The Global Sustainable Development Goals aren't just for saving the planet - they also help with quality management and professional standards

10 years ago the United Nations launched the global Sustainable Development Goals - a basket of 17 thematic aspirations that, if pursed well, will help see our common world a generally better place to live, work, and play for all of us (as well as those animals and vegetations that we also share the planet with too).

And in the year that followed, I redesigned the impact reporting framework I'd started to create for my own enterprise around it.

The goals, and my engagement with them in this way, have subsequently drawn ongoing interest and recognition - most recently from a new global special interest group who asked me to be their inaugural guest speaker. Specifically, the group is made up of facilitators who are all part of the global International Association of Facilitators, and who were keen to explore and understand different perspectives in how facilitators (one of the capes I sometimes don) have thought about how the Goals relate to their practice and profession.

As always, when I have opportunity to share some of my own story in this way, I try to deliberately pause to reflect on it afterwards. This post is therefore what struck me as being of most interest and encouragement from my side of the screen (but if you manage to join this interest group - links below, you'll also get to read other's take-ways to add to these):

Good ideas take time 

Most people who have a passing awareness with the Goals might know that they were launched in 2015. 

But they weren't officially adopted until 2016, the first guidance about reporting against them wasn't published until the year after that - and it took 3 years to even get to their launch point after the concept for them was first agreed and started to be explored in 2012.

So whatever your aspirations might be to create change; design new systems; and see people adopt new ways of working - take some consolation that it took the UN 3 years to get to the point of being able to start to get some early adopters to commit to adopt these Goals after they first started to talk about the idea of them.

You don't (and shouldn't try to) do it all

One of the few regrets I have in this life, is that I didn't buy all of the mugs I once saw in a shop window, with the message "you can't save everyone" printed on them.

The Goals are no different - they were never designed or intended to be adopted in their entirety by any single organisation. That's why I've focussed on working to 5 of the 17 Goals: it means I can hopefully be more credible in how I'm presenting myself in how I'm contributing to them (i.e. I'm not making what many would see as incredulous claims about how my different business offers are helping to improve the biosphere for life under the sea).

Altruism isn't (and shouldn't be) the only motivation for all of us that adopt the Goals 

As part of my reflections with the group, I'd mapped the Goals against the IAF's professional standards for facilitators. In doing so, it highlighted how taking a Goals-based approach to how you design and deliver your work very easily demonstrates how you're meeting and working to occupational and quality assurance standards - so there's also a clear direct business case for the Goals to be picked up, as well as an ethical/moral one.

My using the Goals helps others to contribute to their delivery

As my business model and ways of working are wrapped around the Goals, then the more I work, the more I'm delivering against them. Which means that whenever a client commissions me, I'll do more work = more delivery against the Goals.

I'm not aware that any client has ever engaged me solely on the basis of this, but it's an additional assurance I can offer them as to the wider benefits they get from using me as their consultant?

We don't usually think about how the Goals help us have better conversations about our role in local communities and the wider economy 

I was struck by how most people hadn't fully appreciated the wider importance of small and micro businesses, and how we can encourage and support these by trying to prioritise them in our own respective supply chains - despite us all bemoaning when a large employer closes their site, and the wave of unemployment this causes with the knock on effects to other businesses, families being able to remain in the area to find new work, etc.

The Goals prompt us to think about who we're doing business with, and how this in turn helps build more resilient local communities in the context of seemingly increasingly unpredictable economies and extreme weather events.

We're all already doing more than we realise

Through breakout room reflections, people shared a range of practices that they already used that were aligned with the Goals, but who hadn't realised the importance or impact of, before correlating them in this way. This meant people were more encouraged to continue and build on these models of working. And, within the framework of the Goals, they'll now be able to more easily share with others, as encouragement and challenge for them to consider doing similar.

