A Tribute to a Pioneering MeshWORK Project
written with input from Christopher Cooke
& inspired by an original report by Matthew
Kalman
2nd update: 12 December 2007
'HemsMESH' was the first major Spiral Dynamics-based project in the UK. Technically,
it was a 'pilot' – which meant in reality things were being tried out as the project
went along – which also meant that it was an awesome learning experience for all
involved! There was never any official 'follow-on – but the project was far from
a failure as all the key figures in the project went onto to further work with the
principles involved. Indeed Christopher 'Cookie' Cooke, the project leader, still
does work with both individuals and agencies that were involved in it.
It also brought to a climax a remarkable three years which had seen Wakefield Training
& Enterprise Council and Business Link Wakefield & District, two organisations rooted
in BLUE Bureaucracy, not only embrace Spiral Dynamics – in part, at least – but also
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)!
The architect of much of this was Business Link's Ian Lavan, a Master Practitioner
& Trainer in NLP who, at the beginning of 1998, flew to Texas to train in Spiral
Dynamics with Don Beck & Chris Cowan at the National Values Center. Following on
from that, Beck & Cowan were brought over to the UK that March to present their Spiral
Dynamics courses in Wakefield…and life was nevermore to be the same for a number
of people who attended those workshops!
One consequence was that the 21st Century Group – a business network I had been running
for the Business Link with the help of that organisation's lead advisor, Steve Beevers,
upped its game considerably, As a result Ian got heavily involved, the network became
highly radical and was soon being described in terms such as “worldbeating”.
At the
time Business Link brought Don Beck back in June 1999, I was also carrying out a
contract for them as a part-time advisor to businesses in SESKU & Hemsworth – SESKU
being the villages of South Elmsall, South Kirkby and Upton grouped together as the
beneficiaries of an 'SRB-1' scheme. These were all former pit villages in the south
east of Wakefield Metropolitan District – Hemsworth was officially a 'town', though
in reality it was little more than an overgrown village.
The demise of the coal mining industry had devastated the local economy and the social
fabric had soon started to wither. By the time I was working there, unemployment
– much of it long-term - was well above national average, burglary, petty crime and
minor violence were endemic, and drug abuse was rife. (Nearby Grimethorpe, just across
the border in South Yorkshire, had the dubious distinction of being the first place
in Britain where bags of heroin were sold for just £5.)
Ian Lavan remarked that the thing that, to him, most summed up the sad state of the
area was the South Kirkby Miner's Institute reduced to putting on dog training classes.
(He was very conscious of the proud (PURPLE) traditions being demeaned.) A similar
moment for me was a man reluctant to walk his dog on the grass outside the closed
South Kirkby colliery gates because of all the syringes on the ground. The conversation
was held next to a dilapidated sofa the junkies used in the Summer to 'bliss out'
on after shooting up.
Inspiration
at Minsthorpe!
Some £35M - £20M from the Government's Single Regeneration Budget (SRB),
plus another £15M from the European Union and other sources – was going into SESKU
under SRB-1. Unfortunately many of the projects developed under the scheme seemed
to connect only marginally with the local people. Take-up and involvement with projects
were relatively low.
Perhaps most tellingly, after nearly 3 years of SRB-1, there was little new business
in the area and unemployment remained stubbornly high. In May 1999 a couple of local
businessmen made mischief by going to the Yorkshire Post with the story that SRB-1's
£35M had been effectively wasted!
Almost from setting foot in SESKU, I pushed for Spiral Dynamics to be used to inform
and improve decision-making in the area. With Ian Lavan, I tried putting on a Spiral
Dynamics workshop; but, to the frustration of those who did attend, they couldn't
get most of the key decision-makers there. So, with the Business Link committed to
bringing Don Beck back to Wakefield, we angled for him to speak in SESKU.
With heavy promotion emphasising Don's role in the early-mid-1990s transformation
in South Africa from Apartheid to multi-cultural democracy, 65 'influencers' turned
up at Minsthorpe Community College on the hill outside South Elmsall on 17 June for
his lunchtime address.
Don spoke eloquently and passionately for an hour about the need for MeshWORK solutions
to free the 'coalminer identity' to do other things.
Among those fired up by Don's speech was TEC Chief Executive Iain Wilkinson. He convened
what we called a 'MESH Group' of those in the TEC, Business Link and Wakefield College
with knowledge and interest in Spiral Dynamics, with a view to creating a 'Wakefield
MeshWORK'.
After several meetings of very excited talk, the MESH Group finally buckled down
to the fact that we actually had to do something! We felt we needed a 'real-world'
project to demonstrate the power of the MeshWORK approach.
