Announcing Kinship Works
An alliance for a human alternative
It’s no longer contentious to say that the old institutions of the public and social sector are struggling to rise to the moment. It’s clear bureaucracies find it hard to cope with the complex social challenges that now dominate our landscape, from chronic health conditions, to care and ageing, to loneliness and entrenched disadvantage. More generally, our large public institutions seem to be brittle and slow to adapt. Together this is wasting significant amounts of effort, time, and money.
The good news is, there is now a remarkable vitality of alternatives, often around the edges. This work is deeply serious, increasingly well-evidenced, and often mature, with many of its key techniques and disciplines having been refined over decades. The work is very diverse, from its people and skills, to its ways of working and institutional forms, but I notice a common theme. From relational services to community-led development to more deliberative forms of democracy, the deep logic of this work is human, as opposed to bureaucratic.
In January this year, I thought it was time to commit myself to these ideas, so I went full-time supporting what I now think of as the movement for a human alternative. This has partly meant writing a book about the long history of the movement, and the transition it is driving. And it has partly meant rolling up my sleeves to support the work on the ground.
I’ll say more about the book soon, but in this post I thought I’d share an update on the practical work I’m doing. In particular I’m excited to announce a new initiative I’m launching with some wonderful co-conspirators, Kinship Works.
The work to be done
The work I’ve been doing since January has fallen broadly into two buckets. Partly it’s about helping organisations that want to be less bureaucratic and more human — mainly government departments, or big charities. And partly it’s about helping organisations that want to support the wider movement, or who are a part of the movement — mainly foundations, practitioner networks, consultancies, and community initiatives.
In nine months doing this work I’ve learned two main things.
The first is that there is a lot of demand for this work. More and more senior leaders can see that our old bureaucratic ways are failing, at least in complex domains. And many can see that the answer is something more human. But many also don’t yet feel confident about the specifics, or would like help navigating the system’s defence mechanisms, and making the various trade-offs this implies. A growing number of leaders also now see that it is a key part of their role to spread the energy at the edges. People can see that this task of bridging from the centre to the edges is nuanced, and they often want help working out how to go about it.
The second lesson is that there are many brilliant people who are broadly allied to the movement, some working in this space already, and some in adjacent fields but with relevant skills. And although there are some wonderful clusters of energy, it also feels like we sometimes miss opportunities to collaborate.
Together this has made me think it would be useful to create a vehicle — something like a network, or a collective — to help to scale impact, make it easier to collaborate, and to spot patterns in the work, learn lessons, and to help us tell a bigger story. And this takes me to the new initiative.
Kinship Works
Kinship Works is a network of people working to mature and spread more human ways of making society better. It will give a front door people can come to, but it will act and feel more like a collective — a group of people who share the diagnosis, and work in a similar spirit, and who bring different skills to the table. So it’s a place you can come if your organisation wants help being less bureaucratic and more human, or if you want to support the wider movement.
The work will be additive, not competitive. There are already many brilliant people in the wider movement, and we have no interest in cannibalising great work that is already happening. The goal of Kinship Works is to strengthen the movement, so we will do lots of referring, convening, celebrating, and dot-joining. We will also experiment with more porous, organic, and collaborative organisational forms to get the work done. In this sense, Kinship Works will be prefigurative—we will try to be the future we want to see. But that is a rabbit hole I will save for later.
What will the work be? This will keep evolving and we’ll go wherever we can help the most. But from the many conversations I’ve had with local and national leaders, foundations, and practitioners — mainly in the UK, US, and Australia — I’ve noticed four themes come up a lot. You could see this as a loosely held hypothesis for where we can add value.
Supporting
The first issue is that more human ways of doing things can be unclear, or inaccessible. People often reach for bureaucratic responses just because they are familiar. By human approaches, in this context, I mean things like a relational way of running a service (as opposed to technocratic), or a way to activate community agency (as opposed to funding a point solution/coming up with a policy answer), or deliberative ways of engaging people (as opposed to transactional engagement). What are these approaches? What does good looks like? How do you do them?
There seems to be value in codification — clarifying the methods and making them explicit (e.g. how-to-guides, service patterns, codified disciplines). But perhaps more so, there seems to be value in spreading tacit knowledge. Linking people with expert practitioners, convening workshops, or helping organisations reflect and improve. The key to all of this is that it’s not about human approaches in the abstract; it’s about how to do this work in the inhospitable environment of bureaucratic systems.
Learning
The second theme is about evidence. I’ve spent a lot of my career pushing for empiricism in policy-making and government, and the same applies to human approaches. We need to know which approaches work, and why, and how to improve them. The challenge is that the way we evaluate work in the public sector and civil society is often itself mechanistic. RCTs, for example, are less suitable when work is very complex and context-dependent. Indeed, for work of this kind the whole mental model of ‘test an intervention and roll it out’ is inappropriate.
Fortunately, there are many ways to learn and evaluate work that fit complex, human domains. This includes ways of running organisations and systems (Human Learning Systems, Test & Learn); evaluation methods that fit complexity (Theory Based Evaluation, contribution analysis); and re-framings, such as appraising civic capacity not through one-off projects, but as infrastructure. By helping organisations to use these methods, we can square the circle of being both human and deeply empirical.
Spreading
Third, I notice that people often want help spreading more human mentalities and ways of working across bureaucratic organisations or systems. It seems to me this work of spreading human approaches is mainly social, not technical, since most of the barriers are psychological and sociological.
