Locating my inner DIVA #divamanc

At the end of September I attended the first #DivaManc meeting in Manchester.  The impetus stemming from a shared frustration that the voices of women in Greater Manchester are not being heard in the devolution debate; putting the diva (Diverse, Inclusive, Vibrant, Accountable) into Devomanc.

Many column inches have already been spent contesting and ridiculing the image of the signing of the DevoManc agreement; the infamous pale, stale and male scene.  It may be suggested that you can read too much into one image.  But images are an important part of the story and the fact is that it did happen and those who were there obviously thought it was acceptable, or worse didn’t even think about it at all as an issue.

Well that was nearly two years ago and the plurality of voices and images surrounding the devolution  does not appear to me to have improved much.  #DivaManc was a starting point to see how we could begin to address this by listening to the voices of each other and have more diverse conversations about what Greater Manchester means to us and what we want for it’s future.

We were asked to consider, “what is important to us about Greater Manchester?”  Following a discussion I had written on my label, “civic pride”.  I’m not sure the term fully expressed my feelings or understanding of that pride; too-often in a corporate and capitalist dominated vision, obsessed with the idea of the north rejuvenating along the lines of the ‘industrial powerhouse’ of the past the elements of that pride in the radical, challenging and innovative social and political movements of Manchester, and all northern cities and towns are too easily forgotten.

All these experiences matter to our identities as northerners, the connection with the past and tradition has to be part of our future (a connection Melvin Bragg has been talking about much more eloquently on Radio 4 recently).  And when we go ‘forgetting’ parts of our history and identities there’s a common strand that occurs: we silence women’s voices and stories.  Greater Manchester has always been home to pioneering women, the Pankhursts, Elizabeth Gaskell, Marie Stopes and home to the experiences and lives of the masses of every-day women of the North.

 

I fear once again those with power are ‘forgetting’ about the voices, experiences and contributions of women and thinking about building the next phase of the ‘North’ without listening and understanding the many and varied visions of a significant portion of the population.  And not just women there are a host of other voices that also don’t appear to be included in the debate.

 

Another image was instructive for me at the #DivaManc event about the risk of not hearing more voices.  One of the organisers described a visceral image of what they saw when presented with DevoManc: the ubiquitous image of a man, standing rigid in high-vis vest and hard hat, arm raised and pointing triumphantly into the middle distance, flanked by shiny skyscrapers.  The standard shorthand for, “economic progress and growth”.

Is this the progress we all want for Greater Manchester?  I don’t doubt that we need jobs and opportunities,  but who gets to share in the wealth that is created and how?  How will devolution create better lives for all the communities of Greater Manchester?  Where’s the sustainability for our communities and our planet in the ‘shiny skyscraper building’ version of growth?   How will we ensure that our fabulous cities don’t end up looking like every other identikit ‘modern metropolitan city’?

As a practical and immediate example we discussed how can we have responsibility for planning employment and skills for the region and, as we understand it not childcare?  In very practical terms if there had been more women at that table in 2014 would we have wide-ranging powers to revolutionise childcare – a very practical step to realising full engagement in the economic opportunities that devolution can offer.

 

I’m going to leave it to the organisers to summarise what the more than 50 women at that first #DivaManc meeting said.  And it will be a plurality of things, because there is not one view on devolution and what it means for women, and this one event did not capture all that women will have to say.  I hope though it has raised the need for more participation and that is heard by those currently seen to be wielding the power in this devolution debate.

 

And as for me and why I consider I have a stake.  I identify as a ‘northerner’, it’s one very important part of who I am.  I’m not a dyed in the wool Mancunian; born in West Yorkshire, I spent most of my childhood in Whalley Range and Chorlton, and now living in East Cheshire after 15 years in the South West.  I’m a Diva because I want to help women’s voices to be heard and I want the ‘north’ to be a great place that addresses inequalities, that does things differently and I know that the evidence says we have to design that in – it’s not going to happen by accident.

 

The Universal Basic Income “learn-in”

Yesterday I attended a “learn-in” event hosted by Steady State Manchester and the Social Change and Community Wellbeing Research Group at MMU.  The aim was roughly outlined as to  consider the detail of a range of proposals for the implementation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI), implicitly focused on the UK, the arguments against, the idea of unconditionality, potential alternatives and any other major issues we came across.