If you'd like to know more about the conversations which are exploring how the Global Goals are being supported through the work of facilitators, please check out the IAF's Special Interest Group at: https://www.iaf-members.org/site/chapters/sustainable-development-goals

And a recording of the story sharing of my history with, thinking about, and approach to the Goals can be watched again via my YouTube channel:

Why social entrepreneurs (can) never retire

In my decades of walking around different parts of the social economy, there's something that's always personally bugged me - far too few people encourage us to openly talk, and think about, how we get paid (and how much we should be paid).

The focus always seems to be on supporting a person or groups' shiny social enterprise idea, and how to help it create as much impact in the world as possible. There's an implicit assumption that the social entrepreneur leading it will not only be able to give the emerging and growing venture whatever it needs from themselves personally (time, energy, own money, etc), but that they'll be able to do so indefinitely without needing to take anything from it to balance/in recognition of this.

Also, there doesn't seem to be any talk of 'succession' or 'exit' (such as we see in 'mainstream' business support programmes). There's little or no option for social entrepreneurs to take any form of future 'sweat equity' in lieu of foregone wages, the lost time they've incurred in otherwise having been able to build up savings for their own retirement, etc; (does this mean we may see future generations of social entrepreneurs retire into poverty?).

This also creates problems beyond those for the individual person as outlined above - most people who pick up, or are offered the badge of 'social entrepreneur' aren't in privileged or independently wealthy positions. They (we) need to continue to earn money to pay our rent and bills with. And as social enterprises are usually relatively slow to start to be able to generate enough cash to offer and sustain wages, this usually means many start life as 'side hustles' alongside other paid work that the person needs to maintain so they can still afford to live. This in turn, creates more tensions and potential issues for these new social enterprises, as they're being managed with a part-time/split-focus founder.

But despite the potential gloom in the above, I'm starting to see/take some encouragement from a small but growing trend of people who seem to be similarly feeling able to start to talk more openly about the social enterprises they're developing, and who need to recognise and reconcile these tensions and possible contradictions - this has led to my being asked to explore more 'group structure models' (using combinations of linked legal forms to help best manage the tension between a founders' personal, and their respective communities' needs, both now and into the future). It's also involved my starting to be approached by the leaders of more established social enterprises and charities, asking for support with salary benchmarking (although to date, this has highlighted how in general and as a whole sector, we usually pay our people and selves less than in other sectors for broadly similar roles, and this includes with making less provision for future pension and retirement).

I also recognise the tension that underpins all of this - if what we're doing is to ultimately create social good, then to pay better wages etc, we need to charge more. But how can we feel comfortable doing this when we see that the communities we support are in poverty, etc? 

But if we don't find ways to start to address these elephants, then we risk losing talent and skills as people may begin to feel that they can't continue to trade off their personal futures for the sake of helping others today - and actually, research from Social Enterprise UK shows that social enterprises are generally more likely to be profitable if they're trading in areas of deprivation; so it seems that there are ways to reconcile this apparent contradiction.

 

I have an idea that the only way we can start to break this taboo of social entrepreneurs being able (encouraged, and allowed) to pay themselves both today, and with regard for their future retirement chapters without feeling guilty for doing so, and the limitations it's placing on the sector as a whole, is by trying to talk about this more openly and in grown-up ways.

To this end, I'd encourage anyone reading this to share, reply, and engage in these conversations where and how you're able to (although I recognise that talking about money isn't something we Brits do very well). But if no-one talks about it, then nothing can ever change...

why unpaid carers struggle so much to be heard...

I think I've figured out why it's so difficult for the views and experiences of unpaid carers to be accepted by policy makers and government.

Along with a few million other people in the UK, I'm an unpaid carer - and I'm also self-employed; juggling earning a living alongside meeting the support needs of several immediate family members.

Over the last few years, I've been trying to wave a flag for those of us like me - because we're the only type of unpaid carer not currently recognised in law or policy (which means there's no support for us). This lack of support is also a problem for everyone else, because it means that our respective businesses are all under-performing: in the wider economy there's over £10Billion of lost/deferred job creation, investment, exporting, etc that isn't happening every year, because we're trying to figure how to support ourselves in reconciling these competing roles on our own.

