The Best Ideas Don't Have to Cost a Fortune

1. Ventilateur ‏@gofango  3h 
   

   @OpenCommunityTO @ResultsJunkie It would be great if there was a readable source for us dealing with financial things for the first time

   View conversation
   

   • Reply
    
   • Retweet
    
   • Favorite

"I don't think about anything unless I'm paid to."

That gem was once uttered to me by a successful, respected, wealthy government relations consultant.  He meant it, too - this guy, like most government relations or public affairs or management consultant folk bill by the hour, or even by the 15 minute time increment.  

They're consultants - they are experts and their expertise costs money.  If you want some of their time, you have to pay for it.  

Since they are paid for their advice, advising is their focus.  They may offer added value to keep a contract - a bit of writing here, a few words in political friends' ears there - but by and large they are financially fixed on the idea of offering advice and moving on.

The problem is, their commitment is to the activities that bring them money.  They have no reason to stay engaged with a topic before or after they get paid to care about it.

Traditional high-priced consultants come at problems from the outside, offer their wisdom, write a report, collect their paycheque and move on.  Nowhere in this transaction is a need to map their consultation to reality; behavioural economics, design thinking, iterative process and community relationship-building aren't in their mandate.

So how many super-smart (or at least, super-successful) consultants have been paid top-dollar for reports or advice that goes into reports that are subsequently shelved?  How often do ideas implemented not stick, because they weren't grown from the ground-up?

We spend a lot of money - tax payer dollars, which are supposedly valuable - on advice that sounds nice but doesn't reflect the real word and won't be acted upon anyway.  The theory of transactional politics is that the advice offered is a consumable product that one stakeholder or another may decide to carry forward, while others may oppose it.  

Such was the case for the Drummond Report - lots of ideas were presented, with interest groups picking the ones that mattered to them and pushing for action/insisting that action not be taken.  Politicians were the ultimate recipients of all this lobbying activity and based their go-forward options on what they felt was in their best political fortunes, which theoretically maps to the biggest voices from the public.

That's how democracy works, right?  Everyone pursues their own interests and majority rules.

But we all know that isn't how it works - the loudest voice can come from the smallest groups, if they are well-funded.  I remember once sitting around a board-room table with a bunch of political organizers who talked about how they wanted a commission created and who they wanted to have on it, but how they would shape the recommendations regardless.  Their clients would then be well-positioned to get what they want, whether it was in the broader public interest or not.

That's not democracy - that's transactional politics.  Which is what we get when the smart people only care about what they're paid to care about.

This is why we have so many boring, unsexy or complex structural issues that never get addressed or, at best, get token solutions so that a government can't be accused of not caring.  In the worst possible scenario, transactional players actively want problems to persist so that they can keep getting paid to address them.  

Why on earth would I try to solve lead poisoning when I make my money curing it?  That'd be like putting myself out of business - or forcing myself to adapt.

This is why the best consultants aren't the people paid to think, but the people who live a given problem every day.  They have insight into how the problem impacts them on multiple levels, can walk policy-makers through their challenges and offer ideas that are grounded in their world, rather than imposed from above.

Far too often, public consultations is a PR exercise - something to keep the plebes happy, rather than an actual attempt to gain insight and ideas.  It's too bad, this, because there are a lot of great ideas brewing among the people policies are being designed to help.

Why?  It's easy - solving their problems isn't a think they get paid for, it's their life.  This is why the best, most passionate and most dedicated advocates for any cause are people with lived experience.  Think Clara Hughes.  Heck, go bigger and think Helen Keller, or the likes of Martin Luther King Jr.  They weren't motivated by money to change the world - they wanted to change the world so that they might equitably live in it.

As is often the case, what helps the most disenfranchised helps the rest of us.  The Labour Revolution was about sustainable living for hard-pressed employees; it ended up improving productivity, quality of life and spun off whole new industries.  Emancipation in all its forms has done the same thing - reduced poverty and crime, expanded the workforce, created new markets and brought new ideas to the table.

My favourite example, one we continually seem to forget - the more rights and equitable opportunity women get, the more peaceful, stable and successful our societies become.  You don't get that when the Alpha Males just focus on what they think matters, do you?

Society is becoming increasingly stratified into haves in competition and have-nots that serve as collateral damage.  The former tell the latter to suck it up, try harder, do something more to earn a spot at the big boy's table.  

Meanwhile, those without access, sophisticated training or a familiarity with jargon are telling us what they need to succeed.  Deemed inferior by the Alphas, these voices are too-often ignored, dismissed or ridiculed, which is an opportunity lost.

While the consultants independently mull what to do about youth disengagement, financial literacy, youth employment, declining voter turn-out and sluggish economic growth/a lack of innovation, we have people like @gofango, hinting at shared solutions for all these problems - solutions rooted in modern tools that she will understand far better than the seasoned vets who grew up with type-writers and see excessive ink as a way to demonstrate wealth and success.

It's time we flip our consultant model on its head and rethink how we define expertise.  We need fewer consultants who only think about what they're paid to and more who believe that the people have the answer and serve as conduits/translators for them.

Best part - the people who do something because they believe in it don't want a ton of money.  They need sustainable living, tools and the opportunity to own what they do.

Is this the way things work?  No.  It would be a new way for government to engage, bypassing the usual suspects they have relied on for so long.

Governments needn't worry, though - there are plenty of people on the front lines of society who would happily walk politicians through this process for the first time.

Success, Consequence and Integrity

“By seeing the seed of failure in every success, we remain humble.  By seeing the seed of success in every failure, we remain hopeful.”