It was then that Steve Beevers and I put forward an issue we had been discussing
for some time. A factor holding back the development of SESKU & Hemsworth businesses,
I had been told repeatedly by local business people, was the quality of school leavers
from the area's two secondary schools, Minsthorpe and Hemsworth High. In short, in
an area of high unemployment, many local employers considered the school leavers
unemployable. They preferred to employ older, more responsible people. It was even
alleged that some desperate business people were bussing in workers from the nearby
city of Doncaster – though later investigations failed to find hard evidence for
this claim.
So the MESH Group decided to set up a Spiral Dynamics-based project to examine youth
employability issues in that area. “Oh, good,” commented Ian Lavan, somewhat incredulous
at the naïve audacity of the scope, “let's start with something easy!”
The
Start of HemsMESH
I felt I didn't have sufficient knowledge at the time to design
a MeshWORK project and Ian Lavan had other commitments – so it was given to Christopher
Cooke to take the lead. His consultancy, Hidden Resources Change Management Ltd,
had arranged the 98 Beck & Cowan and 99 Beck visits which meant he could draw upon
Don's expertise in overseeing the project from a distance. It was also Chris who
coined the 'HemsMESH' moniker for the project.
Since SRB-1 was winding down, it made sense to target funding from the new £20M SRB-5
scheme (with a core of £8M SRB), for which Hemsworth was eligible – having missed
out on the SESKU SRB-1 due to some arcane manipulation of demographics.
Cookie and Steve Beevers first of all won over Hemsworth High headteacher Richard
Dunn who, having presided over a considerable improvement in A*-C GCSE grades, in
the previous few years, announced: “It is unlikely that we can improve academic standards
without engaging the broader community.” With Dunn's support, they were able to get
the bid through the various SRB-5 approval and scrutiny stages - committees and public
meetings, etc.
Hemsworth High, where the project was to be centred, in many respects represented
a near-perfect opportunity to 'road test' Spiral Dynamics. Between 16-19% of their
16 year-old school leavers neither went into further education nor into legitimate
employment, compared to the national average of 14% of school leavers who got 'lost'.
Since the project would involve a lot of data collection and analysis, Wakefield
TEC donated the services of Donna James, their leading researcher. As the TEC was
the 'lead body' for managing the funding, their European Manager, Tim Goodspeed,
became the project's coordinator. He set up a 'HemsMESH' page on the TEC's web site.
(Unfortunately the TEC HemsMESH page disappared along with the TEC and the site in
2001.)
In accordance with Don Beck's concepts, a Vital Signs Centre was established at Cherry
Tree House in the grounds of the school and Cookie persuaded Intergraph, a leading
designer, to donate some geographical information software (GIS). This enabled data
(such as location of businesses, houses banded for council tax, households receiving
benefit, burglaries, incidents of violent crime, traffic accidents, etc – and eventually
vMEMETIC information) to be coded and layered onto maps of Hemsworth. Wakefield Metropolitan
District Council contributed data, as did the West Yorkshire Police whose Chief Inspector
Ray Helm became an ardent supporter of the project. In the interests of confidentiality
and Data Protection, identification of data was mapped only to street names and post
codes rather than individual buildings.
To avoid the core delivery team of himself, me, Dr Henrie Lidiard (a Hidden Resources
associate), Tim, Donna and Vital Signs Centre Manager Jan Cassidy falling into groupthink,
Chris set up both a Steering Committee of representatives from local organisations
(public and private sector) with an interest in the regeneration of South East Wakefield
and a 'Wisdom Network'. This last allowed Cookie to draw on expert opinion well away
from the project. It included Don Beck and South African Loraine Laubscher who had
worked with Don there in the early-mid-1990s and remained a trusted confidante.
Although Chris' first real efforts to promote the project were at the Business Link-sponsored
'Business Marketplace' event at Minsthorpe in January 2000, HemsMESH formally kicked
off on 3 February with an Induction Day at Hemsworth's Vissett Cottage motel. Cookie
and Henrie led this basic introduction to Spiral Dynamics for local influencers which
included 'Walking the Spiral' – a powerful exercise for fast-tracking appreciation
of the Spiral's different worldviews. Amongst the attendees were Martin Clay (from
the SRB-5 project team) and Annie Mars, from the Hemsworth Community Initiative,
who took a keen interest in the project all the way through.
Interestingly, after walking the Spiral, ex-miner Jim Haley (from the Hemsworth Christian
Fellowship) said with real conviction: "The problem here in this town is fractured
PURPLE."
Identifying
the Issues
As well as providing general support to Cookie, my role was to liaise with
local employers and to assist in building a stronger relationship between them and
Hemsworth High. Essentially this was an extension of the work I had been doing for
the Business Link. Unfortunately their office in South Elmsall was closed (due to
shortsightedness amongst Business Link management over continuing funding) around
the time HemsMESH really began to attract attention. Thus, a major opportunity to
link in economic (business) interventions with social interventions was missed.
