Transition Culture

15 Jan 2014

Can earth building scale up to the mainstream? 1: ClayWorks and clay plasters

Academic Gill Seyfang wrote in 2009 in a piece about natural building that such materials and techniques will only make the step across into the mainstream if they succeed in “scaling up the existing small-scale, one-off housing projects to industrial mass production”. Over the next 2 days we’ll be looking at 2 aspects of earth construction, cob and clay plasters, and their potential for scaling up. We start today with Adam Weismann and Katy Bryce, who founded Clayworks, an “award winning UK manufacturer and provider of services and products in unfired clay”, who provide “a beautiful range of backing coat and through-pigmented top-coat clay plasters”.  Walls good enough to eat. But might they become a mainstream building material? 

You’ve been involved in earth building for some time now.  Where do you see it in terms of its penetration into the mainstream?

Our experience is that mass earthen wall building is more difficult to transfer into the mainstream due to the price of labour vs materials. Earth walling systems are generally labour intensive which makes them expensive unless being executed by the homeowner or a volunteer based programme. This tends to keep earth walling as a specialised, niche way to build walls. Our attempts to bring mass cob walling into the mainstream were thwarted by costs, that is why we decided that the best way to get unfired clay into buildings was through the route of finishes, which could be applied onto more conventional materials.

You recently launched Clayworks as a business making and selling pigmented clay plasters.  What has that experience taught you about the potential of these materials to go mainstream? 

Our past and current experiences are that it still remains tough to convince the mainstream market about the value of using unfired clay in buildings. Cost still remains a challenge for us – how can we compete with our direct competitors such as British Gypsum and La Farge? There is still a lot of education that needs to be done to convince large scale and small-scale developers about the durability of using clay plasters. A large portion of our work is in this awareness raising/education.

 

Although programmes such as the dreaded Grand Designs have taught the public that natural materials such as clay and straw are viable options for building a home, many people remain sceptical and unaware of the potential for building with these beautiful and functional natural materials. They are also held back sometimes due to the outdated perception that they are quirky, ‘rustic’ and unreliable. Until real economies of scale can be reached, cost will always be the issue.

With most mainstream building projects cost is the main deciding factor about which materials to be used. Where we have seen success into penetrating the market, is when our clay plasters (a ‘luxury’ product) can be used alongside conventional materials. People can choose to spend their money on the really visible part of the house and achieve the functional, aesthetic, environmental and health benefits that most natural materials bring. This was therefore a key prerequisite behind the design of our clay plaster systems.

What do you see as the key obstacles for natural building materials becoming a more commonplace part of the construction industry?  Are they always bound to remain in a niche? 

Firstly, the technical difficulty of standardising materials that are by their very nature ‘local’, ad hoc, variable and inconsistent. To sell a building product on the open market you need to have tests and technical data that tell your customers that this product will behave in exactly this way every time. It was a huge challenge to develop a clay walling plaster to this level of standardisation when it had grown out of a philosophy which embraces the use of materials that encapsulate the soul of a locale. Everything about creating our product was a lesson in making compromises around these core beliefs, set a against a stronger desire to bring the beauty and functionality of clay to a wider audience and our belief in the power of  building materials to change and enhance  peoples lives – from the physical to the more esoteric levels.

Secondly, as touched on above, the challenge of economies of scale to produce a product that is affordable to a wide variety of customers. Our product remains more expensive than the standard walling finishes such as those made out of gypsum and cement. However, due to the way clay walling plasters and most other natural building products function (regulation of humidity and temperature in a space etc) these costs are mitigated against the costs of health, environment and building longevity. It takes a very aware and environmentally responsible individual to value these long term cost savings and to set the long term gains against the intitial cost. 

Thirdly, this brings us back round to education and the need to engage with homeowners, developers, designer, architects, builders, the general public about the very real need to build environmentally responsible buildings that not only have a lighter impact during their construction but also in the way they function in the long run. Not just greenwash.

Lastly, developing a skilled pool of labour who are trained in producing environmentally responsible buildings out of natural materials to a very high standard within a financially viable business context i.e tension between artist/craftsperson vs businessperson. 

Natural building products can be brought out of their niche, but only with certain compromises. The purest approach will always remain philosophically bound, for its very essence does not allow it to expand and filter outwards. The purely cost-driven, conventional approach will never allow room for natural building materials and techniques that compromise the profitability of the project. The gap must be bridged between the two. Hopefully, a product such as ours and other similar ones on the market, are going someway to laying the foundations for this bridging. 

What construction projects have you seen recently that have given you most inspiration?