A key way in which I've been able to have some small initial successes in attracting interest to the approaching 1million people / unpaid carers / small business owners who are in this circumstance is through research and data - without which, policy makers and membership bodies can't justify investing the time to investigate these issues more.

But recently, a comment by one of Directors at the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) gave me reason to go back to basics with this - I'd referenced in conversation that most unpaid carers are just as likely to be men as they are women (in contrast to the typical general perception that it's usually women who take on caring roles). They challenged this by referencing the latest national census return, which CLES use as a baseline for all their policy work, as showing that it's actually predominately women who are unpaid carers. 

So I went back to the original source materials and realised that all the national government, health, policy, and support bodies are all working to a different understanding of who we are as unpaid carers.

It's shocking and depressing in equal measure - they all have different data about who unpaid carers are, and are using to base their support to us on. Is it any wonder then, that there's so much confusion about us, and why it's so hard for our voices to be heard? Because without a common agreement on how many of us are men, women, or other, each public body or agency can easily dismiss the research of others', on the basis that the starting point of identifying and understanding who carers are at such a fundamental level is so different to their own.

Can you see the confusion in the above chart?

• The government census shows a roughly 60/40 split in gender - but this survey was done in a global pandemic, and there's been questions subsequently raised by others about the validity of this finding, because of how the question on the census from was worded which likely led to many people not identifying themselves as carers when actually they are;
• Another government source (the DWP's family resources survey) has a different split at 66/33;
• x2 national public health sources (the national GP patients survey, and a national NHS survey) both have a big difference between them in how they've identified the gender split of unpaid carers;
• and the research by national bodies are who specifically created to understand and support carers have a notably different split again, at 50/50.

And this initial basic question of gender is also excluding people who don't identify along such binary f/m lines. 

So - if all the government bodies and statutory health services can't agree on such a simple basic starting point of 'what's the gender of unpaid carers?', then is it any wonder why carers are so mis-understood when it comes to us trying to share our experiences, or lobby for changes that would see us getting closer to being afforded the same recognitions as everyone who doesn't have caring responsibilities?

As for me - I've always generally aligned with the maxim "nothing about us without us". In this instance, that means I'm currently more trusting of data from carer support bodies, rather than distant civil servants whose own internal governmental departments and bodies can't agree on how far we may be made up of more than one gender than the other.

Why the 'endings' chapter doesn't come at the end my book

'the end' is never 'The end'...

We often think of "the end" as being the final point in something, after which there is nothing more - the end of the movie, the end of a book, the end of a relationship, the end of a business...

But endings don't actually signify a finality of things stopping and not continuing. They're just a transitional stage (albeit sometimes a bumpy on) that leads us into the next thing. After all, if nothing ended, nothing new could begin (because there wouldn't be enough space).

Endings are also not an automatic sign of failure - I've referenced elsewhere how my business has outlasted 90% of all others who started out at the same time as me 20 years ago. But just because they're not still trading like I am, doesn't mean that we should see them as having failed: some may have been designed with an intentionally limited life as part of a stop-gap for people; while for others the world may have changed too much for them, and they decided that they didn't want to twist and subvert themselves for the sake of carrying on being a part of it.

And that's why when I was putting 'Flushed!' together, as part of marking the 20th anniversary of my business, I deliberately didn't make the chapter titled 'endings' the last part of it - to highlight that things can, do, and should, still happen after 'the end' has been announced by someone.

If you want to dig more into this idea about endings not being what most people think they are, and how to approach them better, you should check out the decelerator -https://decelerator.org.uk/ 

20 years of making hard things possible, amplifying voices, and enabling action

I recently openly asked people who've had had type of interactions or contact with me over the last 20 years, what they thought my most important impact has been over these 2 decades.

This isn't (just) for the sake of gratifying my ego, but as part of a genuine intention I have, that's been sparked by my business' porcelain anniversary, to start to try and take my enterprise more seriously.