Mel Ziegler

 We’ve all heard the phrase “if you don’t use it, you lose it.”  Sometimes it’s used in reference to muscle strength.  In other cases, it applies to memory or more broadly, our thinking skills.

Can it apply to integrity, too?

Another maxim we’re all familiar with – learn from your mistakes.  Everyone makes mistakes – after all, nobody’s perfect.  Our educational system is designed not just to train our youth, but to test them as well; each experience becomes an opportunity to learn and do things a bit better (subjectively) the next time.  This applies, in theory, to social interaction, too – kids date to determine what they like and don’t like in mates, as well as sort out which approaches work and don’t work.  All this training ostensibly prepares them to find and land a good mate.

This process applies equally to politics.  Elections are the proving and continual testing grounds for politicians as well as political techniques and methodology.  Polling provides an even more frequent performance metric political folk, or business folk, can use to judge their relative strengths.

While life as a training ground makes for a lovely notion, it hardly plays out this way in reality.  There are guys and girls who never learn to mesh well with others; they might blame themselves, or they might feel it’s always the other person who’s the problem.  In business and in politics, there are those who never fail themselves; their failures are trickled down to the market, to shareholders, to government.  These are the stereotypical 1%, the kind who say (and believe) things like “we’re smart, they’re dumb” in relation to opponents, stakeholders, even team members or supporters.  The more often they place blame on others, the easier and more instinctive a response shirking accountability becomes.

A stereotypical 1%er once told me you don’t have to know what you’re talking about; what matters is that you sound confident while saying it and employ enough bluster to make the other person feel you’re right or, at least, that someone else is wrong.  This same person told me that nothing makes them happier than seeing staff they’d let go for some reason or another succeed, but when pressed, could barely recall a couple of names.  When I sought out some of those deposed folk, the opinions they gave me were remarkably similar to what you’d expect of a person who’d been thoughtlessly dumped by a boy/girlfriend.

This isn’t to say that the people at the top aren’t smart and capable; they quite often are.  That’s how they managed to get their first taste of victory.  In business, politics and civil life, however, success often works the same way as it does in evolution; I don’t need to be faster than the bear, I just need to be faster than you.  In any large institution, success involves moving up a hierarchy, a change in title and access to different resources and a different “social class.”  Call it a Starbucks-vs-Tim’s social stratification.

The further up the ladder you go, the further removed you become from reality at ground-level.  Ironically, living in “the bubble” is like having an addiction; the first taste is agreeable, then the euphoria becomes the norm.  Eventually, what had been a positive experience has become a dependency.  Instead of needing the drink or to gamble or have sex, you need money, power, finery, access.  Success slowly shifts from being the thing one strives for to the thing one tries to maintain; accountability regresses into entitlement.  What results is corruption.

When it becomes about winning, not achieving, you’ve lost. 

We’ve all seen it a thousand times; the periodic pop-up in the media of some high-profile individual or organization who gets caught with their hand in the cookie jar.  In Canadian politics, longevity (facilitated by a fractured opposition) left the Federal Liberals without many mistakes they needed to learn from; instead of providing the best option for Canadians, the increasingly-bubbled folk at the top spent their time fighting over the best seats at the table.

The same is now happening within the Canadian Conservative Party – where once they fought for electoral dominance to put forward an agenda focused on safety and security, their concentration is increasingly just on power itself.  Sadly, the result is this thing called corruption.

Governments defeat themselves; as the Harper Conservatives’ grasp starts to falter (due to their own negligent arrogance), their actions will become increasingly desperate.  The net effect of complacent elitism is always, always the same – you reap what you sow. 

What happens when your internal focus comes at the detriment of respect for your voters?  You lose elections.  What happens when businesses undermine their clients?  Those clients get picked up by someone else.  More broadly, what happens when the top of a social hierarchy becomes woefully disengaged from the majority?  You get movements like Occupy.  Remember the left-behind staff/jilted lovers from before?  It’s a lot like that.  Put another way; suggesting that “Canadians don’t care” is the political equivalent to saying “I’m just not that in to you.”

If people aren’t willing to make mistakes they’re never going to make any right decisions.  The same holds true for taking ownership of mistakes – which is what integrity is all about.

Success doesn’t have to come at the expense of responsibility. In fact, lasting success never does.  That, essentially, is what the whole post-capitalism movement is all about.  The world is looking for leadership that doesn’t skirt past responsibility or download accountability to the next generation; we want leaders who don’t mind rolling up their sleeves from time to time and doing the hard work.

Of course, the only reason the populace is itching for more from leadership now is because the times are tough for a growing percentage of us.  Remember, we say 99% today, but we didn’t get here straight from zero.  There are always those on our streets, in our schools and in other countries that have continuously been left behind.  The truest integrity challenge we face is demonstrating how committed we are to moving forward together.

UPDATED Tuesday July 23, 2015: A study conducted by Sanford DeVoe and Jeffrey Pfeffer found that individuals who are paid hourly or bill their time are less likely to volunteer.In another experiment they conducted, individuals who billed their time in the experiment were less likely to send letters to the sick children than those who did not bill their time to volunteer. Remember this the next time you bill your clients.

Yup.  It gets better:

Research by Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton has found that those who spent money on others rather than themselves reported greater happiness. In addition, in an experiment where individuals were given money and told either to spend it on themselves or on someone else, those who engaged in prosocial spending – spending it on someone else – reported the greatest levels of happiness. Moreover, this effect has been replicated in 136 countries.

So there.