What Matters@ At St George’s House, Windsor Castle
What matters? It is a small but gently interrogative question, and it was the one I chose to leave in the room at the end of an after-dinner talk at Windsor Castle last week, at the launch of the National Civic Alchemy Network at St George's House.
I had been asked to speak to a substantial brief: how do we scale up, adopt and adapt civic practice, how do we bring underrepresented voices into the mainstream, and what cultural and behavioural shifts might that require.
I took my premise as ‘working civically asks us to look sideways.’
Universities, and institutions generally, are extraordinarily good at looking outwards and inwards, but not necessarily, amongst. Civic work asks us to become equally good at looking sideways, at the people, organisations and communities alongside us and understanding ourselves as one participant within an ecosystem. That changes the geometry of the relationship. If we are looking sideways we are not at the centre, and the people alongside us bring knowledge, histories, legitimacy and ways of knowing a place that we do not have.
Then the three words: scale, adopt, adapt. They sound straightforward. Civic life does not work like that. What works somewhere often works because trust has been built over 10 years, because somebody knows who to call, because an institution took a risk, because the right people were in the right room. Those things are not incidental to the practice – they are the practice. So perhaps what we want to scale is the learning, the relationship, the principle or the conditions, and the thing itself is better left small. Adoption without attention to place becomes replication. Adaptation starts by paying attention.
And before any of that, we need to ask what matters about the thing are doing – asking that gets us upstream to the core of the personal and profession purposes we will be working to. Checking in on ourselves with that breaks our practice open, gets us (back) to the core of why we do what we do and why.
My thanks to the network partners, the University of Derby, Socitm, the University of East London and Impera, for the invitation, and to St George's House for the hosting. There is something in the design of a St George's House consultation, in the rhythm of talk, Evensong, dinner, sleeping in the grounds of a place that has seen centauries of societal change, that lets ideas flow more freely than a conference room ever does.
It left me thinking about why networks matter in this moment. The issues in front of us, inequality between and within places, fragile local democracy, the erosion of trust between institutions and the people they serve, are distributed problems, and distributed problems need distributed responses. Networks aggregate what is otherwise scattered evidence. They galvanise people who feel isolated inside their own institutions. And they can affect change, because a network speaks to policy and to funders with a weight no single project carries. They also give us somewhere to look sideways from.
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