American Networks
While the RSA in the UK enjoys a long and distinguished history and is rightly regarded as an institution in the UK community of ideas, in many ways the RSA-United States is something of a start-up, with a modest budget, a handful of staff, and a small but growing (and distinguished) Fellowship. Start-ups must find a successful place in the market quickly, or risk being extinguished.
This is particularly true in the community of ideas, which features well-funded and publicly establish think-tanks and advocacy groups that dominate the market. Rather than compete with established Goliaths, the RSA-US has had to focus on the essential question: what service do we provide that no one else does?
If we cannot supply an answer to that question, we cannot hope to recruit new Fellows, develop programs, or secure the resources we need in the always-rigorous individual-based fundraising field and the worst corporate-giving environment in over fifteen years. Further, there is a moral question at stake: does an organisation that cannot persuasively answer the question “what unique service do we provide” deserve to exist?
The US marketplace of ideas is full of organisations whose members serve as an audience for the organisation’s work. In some respects these organisations operate on an industrial model, with an output decided at the top level of management, executed through middle-management supervision of the factory floor, and distributed to individuals whose only engagement in the process is to consume the end product. In this respect what is true of a washing-machine is true of a piece of policy or intellectual content.
In the 2008 chief executive’s lecture, Matthew Taylor talked about using advances in our understanding of human behaviour to create the conditions under which citizens are able to make more socially-engaged decisions that lead to a better society. This is an emerging theme in my conversations with Fellows, including “serial innovator” Dr. John Kao and this year’s Benjamin Franklin Medal winner Sir Ken Robinson, have applied this theme, both of whom apply to their own fields the need to move away from the industrial, command-and-control structure of organisations and toward a model that allows new ideas and good practice to develop, that creates the conditions for innovation
This is where the work of the RSA Networks team and the RSA-United States converge, and they do so around the greatest asset of the RSA and the answer to the essential question of why the RSA should exist: the Fellowship.
Wherever there have been projects that benefit society, there have been three actors: there has been a person with an idea - an innovator; there has been a network of people who help to sharpen and promote that idea; and there has been a person or organisation with the resources to make it happen. The RSA has all three of those actors within its Fellowship – innovators, networkers, and philanthropists – and in specific cases where the Fellowship network is lacking, the personal networks of the Fellows are able to supplement that with new entries in all three areas (who, in turn, can become valuable additions to the Fellowship).
The role of the RSA, then, is not to command an outcome and produce it for the consumption of Fellows – it is to create the conditions under which the ideas, networks, and resources of Fellows and their networks can come together to produce innovations that benefit society. The RSA-United States has a Fellow at the centre of every project it runs, and operates like a brokerage house – in this case, a brokerage of ideas, facilitating the necessary relationships. No other organisation pursues this model with such clarity.
In order for this model to succeed, it requires a new understanding of the role of Fellows and the organisation. As RSA staff, we must remember that the Fellowship is not a passive audience for our work – instead, we exist to serve the Fellowship by connecting their ideas with networks and resources.
This also requires an adjustment on the part of the Fellowship. Fellows should consider where they fit in the model – are they innovators with ideas to be executed or expanded? Are they networkers, keen to be involved in interesting discussions and connect ideas to people who can help? Are they in a position to contribute, themselves or through others, the resources needed to turn an idea into action? In any case, the words “the RSA should do a project on…” must be banished from the lexicon of the Fellowship, for the simple reason that in the new model there is no longer a divide between the RSA and the Fellowship. The RSA is the Fellowship. Matthew Taylor, for all his virtues, is not William Shipley, and I am certainly not Benjamin Franklin. The Shipleys and Franklins are out there amongst the Fellows. Our job is to connect them to each other, to create the conditions for their ideas to thrive.
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