In this large and wide-ranging book, John Kay (economist and founding Dean of Oxford University’s Said Business school) and Mervyn King (economist and former Governor of the Bank of England) set out to distinguish between risk and uncertainty.  They argue that this distinction once understood by economists on all sides of the political spectrum – they refer in particular to the writings of Keynes and Frank Knight, the father of the Chicago School – has been forgotten to the danger and detriment of good decision making.

‘the world is inherently uncertain and to pretend otherwise is to create risk, not to minimise it.’

Risk is likened by the authors to a puzzle.  It can be solved by existing information ordered in the right way. Uncertainty is like a mystery – we are missing information and in particular we are beyond the limits of statistical reasoning.  The authors argue that most of the big world decisions we currently face – whether in business, epidemiology or politics – are radically uncertain.  We are operating in conditions of mystery where our knowledge is imperfect and variables are constantly changing.  Climate, economic and social systems are not linear.  They are subject not just to multiple variables and action, but also to what people think.  Our failure to understand this context – radical uncertainty – and in particular our attempts to model our way through using data and statistics are at the root of poor decision making and much of our current woe.

These once orthodox economists ruthlessly take apart economic models which they describe as ‘parables’, ‘believing them to represent reality has led macroeconomics astray’.  In particular they critique a ‘relatively recent’ over reliance on probability models, when probabilities can in reality seldom be known.  Withering critiques are made of ‘futile’ strategy away days, most of behavioural economics, a large swathe of number-based policy making processes, ‘the number is not the policy’ and risk registers, ‘long lists, received in silence and signed off’.  They take a swipe at journalists who ‘don’t send the car’ (for the interview) if a nuanced argument to a complex problem is suggested, Treasury mandarins who try to add more complexity to their failing models (as opposed to standing back and asking ‘what is going on here’) and CEOs such as the Goldman Sachs’ executives whose models categorise events as ‘inordinately improbable’ even as they unfold around them.

A reliance on data driven modelling leads large organisations in particular to make decisions ‘on the basis of what is easiest to justify rather than what is the right thing to do’.  Whilst Kay and King do not specifically refer to British social institutions this critique sadly brought to mind many large third and public sector organisations whose management and focus on risk has visibly been all too often at the expense of doing the right thing and addressing the causes of our vulnerability.  I think in particular of children’s care (where in the case of complex families troubles the context is always one of uncertainty) and care for the elderly.

‘when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right’

The authors argue that we need to turn to story-telling, what they call the ‘Narrative Paradigm’.  Story telling helps us to marshal the information we do have and to make sense of a complex and confusing world that continues to change.  Too often dismissed by the statisticians as anecdote or ‘bias’ Kay and King argue that in fact stories are a powerful way to work out ‘what is going on here’.  The story making process is collaborative – stories are shared, they are a sort of team work – and good decisions are made in a social context, with others who bring diverse experience.

‘the prospect of new experiences – can be a source of joy, rather than despair

Many if not most people I work with experience radical uncertainty in the day to day – something policy makers have only recently become aware of and I have written about here.  The traditional response – once this precarity is finally recognised – is to try and make further static adjustments to inflexible systems – add a bit to this benefit, a marginal adjustment to this service – rather than to think differently about flux and uncertainty and what is really needed.

‘uncertainty as delight’

I was drawn therefore to the authors’ discussion of uncertainty as delight: ‘the prospect of new experiences – a source of joy rather than despair’.  The authors understand that it is not just nations that need an overarching narrative, communities and individuals need it too.  They point as an example to the ‘secure reference narrative’ in Denmark – no fear of crippling medical bills, or dramatic losses of income if a job is lost – enables people to embrace risk, to try new things. Uncertainty becomes like the feeling we have when we discover something new on holiday.

As someone who has spent years trying to convince officials in the Treasury and elsewhere to ask different questions, to listen to stories and to work in new ways, I found this book compelling.  I have written in Radical Help – borrowing on the work of Eddie Obeng – of how change requires methods that understand we are working in the fog (the mystery); of the need to constantly adjust our idea of what the problem is (‘what is going on here’) and how a widely shared story – such as the Wigan Deal or Barrow’s New Constellation – is the necessary starting point for any systemic change.  I have long argued for the power of stories – for baggy, winding stories – where the differences between us are encompassed not smoothed out – as the starting point for good policy and I believe an embrace of this book would be a critical starting point for any real commitment to a generative economics of place.

There was however one thing about this book that irritated me beyond measure – not a single woman economist is referenced in the stories or the copious index.  ‘Not many economists are women’, they note at one point reminding me of an interview with a mandarin I once read in the FT where, as a justification for the absence of women in key appointments, he explained that ‘not many of the chaps we know are women’.  This gender bias limits arguments that could have been made and in particular many of the practical applications that the authors could have suggested.