Despite the lack of a great deal of structure and initial admissions from most of our small group of four of limited pre-reading we quickly got well and truly stuck in to putting down some details about a range of proposals and coming up with a raft of questions.  And we had access to google so frankly it was all going to be okay anyway.  In fact pretty much two hours later it was great to be in a small group of people, previously unknown to each other who were both surprised and vaguely disappointed at the suggestion that it might be time to wrap-up.  As a learning experience it felt great to confidently share what we did, and didn’t know and ask questions that others may or may not have answers or thoughts on, but at least would generally agree with the validity of all such musings.

By the end we had the bones of an A-level essay on giant post-its, although I doubt such an idea has made any syllabus.  We had considered basics of proposals from the Green Party, RSA, Malcolm Torry (all 3 with some basis in Citizen Incomes Trust workings), Richard Murphy, Compass, along with some googled content for and against from NESTA, New Statesman, Independent, a feminist analysis from WiSE and mused on the thoughts of Paul Mason and The Idler.

I’m not inclined to actually write that essay here but the main factors we considered were:

• The various motivations: social justice, sustainable living, unleashing creativity, changing nature of work and the role of technology, “making work pay” and the role of disincentivisation impeding economic growth – obviously ideas from both the left and right of the political spectrum
• A UBI rate that is livable or non-livable, with I think a consensus on the idea that the idea was more about “breathing space” rather than longer-term livability
• The reality of how UBI would be funded concluding there is a need for more detailed modelling, ideally with the knowledge and capacity of civil servants
• The notion of citizenship for all, and the inevitable links with migration – there were some people at the event from World Basic Income.  How you can implement in one place and inevitably not others is a question I’d want to think more about
• The notion of work – paid and unpaid, as well as the drudgery of the ‘bullshit’ job.  The value placed on certain ‘productive’ activities over others, in particular the potential impact on caring and domestic work and by its nature women, and generally low-waged and often migrant women
• Unknown consequences for productivity, wages, inflation, workforce participation and ‘capital flight’, does UBI hinder or help a ‘sharing economy?’
• Does a UBI increase state control and interference in our lives or at the other end of the spectrum is it about a truly marketised approach to society, “here’s your UBI everything else is up to you?”
• Related to this it was very important to the group that UBI was not a sole policy but  part of a package that includes a national living wage (although defining that when everyone has a UBI becomes tricky), the NHS, education and a housing policy (the retention of something akin to Housing Benefit was without doubt agreed as an absolute necessity while there are such varying and for many astronomical costs associated with housing).  And what other targeted social welfare programmes would we either be able to afford or be desirable, would these be transitionary or a permanent requirement?
• The absolute imperative to change the normative culture and behaviours of people – and a good old chicken and egg discussion on where to start – if we want to realise the benefits of a UBI
• And how would you start building a wider consensus of support for an idea that at the last election (Green Party manifesto) was too easily written off as, “lefty, utopian nonsense”, just as probably the NHS was less than a century ago.

There was more I am sure, a really impressive and exciting discussion for a Thursday afternoon, and a great way to gain an understanding working and collaborating with others.  There remains a big list of unknowns – for me and the thinkers of UBI generally.  Yet I left excited about the level of interest and despite having a greater understanding of the questions, complexities and arguments against I also have more sense of the tangible feasibility of something that appears to be genuinely quite radical.

One thing that struck me about the proposals and the discussion was the absence of caveating, conditionality and judgement about the supposed ‘choices’ people make about how to live their lives – so often illusory choices more likely the result of so many other greater complexities.  And I guess complexity is the watch word here – how do you keep an idea so simple in its bare bones but understand well and therefore design in the complexity of the implications.  I obviously don’t know but I do feel confident that I met and worked with some people today who want to start working this out and that’s exciting.

