becoming deaf, dumb, and blind, during the lock-down

Nearly all of us are currently subject to a national 'lock-down' during an unprecedented pandemic.

And all of us are responding in different ways to the challenges that this 'new world' we now find ourselves living and working in present.

After the initial panic, patterns seem to be starting to stabilise: we're getting used to having to que for an hour (or longer) to get into the supermarket, and then once we're inside for it to take 2-3 times as long to get around as we used to be able to do our shop in, in order to practice social distancing and limiting contact with fellow shoppers and store staff.

But for many, the revelation that they can now work from home using video conferencing and remote access, and which people seem to already be developing habits around, seems to suggest that many will struggle to want to go back to the drudgery of commuting once we're out of the other side of this (whenever that may be).

But there's something about working from home, and also the wider implications of how as enterprises and business we fumble our way forwards through this, that no-one really wants to seem to talk about:

1) what it your internet connection goes down? I've heard of several people and small businesses who have been essentially excluded from the world completely after routine line installs and upgrades fell foul of 'human error', leaving them deaf, dumb, and blind to the world...

2) and what it your tech dies? My laptop's hard drive failed at the start of this week - and it's unlikely that I'll be able to get it anywhere for repair for months, so in the face of having already had nearly all my earning work cancelled by clients already, and an uncertain wait to find out if I'll be able to access the self-employed income support scheme, I've had to pay out several hundreds of pounds unexpectedly to order to buy a new one, and hope that it can be delivered sometime in the next 2 weeks... (in the meantime, my girlfriend has very kindly offered me the use of hers, from which I'm typing this).

3) Gurus and experts all seem to be extolling the virtues of 'pivoting' our business models - but encouraging us to do so in ways that assume that it's only our current market place or customers that are being disrupted - this is nothing like any of us have lived through before, and nothing that was ever conceived of by the academics and speakers who developed these models and frameworks. So for us businesses and enterprises already facing an immediate uncertain future because of cash shortfalls, our longer term planning is also compromised by the models we're being presented with to reinvent ourselves through having been developed for different times...

4) And finally, what happens after the summer for education bodies?

Universities and Colleges quickly moved to continue to offer teaching and classes using on-line platforms, and replace exams with assignments. But within a few months, these will become the norm for many students, who must surely then begin to wonder why they need to raise the money to live on or near a campus to be able to engage with their further and higher education in the future, when they can access it equally from wherever they find themselves living now?

Like many, I can't see that we're ever going to fully return to living and working as we were at the start of 2020, but I wonder how many waves of shock, panic, and fear this pandemic will successively unleash on us before we can all feel its over - and what these will do in turn to our work, learning, and relationships as societies, communities, and economies.

Hopefully the time that the lockdown offers us to start to carefully think about these things will mean that we don't emerge from the pandemic only to fall into the next global panic... 

why I go quiet on social media in times of pandemic

Unless you've been a contestant in a Big Brother House, everyone in the world is currently united in fear about the Corona-virus and Covid-19.

In the UK we've been seeing swift, sweeping actions and measures announced by the government - but in light of the unprecedented nature of what we're now (hopefully) living through, information about how our businesses, livelihoods, and homes can be protected in light of most trading and employment of all types suddenly ceasing (with no indication of when they may return), is scant.

Scant information in times of panic means that we worry and panic more - that's why we see explosions of fake news, contradictory guidance, confusing stories and such like. And our brave new world of social media that we've all been building over the last decade or so means it's scarily easy for all of us to be posting, re-posting, and sharing others' posts like spam-bots. that only exponentially makes the situation worse for all of us and our mental well-being and health.

Which brings me to the title of this post - some of you reading this will now I'm usually relatively prolific across multiple social media channels on an ongoing basis. But I also try and live in a way that's 'authentic' (modelling behaviours in myself that I think are important for us all) - and that means that rather than accidentally 'fanning the flames of social (media) panic', I'm watching what's being posted and shared more than I'm posting myself; and I'm only posting or re-posting content where I think it will offer immediate, tangible, and direct assurance and benefit to groups with whom I closely identify and work with:

- fellow freelancers and the self-employed (all 5 million of us!)

- people who live in rented homes (equivalent to roughly 13 million households)

- co-operatives, social enterprises, and charities 

- micro and local businesses 

As to when I'll resume 'normal service on social media' (insofar as I have a 'normal service') - I'm currently looking to start to ramp back up my traditional provocations, encouragements, and randomness in line with how we as a society start to feel we're coming to terms with this 'new normal'... 

why you shouldn't trust your business adviser

having your accounts audited doesn't prove they're correct - so why do we keep thinking it does?