Seven years ago, in the Chessboard and the Web, Anne-Marie Slaughter set out how many of the approaches Kay and King advocate could become new policy tools but no reference is made (although curiously the authors do cite a powerful Princeton commencement address).  Carlota Perez’s work on historical narrative and its importance in understanding finance, industry and institutional development and decision making is not mentioned.  Kate Raworth’s redrawing of many of the models the authors critique is passed over in silence.  The work of Diane Elson and the Women’s Budget Group in the UK and Heather Boushey in the US would deepen the connections between household narratives and policy making, but is not mentioned.  The work of Mariana Mazzucato would enable the authors to link their arguments to questions emerging from the current pandemic. I could go on.

But, when two establishment economists such as Kay and King recommend ditching the statistical models in favour of narrative, when they emphasise the role of our humanity in good decision making, it’s definitely a moment.  Something is going on here.

“I just wanted to tell you how much you inspired me that day in Arendal. I had never thought about loneliness or solitude that way. Thank you. 

I have started a popular movement called Skravlekopp.  It’s a green cup with the word Skravlekopp written on it. If you choose that cup instead of the regular cup when you´re out having coffee, other people in the coffeehouse know that you are open to talk to others. 

If you are one who needs conversation or wants to offer it, it makes no difference. We just need a signal to let people know that we are open. 

It started out with one coffee-house where I live. Now there are over 100 all across Norway – and there are new ones opening almost every week.  Coffeehouses, working places, schools, senior centres, …. ” Venke

What a beautiful, simple idea.  Skravlekopp illustrates the very core of how I think we must re-invent the meaning of welfare.  Skravlekopp is not a “service”: you can’t measure it and there are no outcomes.  It is a simple idea woven into everyday life. Most importantly there is no boundary between those who need help and those who offer help: there is just an openness, a human recognition that we are all woven together and might need different things at different times.

Many of the Experiments I describe in Radical Help share this principle: a lack of delineation between the helped and the helper.  Circles for example –community support for a rich older life -have members, some of whom are offering “help” to others and some of whom need “help”, but who can say who is the helper and who is the helped or who gains most from each interaction. The boundaries shift over time and between encounters.

I’m very honoured that a talk I gave almost two years ago that summer in Arendal could have sparked this idea although clearly it is Venke’s imagination and energy that have made this happen.  That same talk was the start of something else too:  in Oslo social workers have started a project called Oslo Life, building on the family experiment I describe in Radical Help.  I will write more about this in another blog to follow.

I am returning to Norway this week, where a new Institute is to be opened in Trondheim dedicated to the development of Relational Welfare.  I’m honoured to have inspired this Institute with my writing and work.

In Norway state welfare systems are well-funded and resourced.  But just as in every other part of the world, there are many who are asking how well these systems are really supporting us in this century.  There are those who worry that many languish over generations: their problems are managed but their lives never change. Others draw attention to the fate of people who have recently arrived in Norway and who don’t have the help they need to find new, thriving lives and to get to know others in their new home country. From loneliness, to health, to work and good family lives – in Norway many are seeking for a new way forward – one based in deep human connection as opposed to efficient industrial transaction. The open, light touch and very human connection that defines Skravlekopp is like a beacon lighting the way. 

Everywhere the social systems, tools and frameworks we inherited in the last century are proving unfit for purpose.  Take health: our industrial health systems were brilliant at curing 20^thcentury infectious disease but today one in four of us have a chronic condition: ailments which include diabetes, depression and the complications of old age. Our health services can’t cope. In Britain 70 percent of hospital expenditure is dedicated to managing these complex conditions which cannot be cured. We need motivation not medicine and this requires a wholly different way of thinking and working.

Or take employment. In most parts of the world those out of work face industrialised systems of support: conveyor belt services meant to slot the individual worker into a job.  These expensive systems have high failure rates (over 60 percent in the UK) because they ignore wider seismic economic change, they shut out the challenges of low wages and they are blind to the problem that progression in work is more difficult than finding a job.

I work with people like Anne.  Anne is unwell, in pain and overweight. Keeping appointments with nine specialist doctors is her full-time job.  But when I meet the doctors, they tell me something Anne already knows – the drugs don’t work.  Anne needs radical help to change the way she lives.  I set up in doctor’s surgeries and ask them to send me ‘heart-sink’ patients like Anne.  A small team then starts to unpick the always complex problems that lie behind ill health. Anne decides to take up her embroidery again, her mood lifts and she is ready for the next challenge. The remedies are unorthodox, more often social than clinical but the data impresses the clinicians and the service is low cost.

