Why did the social action agenda fail? Part two.

It’s easy to critique a government agenda. What about the organisation I was responsible for, Generation Change? Where did we go wrong?

In Part 1 of this reflection piece, I looked at the broader “youth social action” agenda as led by the government.

I knew it would make “extremely uncomfortable reading” for some! But I took the risk of burning some bridges in the hope it might open up some honest and useful learning conversations for those who are still working in the sector. I am so grateful for the responses so far, from so many, which are encouraging me that it has been worthwhile. Thank you.

In that same spirit of full disclosure, I will now turn my attention to Generation Change, the organisation I set up and led as Director for 6 years.

As I said in Part 1, we too have some accounting to do about where we failed, and what we learned. I believe we have some very costly and hard won lessons to share that could benefit others who still believe in our mission.

Part 2: Why Generation Change failed; what we got right and wrong

I was 22 when I started at Generation Change — and many of my mistakes were a result of inexperience. I was a weak line manager, for example. I was much too confident that I had the right answers, and oversold some of what we were doing. And I frequently overstepped the mark, or got my tone wrong with people who were wiser and more patient than I was.

But whatever my inadequacies were as a CEO — and they were many — they were not, ultimately, the reason Generation Change failed.

In a practical sense, we were able to raise funding, plus build a coalition of stakeholders, and ended up delivering some good work that was directly in line with our strategy. When we decided to close the charity, we had enough money in the bank to continue operating.

So what happened? To explain, I need you to understand our strategy, how we put it into practice, and why it didn’t work.

Our view of the problem

Generation Change had a very well-defined theory for how to take social action ‘mainstream’. It was a good theory, rooted in the experience of some very talented social entrepreneurs who had managed to set up award-winning social action programmes in the UK, and seen first hand why this type of activity was struggling to go mainstream. It captured my imagination and my professional life for 6 years.

Our theory was rooted in an understanding of “market development”.

Essentially, we believed that the reason social action is such a niche activity in the UK is because there is no easy way for potential participants to know what “good quality” looks like. You see, if you don’t know what ‘good’ looks like, for any given activity or product, then there are no rational relationship between supply and demand. The ‘market’ never really takes off.

I had two analogies for this. Firstly, football. Hundreds of years ago, people played all sorts of different ball games — but they looked very different, and people’s experiences varied hugely depending on where you played. Then one day, some people sat down and wrote the ‘rules of the game’ of football. Once you had these rules, then for the first time, everyone knew what a good game of football looked like and how to play.

My second analogy was outdoor swimming. Not long ago, if you swum in a river you were something of a freak. Today, like football, outdoor swimming has become a widespread and mainstream hobby for large numbers of people. Why? Because something very similar to the rules of the game of football were created — people like the Outdoor Swimming Society started to map water routes, and helped to catalogue and share best practice. Suddenly, anyone could know what good outdoor swimming looks like; how to do it, and where they could take part.

Generation Change wanted to do the same for youth social action. We wanted to ‘grow the market’, by helping funders, providers and educators to all start playing the same ‘game’ — so that great quality social action had ‘currency’ for the funders, providers and educators who made decisions about how these activities were delivered and access by young people. Our theory told us these three steps would help social action — just like football and outdoor swimming — become a more widespread and mainstream activity in our culture:

• Define what ‘good’ looks like
• Create ‘rules of the game’ for providers, funders and educators to all understand ‘quality’ in the same way.
• Increase the recognition of high quality programmes.

Where we got it right

I’ve already invited you to start picking holes in this theory by telling you it didn’t work. So if you’re looking at the three steps above and thinking “of course that wouldn’t work”, then perhaps check yourself a little bit.

Because, you know what? This was a good theory. And to emphasise this, I want to start by sharing some of the ways we were proved right over the last 7 years. Here’s what we learned, that we didn’t know in 2013:

1. Outcomes do vary, hugely, across different social action experiences. Thanks to much research and evaluation, we now have plenty of evidence to prove our hunch that young people experience vastly different outcomes depending on which type of social action they take part in. Some social action activities have negligible impact. Others see remarkable outcomes. And overall, we found that 1 in 3 young people already taking part are not experiencing the benefits.
2. There is already sufficient ‘demand’ for social action to go mainstream
   Survey data since 2013 has shown that 81% of school pupils in England want their school to do more to help them take part in social action — despite less than 40% taking part. Lack of demand from young people is not the problem.
3. Educators and funders lack understanding about how to plan or engage young people in quality social action
   As a learning partner on the #iwill Fund, we encountered large numbers of youth workers and school leaders who had no meaningful grasp on how to engage young people in quality social action projects.
4. There is considerable information scarcity in the ‘marketplace’
   At Generation Change, we tried our hand at a couple of different projects that would have helped educators and providers to find information — including a mapping tool called Horizon, that never really worked (more on that below). Our user research for these projects confirmed that there is a lack of information about what projects and programmes exist. Youth workers, fundraisers and teachers are spending hours googling this stuff — or getting inundated with marketing emails, and frequently expressed to us huge relief at the idea of having some basic, basic tools to help navigate the landscape and find what’s good.

I’ve reflected on this, and cannot escape the conclusion that the core of our theory was correct. So why was it wrong?