 

 

Habits: the problem of rules

The countdown widget of this blog informs me I have, “8 days to go” of my 30-day blogging/ brainstorming challenge.  Over the previous 22 days I have delivered 9 posts.  The purpose of attempting the 30-day challenge posted by Learning Rebels was to support me in the practice of making my work visible – a key plank of Working Out Loud.  As Shannon Tipton puts it when we don’t do something we become rusty, “the more we turn our head away from what’s important, the harder it is to turn back.”   Habits are things we repeat regularly and tend to occur subconsciously, they are powerful elements of our behaviours to learn how to develop.

So I am some way off target with my posts, technically not even reaching the 50% ‘success rate’.  And I don’t think I have a habit, unless its for avoidance.  While some of the issues have been fundamentally practical – e.g. I tend to spend my free days either in fields or on the sea, not areas renowned for connectivity – others are about my style of working and inevitably some are about how I feel about the process of ‘putting myself out there’ and its importance to me.  Unfortunately what has resulted from this is one too many incidences of feeling guilt, a bit stressed and a sense of failure.

At some point last week in a supermarket aisle, while I was simultaneously attempting to remember the contents of the forgotten shopping list and work out when I was going to blog that day, I got to thinking that I was conscious of too many ‘rules’ about what I was supposed to be doing that day.  Now a rule is fundamentally difference from a habit in definition, tone and ultimately helpfulness for changing behaviour; ‘explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct or procedure within a particular area of activity’.  In that moment I felt like a jurisdiction on which the self-improving me was exercising great swathes of control, “don’t do this, do that”, “do this now”, accompanied by negative messages and penalties of guilt.

Now I am an inveterate self-improver, that’s one habit I’ve really got nailed.  I just wrote a list and it transpires I am currently, simultaneously engaged in trying to adopt 8 new habits.  Not solely, or even mainly, because I see a mass of inadequacies about myself but  because it goes hand in hand with my constant desire for trying new things, challenges, learning and generally being interested in stuff.

As a coach and change agent really interested in what works in changing behaviour.  Habits as Charles Duhigg evidences are one really important way of thinking about this, “the more you focus the more that focus becomes a habit”.  And in ‘Happiness by Design’ Paul Dolan relates this idea to achieving the balance between pleasure and purpose that brings happiness, “attention acts as a production process that converts stimuli into happiness.”

So, I decided to not do as I was told (yes, by myself), stuff the blog posting and go to a field for the weekend – to be present, flexible and potentially spontaneous (not one of my strong habits 😉 ).  Because that is one of the fundamental problems of rules, they stop you being present and enjoying the experience and opportunities of now.  That is where they are fundamentally different from habits; a habit is resilient enough to recover from not being performed on occasion or even for a limited period of time.  Yet when trying to adopt a new habit making ‘rules’ is an essential part of getting to where you want to be because you are acting consciously.  Rules are the shorthand of designing in the environment, process and timings of the necessary activities you want to undertake.

All this made me think about the key things to remember when trying to adopt a habit, to differentiate it from a new set of rules and make sure that the rules are just a temporary means to an end, a framework for getting where you want to be:

1. Have a purpose – i.e. a thing that you want that you are motivated about – its unlikely the habit itself is the end-game.  I.e. I am working on weight training three times a week so I can be a better sailor, not because I want to lift weights 3 times a week.  I may by the time I have the habit have changed my mind about the necessity and joy of lifting weights but it’s not currently my goal.
2. Experiment – habit-forming as Duhigg says is an individual process, try a thing, if it doesn’t feel right or get done then try something else, keep the things you are using to form the habit under review.  I’ve just realised I have spent years trying and failing to floss at night because my hygienist says that’s when I should, but I’m going to try the morning because I think that might work, and could be a stepping stone.
3. Wear lightly – if you don’t do the thing don’t beat yourself up, think about it and try and learn something but move on to try another day or time, maybe go back to 2 and change something.
4. Reward and celebrate – acknowledge what you have managed to achieve and the effort and skill that went into making that happen.  It will give you a platform to help with future habits.  When I wrote my mental list of current self-improvement projects I noted there were at least 3 things that I thought would be on there but actually I now considered them to be habits, but I had not previously acknowledged that I had made that happen.

