Creating a Social Enterprise

On Wednesday I went to a seminar run by i-Social Entrepreneurs in Birmingham, on setting up a social enterprise.  I’m still toying with the idea I described here although my conception of it keeps shifting.  At the seminar I coined the term “volunteer virtual assistants” which seemed to fit nicely with my current take on it.  Basically, if you are a tiny, struggling social enterprise there may be a role that “volunteer virtual assistants” can play for you.  Perhaps you don’t have the time or the skills to sort out that cashflow spreadsheet, do that research, or proof read that proposal.  You might not need a permanent volunteer, just a couple of hours of someone’s time to enable you to get on with pushing the organisation forward, not getting bogged down.  Well connected groups, e.g. those affiliated to churches, wouldn’t need the service because they are already connected to a large community, but many struggling one-man-bands might.

But I digress.  The seminar was fascinating, particularly the preponderance of people who already work in caring professions (social care etc) but can see the writing on the wall vis a vis how public services will be funded and commissioned in the future.  It appears that David Cameron’s “Big Society”, an inspiring but frustratingly vague concept, is already being planned for by those that we will need to take the lead in providing services.

Other observations include: three-quarters of the attendees were women; that Loaf chap (the excellently named Tom Baker) got a mention – he seems to be a bit of a Birmingham celebrity; social enterprise is a very quickly growing sector, and this will almost certainly increase.

All in all, an interesting and inspiring session, albeit one not really aimed at me as it turned out.

UPDATE – see here for a one-page overview of the virtual volunteering thing – others seem to be pursuing similar things according to i-volunteer

How do large companies think?

Dutifully, I filled in the Survey Monkey survey that I received at work.  My department was canvassing our opinions on how they communicate with us.  As is so often the case, I felt I had something to say on the matter but the questions didn’t allow me to do so.  This is (paraphrased) what I wrote in the “any other comments” bit:

Generally I think that the quality of the communications we get is quite good, although there seems to be an excess of titles – perhaps they could get rationalised a bit?

More importantly though, the problem is not communication from “on high” (I don’t say that as a dismissive comment, merely as a description), but communication “on the ground”.  It is SO difficult to find information on the intranet, either via browsing or searching, and so difficult to make connections with other people – this is the problem.  How can we cross-sell when it is so hard to find out what is going on and make connections?

I would characterise the communication as being analogous to good quality magazines and newspapers – good material, but conceptually stuck in the last century.  Communication now is about wikis, blogs and blog comments, and social networks – i.e. connections between end-users, not mediated by a central authority.  I’m not saying we should all start blogs on the intranet, but we need to rethink how we communicate as a company.

Globally, we employ about 15-20,000 people, with a large concentration of people in the UK.  I would think that this should be sufficient to create a “critical mass” of people who could post and edit material on the intranet.  I’ve heard the term “corporate wiki” before and I guess this is what I am envisaging.  If it could work for anyone it could certainly work for a very large interdisciplinary consultancy, although I have no idea how well they work in practice.

One-stop-shop for risk screening values

I’ve just had ANOTHER brilliant thought (quote at 5 mins)!  Well, my colleague did, but she said I was welcome to it, and if I made any money out of it I said I would buy her a drink.  Seems like a good deal to me.

For those of you who are not involved in environmental consultancy and risk assessment, you might assume that by now it would be a simple thing to determine if the level of a contaminant in something (soil, water, food etc) is dangerous or not.  It isn’t.  The problem is that the available screening values (which can be enshrined in legislation, or simply the firm opinion of the relevant agency, which almost amounts to the same thing) are smeared thinly and irregularly across the internet.  If you come across a non-standard contaminant in a non-standard situation, it can be a nightmare even to find out whether there ARE any statutory limits, let alone what they are or if they apply to your particular situation.

There could well be an opportunity for the brave soul(s) who decides to collate ALL of this information into one easily searchable database.  You could charge quite handsomely for access to this, so long as you could guarantee the currency of the information, because for the consultants who need to deal with the figures time is money.  One graduate could spend one day searching for information for one project they are working on, and still not necessarily get the correct information.  That’s £250 right there, gone.  Multiply that by a lot of projects and it could save consultancies serious money, as well as making their services more saleable because they could guarantee they would be using the most up-to-date and relevant information (this is a problem more often than you would think).

Seth Godin and I are obviously thinking along the same lines.

Crowd-sourced Consulting for Charities

A few weeks ago I discussed how you should capture those ideas you get that might just turn out to be good ones.  Needless to say this was prompted by one of those ideas. which I have now written down.

You can find it here.  Let me know what you think.

Requiring the services of consultants can be an expensive barrier for small charities and similar organisations to achieving their goals.