Human approaches often jar with the mental models that dominate in the public sector and in large charities, and this manifests in emotional and social pushback. People might feel, for example, that the methods of community-led development are risky, or even unprofessional, or they might patronise and sideline relational work as fluffy. These are in large part (although not entirely) defence mechanisms and many of the leaders I speak to want help overcoming them. There are a range of techniques that can help us do this, from using stories and metaphors to help people think differently, to investing in meetups and communities of practice to generate social momentum. I sometimes think of these as ways to save bureaucracy from itself.
Reforming
The fourth theme relates to operating environments and institutional forms. In the last nine months I’ve heard again and again how hard it is to use human methods in a bureaucratic operating environment, since you often get stuck in rigid, mechanistic governance. In a sense, this is intentional; part of the original point of bureaucracy was to make institutions less human, in the sense of making leaders less capricious, and decisions less biased (we achieved fairness through standard procedures). Now, however, we see endless examples of these operating environments blocking the good sides of human work. It’s hard to be holistic when you work in a silo; it’s hard to listen and respond quickly to a person’s needs when you need permission from the hierarchy; it’s hard to feel moral purpose in your work when you have no discretion; and it’s hard to adapt your response to the person in front of you when deviation is seen as risky, and variation is seen as unfair. So this fourth theme is about helping organisations to adopt operating models that are more conducive to human ways of working, and it’s about ways we can carve out at least a little space to be human within the machine.
That gives us four broad areas of work — supporting, learning, spreading, and reforming.
As I said above, these themes are held loosely and will evolve. And I’ll stress again that many brilliant people are already working in these areas. For example, The Relationships Project is building the field of relational practice; Stir to Action runs wonderful peer learning sessions around alternative economic models and community-led development; there are infrastructural organisations like Platform Places and Place Matters supporting vital aspects of this work, and many others. So again, our work will be additive, not competitive — referring, partnering, convening.
Finally, I’m conscious this all sounds a bit imaginary, so I’ll end by describing four real pieces of work we are doing this autumn. I’ll say more about all four soon, so this is just a taster.
The Centre for the Edge. We are working with Joseph Rowntree Foundation to help leaders in government who want to support the energy at the edges. If you’re working in government, and you see the machine around you struggling, how can you shield, support, and spread alternatives? This work will look at various barriers that stop the centre from supporting the edges — from narrow standards of evidence, to outdated control mechanisms, to mechanistic mental models. How can leaders meet the needs of the ‘old’ system, while also supporting very different ways of working?
The craft of rebuilding civic capacity. We are working with Local Trust to synthesise the evidence from over a decade of efforts to rebuild civic capacity and social capital, with a focus on the landmark Big Local initiative. What have we learned in the last 10–15 years about these efforts? Do they work? And, if so, what about them works precisely?
A Marshall Plan for civic life. We are partnering with Demos on a landmark investigation into viable funding models for a decade of civic renewal. How could we fund 10+ years of multi-billion pound investment to rehabilitate community life in Britain? What funding mechanisms could be politically and fiscally viable? This work will start with foundational research, looking at international and historic case studies, from levies to place-based tithes, to subscriptions and clubs, to crowd-funding and strategic procurement. We’d love to assemble an especially wide coalition for this work, so do reach out if you’re a funder or partner interested in supporting the work at the ground level.
Governing human. We are planning to work with the Future Governance Forum and Barrow Cadbury to help codify emerging alternatives. If there is energy at the edges of the system, what is it? What techniques and institutional forms are being used? And what does this mean for the way public institutions should interact with the energy at the edges? To keep this work concrete, we’re hoping to base it on a case study of Birmingham and the surrounding city region; a place with a long history of shaping the future, and home to a vibrant civic movement. This work will feed into a longer term plan to host a Governance Pattern Library — a way of curating the many diverse ways human beings can cooperate to make our lives better together.
In the spirit of being additive and linking into the wider movement, we’re also plugged into a range of wonderful networks to learn and share insights. This includes:
Links with the Cabinet Office Test, Learn and Grow initiative, where we’re feeding into the brilliant work being led by Public Digital in their role as the lead delivery partner for TLG. We see this as a great example of practising a more organic, bottom-up conception of public service reform, in which intelligence and energy flows from the edges into the centre.
Links into the public service reform debate in Australia and New Zealand, thanks to connections with the Australia New Zealand School of Government, most recently via workshops in Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane in August. This includes some work on the notion of ‘Mode B operating model’. I give some more context here.
Links into the wider international movement via the Governance Futures network, a global group of practitioners and academics who are starting to sketch out and practice future ways of governing. GF has already shaped our thinking via convenings in Santa Fe, Santa Cruz, Hawaii, and Bogota, and we look forward to strengthening our links with this network.
Finally, we’ve been lucky to work with a range of brilliant like-minded organisations already this year, from Power to Change to Place Matters, More Social, TPX Impact, the Innovation Unit, and Service Design in Government. We hope to continue and deepen these connections in the coming months and make more along the way.
I’ll share more info on those upcoming projects soon. In the meantime, if you want to stay connected, you can subscribe to our newsletter via the Kinship Works website, where we’ll share links to our work and to other work across the movement. Or feel free to reach out directly if you’d like to work together.
You can read more about us at the (minimal!) Kinship Works website, or follow us on Blue Sky or LinkedIn. For more in a similar spirit, you can read some of my recent, pre-KW posts: How to save bureaucracy from itself, Are policies like medicines?, and The Energy at the Edges. Or to follow my wider work, you can find me on Blue Sky, Medium, or Substack