The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing: Introducing the Knowledge Café
Words by Kieran Whiteside and Yelena Bidé, both Inclusive Economy Project Officers at London Borough of Camden
Making time in the work week to engage with new ideas can be hard. Even more so in work-from-home mode, when the days can start to feel like an endless blur of back-to-back video calls. But making space to absorb new ideas and perspectives is important — listening to a talk can be informative, thought-provoking, and sometimes uncomfortably challenging. Enter the Knowledge Café: a series of talks designed to provoke, inspire, and teach.
We’ve been introduced to the basics of behavioural science, pondered how COVID might reshape (or not) the city of the future, learned about alternative finance models that consider people and the planet and not just profit, and reflected on how we might redefine the relationship between residents and local government, amongst a number of other fascinating talks.
Here are three of some of the favourite things that we’ve learnt so far…
- Values drive political choice, not policies
An original theory of democracy is that people vote for the party with the policies that they like.
Stephen Muers challenged this narrative in his talk on values and culture at the heart of policy making. The electorate rarely has a detailed understanding of policies (and it would be irrational to expect them to; we all live busy lives and manifestos sit at hundreds of pages long!).
Politicians often underestimate the importance of values in influencing what voters are attracted to or not.
People are, in fact, much more likely to vote on a basis of symbols and values — is this party or candidate on my side? Do they back my principles? What is the culture they represent, in a general sense? It’s far less about the detail, and more about the stories you tell and symbols that represent it that bring voters on side. And as policy makers, we should be thinking about these more seriously alongside our traditional policy tools.
He used the example of Trump and his famous flagship ‘build a wall and get Mexico to pay for it’ policy. On election day in 2016, the majority of his supporters didn’t actually believe he would achieve it. It was really about the world view and approach to government that they were buying into.
Stephen made the case that we should look to hire more anthropologists, sociologists and communication specialists in central and local policy teams in order to make the most of this human tendency.
You can read more in his book, Culture and Values at the Heart of Policy Making.
2. To encourage a behaviour change, you’ve got to think EAST
Our very first talk was from Pieter at the Behaviour Insights Team, who made a compelling case for how governments can nudge a change in behaviour through the EAST framework.
First, it’s got to be easy. Simplify your communication, remove any friction costs and harness the defaults — we all have a tendency to go for the pre-set option. A well-known example of this in action was in the first six months after employees in large firms were automatically enrolled into pension schemes, participation rates rose from 61 to 83%.
Second, make it attractive. By both attracting attention, using personalisation and images, and by designing rewards or sanctions for maximum effect.
Third, make it social. You can do this by showing that most people perform the desired behaviour to encourage others to do the same. And by using the power of our social networks, as these often shape our actions. Governments can harness these to provide mutual support, spread behaviours peer-to-peer and enable collective action.
And lastly, make it timely. Behaviour is generally easier to change when habits are already disrupted, such as around major life events, so prompt people when they are likely to be most receptive.
You can read more about applying behavioural insights in their paper with Nesta and the Cabinet Office.
3. How we can reframe what help looks like.
One of our most recent talks was from Sophia Parker, CEO of Little Village, a London charity whose mission is that no child in the capital is without the essential things they need to thrive, and that every parent can play a part in achieving that goal.
They collect quality donations of clothes, toys and kit for babies and young children, and gift these donations to local families who are dealing with challenging circumstances — homelessness, unemployment, low wages and domestic violence. They’re powered by a network of over 300 volunteers, many of whom are parents with small children themselves.
A fascinating takeaway from Sophia’s talk is the way she powerfully reframed the traditional definition of ‘help’. Parents who ask for help from their centres can experience overwhelming feelings of judgement and shame; Little Village is not only mindful of this but is actively redesigning how they work and communicate to tackle that. It’s about the language they use (they never talk about beneficiaries or users, they say families or parents or children), and the behaviours at volunteer workshops and training that underpins this. No-one is there to ‘fix’ someone and it’s about empathy, not sympathy.
This deeply human approach is core to how they operate. As Amy, one of the mums (and now volunteer), said:
“The first day I came to Little Village was the first time anyone had ever made me a cup of tea. It makes me feel emotional now to think about it. I was so used to being the one who did everything for everyone else.”
They also value the cycle of help — a parent may come to them when they need help, but there might be a time when things are more stable and that parent can offer help instead, and that offer and invitation is always there. The same applies to their gifts. Any parent can bring back and gift the item they were given before, embedding a sense of cyclical equality. When we talk about ‘help’ it’s easy to think about people as victims, instead of individuals who need support at that moment in time.
Inevitably the conversation also touched on the impact of COVID, and their work with JRF to raise the profile of child poverty. 95,000 children under 5 are living in poverty in inner London and this is set to get worse. They’ve experienced a 182% increase in families they’re supporting. Never has their work been so needed. And at a time when child poverty in one of the richest countries on earth, is back in the spotlight, this felt all the more prescient.
If you haven’t made it to a Knowledge Café session yet but are keen to, please join us for one of our next sessions. If you’re a Camden employee, join our Yammer page here, where you’ll be able to see what talks are on the agenda and catch up on talks you missed with our video recordings.
Reading this from outside the Council? If you’re interested in giving a Knowledge Café talk, please get in touch with yelena.bide@camden.gov.uk and kieran.whiteside@camden.gov.uk — we’d love to hear from you.