Anything built out of natural materials – unfired clay walls, floors and finishes, strawbale, stone, wood, thatch – built on a large scale: 

• Studio Mumbai Projects (an architectural/craftspersons firm in India) who create a fantastic synergy between building vision and execution due to the fact that the designers and builders are one and the same firm.
• School in Bangladesh by German architect named anna (can’t remember last name!)
• Japanese temple architecture
• National Trust visitors centre in strawbale – Lake District, UK
• Cobtun, Totnes –  Paul and Ivana Barclay –  a beautiful testimony to a family with no experience of building with cob to create a unique and indvidual work of art as a home.
• Econest projects in Santa Fe, USA
• The Globe Theatre – Southwark, London – a beautiful building made out of natural materials that nestles softly amongst the London skyline

With the green building world becoming increasingly focused on performance (i.e. Passivhaus) at the expense of the localness and low impact of the materials, how might we change that? (if indeed you agree with that statement?) 

We agree with this statement! Our core philosophy has always been to use low impact, functional materials – making a building work from the bottom up, before using add on technology (which does not have a low environmental impact to make) to make it function better. To change this, it comes back to education.

The most important people to educate about this are those designing our homes for the future. An example of this is the use of unfired clay to regulate humidity and temperature in a building. The Passivhaus concept is fantastic, but many people get caught up in making a building perform better with add-on technology, and using materials such as plastic sealing tapes throughout the entire building. They fail to think about the impact of these products on the environment from their production to their afterlife, whilst thinking their conscience is clean because they are using very little energy to heat their building. Our other bugbear about Passivhaus and the failure to consider the use of natural materials in their construction, is the fact that a sealed building envelope is created holding a veritable soup of off-gasing building materials – not good for the health of the inhabitants or mother earth.  

Most ‘natural building’ projects tend to be one-off self-build projects.  On larger developments, with larger economies of scale, what do you think is possible with sufficient imagination and determination?  Is natural building always going to be the most expensive option?  

Anything is possible with the right intention. It would take a collective of very determined individuals who all hold a strong environmental vision. We see a larger development being created through the use of intermediate technology, such as a cob block maker to turn local clay soils into building blocks, a min-miser for milling local timber, large paddle mixers for making mortar etc. A strong core of skilled leaders leading a collective of physically fit, enthusiastic people working towards the same vision.

The project would also need strong financial leadership to ensure that it remained commercially viable.  A project such as this would need to be situated somewhere in the world where there were plentiful local materials that could be used for construction materials. As in the past, the designers of these buildings would need to be skilled in understanding how the local materials could be used to their best effect. 

What role does design play?  Most houses in the early ‘cob revival’ were what many people dismiss as ‘Hobbit houses’.  What can design do to make cob funky, modern and desirable, and who is working in this field already would you say? 

To bring earthen buildings more into the mainstream and make them more modern and desirable, design is absolutely essential. Not just for how the building looks, but also in how it functions – using the materials to do what they are good at, and in the environment that they are situated (local climate etc) and creating design details that ensure their longevity and hence the longevity of the structure.

Natural buildings will grow in viability once people gain confidence in a legacy of optimal functioning and longevity. For people that we see working successfully in this way, see point 4 above. Two astounding people (an architect and master timber framer) who have really managed to bring together excellent design with the use of local, natural materials, are Robert and Paula Baker-LaPorte in the USA (EcoNest). They design exquisite earthen buildings of all scales, that have exemplary design detailing. They look highly modern and classic, but remain earthy and wholesome, so can appeal to a wide audience of people. They have taken natural building to the next level in our eyes.

You’ve spent a lot of time in and around earthen buildings.  If you had to summarise how they are different, how the experience of being in them differs from conventional building, what would you say?  What was it about earth buildings that you fell in love with however many years ago it was that you fell in love with them? 

Aha, a very long and intense love affair indeed that is set to continue into infinity! Where to begin. 

• The way the walls absorb sound
• The ability to create rounded, sculptural shapes as well as very linear, angular lines
• Living inside of nature – the ground beneath your feet rearranged to create walls, floors, plasters
• Earthy colours and pigments pleasing to the eyes and senses
• Healthy indoor climate – humidity and temperature regulated
• Walls warm to the touch
• Walls and floors that remain alive and in dialogue with their environment – unfired clay materials never chemically set, they just harden, meaning that they remain fluid within the realms of aliveness
• The sheer vastness of different ways, methods, styles, techniques of building with this one ubiquitous material around the world, and the way they tell the story of the people and the places in which they are situated

All the above points come together into one elating feeling within the sub-conscious mind whenever we walk into a clay house!       

If natural building and its vision is to truly scale up, what skills, observations, expertise and shifts in thinking do we need to bring into the movement?  

• Compromise, whilst maintaining core values and ethics of natural building.
• Expertise in natural building skills and trades of a very high standard, inspired and grounded in traditional crafts and building skills  – arranged through the traditional apprenticeship scheme (training with masters for years instead of months)
• Marrying together expertise in natural building skills with strong business training to make financially viable businesses that make commercial sense

Be brave and take your vision out into the ‘conventional’ mainstream building world i.e stop preaching to the converted. If you believe in what you do with a strong passion and you have sound technical grounding behind it, you will be amazed at how appealing this can be to even the most conservative amongst society.