And I work with people like Earl.  Earl has trouble holding down any job and has a criminal record for petty drug dealing. He wants to be a chef but the employment service thinks that’s laughable and try to get him to do an entry level job he finds demeaning.  I invited Earl to help me design a new service.  

We create simple tools and use public meetings to connect people in and out of work together.  The emphasis is on practical steps towards long term goals.  Simple digital platforms enabled us to work with many at low cost.  Randomised control trials show our approach cost one fifth of current services, fostered skills and enabled 87 percent of members to make progress in or towards work.

This is 21^stcentury welfare.  It starts where you are and instead of commanding change or trying to fix you it offers support to grow capability.  It includes as many people as possible given that it is our relationships that help us find work, keep healthy and care for one another. 

I design with people. I ask families isolated on tough estates, who feel angry and locked out, to draw on new support with transformative results; I work with older people on a community service that brings joy and affordable warm care.  In every case I work in partnership with exceptional public servants to create and grow new work: social workers, politicians, policy makers: engaging with sleeves rolled up at every stage of the process.  

The effect is powerful and low cost.

Perhaps on the surface it sounds familiar.  Many of us practice design thinking or we use focus groups to ask citizens what they think should happen.  But the work I am describing is very different -it is about a shift in power and mindset.  It starts not by asking questions from our point of reference as public servants: how can I change this or fix that.  Rather it asks about yourlife: what do you do, care about, want and how can we collaborate to make that happen.  

This new public mind-set is one of investigator, facilitator, inventor – not that of the previous century; gate-keeper, auditor, commander.  And when we have the solutions we don’t try to distribute them once again through an industrial pipeline, we seek to embed the solutions locally in new ways, ways I describe fully in my new book Radical Help.  The role of the public servant is no longer that of controlling the mechanical levers, it is that of the head gardener: setting out the design, planting, tending, nurturing and where necessary, weeding.

Every public servant I know is committed to making change.  No-one signs up to be a humaniser of the inevitable.  And our challenges from climate change to demographic shifts, from health to education are too great and too pressing to tinker any longer with the tools and attitudes of the last century.  As I argue in Radical Help it is only the state that can create the new framework we need, only our public servants can nurture the vision and model the behaviours. I propose a new and active role: this is Radical Help.

This blog first appeared on the apolitical website in November 2018

^[1]A phrase I borrow from the Brazilian political theorist Roberto Unger

I had become so used to the British context where public employees are more frequently seen as the problem rather than the source of innovation and where most local leaders feel compelled to start by framing their challenges in terms of financial indicators, a ranking on a deprivation index and the number of people unemployed, that I was immediately gripped by what Mr Clausen had to say.

Of course, Odense has its challenges, which include a welfare system that is no longer affordable and on which its citizens are too dependent – this is why Mr Clausen believed that radical change is needed.

Mr Clausen asked how politics and public service works when we no longer have the answers and the old ways of doing business are bust.  His answer is genuine dialogue – the better the dialogue, the better the solutions will be.

So, Mr Clausen argued – with great foresight five years ago – that future solutions lie not in his institutions but with the citizens themselves and the extent to which he could foster better bonds, better conversations and better co-operation between them.  It’s a very different starting point for the design of welfare services.

This week I will be visiting Odense at the invitation of Hjerte Foreningen (the Danish heart foundation) I will be exploring these same themes which are core to Radical Help – how the bonds between us can be the starting point for a new way of thinking about health in particular and welfare more generally.  I can’t wait to see what Odense has nurtured in the intervening years.

The police are facing something of a perfect storm.  They witness every day the increasing vulnerability in the populations they serve: a result of widening inequality, the effects of modern poverty and the rise of new problems such as digital crime and modern slavery.  As deep cuts to our public services take effect the police become a service of last resort called out to find that missing child, confused older person or distraught homeless youngster with increasing regularity.  At the same time the police have faced their own cuts and must maintain their focus on addressing the complexity of modern crime.

The police need to work differently and they are exploring how best to do this.  Those who gathered this week at the National College of Policing were frank about the challenges and open to thinking in radical new ways about how to move forward.

I was asked to take vulnerability as my theme in this year’s lecture and a tweet announcing the title of my talk provoked social media interest from the police but an exasperated and sometimes angry response from social workers who are clear that social work and policing are two distinct roles although as Mick Ward, a trained social worker and public leader I very much admire pointed out, ‘bad social work is soft policing’.