As in previous cycles of this 'game', I've tried to anonymise all the responses I received at the end of this post, so you can check my workings out - but this time, I tried 2 different ways to try and make sense of what people kindly took time to share back with me: my own reading of the comments, and AI's analysis of them.

Firstly - to my own interpretation:

It strikes me that there are some common threads emerging:

1) championing less sexy and overlooked causes and injustices that people agree are important, but no-one seems to know what to do about them;

2) building other people up so that they can go further, and with more confidence, than they believed they ever could;

3) helping people make sense of things that most others see as in-sensicle (is that a real word?) - supporting them to understand and navigate systems and processes that otherwise appeared too technical and complex for them to cope with.

And the above seem to speak to not only impacts, but also the approaches I use it doing it (which nicely echoes an argument in my latest book, that the important thing about impact isn't what we do, but how we do it).

But nothing pointed to a single event, change, or new thing (which I find interesting, as there are workspace buildings that now exist because of me; and specific pieces of legislation that are different to what they were before I 'targeted' them). However, on reflection this is a good thing - as it echoes some of my core sentiments about the importance of relationships we have with each other (after all, in the ultimate end, that's all we ever have).

Secondly - to AI.

I fed it all the quotes and testimonials I'd received, and asked it: "Analyse the attached document of things people have said about me (from what they've seen and known that I've done and been involved in), to find what my biggest impact has been. And I'm defining 'impact' as "a marked effect or influence"."

For the sake of not wanting this post to turn into something that will take another 20 years to read, I'm going to extract some of the core points it generated from the swathes of ideas, suggestions, and follow-up prompts it created:

Across all the testimonials, your biggest impact seems to be: You enable others to do    more than they thought possible—by simplifying complexity, advocating for justice, and generously opening up new perspectives. In other words, your influence is both practical (making systems/processes work better) and transformative (changing how people think, act, and feel capable).

I asked it to reframe this into an 'impact statement', to try and make it flow a little better:

Adrian makes complexity accessible and give people the confidence to act. Through generous support, principled advocacy, and creative facilitation, he helps others see new possibilities, overcome barriers, and shape fairer, more effective systems. His influence lies in enabling people and organisations to do more than they thought possible—while amplifying voices and issues that might otherwise go unheard.

But this still feels a bit wordy and corporate jargon-y, so I asked to get a final version as a single sentence statement:

Adrian makes the complex simple and the possible achievable—equipping people and organisations with confidence, clarity, and courage to create fairer systems and lasting change.

Which somehow lost the opening core essence of what it originally found in its analysis. So I made a final attempt, by asking for 3-5 work taglines. These felt better:

* Making the hard things possible

* Amplifying voices, enabling action

It seems to me that AI didn't find anything substantially different to what I read and identified (so a useful sense check), but boy was it wordy in how it got this to a point that I think makes it easier to share with other people in ways that will be easy to understand and not sound like the usual patter of most consultants?

And as another sense-check on this, I also went back to the tag-line I created for my business nearly 20 years ago when I was first setting out - Insight, Development, Encouragement.

And it I think that based on what people have shared about their experiences of me and my work since then, I've done pretty well at sticking to those core 3 words?

(and the outcomes of this exercise also echoes my favourite testimonial which someone I once worked wrote about me, but which I've also struggled to be able to actually use in anything until now: "Adrian made us feel less stupid".)

The full schedule of all comments received from different people:

“What I’ve valued most is the generous, thoughtful, timely feedback at critical stages in promoting cooperative education in voluntary, and policy work undertaken.  Thanks Adrian you are a gem.”

“Every time I hit a brick wall and ask for help, yours in the name that keeps coming up”

“Well, I think the biggest thing that you’ve helped me with has been the change to our governance model and making sure we were doing it right for people living with HIV. You guided us through what was potentially an incredibly challenging process, identifying some of the landmines and encouraging us to prepare for and pre-empt them, which was incredibly useful in supporting people to feel able to vote for the change at an EGM.”