Adam and Katy founded ‘Cob in Cornwall’ which is now called ‘Clayworks’.  They are the authors of Building With Cob: a step-by-step guide and Using Natural Finishes: Lime and Clay Based Plasters, Renders and Paints – A Step-by-step Guide.  They also work as earth building/clay plastering practitioners.  

Tomorrow we head to East Devon to visit the the largest cob house ever built and to hear what lessons it can offer for the scaling up of cob construction. 

 

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13 Jan 2014

Holmgren’s ‘Crash on Demand’: be careful what you wish for

It is a rare occurence that I disagree with David Holmgren.  One of my heroes, and the co-founder of permaculture, I generally find his intellect formidable, his insights on permaculture revelatory, and his take on the wider patterns and scenarios unfolding around us to be deeply insightful.  But while there is much insight in his most recent paper, Crash on Demand, it also raises many questions and issues that I’d like to explore here.  I am troubled by his conclusions, and although I understand the logic behind them, I fear that they could prove a dangerous route to go down if left unchallenged. 

‘Crash on Demand’ in a nutshell

So what are the paper’s core arguments?  It picks up from his ‘Future Scenarios’ work a few years on, reassessing their relevance in a rapidly changing world (you can read Jason Heppenstall’s summary of the new paper here).  In essence, he has shifted to thinking that a gradual energy descent isn’t going to happen.  Rather than his Green Tech Future scenario which sees a concerted government response (similar to what we’re seeing in Germany) or the Earth Stewardship scenario, an intentional powering down, he argues that in reality we are moving deeper and deeper into what he calls ‘Brown Tech’.  

Brown Tech has emerged because “sustained high energy prices have allowed private and national energy corporations to put in place many new fossil and renewable energy projects that are moderating the impact of the decline in production from ageing ‘super giant’ fields”.  Most of these new fossil fuel projects, he argues, “generate far more greenhouse gases than the conventional sources they have replaced”.  

The pace of the unfolding of climate change has outpaced expectations, and the world, if it continues to pursue Business as Usual, is still on course for a 6 degree rise in temperature, which would be catastrophic.  He states that we have left it too late for a planned and intentional ‘Green Tech’ future, and the structural vulnerabilities of the economy mean that the currently emergent ‘Brown Tech’ future will be short-lived.  

He suggests that in this context, “severe global economic and societal collapse would switch off greenhouse gas emissions enough to begin reversing climate change”, and that we should deliberately seek to make this happen. That troubles me.  I have two key objections to the paper which I’ll set out below. 

One: A Post-Growth Economy = Economic Crash?  Really? 

The first place the paper comes unstuck for me is in his overarching conclusion, namely that a post growth, climate-responsible world is inevitably a crashed economy.  Holmgren writes:

“If we accept a global financial crash could make it very difficult, if not impossible, to restart the global economy with anything other than drastically reduced emissions, then an argument can be mounted for putting effort into precipitating that crash, the crash of the financial system”.  

He argues that “a radical change in the behaviour of a relatively small proportion of the global middle class could precipitate such a crash”.  He goes on:

“I believe that actively building parallel and largely non-monetary household and local community economies with as little as 10% of the population has the potential to function as a deep systematic boycott of the centralised systems as a whole, that could lead to more than 5% contraction in the centralised economies”.  

That feels like a huge claim.  No research is used to back it up. It’s also a huge leap to state that a post growth economy is unavoidably a crashed economy, as well as being a very Western-centric proposition.  Talking to people from China and India recently, it is clear that the kind of ‘post-materialists’ who in Western economies might pioneer this “crash on demand” hardly exist there, and those are the economies where emissions are actually growing.  

Also, on what research is this idea that boycotting the economy would bring it to its knees, and that that would be a good thing to do, actually based?  The main reference to this thinking is given when Holmgren states:

“By 2008, the work of both systems analyst Nicole Foss and economist Steve Keen had convinced me that deflationary economics would be (and already are) the most powerful factors shaping our immediate future”. 

Now I’m no economist.  The subject, once it starts getting even vaguely complicated, leaves me rather puzzled.  But I do know that there are views other than Foss and Keen, and many of them don’t share their analysis (as an aside, I’m still scratching my head about Foss’ statement, in her response to this Holmgren piece, that “the best way to address climate change is not to talk about it”).  There is a wide range of views on what happens when an economy stops growing beyond those of Foss and Keen.  Here are just a few.  Robert Solow, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics has said:

“There is no reason at all why capitalism could not survive without slow or even no growth. I think it’s perfectly possible that economic growth cannot go on at its current rate forever”. 

When I talked to Peter Victor in 2012, author of Managing Without Growth (subtitled ‘Slower by design, not disaster’), I asked him “so the end of economic growth doesn’t necessarily mean an economic collapse?”  He told me:

“It could mean that, if you have an economic system that relies on growth.  That’s the dilemma we’ve got now. It seems to be that unless the economy is growing it flirts with collapse or it does collapse. The challenge to us is to try to configure an economy that doesn’t grow and doesn’t collapse”. 