In my lecture, I was not arguing that police should become social workers.  Since I am no expert on policing I was not in fact making any recommendations, I was simply asking a series of questions about how we can look afresh at some knotty challenges and what we can do differently.  As everyone that evening acknowledged better management and greater efficiency are important but doing the same things differently will not get us to where we need to be.

Here are the facts.

Demand is rising – the welfare state has not eroded poverty – it is here with us in old forms and new – there is increasing and deepening vulnerability: amongst the young, the old, and those left behind in many ways;

Complexity is thickening – crimes that take place where we can’t see them – on the net – through networks we cannot easily fathom; and here we see some of the challenges too of the instruments of old institutions – traditional statistics can mislead, telling us that crime is going down when it is taking on new form, becoming concentrated in certain places and often increasing;

And our communities are changing: new patterns of work, of family life, of migration: the social bonds between us are shifting and altering the contexts in which we work.  Many want to participate within their communities but traditional forms of professional working and hierarchical post war welfare institutions make it hard to join in.

What should the police do?

My work designing new forms of public service with front line workers and communities across Britain has brought me face to face with crisis and vulnerability on a regular basis.  As I describe in my forthcoming book Radical Help, I have seen the way that those most in need – families in crisis, those with mental illness, those who cannot find good work, those who are lonely – revolve through our welfare systems again and again.

Why is this?

I think we face two problems.  First, when there is not enough resource to hand to do the job properly you must manage the situation below the line of risk and turn to the next person in the queue.  Police officers, social workers and many others do this every day, knowing that this individual or family will come back on their radar but not being able to do very much about it.

Secondly, our current welfare institutions were not designed to solve the problems we face today: problems that are complex and different in nature, problems that need mass social participation if we are to solve them.

So it is not just about a lack of money nor is it a simple case of whether the police, social workers or any other committed public workers are best at the job.  We cannot get lost in a border war.  Instead we need to work together to grow different and socially rooted approaches – we need to find new public solutions that support communities and each and every one of us to flourish and we need to develop new roles and ways of working to facilitate this change.  In this particular way – in advocating a way of working that is socially rooted – I would argue that modern policing is social work.

In my book I argue that a 21^st century approach to bigger questions of welfare must invert the current emphasis on managing need and seek instead to foster capability within individuals and communities.  I look at how this can work in practice.  Many, many people in Britain are already working in new ways, sometimes inside radical teams and sometimes in spite of the limits of their organisations.  The challenge is to move this work from margin to centre: to think about the new systems, leadership and metrics that are required to sustain this work.

To do this all of us must work in new ways and our systems need to change.

I have been struck again and again in my work at the way that vulnerable people reflect vulnerable systems.  Those trying to help and those who need help mirror each other in their behaviours, the way they talk about one another and sadly very often in their lack of trust in each other.

In this situation we can focus on, for example, an individual family in crisis or a person without work and we can berate them.  In the same way we can say that a lack of change is the fault of a particular professional or indeed a whole service – it’s about the police, or it’s about social work.  But I think this is a deep error. Good people cannot work within vulnerable systems and vulnerable systems cannot support vulnerable people.  We need to admit that the challenges we face are much bigger than any one individual or service.

So, within this much larger context, what specifically should the police do?

It has been my experience that the police make excellent community workers.  In my book I talk about the creative contributions police officers, nurses, housing officers, social workers and many others have played in designing new ways of working that foster capability at the community level. Sometimes these new roles were voluntary, sometimes they involved the day job: forming and joining new teams in which traditional identities, service menus and measures were put aside to building something genuinely collaborative.

Police officers I have worked with have been adept at forging new roles.  They have been keen to be part of new ways of working that bring different professionals together and very often their frank talking has been welcomed by those who have been seeking help but are exasperated at being managed and talked down to.

In my lecture, I asked, should these social roles form the template for police officers of the future?

My answer is that I don’t think so, in the sense that I don’t think in a healthy, flourishing society the police would concentrate on social projects or do the work of social workers, neither would they become an emergency mental health service.

But I do think modern policing is social work in the sense that the police must be socially rooted.  And I do think experimenting with new roles can play an important part in developing new skills and relationships with others.

Perhaps good policing is above all about good relationships but here’s the challenge – good policing is about facilitating relationships outside the police force.

What could this mean in practice?

I had three suggestions.  Firstly I think a new vision is needed.  This vision cannot be about delivery or managing risk or greater efficiency – these things are important but they are not galvanising.  A new vision would re-connect policing to a bigger story about who we could be.  We will protect you but we will also make sure that neighbourhoods and individuals flourish.