So, in this spirit I am calling an end to my 30-day challenge.  I have learnt a lot of other stuff already with my 9 posts, which I will reflect on elsewhere but on review it’s not the right rule at the right time for me.  By focusing on solely my economics learning goal I have over-complicated the rules.  I am now aiming to post 3 times a week, and if I make 4 I will be especially pleased for myself.  Through to the end of September.  And I will post about a wider range of things I am learning about and thinking about.  Some posts will be short and shipped quickly but at least 1 a week I will sit down for an hour and focus on thinking through what I want to say – because I don’t think just short shipping is helping with the quality of what I want to say.

Struggling

New habits – they’re hard to make happen.

I’ve been thinking somewhat this week about the difference between making rules for yourself and trying to create new habits by design; as I am going to a field for the weekend I am going to attempt to write about this some more while I’m away.

In the meantime something about where I am at with the learning so far from my 30-day challenge:

• When you don’t blog for 1 day it’s harder to blog the next
• For me, if I haven’t blogged first thing in the morning I probably won’t.  I keep pretending that I will but I already know that mornings are my best time of the day (this afternoon blog is happening only because I am very consciously avoiding doing something else less appealing right now!)
• I’m trying to learn too much at once – how to blog regularly and ‘make work visible’, about the basics of economics, about how economics can change the world, how to use the tech side of things
• All of that impacts on each other – most obviously in time available to do things, but also whether I should blog about the process, or economics, or who knows what.  I need a clearer idea of what is the ‘work’ that I am trying to make visible
• Having a project and a goal for learning has massively helped me in some ways – I’ve made time to read and do on-line learning and I’m thinking about how to record and arrange my thoughts in a more structured way than I have before
• Still, it’s quite difficult to keep to goals that you have set for yourself alone – some kind of peer sharing would help – which proves the benefits of the Circle approach to Working Out Loud – being engaged in an interdependent process of learning with others (My best cheat example so far is not tweeting my blog as I agreed with myself I would, that way I can tell myself I’ve made visible, but no-one has actually seen it.  It’s a bit like short-cutting on a run – I assume at some point I’ll get bored of it because it won’t give me the results I want!)

And on Tuesday I learnt that the local library has a pretty good economics section (for a very small library).  Among the books on how to make money there are some basics books and quite a few of the more popular ‘new theory’ books – I have borrowed and started reading Yanis Varoufakis, ‘And the weak must suffer what they must? Europe, austerity and the threat to global stability.’

I’m not taking this book to a camping field – it’s not mine after all so I can’t really get it muddy.  But I am going to take advantage of some point over the weekend to ponder where I am at and just what to do next week I think, to make things a little bit better – I note I asked myself the wrong question above and so produced a list of mainly negative learning as opposed to “what goes well” which would be a better starting point for where next.

Universal Basic Income

I’ve been interested in the idea behind a ‘Universal Basic Income’ for a while but not really sure where to start in understanding what this means.  It’s one of the particular reasons behind starting on this economics learning.  On initial consideration it manages to appear to me so outlandish an idea, yet so marvelously simple – and importantly fair.

The motivation to finally make the effort to understand the idea in more detail came from an event shared with my by @evefrancisholt, Universal Basic Income: what would this look like in practice? organised by Steady State Manchester and Social Change and Community Wellbeing Research Group at MMU.  Hopefully, this will prove to be exactly the kind of learning event I really enjoy and benefit from learning at – a discussion where people with a greater level of expertise are opening up to questions and ideas from others.

I’ve worked my way so far through much of the supplied pre-reading list:

1. Richard Murphy: http://classonline.org.uk/pubs/item/financing-the-social-state

2. Green Party: https://policy.greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/Policy%20files/Basic%20Income%20Consultation%20Paper.pdf

3. RSA: https://www.thersa.org/action-and-research/rsa-projects/public-services-and-communities-folder/basic-income/

4. Compass: http://www.compassonline.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/UniversalBasicIncomeByCompass-Spreads.pdf

5. Malcolm Torry: https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/research/publications/working-papers/euromod/em5-16.pdf

And, I want to supplement this with some feminist economic readings on the subject, it’s interesting so far to me that there is such limited mention of the potential impact of this on gender equality and the nature of the existing degree of ‘unpaid work’ undertaken in the economy.   Hopefully then I should have a list of questions and thoughts for the event and I can form a view on which particular scheme I favour and how I would explain this to others.