Tim Jackson, in Prosperity Without Growth, writes:

“The risk of humanitarian collapse is enough to place something of a question mark over the possibility that we can simply halt economic growth.  If halting growth leads to economic and social collapse, then times look hard indeed.  If it can be achieved without collapse, prospects for maintaining prosperity are considerably better”.  

Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill’s book Enough is Enough, which explores the possibilities of a post-growth, steady-state economy, don’t even mention the word ‘collapse’ in the book.  Kevin Anderson, one of few climate scientists explicitly stating that staying below 2 degrees excludes economic growth as a possibility, told me when I interviewed him in 2012:

“Of course our view is that to deliver on 2°C, we should plan the economic contraction. It need not necessarily have the devastating impact that it very clearly had, and very inequitable impact, in Russia in particular”.

I have never heard him use the word collapse in relation to his proposals.  When I attended the DeGrowth conference in Venice last year, I don’t remember any presentations among that whole 4 day programme of talks and presentations anyone talking about collapse.  So I, for one, do not accept this notion that stopping growth, even if attainable, means inevitable collapse, and that striving to cause a collapse is a highly dangerous and irresponsible approach. 

In the environmental movement in general, and in Transition in particular, there has long been a tension between “brightsiding” (always focusing on the potential upsides of climate change) and dashing straight to the idea of collapse.  As John Michael Greer put it in a 2007 piece called ‘Immanentizing the Eschaton’:  

“It’s one thing to try to sense the shape of the future in advance, and to make constructive changes in your life to prepare for its rougher possibilities; it’s quite another to become convinced that history is headed where you want it to go; and when the course you’ve marked out for it simply projects the trajectory of a too-familiar myth onto the inkblot patterns of the future, immanentizing the Eschaton can become a recipe for self-induced disaster”.

But it’s not only one or the other, it’s a spectrum.  It’s not clear to me why Holmgren dashes straight to collapse.  He argues that in his opinion, regardless of what we do, there is a 50% chance of a crash anyway, as an inevitable outcome of the fragility of our economic system.  But no evidence is provided for this.  

As a recent paper by the Simplicity Institute (who also published Crash on Demand), entitled The Deep Green Alternative, highlights, between industrial growth and collapse lie a broad spectrum of approaches, all of which explore different routes to “a radically alternative way of living on the Earth – something ‘wholly other’ to the ways of industrialisation, consumerism, and limitless growth”.  To simplify this discussion down to such an either/or really does nobody any favours. 

All of this leads on to my second point, that of how Holmgren communicates his proposal.   

Two: the concept of ‘Skilful Means’

There is a concept from Buddhism called “skilful means” which offers some very useful insights as to what lies at the root of my disagreement with the paper.  Skilful means (or upaya in Sanskrit) is sometimes also translated as tactfulness or ingenuity, and refers to the observation that different people have different capacities, different ways of taking in information.  If you want to share an insight with a diversity of people, given sufficient insight and wisdom, with some you might sit and explain it, for another you might tell them a story, and another, you might just make a particular comment at a particular time that triggers a train of thought that leads to the same conclusion. 

For me, skilful means is what this paper lacks.  Personally, I find Holmgren’s analysis, namely that we seem to be moving towards a Brown Tech scenario, that climate change is accelerating, that no leadership looks likely from most government, to be compelling.  It is a useful analysis, a useful revision of Future Scenarios.  It may be that some people involved in localisation and resilience work choose to see what they are doing in the context of a deliberate attempt to crash the system.  But is it in any way skilful to publicly reframe that as the driver for Transition, or permaculture for that matter?  That is where I part company with Holmgren. 

That’s not to say I don’t understand why he would think it.  Climate scientist Kevin Anderson recently stated “Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony”.  He argues that economic growth is no longer compatible with staying below 2 degrees.  This entirely justified sense of urgency leads some to take an approach to climate change that resonates closely with the famous words of Mario Savio in 1964:

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

But to imagine that a popular movement could be built around deliberately crashing the global economy feels to me naive in the extreme. It would certainly prove virtually impossible to muster any kind of mainstream political support for it.  While a number of MPs I have spoken to are happy to state off-the-record that they have doubts that growth is the best way forward, none of them would say so on the record.  

My question is, if Holmgren is right to suggest that we deliberately seek to make economic collapse happen (which I personally think is a naive and irresponsible proposal), then how best to communicate that?  What is the audience for this paper?  Is it written in such a way as to appeal to a broad range of readers?  No.  It is written for “PLU”s (People Like Us).  It isn’t written for potential allies in local government, trades unions, for the potential broad coalitions of local organisations that Transition groups try to build, for the diversity of political viewpoints that are found in most communities.  

