“Must you be so linear?”

I’ve just participated in the second Ageing Well Dudley stakeholder session, helpfully facilitated again by Carol Hayden (I shared reflections on the first session here).

Ageing Well Dudley activities have involved Appreciative Inquiry interviews and group sessions in two areas of the borough with contrasting demographics; Brockmoor and Pedmore. From the interview information some composite fictional profiles of older people in each area were put together and shared at the stakeholder event to get us thinking about:

• What type of support would make a difference to this person’s quality of life?
• What support could be found without relying on statutory services?
• What is needed to extend this sort of support
• How would you use £1000 to make this happen?

The group I was in were given a pen picture of the fictional Mrs Bates, a 73 year old retired dinner lady who is a council housing tenant in Brockmoor. Her husband died 8 yrs ago, she does a supermarket shop at the weekend with her daughter, shopping locally is not as easy as it was as she is less mobile. Her daughter and son-in-law are moving away, and she won't have to look after her grandchildren any more, she will miss them but is a bit relieved as it was becoming hard work. Getting things done in her home is difficult. She would like a grab rail but has been told that the council don't fit them. She waited 6 months for hole in ceiling to be fixed. She doesn't know who to ask for advice and help, she doesn't want to speak to social services.

Some of common features of discussions about the pen pictures of older people included a need for some listening, them having someone to talk to, seeing an older person as a whole (not a broken arm, in the case of one who had been in hospital) and older people knowing about services and activities when they need to. Then, in groups we were tasked with developing an idea to share with others in the room which could be done with £1000.

Dudley Social Media Surgery

I described to my group the model of Social Media Surgeries and that the beauty of them is that it is people offering their time and a bit of knowledge which creates connections in the room. Here are the ingredients for a Social Media Surgery, as compiled by Nick Booth in 2009.


I was wondering if a similar model of voluntary, peer support could be developed in a neighbourhood.

Nick stresses that social capital is the most important ingredient:

Think of social capital as the stock pot of your social media kitchen; you need to keep it constantly bubbling away. By the way, it has to be home made and hand made. In an emergency you can borrow some social capital from your neighbour, but please take care to return it as soon as you can. Some people are tempted to use shop bought social capital. It never works.

Nick recently updated his recipe as he thought it should be more simple and is mainly about being there - here's my version of the simple version for an older people's peer support meet-up:

• A free room with some chairs and where you can buy or blag a drink (a cafe is perfect)
• A host – the person who’s happy to choose a time and date and check with the people at the venue that it’s ok with them. On the day they welcome people, introduce them and just make sure people are ok
• At least one volunteer helper from the neighbourhood and hopefully at least one older person from the neighbourhood looking to make new connections. 
• Zero expectations – high hopes can kill enthusiasm. Expect nothing and be delighted by what does happen.

My difficulty today was that in starting to share this idea I was struggling to communicate, partly because  most people were service providers and immediately started think about giving advice, and what if the person volunteering gives the wrong advice … and so on. What I am thinking about isn’t really about advice at all, it’s about an impartial person giving their time freely to sit with someone else who lives in the same neighbourhood and is perhaps feeling a bit isolated. Admittedly the volunteer helpers might need to people who know a bit about what goes on in the area or have experience of accessing services and navigating through services, but there is no way that such an activity could be expected to match exactly a the needs or questions of an older person with a service provider who has an answer (see Nick's recipe: have zero expectations).

The Third Sector Research Council recently published a fantastic paper by Eileen Conn which helps me to understand why I’m struggling to communicate my idea. In Community engagement in the social eco-system dance Eileen describes two systems, as below.

The first is the system of relationships which we see in our public sector agencies and formal voluntary organisations:

... the nature of the relationships is primarily vertical and hierarchical: tightly regulated to ensure compliance with organisational policies and constraints including employment and contract laws, and financial and managerial governance. They are generally divided into segments, subjects and topics. The organisation structures, and management and governance systems, have co-evolved with the vertical hierarchical system of relationships.

Eileen calls this a vertical, hierarchical system of relationships. Eileen explains that this is very different to civil society - which is not like regulated organisations, where people are recruited to particular defined jobs. Instead, individuals, when they come together voluntarily through their shared interests, connect to give each other mutual ‘peer’ support in some way. These personal connections are the source of nourishment for the horizontal relationships between peers. Eileen explains that for the horizontal, peer system of relationships to be healthy and strong

the roots for these social relationships need to be appropriately tended. The way grass roots grow… is an instructive image for this. Grass that grows strongly and healthily, and is difficult to uproot, has a strong and intertwining mat of roots. These are like the strong interconnections in a community, all giving strength and support to the whole. If the grass is separated from its mat of roots it loses its strength and its intrinsic nature. These social networks, and the need to nurture them, are fundamental to resilience.

I guess what I was making a fumbled effort to convey in the meeting today was an idea for a very easy to manage way for some of those roots to give a bit of their time (an hour or two a month, or less) in a hosted space to connect and intertwine with neighbouring roots, perhaps with a look towards that whole other system of vertical, hierarchical relationships and tips on navigating it, but as much, if not more, with a view to people in similar situations sharing, connecting and learning from each other. It could be that the first time someone attends they end up sharing a recipe, or a story about living in the area 50 years ago… but they have had the opportunity to be listened to and to connect. No-one has put them in a box clearly marked with a service area.

My idea was about this, but I appreciate that it’s difficult to see that if you’re used to doing things for people, providing services to people and if you’re looking at the world from through the windows of your vertical structures. Eileen explains this really helpfully in this video clip:



So I’ve come away from the meeting feeling that I may have been less than helpful to my colleagues (in being inadequate in conveying my idea) and that I might have destroyed my idea by exposing it to a different way of thinking, which is very linear: a person is seen as having a problem, a service provides response. As the character Q in Star Trek: The Next Generation says to Captain Jean-Luc Picard: 

You humans are so linear… although you can occasionally break the patterns of thought that so limit you. While you know better from personal experience, you still engage in this linear thinking that so restricts your understanding …

I feel that I am frequently guilty of linear thought, and I think people who provide services often work in culture which encourages linear thought. In order for older people in Dudley to become empowered, connected and like the intertwined roots of grass needs us to stop worrying about linear solutions all of the time, and facilitate emergence. Rather than only providing the solution to what we see as a person's problems, can we do more to tend the whole lawn - allowing each blade of grass to lean towards the sunshine?