Lets get one thing clear from the start here - there are a lot of accountants who will be upset with me for writing this.

But at the same time, there are hopefully a lot of groups and businesses who'll now start to save a lot of money and stress after reading it...

There's a commonly held belief that I want to correct with this post - namely that an awful lot of people (including commissioners, grant making bodies, government officials, and the like) all think that if you have your accounts audited it proves that they're accurate.

It doesn't.

The process of auditing is simply someone giving an opinion that the way you've approached adding up your receipts and invoices (based on what you choose to reveal to them) is sound. 

An audit does not guarantee that the accounts are fully correct, or that you're a sound business proposition - and if you don't believe me, just go back and read what it says on the certificate that you pay an auditor to give you (the below extracts are from the auditors certification to the 2019 accounts for Arrandco Business Services):

• "Our objectives are to obtain reasonable assurance about whether the financial statements as a whole are free from material misstatement...  Reasonable assurance...is not a guarantee that an audit...will always detect a material misstatement when it exists."

• "We do not accept or assume responsibility to any party... to any body, for our work, for this report, or the opinions we have formed"

So if the audit process doesn't guarantee it will spot mistakes in your accounts, and if there is subsequently found to be an issue that the auditor missed, then the auditor isn't responsible for that - so what do we pay for..?

And to add to this question on the validity of the audit process, let's also remind ourselves of a few recent 'audit failures' - 

Patissie Valleirie - when asked why the auditors to this high street retail chain didn't spot the £40m fraud that spanned several years, their auditors said they don't look for fraud as part of their audit process... 

Carillion - not just one, but two firms of auditors missed the signs of a greater than £1bn hole in the accounts of this national construction firm that was a one-time darling of government commissioners, as well as ongoing signs of insolvent trading...

Kids Company - the flagship charity that suddenly seemed to run out of cash in 2015, was having serious concerns raised about apparent financial reporting and management irregularities to its Trustees as far back as 2002, yet still had accounts signed off every year...

RSM Tenon - one of the leading accountancy and audit firms found that it wasn't even getting its own accounts right after they were signed off...

the Charity Commission - last year openly said that about half of the accounts filed with it aren't being properly examined or checked by the auditors who are being paid to do so, which calls into question how far we can trust the accounts of any charity in general...

So - back to my opening question: if the process of auditing accounts doesn't guarantee that they're correct, and the auditor has no responsibility if its subsequently found that they didn't do their job properly:

(1) why do we pay for our accounts to be audited?

(2) and in light of the above quick example from across different sectors, why do we still keep asking for accounts to be audited as proof of assurance that the organisation is trading legally and is not insolvent?

If you're not prepared to 'burn out', maybe you shouldn't be a social entrepreneur...

With the start of a new decade, resolutions abound - and they're usually to do with trying to be healthier and taking greater care of ourselves. Indeed, there seems to be a growing trend in many Facebook and LinkedIN groups that I'm part of to encourage more open and honest conversations about our mental health and well-being.

And this doesn't seem to be a passing fad - the imperative to do so seems to be increasingly supported by evidences and research, highlighting the cost of 'burn out', particularly for/to social entrepreneurs... https://uk.reuters.com/article/entrepreneurs-social-mentalhealth/doing-good-found-to-take-its-toll-as-more-social-entrepreneurs-report-burnout-idUKL5N2715KT

But I can't help but want to 'poke this with a stick' a little bit, and suggest that actually, burning out may be exactly what a social entrepreneur needs to do, if they're to fully achieve their vision.

You see, to my mind, "social entrepreneurship" isn't about creating the next big social enterprise that will magically create hundreds of jobs for people who otherwise wouldn't be able to work, or managing to somehow stop all plastic pollution by itself (as they're often envisaged and encouraged to be by policy makers and similar). 

I have an idea that a social entrepreneur's biggest impact is actually more through how they influence others, and contribute to changes in others' practices and understanding more widely - and in doing so, can have a far greater reach and generate far more change than a single venture could ever hope to.

And in that regard, they're a bit like artists - many of whom seek to re-imagine the world as it is, or could be; to offer us a critical and fresh perspective that gives us pause to reexamine what we think we know and understand; and in doing so, become a fuller and more complete person.