It is written for the very small sector of people who read this kind of thing.  Yet the very issues we need to be creating responses to are felt across society and need responses from across society.  It is precisely my frustration with permaculture’s seeming contentment at residing in a niche of its own making that prompted me to start thinking about the need for Transition in the first place. 

This paper offers something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: if we present the alternatives to collapse in such a way that they engage and appeal to nobody, then the opportunity to avert it (assuming its inevitability) becomes even less likely.  It’s the antithesis of skilful means.  

It seems to me that what we need to be doing, and what permaculture, Transition, and many other movements around the world are trying to do is to build resilience, model a post growth economy, from the ground up at community level, the “actively parallel economy” Holmgren describes.  

For example, in Totnes, we produced a Local Economic Blueprint.  It set out the case, built on extensive research, for 10% shift towards a local economy.  Part of its power was the coalition of local stakeholders who co-published it, Town Council, Chamber of Commerce, Development Trust and so on.  But did it present itself as a plan to deliberately crash the global economy in order to save the biosphere?  If we had done, almost certainly we’d have been the only group involved in it.  Instead it found a wording that everyone was happy with:

“We agreed the overall goal of this system would be to maximise the wellbeing of our entire community, and to do this in a way that uses and distributes resources fairly while respecting natural limits. Economic growth is welcome, certainly within the sectors identified within this project, but not at any cost”.

Enabling the kind of shift of financial capital from fossil fuels to investment in local resilient economies that I set out in last week’s post will be key to enabling this transition.  As will building vibrant coalitions of local organisations around the benefits of doing it.

Holmgren argues, in his ‘Nested Scenarios’ graph (below), that what we are seeing is different scenarios unfolding at different scales.  “To some extent”, he writes, “all scenarios are emerging simultaneously and may persist to some degree into the future, one nested within another”.

 

For me, rather than trying to use the local community and household scales to try and deliberately crash the economy, they both have a huge potential, as yet barely scratched, to inspire and model a new economy.  One that is low carbon, resilient and which builds social justice.  Yet that can only happen with the very broad support, buy-in and engagement that an explicit goal of “crash on demand” and the kind of language and approach embodied in this paper would render impossible.  

I may be naive, but I still think it is possible to mobilise that in a way that, as the Bristol Pound illustrates, gets the support and buy-in of the ‘City/State’ level, and begins to really put pressure and influence on ‘National’ thinking.  I may be naive, but it’s preferable to economic collapse in my book, and I think we can still do it. 

Also, if Holmgren is going to explicitly call for an orchestrated attempt to trigger an economic collapse, this paper should surely contain more about what that might look like?  What does collapse mean for someone living in an inner city food desert, whose benefits are being capped, reduced, or taken away altogether, with no access to land for growing food, with no skills, and little interest in acquiring any?  How does he intend to “sell” this message to them, to make this seem like an inviting proposition?  Given that one of permaculture’s three core underpinnings is “PeopleCare”, this paper is surprisingly lacking in such considerations.  

Or is he heading towards a position of assuming that the dangers of climate change are so overarching that the nightmare collapse would lead to in such communities is just what needs to happen, a “can’t make an omlette without breaking a few eggs”-type approach. Can it really be right that “a relatively small proportion of the global middle class” should be able to deliberately plunge those beneath them on the social ladder into such chaos without a clear strategy as to how such large-scale suffering might be mitigated? If so, this placing to one side of issues of social justice is alarming. As Yotam Marom wrote recently: 

“We have to re-learn the climate crisis as one that ties our struggles together and opens up potential for the world we’re already busy fighting for”.

Last thoughts

There is a progression of thinking in this paper, and a point at which I part company with Holmgren.  Economic growth and the current financial system means we are on course for a 6 degree rise in global temperatures.  Yes, get that.  Current approaches aren’t working. Yes, fine.  We need, with great urgency, to move beyond the growth paradigm to a different approach built on local economies and so on.  Yes, I’m with you.  And as Naomi Klein sets out in her recent New Statesman article, there are grounds for building a popular movement around that.  But then to state that we need to deliberately, and explicitly, crash the global economy feels to me naive and dangerous, especially as nothing in between growth and collapse is explored at all.

This month on the Transition Network website we are exploring the theme of “scaling up”.  It seems to me that if there is one sure and certain way of ensuring that we won’t scale up all the great work already being done around the world to build community and local economic resilience, it will be by framing it as being about deliberately bringing around an economic crash. It would set us back years.

Holmgren argues that:

“bringing these issues out into the open might inspire desperate climate and political activists to put their substantial energy into permaculture, Transition Towns, voluntary frugality, and other aspects of positive environmentalism”.  

That’s as may be, but if we are to make anything happen, we need to also bring the wider community and other organisations on board.  We have to speak beyond the People Like Us.  Unless we’re able to do that (last week’s piece about Transition Laguna Beach showed a brilliant example of such skilful means in practice), a rallying flag of Crash on Demand will be entirely self-defeating.  ‘Crash on Demand’ is a case of, as they say, being careful what you wish for.  

