The house of unreason
When I stood up to deliver my first chairman's lecture to the RSA 23 years ago, I said that its greatest asset was its 20,000-strong army of Fellows. It is true then and it is true today, when the army is even bigger.
As I was soon to discover, however, it is one thing to have an army but quite another to engage it in action, particularly if it is a volunteer army.
For a start, we had no good way of communicating with our Fellows (and nor did they with one another) except through the monthly RSA Journal, which was mostly a condensed version of our lectures and was, I suspect, left to collect dust on too many coffee tables. Otherwise we relied on one-to-one communication by telephone or post, but even then there was a limit to how many times you could expect staff to stuff 20,000 bits of paper into stamped addressed envelopes.
Although most organisations at the time could at least gather working groups together to share key messages – something that would have been impossible for a network as extended as the RSA – we were not unusual in failing to have much upward or sideways communication. What no one seemed to realise at the time was that a one-channel system of communications inevitably led to a centralised and hierarchical organisation.
The coming of the internet changed all that. Suddenly everyone could write to everyone else. The web could open up the inside of the organisation, making its workings available to anyone who had the key and making everyone privy to the same information. But information is power, so what followed was a process of democratisation. Wise organisations lapped this up, although some clung to the old ways and merely speeded up the existing one-channel system, keeping the power where they felt it properly belonged. The latter soon discovered that the status quo could no longer be the way forward, because they lost out in the chase for new ideas.
Creativity is now the key requirement for any organisation. Unlike efficiency, which is often a brake on experiment and imagination, creativity gives an organisation its critical edge.
In a one-channel world, almost all new initiatives had to come from the centre. But creativity has always bubbled best at the edge of an organisation. Now it can. To encourage it, organisations have developed a range of incentives. Some offer rewards for good ideas, which they then celebrate around the rest of the firm. Others create internal venture capital funds, giving grants for interesting ideas. Others keep a look out for exciting developments outside, then pounce and buy them in.
The RSA has done all three. It has a long tradition of offering ‘Premiums’, or prizes, to encourage new initiatives and, each month, it celebrates Fellow-led projects in its newsletters. RSA Catalyst is effectively an internal venture capital fund, although the offer of practical help from the centre or from other Fellows is often more useful than cash. Of course, the option for the centre to recruit a group to investigate one of its own ideas will always remain open. Nor should the RSA be averse to bringing in the occasional idea from outside. In my time, Education for Capability, the forerunner to Opening Minds, was initiated by a group of concerned individuals outside the RSA, but when offered our patronage, space in the House and a modicum of staffing, the project became an important part of the RSA’s portfolio.
There is a danger in this free-for-all chase for ideas. The organisation could end up as a loose conglomerate with no cohesion. This might suit a private equity company that is only there for the money, but the RSA risks losing its cutting edge as a force for change. It needs both a central theme or thrust – the 21st century enlightenment? – and an understanding of its core competence: what it is uniquely good at doing.
The enlightenment theme is an inspiring and challenging one. Its advantage is that it allows room for debate within the organisation about its substance: what would be the essence of an enlightened society? Its drawback is that, until that debate is resolved, it will be difficult to use the theme as a criterion for deciding which projects fit and which don’t. There should be, as a minimum, some common thread that will act as a necessary condition of any future initiatives.
There also has to be agreement on the core competence issue. I have always thought of the RSA as a testing ground of ideas for a future society, as the ‘home of unreason’, after George Bernard Shaw. Shaw distinguished between the reasonable person who followed the trends and the unreasonable one who sought to shape the trends by thinking the unlikely and doing the impossible. The future, he concluded, belonged to the unreasonable ones. Frightened organisations expel unreasonable ideas but courageous ones foster them, understanding that not all of them will necessarily work. If Number 8 John Adam Street became known as the House of Unreason, I personally would be delighted.
Charles Handy was chair of the RSA between 1987 and 1989.
RSA Catalyst is a seed funding initiative aimed at helping Fellows turn great ideas into successful projects, no matter where they are in the world. New or early-stage Fellow-led projects that aim to have a tangible social benefit and that align with the RSA’s values will be awarded small grants, while also benefiting from Fellows’ expert advice through RSA Skills Bank. Applications are assessed by a panel of RSA staff and Fellowship Council members, and funding is awarded on a monthly basis (except August and January). Before applying for funding, why not take one of the following steps?
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