Trend-bucking in Wales

A week or so ago, there was a twitter exchange between @dylanjonesevans and @markjhooper about a Wales Online story.  In a nutshell, Wales is going to the States to find answers on how to build the Welsh economy. Some feel we could find the answers closer to home. The exchange made me think of Barod’s experiences of the industry that has built up around purporting to create or find jobs for people with learning disabilities. And I felt a blog coming on…

So - What do these have in common?

• Schemes to kick-start the Welsh economy
• Schemes to find paid work for people with learning difficulties/disabilities

The slightly cynical answer is “we spend shed loads of public money on it, with very little success”

The more biting answer is “it is a way for people to create work for themselves, while failing to achieve what they are funded to do”.

There are a few trend-buckers who don’t fit with either of those answers, but perhaps we are too busy throwing good money after bad to have the time or inclination to look at them. If we did, I think we would see that the trend-buckers share some characteristics.

You see, if I wanted to kick start the Welsh economy or see more people with learning difficulties in paid work, I’d start by finding our own examples of what  works and try to work out why. I’m about to give my best-guesses about the trend-buckers. But I wouldn’t want to stake my life, Wales’ prosperity or the lives of people with learning disabilities on my best-guesses. 

We need evidence and answers about what makes the trend-buckers succeed where so many larger, better funded projects are failing. Instead of this, what do we get? We get another chunk of public money chucked at another programme for economic regeneration, this time bringing in expertise from the United States.  And at the same time, we get more funding chucked at maintaining day services, training opportunities and supported employment agencies that, by and large, DON’T WORK.

I’m not arguing for no public funding. And I’m not arguing that there haven’t been occasions where public funding has delivered cost-effective benefit. I am arguing that we need  to stop doing the same things and dressing them up as innovative projects. We need  to start thinking differently and doing different things. And to do that, we need to examine examples where people are already doing different things, and learn from them ways to use public funding more effectively.

Welsh trend-buckers support wealth creation. This may be social wealth (like Carmarthenshire People First Job Club) or financial wealth (like Indycube). And perhaps a characteristic of trendbuckers is that they don’t actually separate the goals of social and financial wealth. 

The bad news is that we could’t round up Carmarthenshire People First Job Club to see how it works even if we wanted to. They scraped enough money for a short term project and haven’t found a new backer - yet. But they achieved more success on a shoestring than the multimillion pound publicly funded industry for job-finding for people with learning difficulties/disabilities. If anyone reading this fancies investing in social good (you will lose your financial investment - but your money will transform lives & benefit the Welsh economy) then I’d be delighted to put you in touch with the people who can make that happen. 

Let’s have a quick look at what I think Welsh trend-buckers seem to have in common.

• Different expectations of what counts as ‘normal’
• Driven by a commitment to changing the status quo
• Less ‘Let’s think outside of the box’ and more ‘Box? There’s a box?’
• Connecting  - ideas, people, organisations, infrastructure, technology
• Finding others who will look with them for solutions when the trend-buckers get stuck

Different expectations of normal

We will always tend to work towards whatever we think is normal.

If you are used to a 9 to 5 with a regular salary, sick pay and holidays, that  will be your normal. You are unlikely to recognise, understand or support what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur.

If you are used to people with learning disabilities relying on benefits, that will be your normal. If you think they need protecting and sheltering, then that’s what  you will recreate even if you are paid to help them find real jobs.

No matter what you are funded to do, you will do it in a way that tends to work towards that norm.

So the trend-buckers are those with different expectations of normal. Their normal is the insecure, exhausting, exhilarating, hard work of starting a business that will succeed and grow. Their normal is knowing that the real barriers to real paid work for people with learning disabilities are the knowledge, skills and assumptions of employers, backed up by the attitudes of agencies, not any inadequacies of people with learning disabilities – so no amount of training, work preparation, support or job coaching of people with learning disabilities will result in real paid jobs.

Driven by a commitment to change the status quo

The trend-buckers are not in it for an easy life. They aren’t limiting what they do to what they are paid to do or the hours in their job description. And they certainly aren’t doing things because they are paid to do them. They are driven by a commitment to something – a cause, a value, a belief they can change Wales. And that commitment is strong enough to work ridiculously hard, make themselves vulnerable, keep chipping away against the odds and focus on the long game.

Box? What box?

I guess this is another version of different expectations of normal.

When Barod was started, I was the only one with experience of running a business. The others had no idea what ‘should’ be possible or normal. I had to think outside my box; they just had to think.  We didn’t know what was supposed to be possible, so just got on with doing ‘the impossible’ without realising it was ‘impossible’.

Others (like me) know there is a box, but refuse to acknowledge it beyond being aware that other people choose to live in it. Even people who think ‘outside the box’ are defined by the box and whether their thoughts are inside or outside of it. And that’s why simply thinking ‘outside the box’ isn’t going to lead to radically new and effective solutions.

I think that’s also why I like Barod’s Coffee Conversations. They make the general public’s ‘Box? What box?’ thinking accessible to people who run aspects of public life and public services. Ignorance can be dangerous – but it can also be a huge blessing if you want to escape established ways of working.

Connecting

I’m not talking old boys networks here. Those involve connecting, but in a self-limiting way. I’m talking hearing an idea in one context and wondering ‘what if?’ in relation to other contexts. I’m talking expecting to find something or someone of interest wherever I travel and whoever I meet. That could be the person on the checkout, fellow passengers on the train, keeping an eye on twitter or deliberately going to a conference and working the room.  And, when I talk of ‘working the room’, I’m talking expecting to find people and information of interest, expecting to give and receive, working to promote connectedness in general rather than make myself the centre of the hub.

I know I connect ideas, people and organisations differently and highly effectively. It’s a legacy from a first degree where I was encouraged for three years to join up the dots ignoring the order of the numbers by the dots to get a different picture from the one I was ‘supposed’ to create. It’s also because my personal neurodiversity involves living with a committee of different aged, skilled and gendered ‘people’ in my head. That certainly helps with making unusual connections!

I love neurodiversity. I cannot be thankful enough that people have their brains wired differently and we don’t all think the same way. It can be a pain if we live in a world that assumes all brains are wired the same way. But if we want to create economic and social change, we need diversity.

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Others

These are perhaps the unsung heroes of many stories. Barod would not exist if someone from with the multi-million pound industry hadn’t recognised what we were trying to do and found a way to bend the rules to help us. Every other door in the industry had closed on us because we weren’t doing things the normal way and we certainly didn’t want to compromise our vision for the sake of their checklist, tickbox rules.

This one person found a way round the barrier that might easily have defeated us – the then Catch 22 that to get help from Access to Work, you must already be trading and off benefits, but as a disabled entrepreneur you couldn’t get  off benefits until you were trading and you couldn’t get trading without the kind of support only available through Access to Work. We are delighted  that the Government has removed this Catch 22 and you can get Access to Work support in the pre-trading stage now. We will never know whether our loud protests helped, but we like to think it may have.

These should not be the unsung heroes. They may not be the people directly transforming economic regeneration or job prospects for people with learning disabilities. But they are the people with the vision and willingness to open the doors for the people who are. Without anyone there to unlock doors, us entrepreneurs would have very sore heads from beating them against closed doors.

So – do we continue chucking money at projects that see more self-serving than wealth creating? Do we use strategies  that add to the wealth of  the elite while failing to transform local economies? Do we continue to create paid work for people who don’t have learning difficulties/disabilities while creating bonded unpaid labour for people with learning difficulties/disabilities?

Or is Wales ready to go look at the exceptions, the wealth creators, the trend-buckers, and see what can be learned from them?