Learning goals

The putting out there, or just down on paper, actual goals can be a tricky concept.  It can appear to give a finality and immovable concreteness to the goals that feels very rigid, often in a, “now I’ve told someone I’ll have to do it” way.  Is to deviate now seen as failure?  Even though I know (and advise others regularly) that all goals evolve, can appear different on different days or completely change I have prevaricated about writing these down.  This week though I read a letter from Hunter S. Thompson where he advises on seeking to understand your self and the path, as opposed to be being defined by the goal.

So in that vein I’m putting down some learning goals here, as they are now.  In the full knowledge that they may change because of things I learn or because others influence my thinking about what they should be.  I’ve used the fab tools over at Enrol Yourself to frame my thinking so much thanks there.  Over the next 6 months I am going to spend time learning about:

• What are the major factors influencing the shape of the global economy in the next 50 years – eg climate change, technology, migration?
• What are the alternative economic models that would support a fairer society, with a focus on gender equality?
  • Kinda implies a base understanding of the orthodox and dominant models, with a bit of history of how we got here thrown in (once a historian…..)
• What are the steps that will get us to these models?
• What am I doing to inform and develop that change now?
  • Can I find my voice to articulate competently, boldly and simply my understanding of the role of economics in our lives, and the changes I want (or basically having an opinion and putting it out there)
  • What kind of ‘experiments’ or smaller-scale things could I create or get involved with that support this?
  • How does this understanding influence and present in all other aspects of my life – work, pleasure, family?

There are a whole heap of other related elements here around improving my connections and relationships with people, getting better at technology use in a number of ways, practicing my working out loud practice – but they are all tools I will be using and I can comment on those as I go along.

Right now I’m feeling like I haven’t given this enough structure, but I’m leaving it there for today.

 

Changing nature of work

One of the particular things driving my desire to learn more about economics is about how technology is changing the nature of work and what that means for who wins, how and how much we work in the future.  The changing nature of reward and inequality in who benefits from labour was something I considered but that really came home to me in the post-Brexit fall-out; it matters because it is having a real impact on the lives and perceptions of people about what the threat is to their future.  In the immediate referendum hangover I reached finally for the copy of Paul Mason’s ‘PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future’ I had bought some time previously and not got around to reading.  I need to review in more detail Mason’s views on the shift to an information age but essentially for him this results not in a refinement to capitalism but signifies a whole new economic age.

And it is important to me that during this learning journey I remember to keep the theory joined-up with the reality; the reality of people’s lives.  Because I think this is one of the majorly significant problems with ‘economics’, that the experts talk about it in an abstract, theoretical way that removes it from the impact on people’s daily lives and fails to explain it in any understandable form.  The impact on individuals becomes acceptable, because we don’t see the human cost when we use sanitized words such as ‘austerity’.  Two things this evening have enabled me to keep this joined up.  I watched the final episode of Britain’s Hardest Workers: Inside the Low Wage Economy, I had not seen any of the previous episodes.  It was a fascinating and in many ways surprising, but not so much in other ways, look at what constitutes ‘low skill’ and therefore results in low pay; I can definitively state that making pizzas is not a low pressure, low skill job.  Where they talked about the estimated 11 million jobs that are forecast to disappear with automation and what this would mean for the low-skilled if we do not adopt different policies for the UK economy.  The most depressing thing for me was the economics think-tank dude who confidently said it would probably though be okay for those who remained low-skilled because there would likely always be space for care work to be low-skilled and low-paid, thus joining up with another particular interest of mine – the economy and gender equality.

I also read this blog on the ‘real debt problem’ busting in terribly simple language another lie that the ‘experts’ feed us regularly about reducing the national debt and why it matters.  Well I say read, but I need to do it again.  I mention it only because it epitomises for me the need to constantly challenge the status of the information we are fed by the political elite and how I want to feel informed enough to do that.

There’s a heap of other stuff about the basic minimum wage that leads on from this but I think I’ll save this for another blog….