Secondly the police need to think about new forms of collaboration.  They need at times to step in but at others to step back and facilitate the work of others.  The fire service was transformed by the fitting of smoke alarms in the homes of millions not by more efficient fire-fighting.  Heart attacks have gone down because we smoke less and exercise more not because doctors are better or because technology has advanced.  Of course, in each of these cases the professionals – fire fighters, doctors – were instigators of these changes but they made change happen elsewhere. What is the equivalent for policing – perhaps it is seconding more police for periods to the sort of projects I create and in which police have played such a brilliant role – I don’t know.

It will definitely be about creating stronger relationships within communities.  With every action and every policy we have to think: does this foster the bonds between people – or does it actually – even with the best of intentions – erode those bonds and limit capability.

Thirdly I think the police must think about the relationships within their forces – their own systems and vulnerability.  Front line work in any profession is hard and sometimes unbearably distressing.  There is wear and tear and I think we need to think radically about this as well.  I talked in my lecture about how we could support police officers to avoid burn out and to find the space for learning and new forms of collaboration.

As I argue in my book Radical Help good work means taking care of everyone – those who are vulnerable and need help but also the professionals whose role it is to help.

I am grateful to the College of Policing for their invitation and I was inspired by the many conversations I had afterwards with leaders doing truly interesting work with open minds.

A full version of the 2018 Newsam Lecture will be made available on line from the National College of Policing.  You can find out more about my book which will be published in June here

What happened? Timmins suggests that the Blair government split the welfare state apart. ‘Welfare’ was the term they and we increasingly use for the derided means tested benefits for the unemployed. ‘Public services’ – which would be shiny, modern and for all of us – was the term used to describe health and education, the good parts. In the process the meaning of the term welfare – to fare well – was turned on its head. Welfare became a term of abuse – something for the scroungers and those living on benefits.

I know about this distrust of ‘the welfare state’. I’ve been writing a book about the subject. My ideas were greeted with enthusiasm and various publishers bid for the book – but none of them wanted welfare state in the title. ‘No-one will read a book about the welfare state’ I was told.

Perhaps.

Timmins was speaking at an RSA event held to mark 75 years since the publication of the Beveridge Report, the post war blueprint for the welfare state. His fellow panellists Stephen Armstrong and Anna Minton have recently written their own excellent books on related subjects. Armstrong’s book powerfully dissects the New Poverty of this century and Minton’s book tells a story about the housing crisis in the Big Capital.

What strikes me about both these books and their arguments is this common theme: we are no longer talking about what really matters. Unemployment benefits account for one percent of our welfare budget but we talk about them incessantly. In contrast, sixty percent of British families in work receive benefits – they are paid wages that are too low to live on – but we rarely ask why the state is forced to subsidise low private sector wages. In the world of housing opaque language is used to create a reality few of us can understand. In the housing world ‘affordable’ housing means the very opposite and the official policy of Westminster – one of the richest parts of one of the richest cities in the world – is, according to Minton, to find homes for their poorer residents in Coventry or other more Northerly cities. Who knew? Apparently very few of us because it is not just politicians who don’t talk about the welfare state any more.

Seventy five years ago when Beveridge published his report it was very different. There was a hunger to know about and be part of radical social change. People queued up to get hold of a copy of the Beveridge Report which had to be re-printed again and again to satisfy public demand.

In his report and through countless interviews and seminars Beveridge told a story – about the welfare state and about the country we could be.   Like all the best stories from African fables to Victorian novels, the story Beveridge told linked personal stories and struggles to a bigger narrative and ambition. People could inhabit the Beveridge vision and re-tell his lofty story in their own way, weaving themselves into a national picture and ultimately galvanising action. The result was one of the biggest social revolutions the world has ever seen and longer, healthier lives for most of us.

Today the Beveridge story lies largely forgotten. Like the welfare state itself, the original vision is tattered and threadbare.   75 years on we are lost in the jargon of technical adjustments and performance indicators, in words that cannot explain our reality. And so we cannot see what is going on and we forget that the welfare state is not a project for other people. Most of us will use the welfare state: we will be educated, rely on its health services, on pensions and, at the end, on good care.

I think that in this century we need a new welfare project: one that can confront the new poverty, one that can address our housing crisis and many more new challenges. And so we need to talk about the welfare state. Not unemployment benefits or the public services that we feel are letting us down – workers and citizens alike – but the bigger picture of what might be, of how we could live in this century, of the new forms of support and flourishing that are possible. I wrote my book – Radical Help – because I wanted to start this new story. It will be just the start because we all need to talk about the welfare state.

Radical Help: How we can remake the relationships between us and revolutionise the welfare state will be published by Little Brown in June 2018