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13 Jan 2014

How to discuss Transition with … No.2: MPs and Civil Servants

As Transitioners, what’s the most skilful way to approach decision makers, both civil servants and national government?  I talked to Peter Lipman, Chair of Transition Network and Director of Projects and Innovation at Sustrans, who spends a fair amount of time in and out of meetings with government officials/civil servants at national and local level.  What tips might he have for Transitioners wanting to most skilfully engage?

• Be clear about not only what you want from your meeting, but also what the people you’re meeting might want
• Make time to think about it and research in advance
• Pitch your message to what you know they will be interested and what will help them to meet their objectives,while never forgetting your own objectives
• Find the balance between being assertive and being friendly 

Who 

Peter Lipman is Chair of Transition Network and Director of Projects and Innovation with Sustrans.  His work often brings him into contact with government officials, MPs and civil servants. 

The conversation  

Pete’s first suggestion was that the place to start is with a clear assessment of what it is that both parties want to get out of the dialogue.  If you are only concerned with what you want out of it, it could well end up a waste of both people’s times. He continued:

We’ll close with an example Pete offered that captures much of the advice offered above.  He was recently invited to attend a big European Union event about reconsidering EU energy policy representing Transition Network.  He was invited to attend for the full 2 days, but could only attend for a couple of hours to talk at a workshop:

“It was attended by 200 people, a third of them senior employees at the EU, a third national government and national institution employees, like the head of energy policy for France, and a third big corporations.  It was interesting to see that the people being consulted don’t include not civil society.  I did a presentation, a couple of other people did presentations, there was questions and answers, following which, one woman who seemed to be representing every big energy company in the world said “fascinating, be really interesting to talk”.  The next day I had an email from her, and rather than responding immediately, I did some homework, I set about following up web links, to be clear what shemight want.  It’s so important to understand that before launching into the discussion with her”.  

“Inevitably.  For that EU event I only went to try and jolt a top-down approach so that they would take the possibility of bottom up community action seriously.  So rather than read the endless reams of papers they had sent me in advance, I thought “what is it that would actually make them pay attention?”  So I thought there are two things.  One is the potential scale for community action, and I gave a couple of good examples like Brixton Energy and BWCE to really show the potential for scale.  I highlighted those kinds of examples, and linked that through to the breadth of the movement.  

The other thing is how vulnerable those markets they all assume are going to be there in their current form are to systemic change.  The market in Europe which has most shown that is the German market, where RWE, one of their big energy generators has lost, I can’t remember exactly, two-thirds to three-quarters of its market value over last three or four years, due to the effect of both renewables generally and more specifically community-owned renewables on the German energy market.  

Those are the 2 things to highlight, that combination of “you think you’re in control but actually look what’s happening under your nose in the biggest, most sophisticated most valuable energy market in Europe, Germany, and look at this potential”.  I just banged those 2 points home, and it got an enormous response. My guess is that I certainly wouldn’t have got someone who works with all those big companies immediately following up saying “we really need to talk” if I hadn’t pitched it at what I thought was where they’re interested.  What communities might want from them, if anything, is something I then need to refine before I then have that conversation with her.”  

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10 Jan 2014

Nick Temple on scaling up social innovations

The Transition movement isn’t the first idea/movement to grow rapidly and then wonder how to take the next step forward.  Within the field of social enterprise, the question of scaling up is faced by many diverse enterprises and innovations.  How to take the next step up?  I talked to Nick Temple, director of business and enterprise at Social Enterprise UK (the national membership body for social enterprise in the UK) for his thoughts, via Skype as he sat in a London coffeeshop. One of his key suggestions?  Get on TV.  

  

What for you is a social innovation? What does that mean?

A social innovation I guess, for me that’s broader than a social enterprise. A social innovation would be really an idea that’s being implemented that’s totally new. I think people tend to confuse innovation with novelty at times, so it’s not a new idea but one that’s implemented.

I think the difference with social innovation as opposed to social enterprise is that that can be really across any sectors. It could be happening in the public sector, private sector, social sector or often in a partnership across different sectors.

What are the most common challenges with scaling these things up, in your experience?

I would say we tend to see quite a lot of ambition early on, so we tend to see quite a few unrealistic business plans which maybe underestimate the extent to which scale requires an investment in systems, an investment in people and infrastructure. An investment in some of the central functions that takes time, resources and capacity. Often that can be one of the main challenges.

I think as a sector we tend to be incredibly impatient for scale, understandably because the scale of problems we’re facing are still huge and significant and often growing. But often if you look at those social enterprises and other social innovations that have scaled, the thing that tends to connect them, if anything, is the amount of time they’ve taken and not necessarily anything else.