The cost of consulting is largely a factor of the man-hours required to complete a project. Often the bulk of the man-hours are assigned to a graduate or another grade of staff that does not necessarily have a significant level of experience. The “authority” that a consultant report has is often given by the very time-limited input of a senior member of staff. The author’s experience of costing consultancy reports suggests that often less than 20% of the cost of a report is related to this authority.

The remaining work load could be packaged up into a series of discrete chunks with simple instructions that a motivated volunteer with an appropriate skill-level could easily achieve. This would mean that the bulk of the work could be done by volunteers whilst still achieving an outcome of sufficient quality.

It’s interesting how writing things down affects how you look at ideas and concepts.  When an idea first comes to mind you hold it only in your head and it all seems to click, but having to write it down demands that you establish a logical flow of how it all fits together.  Having done this I’m not as convinced as I originally was about it, but there still might be something there.

What happens when all the jobs are outsourced?

Are you indespensable?  Or, as Seth Godin would put it, a linchpin?

I came across this article recently, “Engineers as Commodities” – it’s 5 years old now but it covers a lot of what I’ve been thinking about recently.  It talks about how, as a lot of engineering work has been made increasingly routine, it has effectively become commoditised and ripe for outsourcing.

Pink has three questions for you about earning a living:

Can someone overseas do your job cheaper?

Can a computer do your job faster?

Is what you offer in demand, in an age of abundance?

If you answered ‘yes’ to 1 or 2, or ‘no’ to 3, you could be in deep trouble.

I wonder though if this will lead to a fall in the number of engineers in the developed world, as so many engineering roles are outsourced.  I don’t think it will.  Engineering will expand – is expanding – into roles that either didn’t exist until recently or weren’t considered engineering.

I work in an engineering consultancy on a floor full of engineers.  The floor above is full of environmental scientists, working on the same projects as the engineers.  Is an ecologist an engineer?  Yes, if they are applying their skills to how engineering designs are developed.  Ground engineers ensure that a building won’t subside, an ecologist ensures that local habitat and wildlife aren’t unduly affected.  To me, they are both doing engineering.

I’ve started working on tools for carbon footprinting – measuring the carbon impact of a development.  This hasn’t even existed very long as a concept, let alone a job.  Is it engineering?  Yes, because it influences how the design is developed.

As time goes on, and tools and standards are developed, parts of some engineering disciplines will continue to be commoditised, just as mass manufacturing replaced cottage industries.  Does this mean there are fewer jobs?  No, it just means the jobs are in different areas.  Once you no longer need an entire floor of engineers doing manual calculations and hand-drawn designs then considering other things, like ecology or carbon, becomes possible.

Business writing can be good writing too

I came across this dire paragraph at work recently:

The policy requires that we deliver sustainable solutions across our activities by evolving our multidisciplinary approach, developing our technical expertise and building on our track record of delivery.

What… the… Hell… does that mean?  It’s supposed to explain how “sustainability” is to be addressed by the designers (we are an engineering consultancy), but it tells you nothing about the concept of sustainability or any concrete information about what it would entail in practice.

In contrast to that, last week I noticed a memo on a colleague’s desk entitled “Sustainability as sartorial style”.  This compared the whole building design process to choosing an outfit.  The underwear is the ground engineering, the fabric is the structure, the architecture is the flamboyant shirt.  The sustainability of the design, however, is NOT the accessories, the cufflinks and watch; it is the style, the overall look.  This is a way of saying that you can’t do the whole design (put all the clothes on) and then add sustainability at the end – it has to be a conscious part of the decision making from the start, and will affect all the choices you make.  It was simple, understandable, and memorable.  I can’t think of a better description of good writing than that.

How to capture those ideas

You know those ideas you get, usually in the pub, which start with the words “Wouldn’t it be great if…” and go on to describe a neat business concept?  Of course, you never do anything about it, and then you vaguely wonder why some people are really successful and you  are not.

Perhaps the successful people write those ideas down.  This forces you to think a bit harder about it than if you are just shooting the breeze over drinks; it also means you can put the idea to one side for a while and come back to it.  I’m going to start writing my ideas down.

I’m trying to come up with a format that can describe such an idea in 1-2 pages, and that just captures the initial excited thinking – research and the like can come later.  These are my heading ideas for this format:

Initial concept – What form did the idea take when you first thought of it?

Sketch – How would it work, what would the process/product look like to the customer/user?

Target Audience - Who is it for?

Precedents – What existing business ideas that you know about make you think that your idea could work?

Assumptions – What (probably unspoken) assumptions have you made about customers, competitors, logistics?  This will give you a list of things to follow up if you take the idea forward.

Anything else?