“From what I see, you have made the often complicated world of social enterprise governance, finance and development much more accessible to both entrepreneurs and those of us that support them.  You use your experience and knowledge – of both the sector and humans – to meet people where they are and offer them the input they need (even when they might not yet know they need it).  I think the impact of this is an increased number of social entrepreneurs, and their supporters, who are equipped with the right critical questions to navigate the world of social business (and social business support!).  I know I have certainly grown in confidence in the decisions I make, questions I ask and support I offer, as a result of learning from and observing your work.”

“For me, you've helped me reframe what a sponsor or donor could look like.  Because I think I had this fixed idea in my head that I had to approach larger organisations (often with dodgy values) if I wanted to get some sort of investment in my business.  And actually since your generous support of my Write the Book programme began, I've also had support for my podcast from a couple of other freelance businesses who've signed up to sponsor it.  I'm not sure I would have had the idea to contact them if we'd not worked together.  Or at least I might have contacted them without much hope of a positive response, but I think I'm more optimistic and open to the idea of freelance businesses being potential supporters now, and that's very exciting.”

 “I’m not sure that there is any one specific thing in terms of biggest impact, because I have seen various things and then there’s the next thing.  But overall, I would say the biggest impact you have had outside the direct services you provide is your commitment to putting your head above the parapet and shouting out for justice, whether that is for self-employed directors who are also carers, #Payin30Days, Excluded UK etc.  Quite hard to put a measurable impact on that!”

“I can only comment from the perspective of your support for Co-operative Climate Action.  You are one of a tiny band of co-operators who support our co-operative option rather than conventional (and often discredited) offsets.  As such you are helping vulnerable communities I Malawi adapt to climate change, protecting biodiversity, and supporting the development of new co-operative businesses that will reduce poverty, give them hope, and a financial incentive to care for the trees in the long term. Thanks to your interest and encouragement we are gradually gaining momentum and giving hope to people."

“Adrian has been a dedicated and powerful voice for carers, sharing his experiences to illuminate the challenges of caring when you’re self-employed.  The searing honesty in both meetings and in the Carers Aloud blog series has not just been moving but has helped instigate change within the organisation, making carers a priority area for future campaigning and lending strength and insight to existing campaigns, particularly on the fatherhood experience.  His insights on our research have been valuable and will be taken forward in developing future research.  He was also able to stand up for the self-employed when talking to the Department of Business and Trade at a focus group on carer’s employment experiences, which will hopefully feed into shaping future policy.”

“Challenging preconceptions and barriers to understanding and engagement. Innovative, creative and engaging learning." 

“Inspiring communications and stimulating conversations.”

“Finding the fun in the fundamentals of business processes and sound practices. Fixing the fundations!”

"I see someone who, despite having SO much on his plate, just Gets On With It. Never a hardy outward whinge or woe-is-me moan about how much of a challenge everything is. Sure, you acknowledge it and know that the setup is anything but 'normal' but you still Get On With It. You find a way to move through the challenges, conduct your work, look after your wards, and make the world consistent and consistently better for those around you."

"Your facilitation generates immediate thinking from different perspective.  The legacy of these 'penny drop' moments have guided the team through difficult conversations.   Your questions have empowered the inner voice to be louder."

I'm part of the 3%

Some people may have heard me refer to how life was, when I started my business 20 years ago - and they gaze in wonder and how I managed to find and deliver any work at all, in an age before iPhones, Dropbox, and LinkedIn (we used sharpened stones to carve messages on stones, which we then threw in people's general direction).

But as I've been reflecting on my porcelain anniversary, I've realised that a lot of the social media that's embedded in our daily lives today was still 'growing up' when I first started to play with them.

Looking at the histories of platforms like LinkedIn, I've realised that I was in the first 3% of people who now use it to Link; and in the first 2.5% of people who started to regularly tweet.