Where do you sit in terms of the danger at the moment, where there are massive cuts in public spending and government appears to be expecting the social enterprise world to step in and fill those gaps. In terms of the politics of that, do you think government is embracing social enterprise because it’s committed to the ideas of social enterprise or because it sees it as something that can pick up the leftovers that the private sector doesn’t want?

I’m not quite as cynical. Social enterprise has had cross-party support for quite a while now, from 2008 onwards. That’s for a couple of reasons: if you’re from the left, some in the Labour party tends to see social enterprise as the embodiment of the Third Way, of social justice combined with economic development. From a Conservative perspective, the fact that it’s enterprise and focuses on enterprise and individuals is something that appeals to Conservative sensibilities perhaps more than a traditional volunteering kind of approach. 

I think we’re always quite clear that social enterprise isn’t a panacea. The reality is a lot of decent sized social enterprises get a lot of money from the public sector through contracts they win, so cuts to public funding affect social enterprises just like they affect private sector organisations who work in the public sector and the public sector itself.

I suppose the more positive side of it is that we are having to come up with completely new solutions to some of this stuff. If you’re running a local authority right now and the cost of adult care and children’s care is going through the roof at the same time as your income is going down, the ‘graph of doom’ as it’s known in local authority circles, then the pithy way of putting it is you can only slice the salami so much and then you don’t have a salami any more.

At some point you actually have to find different ways of doing things that are more preventative, that can save you money in multiple budget lines, help you deliver multiple outcomes and help you make much better use of your resources. I think that’s where social enterprise does have a role to play in providing some of those answers.

So something like Transition which has been around for 7 years and has scaled from nothing to being in 44 countries and is fostering that idea of social enterprise.  When you have something like that, which has gone to a certain scale but needs to take that next push on into the mainstream, that move from the early adopters to the early majority, what’s your sense or your experience of some suggestions about how to do that? What would your advice be in that context?

There’s no single answer obviously specific to Transition. But what I’ve grown to understand a bit more is the power of the media. This might sound a bit superficial but it’s extraordinary to me the power of the traditional media and social media, television in actually increasing awareness of what’s going on.

It’s interesting, if we looked at something like Teach First, which is very different to Transition, it has huge political support which helped it get off the ground very quickly, cross-party buy in, private sector support, and just recently they’re now having a TV programme made following Teach First teachers. That will permeate it even further into the mainstream. What we’re very aware of in terms of trying to raise people’s awareness of social enterprise, which is our job, because actually the primary source of income for social enterprises is the general public, ahead of the public sector. Actually when we’re looking to raise awareness we don’t really bother with our sector press, we only focus on the mainstream media.

In terms of breaking through, recognition, awareness and understanding, it’s having a co-operatively run shop on The Archers or having a social entrepreneur on The Apprentice or the likes of a Jamie Oliver’s 15 etc. etc. that actually help you reach a huge audience and that trickles down to a smaller number who will pick that up and get involved. And it plays into influencing other groups, whether that’s local authority, local enterprise partnerships, whoever that might be in terms of needing to get the actual stuff done. I didn’t expect myself to be sitting here saying it’s about TV, but the power of the media in terms of building that awareness across a whole range of different audiences is really critical.

With something like Transition, a lot of the people who would be involved with it would be people, as with a number of social innovations, who are drawn to it because they are attracted by the social change aspect of it and the social aspect, they don’t necessarily come from a background in commerce or business or enterprise in that kind of sense. What can something like Transition or other social innovations learn from how business approaches are scaling up, do you think?

I would start by saying, what you’ve said in terms of Transition and who’s attracted to it is common across social enterprise as well. Historically we tend to have people who may have come from the more traditional voluntary sector or from a public sector background, who may not have some of those skills. The bit I’m really interested in at the moment is the system stuff, which is the very unsexy, undocumented types of things that people don’t want to talk about, so your CRM database, your IT system, the operational people you have, their project management skills and so on and so forth.

It tends to be those things that you find in a lot of the really impressive business organisations, their ability to do marketing exceptionally well. I think we tend to be a bit shy at times in the social enterprise sector generally – I think it’s relatively weak at marketing. It’s viewed as if we’re spending money on marketing and sales, we’re taking money away from work we could be doing on the ground. Obviously if marketing and sales is successful then it brings you more business and more money that you can use to do more of the good work that you want to do.

For me, that being unashamedly commercial often is not necessarily about being ruthless or red in tooth and claw. It can be about investing in those things that you might not otherwise, and that’s often sales and marketing and communications.

There is the well known model of social innovation (the ‘Innovation Adoption Curve’) that moves from early adopters to early majority and so on (see below).  Often social enterprises and social innovations are very good at appealing to those early adopters, the people who are always scanning the horizon for new exciting ideas and pounce on them and run with them, then taking that step across into the early majority requires a tweaking of message maybe or how it’s presented, are there any examples that come into your mind of things that have successfully stepped across what some call “the gap”, and if so how did they do that?