And just like social entrepreneurs, artists struggle too - with many never seeming to manage to achieve their 'break through moment'. But sometimes, one does, and in doing so, creates a piece of art, the legacy of which completely changes the way everyone around the world who sees it, is challenged to revisit their assumptions and prejudices about a subject matter.

One famous example of this, is Edward Munch's "the Scream"  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream 

This painting that has subsequently inspired so much other media and cultures, has also enabled us to have more open conversations about pain and well-being, and even allows us to communicate with future generations who are likely to loose the language we use today. It has become one of the most iconic images in the art world ever.

As such, it's ongoing legacy surely symbolises what social entrepreneurs strive for themselves.

But we rarely talk about what it cost Munch to create: a crippling anxiety attack, likely brought on from being burnt out...

So, my question for all would-be social entrepreneurs is this: what price would you be willing to pay in order to create a legacy that will touch people's lives around the planet for generations to come...?

reporting social impact - 150 years in, and 8,000 to go...

If you're getting involved with starting to report social value/impact, and find yourself confused about all the different models, standards, bodies, and approaches, then don't panic - you're right where you should expect to be!

Preparing 'social accounts' is often likened to the preparation of a set of financial accounts - tracking what resources have been used, and what's changed (good or bad) at the end of a period.

However - as a species, we've been collectively agreeing how to 'do' financial accounts for about 8 millennia (the earliest reference I can find dates back to about 8,000BC in ancient Sumeria...). But we've only really been doing 'social' accounts for about 150 (the earliest references I'm aware of are co-operative societies in the mid nineteen century sharing how they were impacting on their members and communities).

So if we've been working on agreeing consistent standards and approaches for financial accounts for this long, why is there the sense of urgency and panic to nail the way in which we report the social value and impact alongside the financial stuff?

And just to add to the complication, financial accounting had only a few key audiences who were interested that it was gotten 'right' (investors, regulators, government), whereas social value and impact has far wider groups that it needs to satisfy (providers, commissioners, communities, employees, beneficiaries, customers, grant making bodies, policy makers, and so on and so on...)

So isn't it about time we stopped panicking that we've not yet reached a global consensus on the measures we should all be using when we talk about our value and impact..?

(Unless you're the Bank of England, who've just set a 2 year deadline on us all to figure them out before they make up and impose their own!)

the problems with prioritising social value maybe aren't that straightforward...

Having worked in the 'social value' arena for about 20 years now in guises ranging from developing reporting toolkits for national sector bodies, supporting national programmes from the likes of nef and Social Investment Business, and delivering masterclasses with commissioners and individual groups, there seems to remain a widespread frustration as to why more charities, social enterprises, businesses, and others simply aren't getting on with just (fukcing) doing it...

And I have an idea (well, several in fact) as to why despite the rhetoric and good intentions, it's proving so hard for so many to start with even the first steps of starting to think about how they capture and report the impact they're already making, let alone start to grow it to benefit more people and communities in need:

1) most groups and businesses face a daily trade-off between investing in systems and processes, and being able to 'keep the lights on' - until we can find better ways of presenting the imperative of social value reporting in the context of their current operating pressures and immediate consequences, then it'll always be being put off to the next month...

2) despite social value now being a compliance thing for charities, companies, and even societies (public benefit reporting requirements, legal responsibilities of company directors, and such like), there's little by way of enforcement by these respective regulatory bodies - so if there's no stick, then what's the motivation..?

3) the introduction of the social value act in 2012 was going to herald a new era of social value in public procurement - except it's not that obvious or widespread yet (with most contracts only giving a 5% weighing to social value)

4) we see grant making trusts and bodies seemingly at odds with each other in how they're prioritising social value and impact, with some being so vague as to leave the applying groups more confused, and others contradicting each other, so is it any wonder that charities applying to them are focusing more on outputs and budgets than outcomes..?

5) and the 'professionalisation' of reporting our social value (despite it originating within the social enterprise sector) is starting to see our own people becoming disenfranchised and demotivated when they're asked to start to report and manage it, according to recent research papers...

So is it any wonder why despite the efforts of nationally funded programmes, sector bodies, and rhetoric of others, that 2 decades in, we're still seeing so many groups struggling to begin to even engage with social value, let alone report, manage, and develop it..?

Maybe we need to create more carrots to incentivise and nudge behaviours and thinking, rather than relying on an approach of 'tell people why it's so important, and they're bound to come round...' (after all - how many of us actually manage our recommended '5-a-day' of fruit and vegetables, or religiously floss after every meal, despite knowing how important both are...?)