Being part of this very early crowd of users meant that I experimented a lot with social media, because it felt safe to do so - they weren't that many other people in the spaces to laugh at me if I accidentally created what turned out to be a nsfw hashtag. And doing so got recognised as one of the top 500 most influential tweeters globally for a time in 2012; and LinkedIn celebrating me as having an 'all star'/can't possibly be any better, profile.

Social media also felt a lot more accepting in those days - the pace of posting was slower, and it felt that people were generally more accepting and understanding of each other's content. But I'm mainly taking my realising that I was amongst the early adopters of these now mainstream platforms as another sign of why it might be that my business has been able to last longer than 90% of all other startups: I'm curious to try out new things, and experiment/play with them. And other people were too - which led to some of them creating their own hashtags about me: #TwitterKingAdrian, #ChatToAdrian, and #SocEntSexGod.  

Social media has never helped me land any big client projects, or seen me go viral - but I didn't get into those spaces to do that. I'm in these spaces because this is where other people hang out, and ultimately I'm interested in other people. After all, it's the relationships we have that help determine our future successes, so why wouldn't I want to be showing interest and willingness to try out new things, if other people think they may be interesting too?

 

The sums behind my % claims =  

I was in first 33 million people to join LinkedIn (in 2008) - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-did-you-first-join-linkedin-heres-how-find-out-andy-brown-k9fpe/. In 2025, 1.1bn people have profiles on Linked In, which means I was in the first 3%.

I joined Twitter/X in 2009, when there were 15m active users (out of the 75m who created a profile but then never did anything). In 2025, there are 611m active X users, which means I was in the first 2.5%.

How I've become a daily 1 minute habit for people in 20 countries around the world

As part of reflecting on 2025 being the 20th anniversary of my business, I started to wonder what else was similarly 'birthed' in the same year.

It transpires that YouTube and I both share the same anniversary!

So unless you've been auto-playing the contents of my channel there, I wanted to take this opportunity to do a mini-audit of how my life on YouTube has played out over our lives together so far.

What I've found is that since launching my channel, and generating content for it, most people who find me there do so through my shorts (the videos, not the apparel) or from a direct link from someone else's website.

They've come from over 20 different countries, and over the lifetime of my channel have watched an average of at least 1 minute of my content every single day of every single year.

That doesn't seem too shabby?

The specifics (if you want to get grainy about it) = 

Firsts

1) The first video I uploaded was in 2010, being interviewed for a national project about empowering adults experiencing mental ill health to create their own social enterprises:

https://youtu.be/8AduAsnWMjE 

2) The first content I purposefully created wasn't until February 2020, and was about why should never trust your business adviser (which includes me!):

https://youtu.be/ZpPYqBlt1Ek

3) and my first short was in November of the same year (2020), celebrating the special relationship that social enterprises share with toilets (the first, but not last, time I sat on the porcelain throne to record content!):

https://youtube.com/shorts/EFLDDvLwOrU?feature=share

Biggies

1) My most viewed short on YouTube was about how I'd made a low-tech Meeting Owl Pro:

https://youtube.com/shorts/flf0GExdbsc?feature=share

2) My most viewed video was a rallying cry to stop people using the word 'pivot' during a pandemic: 

https://youtu.be/4G-iHsWIszQ

Guesting

1) The first video I appeared in anywhere on YouTube that someone else had created and uploaded (to my knowledge) was in May 2013 - effusing about the Responsible Business Standard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBx1qWHWt_U

2) The most viewed video of someone else's that I guested in, was recorded in Sept 2023, about redefining the concept of social entrepreneurship with Anne Scottlin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxm8p7w59uQ

Playlists

I curate several playlists in my channel, the most popular of which is my collection of shorts and being interviewed by other people on their podcasts on the topic of imposter syndrome:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbjwTqLUXg99vP8ZLwQhn_vPYY1xlF0ON

So, if you're a Youtuber too, how does your content and audience compare?