What we tend to see is some real focusing of message, often to reach that bigger audience you need to really hone down on the essence of what it is and what it’s about so there’s less room for nuance. If I took something like a bottled water company like Belu (which the Transition Network would probably not be too happy about) which was a great idea and had a lot of early support from the social sector, but actually didn’t really break through.

It was only when it really clarified and simplified its business model and its marketing honed that, which is basically very simply: “we’re a bottled water company, all our profits go to Water Aid, one day every bottled water company should be like us, we bring you mineral water with ethics”. It distilled (no pun intended) their message into something really understandable by the mainstream. I think that’s why, rather than just seeing them at social enterprise conferences, you now see them in Strada, in Sainsbury’s and a whole range of other outlets. They simplified it into something that people can understand very intuitively and very quickly.

I think often it can be about just really honing those messages and getting to the kernel of what this is about so that you can make that really understandable and really accessible to that broader group of people.

Any last thoughts or advice for the Transition movement around scaling up?

The Transition movement’s been very successful in reaching that scale. I like the approach which is a move from ideas through to quite detailed plans and then into action. Now it tends to be about the more you can raise up those examples of action and have that modelling of behaviour and build a healthy competition between peers about who’s doing best. In terms of developing that enterprising culture, I think it’s best to reiterate the mantra of what it’s about, those simple messages about what Transition is all about and its purpose, keeping people aligned to that and understanding that this activity is all building towards that, and continuing to name those really great examples that there are across the world to inspire and encourage and incentivise others to do similar. 

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9 Jan 2014

Eradicating cancer as a route to scaling up Transition? Discuss

Today I want to present you with an idea which has the potential to really inform our thinking about scaling up. When I was in Jamaica Plain in Boston I interviewed Chuck Collins of Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition, an interview published here.  At the end of our discussion I mentioned that at a JPNET event I spoke at, I was approached afterwards by a woman who said she was working with the group exploring the idea of a ‘Cancer-Free Jamaica Plain’.  I was intrigued, so I asked him to tell me more about it: 

Chuck told me:

“I had the same reaction you did.  A woman named Polly Hoppin who had worked for something called the Lowell Centre for Sustainable Production.  She’s one of these people that looks at waste and garbage and all the toxins in our environment. She sat me down and said “look, Jamaica Plain has much higher levels of cancer than the rest of the state and particularly among women.  And we also have higher levels of exposure to carcinogens and other toxins and neurotoxins and things that hurt people than other communities.  So what would it mean to create a cancer-free economy?  We want to make a transition to a healthy, cancer-free, toxin-free economy”.  When she said that, a lot of bells rang in my head.  

[According to JPNET’s website, “Jamaica Plain has higher incidences of some types of cancer than the state average. According to recent Massachusetts Cancer Registry statistics, JP women had more brain, cervix, leukemia, liver, melanoma, oral cavity and thyroid cancer than expected compared to women living elsewhere in Massachusetts. And JP men had more melanoma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and thyroid cancer than expected compared to the rest of the state”].

So we formed a partnership with them to work with our local businesses, for instance the dry cleaners, to help them make the transition to become wet cleaners, using a green, healthy cleaning process.  Working with our beauty parlours to stop using toxic chemicals, and we’re actually going to do a community forum on building a cancer-free economy, sponsored by our Transition Town.  It’s woven in the public health. Our economy shouldn’t be making us sick!  One of the partnerships that’s come out of that is that we have all these hospitals in our community, the biggest employer in our neighbourhood is a hospital, but they’re very siloed.

They’re sitting down the hill and they’re just treating the symptoms of the people that walk in, but we could invite them and say “shouldn’t you be looking upstream at community health issues like exposure to toxic chemicals, shouldn’t the role of the hospital have huge tax breaks and huge profits that why don’t you help us make these businesses safe?  Why don’t you help all the restaurants use safer cleaning substances?  Why don’t you as hospital and a vendor buy your produce locally so that it isn’t trucked from thousands of miles away but is grown 10 miles away?

I think it does open up resources for the organisation, by partnering with hospitals and with people who are just thinking about overall wellness.  In Boston there are probably 10 walks a year raising money for research against cancer. Huge amounts of money, bikeathons, everything.  Actually people are just getting kinda tired of walking for research in preventing cancer and treating cancer.  People want to walk for the cure, “we want to cure the cause of cancer, the things that are making me sick”.  

It’s fun to say that core to our Transition is health.  If we could work with our beauty salons and automotive companies and hospital and artists.   We have a lot of artists in our communities. They use a lot of toxic chemicals in their studios and a some of them live in their communities with toxic chemicals and they have all kinds of illnesses related to that.  If we could help everybody make those safe alternative transitions that will also create livelihoods and markets for the products of the future”.  

I will do little other than leave this with you as a thought.  Seeking to eradicate cancer from a community, when you think about it, leads to most of the same activities a Transition initiative does anyway, but it opens up a range of partnerships, funding opportunities and different kinds of engagement.  Intriguing eh?

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