And yes, I missed yesterday and I’m wearing that lightly, alongside this not being a very structured meandering but I did ship it!

Day 10: the blank bits

At some point yesterday I was talking to a friend who was doing the 22 press-ups for 22 days challenge (raising awareness about the rates of suicide and mental health issues in veterans).  I was conscious that I had started this 30-day challenge and was approaching my 4th day in a row without blogging and was wondering about similarities in the situations.  Both are challenges that are out there in the public domain, although potentially Facebook (in which the press-up challenge exists) is a very different social environment with different rules and expectations for people’s behaviours (it’s interesting that so far in this making my work visible experiment I have not yet posted anything about it on Facebook, preferring twitter – probably ought to come back to that at some point).  But there is a key difference in that the press-up challenge is underwritten by the idea of doing something in an altruistic vein with added peer/ group pressure – if the act itself is not directly selfless it is a demonstration of thinking about and raising awareness of the needs and experiences of others.

Conversely this challenge is only about and for myself – it’s all about me, me, me – developing my practice about putting myself and my work out there, ultimately with the desire to build better and more generous collaborations and relationships, but it’s still about me and my role and wants.  So when I kinda semi-subconsciously thought (i.e. the thought crept in but I didn’t hold onto it) about just not blogging again and pretending like it never happened on Monday  it didn’t really feel like it would matter because who would notice or be bothered anyway.  These particular thoughts are not changing the face of humankind!

But someday I might have a thought or an idea that could change, if not the future of the planet, something for someone(s) – in fact I’m more than confident that I know a heap of stuff already that can indeed do that.  So in a crisis of confidence about ‘failing’ to enact a new habit from the exact start I have decided on the best course being honesty about the fact that developing habits is not easy or straightforward.  For the last 4 days the obstacles have been: making time (I can be a bit of a weekend ‘checker-outer’, it’s a skill I hold dear);  some crisis of purpose on the exercise; and fear of forcing myself to ship something when I’m not sure exactly what to write or how it will come across.  So I’m just forcing myself now to put that out there.

The other issue was that I was not sure that I had done any thinking about economics, which allegedly is the current purpose of my blogging!    That turns out not to be strictly true – many inevitable discussions about the Olympics have provoked discussion of the ‘value’ of the event, and reminded me that in 2015 I read the well researched book by Andrew Zimbalist, ‘Circus Maximus: The economic gamble behind hosting the olympics and the world cup’ – with interesting lessons for reform of these movements so we can focus wholeheartedly on the achievements of the athletes.

Which just reinforces my view that economics is really part of everything in our lives.

 

Day 5: enrolment!

Disappointingly there was no freshers week – somehow replicating the carnival of joining a heap of clubs and activities you never partake in and making best friends for life you never see again is really something we need to work on with this on-line learning business….

Regardless, being hangover free from my lack of freshers entertainment I commenced the Principles of Economics: MicroEconomics course this morning.  They are wonderfully bite sized and animated – 3 to 4 minutes each with little quiz questions.  As well as the introduction I did 3 further sessions on the demand and supply curve (so not quite my estimated hour).  And as we are talking about curves my learning curve over 15 minutes went something like this:

• “ooh, it’s 2 older American men presenting but they seem quite chatty and have a good way about them, I can go with this”
• “I really am starting with basic concepts here, this is nice”
• “really, but what about …..? maybe this was a mistake and it’s too basic? no, stick with it, it’s good and worthy to refresh basic concepts”
• “right, okay, maybe I need to replay this session, I’m not quite sure I took all of that in with one go…..”

In summary, I think I am in the right place.  I have reviewed the basics of the demand and supply curve and they’ve thrown in the first thinker with Adam Smith.  The introduction was all about the importance of incentives and defining economics and why to study so that will help over the weekend as I look to the learning goals.

Simultaneously I am becoming concerned that there may be too much going on in this learning exercise – there are a whole heap of things I want to understand about this blog, not least changing images, using categroies and tags etc.  Maybe some time next week on those.  I’m hoping thought that I managed to ‘unstick’ the Day 1 post from the blog,,, here’s hoping!

Oh, that and the upcoming challenge of weekend posting #notoriouslyrubbishatweekends!