the old hacks’) it was refreshing to meet so many new faces and realise the breadth of skills and experiences available to the programme.

The scheme is centred on the needs of local partnerships; primarily LSPs but including regional partnerships, children’s trusts, New Deal for Communities programmes (NDCs) and neighbourhood management boards, amongst others. The principle focus of the programme is the Local Area Agreement (LAA) with support available to assist with design and delivery. To access a LIA, the partnership first discusses its development needs with the RIEP (Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership) who will assist with putting together a brief. The brief is then brought to the attention of the appropriate LIAs who can then express an interest. The partnership can access profiles of the LIAs through a website to inform their eventual selection. The LIA’s fee is then picked up by the RIEP on the satisfactory completion of the assignment.

There are still some operational details to iron out, but I couldn’t help but be impressed by the high calibre of advisors the scheme has attracted. We were all less than happy with our new title though and are optimistic that one suggestion will be picked up: that we become ALIs (Advisors for Local Improvement) which not only sounds very cosmopolitan, but also sounds like “allies” which we thought was very appropriate. Still, what’s in a name?

W.H. Smith (Retailing and Conflict)

davidburnby — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 17:59:18 +0000

I like W.H. Smiths. It’s one of those national institutions that gives you some reassurance that all’s well in the world. I’m always particularly grateful to find a W.H. Smith outlet open in train stations at all hours of the day to buy life’s little essentials like mineral water and a newspaper. Recently though, this simple routine experience has proven to be less than straightforward. W.H. Smith seems to have an intimate business association with the manufacturers of very large blocks of chocolate and the Daily Telegraph. At the check-out, I’m always asked if I want to buy the indecently large slab of chocolate “for just one pound” along with the things I do want to buy and have to face the dejected look of the cashier as I decline. And then there’s the Daily Telegraph/Water promotion. As I understand it, buy a Daily Telegraph and you get the bottle of over-inflated priced mineral water for free. So I arrive at the W.H. Smith check-out in Paragon Station Hull with my Guardian and over inflated priced water.

“Here’s your Daily Telegraph sir, and the water comes free” (cashier scans in the Telegraph). “Thank you, but I don’t want a Daily Telegraph” I respectfully decline. “Yes, but it’s cheaper if you take the Telegraph” says enthusiastic cashier thrusting the offending publication forward. “Yes, but I don’t want the Daily Telegraph” I explain. “I read the Guardian”. (You see my expectation as a customer at this point is for the retailer to abandon his quest to indoctrinate me with the Telegraph, take my money, and let me on my way without let or hindrance). “But I’m only trying to save you money sir” the cashier insists. At this point, I’m considering sharing with irritating cashier the fact that I wouldn’t eat chips out of said publication, and fear for my reputation if I’m spotted carrying a copy, but thinking better of it, simply say “Yes, but it’s a waste. I won’t read it”. “Well that’s OK” says cashier. “You don’t have to read it; you can just throw it away” (Actually, throwing things away in Paragon Station is not an easy option. There are no waste paper bins. Terrorist threat apparently). The queue behind me is now building and clearly enjoying the entertainment. “We’re just trying to save you money” says first cashier’s sidekick, temporarily suspending his stock opening activities to offer solidarity to his dogged colleague. I feel the red mist of customer rage beginning to fall…

I offer the copy of the Daily Telegraph to the man behind me in the England Rugby Union fleece who looks as though I’ve just offered him a bag of toxic waste. “I don’t want it mate” he says clearly offended. I attempt to conclude the sale. First cashier’s mate (with his back to me resuming his stock opening duties) mutters under his breath “Just trying to save you money sir. That’s all”. To the amusement of the crowd, I then begin my rant about customer choice, compulsory promotions, force feeding chocolate and ‘aren’t I always supposed to be right’ (being the customer). First cashier’s mate, impervious to my ranting, in tape loop mode repeats that his mission in life is “just wanting to save me money”.

This Monty Pythonesque experience won’t terminally damage my relationship with W.H. Smith but it reinforces my understanding of the basic roots of conflict. From the cashier’s perspective, he simply cannot understand the logic of someone wanting to spend more money than they need to, simply in exchange for picking up a newspaper. From my perspective, I don’t understand why he cannot see that newspapers are more than printed paper. They reflect who you are, the way you see the world. Newspapers are about the relationships you’ve established over years with the journalists and columnists, the strip cartoons and the sports pages. To say nothing about the principle of creating unsustainable levels of waste by unnecessary consumption just to “save money”. Most conflict situations are rooted in this type of misunderstanding. Which is why, when I’m dealing with conflict situations in my work as a facilitator, I try and drill down beneath the superficial veneer of disagreement to the real core of the conflict which is almost invariably routed in failure to respect the importance of respective values. I didn’t have time to explore this in W.H. Smiths and must confess I didn’t facilitate the situation particularly well (in my defence it was very early and I don’t do mornings). As long as no one discovers where I buried the body, I’m optimistic I’ve got away with it. Daily Telegraph anyone? (If you’d like to comment on this Blog, click here)

Head in the Sand?

davidburnby — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 09:42:08 +0000

I’ve just completed a run of Outcome Based Accountability (OBA) workshops attended by a very varied group of participants from a broad range of organisations. One workshop was aimed directly at the third sector and the participants’ reactions to the OBA thinking process were as varied as the sector itself. Some recognised the framework’s potential to link outcomes to actions almost immediately; some didn’t get it at all. But there was one comment in particular from a participant that stuck with me. We were talking about managing performance, and I was explaining how it was important that any service provider was able to demonstrate that someone was better off as a result of their intervention. The gist of the offending comment was “Why should we waste someone’s time to collect data to prove what we know already –that what we do makes a difference”. Hmmm…

Seems to me that the voluntary sector is full of people all working very hard doing stuff that they feel makes a difference (why else would they do it?). But how can we demonstrate if anyone is any better off if we’re not disciplined about performance management? I’m not saying that if you can’t measure it, it’s not worth doing (old Chinese proverb says “you can’t make a pig fatter by weighing it”). But one thing’s for sure: if you want to use public money to fund an activity, unless you can demonstrate the benefit to service users, your ability to sustain that activity is going to be limited. Many voluntary organisations I know have been funded for years on the basis of goodwill. In the current economic climate, pressure on public funding will mean that only the fittest will survive. And the fittest won’t be the ones with the highest levels of goodwill. They will the organisations that can demonstrate they’re making a difference to people’s lives AND contributing towards the strategic objectives of the funding body.

OBA provides a straight forward means of demonstrating impact by posing three basic questions: How much did we do? How well did we do it? Is anyone better off? Of course, there are resource implications in answering these questions, though as a wise person once said, “If you think knowledge is expensive, try ignorance for size”. For more information about OBA, check out the outcomes pages on this site.

Do you agree? I’d love to hear from you…