Where we got it wrong

1. Programmes are not the “product”.
   We spent far too long thinking about social action as a marketplace of different programmes. This was a mistake. In reality, there are already hundreds of different settings where young people are in contact with a qualified adult who is able to coordinate activities for them — it’s just that most of these adults don’t know how to design, find or plan social action activities for their kids. Instead of trying to codify and promote the best quality programmes, we should have been trying to codify and promote the best quality practices that youth practitioners could use in their own settings.
2. Evaluating outcomes will not, itself, give us the ‘rules of the game’ we were describing in our theory of change
   We created a ground-breaking scheme for programme providers to evaluate and improve their outcomes using a shared framework. I’m really proud of this work, and I’m confident it will have a positive legacy at the Centre for Youth Impact, who acquired the programme. But, by the time we had recruited 30 organisations into the scheme — we realised that even a shared impact framework as clever as the one we had devised (thanks to Dartington Service Design Lab) wasn’t going to give us the ‘rules of the game’ we were seeking. And that’s because, whilst outcomes are the only meaningful basis for describing what ‘quality’ social action looks like — there are at least three distinct actors in the marketplace who are interested in ‘outcomes’ and who determine how money is allocated and spent on these types of activities. The provider wants outcomes, the funder wants outputs, and the educator (i.e. the actual setting for the young people who participate) wants a variety of different things which may or may not be outcomes related. You cannot create a single currency for all three actors.

My conclusion from these lessons

Instead of trying to build a marketplace of programmes, Generation Change should have focused on trying to codify and extract best practice from these programmes, that a wider variety of youth practitioners can then apply in their own setting. Our strategy should therefore have been:

• Define “what good looks like”
• Codify and share best practice so that anyone, in any setting, can engage young people in great social action projects
• Make it easier to find and participate in existing local projects — including our own programmes.

A subtly different game plan, but the devil is in the detail.

You see, this approach would have been vastly more disruptive to our member organisations. Which is probably why we didn’t start here. Because ultimately, it would have helped to genuinely put best practice in the hands of the people who matter most: the adults who work with young people.

And sadly, if we had taken this approach from the start — I believe our efforts would have been much more complimentary to the approach of the #iwill campaign, and the Office for Civil Society — who were giving air cover for this agenda. I find this the saddest reflection of all.

In the last 18 months of Generation Change, I had begun to recognise these mistakes, and had shifted the pitch for what our organisation was trying to achieve. That was difficult to do: we were in the thick of delivering an impact programme that was squarely leading us into different territory. And it required us to start from scratch on projects like our mapping tool (Horizon), which had been built for a subtly different purpose.

I think there was a critical window in which we might have been able to secure funding for our revised theory of change — and make the crucial pivot. I ended up working with Founders and Coders to make a really successful prototype version of our mapping tool — reimagined as a simple directory that youth workers and teachers to directly find nearby social action projects — that saw far better traction in the user testing. Our work on the Learning Hub had given us unprecedented insights into (and access to) the practices of structured youth programmes. We could have developed a truly programme agnostic platform for sharing these resources and best practices.

But by this point we had left it too late. The needs and goals of the #iwill Fund became the over-riding focus of our conversations with key stakeholders at DCMS, Big Lottery and Step Up To Serve. And we had lost too much leadership from within our own ranks, with major charities going bust, CEO changes, and trustees who moved on to other things in life.

We didn’t fail fast enough, and by the time we had managed to iterate our way towards a more effective understanding of how to achieve our mission — the window of opportunity had closed.

Other lessons on where we went wrong.

Hindsight is a fine thing.

Knowing that this is where we ended up — failing too slowly to pivot — it’s easy to look back and realise we should’ve been playing the game differently. But for what it’s worth, here are some changes we could have made to realise the errors in our strategy more quickly…

1. We should’ve recognised sooner that “Generation Change” had a different mission from the individual mission of our members.
   A lot of our early work at Generation Change was focused on facilitating and aligning the interests of our member organisations. At one stage I had as many as 19 chief executives I would have to call up and get buy-in from on any influencing work we would do.

I still believe in the power of this kind of collaboration. Our members had real equity in what we were doing, because our whole strategy and game plan had come from the sector on our own terms. This gave us a ‘critical mass’ for trying out new projects — like our Impact Accelerator. This sort of work had been tried by funders for years, and I think we got a lot further due to being ‘sector led’.

But Generation Change also ended up with a worldview and set of goals that were distinct from our members — and in some cases clashed with their interests. Most attempts to “share best practice resources”, for example — which is what our strategy led us to — are explicitly done to serve the interests of the programme provider. What we ended up proposing to do, in that final pivot that we never quite managed to land, would have been incredibly disruptive to the sector we had been founded to represent and organise. Our desire to manage that conflict, and bring our members with us, was one of the reasons we were less agile than we needed to be.

2. We simply didn’t have enough experience in how to build products.
Ultimately, Generation Change’s strategy relied on us creating ‘products’, and having a robust understanding of how to design these and take them to market. We just didn’t have enough expertise in how to do this.

We worked with Step Up To Serve on a mapping tool called Horizon, that ended up being built in precisely the wrong way. Our first design sprint cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and simply didn’t work with users. We then pivoted to a new iteration of the tool that cost a fraction of that, but got stalled when we failed to agree on the core function it needed to achieve. Eventually, I ended up building a scrappy, free prototype with Founders and Coders that managed to nail the user validation and probably would have worked. The design process should have happened exactly the opposite way round: scrappy low cost user validation first, then determine the core function it needed to nail first, then spend the hundreds of thousands of pounds.

In the future, I would encourage anyone working on collaborative systems change to anticipate the need to create “products” sooner — and start figuring out how to do that in a genuinely agile way. Build the cheapest prototype you possibly can before doing any serious fundraising. This is the orthodoxy in the tech sector for a reason.

I have so much more I could say: about collaboration… servant leadership… and ‘weaving’ or sherpa facilitation… all of which might help others leading systems change in different settings.

But I have to leave it there.

End of Part Two.

Thanks for sticking with me. If you can bear to keep going — please do check out part 3, which gives some recommendations and suggestions for what funders or policy makers can learn from all this.

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