Amongst the business people I recruited to the 1 April Open Forum were Tom Dyer (from
South Kirkby's Dempsey Dyer Ltd) and wife Anne (a governor at Minsthorpe), Paul Sikora
(Upton's Frigoscandia), and 21st Century Group members Roger Carey and Garry Fox
(South Kirkby's Carey & Fox), Peter Dawson (South Kirkby's PD Engineering) and Steve
Smith (Knottingley's EMC Ltd). I was also instrumental in getting police inspector
Tim Ruse and Liz Gledhill from the South Elmsall Express to the event.
In all just short of 50 people, ranging from local politicians to senior representatives
of regeneration agencies to teachers to business people to community activists to
people straight off the street attended what was essentially an Open Space session
in structure. Don Beck, who was over to lead some vMEMETIC surveying, worked the
PURPLE and RED in the room like a magician delighting children with his ridiculous
'truth meter' - a supposed electronic true-or-false voting system that could tell
whether people were expressing their real views. There was indeed something of the
shamanic priest in the way Don defied clear rationality and fed the need for a powerful
figure able to command the 'spirits of technology'. Meanwhile Cookie put forward
themes in a more cerebral manner for the BLUE, ORANGE and GREEN present.
A huge amount of information was gleaned about key issues inhibiting the development
of South East Wakefield and this was distilled into a report which was posted on
the TEC's 'HemsMESH' web page.
A stream of data Don started the team collecting on 1 April identified 'safe' and
'unsafe' places in Hemsworth. This was fed into the GIS mapping system and led eventually
to rumours that the team were “capturing people's emotions in a computer”. Reputedly
the rumours were stoked up by Hemsworth & District MP Jon Trickett who had never
been convinced of the necessity for HemsMESH. If so, it seemed like RED was manipulating
PURPLE's superstitious fears!
Beyond Today:
an Adventure in Time...
On 18 May I facilitated a meeting at Hemsworth High between a group of local employers
and Richard Dunn and some of his senior management team. More than anything, the
meeting revealed significant gaps in values and understanding between the two sides
but an action plan to build closer relationships was agreed. The school was also
pleased to establish a relationship for the first time with Frigoscandia which would
enable Year 10 Work Experience placements at the company.
July proved to be the most
intense month of the project.
On the 5th, Cookie and I delivered an Adizes LifeCycle workshop at the Broad Lane
Business Centre in South Elmsall. (That workshop represented my first efforts at
mapping the vMEMES of Spiral Dynamics to the LifeCycle stages.) Feedback was generally
highly positive with Claire Burton (South Elmsall's Evolve Electronics) even declaring
it a life-changing experience! (Business Link Wakefield & District was meant to be
involved and engaged in follow-ups; but, by that time, the organisation was starting
to fall apart, faced with the imminent certainty that it would shortly be incorporated
into the proposed West Yorkshire 'super Business Link'.)
On the 13th the HemsMESH team – enhanced by Gerri Moriarty, Dave Yaffey and Richard
Royce – staged 'Beyond Today: an Adventure through Time…' at Hemsworth High. This
was a day-long session for the entire Year 7, designed to stretch the students' perception
of their lives and their environment. The morning centred on the past and the present,
with sessions on mining (by ex-miner Ian Oxley), farming (by farmer Graham Moxon)
and a full-scale mock-up of a Victorian classroom – complete with a cane-wielding
spinsterette teacher! The afternoon, initiated by Cookie playing a time lord to music
from the Dave Clark musical, 'Time', took the year group on a 'magic carpet ride'
into the future where the students were encouraged to develop stories, playlets,
songs and dances about how their lives might work out.
The sheer size of the exercise was breathtaking and the team were glad of the ability
of Steve Foster and the other supporting teachers to corral over-excited Year 7s!
The 19th and 20th saw the same team taking on an even tougher challenge – that of
a 2-day workshop for the Year 10s who weren't going on Work Experience. The theme
was 'Taking Responsibility' and it involved some of the most disaffected students
- mostly boys - in the school. They were placed in teams and taken through stories,
plays and trust exercises to build co-operation and positive self-esteem. My team,
'Keith's Killers', won the Strategy Game handsomely!
It was during theses sessions that we first began to realise just how openly accessible
drugs like heroin were to these young people - a couple of 'playlets' included explicit
modelling of older brothers or older brothers' friends shooting up. Some of these
sessions also gave us our first hints at there being an underbelly of incest and
child sex abuse half-hidden amongst the local community.
Later in the Summer, I arranged for some of the students to recreate their materials
for a live broadcast on Ridings FM, the local radio station.
After the Summer my role in HemsMESH decreased somewhat, apart from generally chasing
up loose ends and working with Sue Richards, the school's Work Experience co-ordinator,
on a report making recommendations to improve the experience for both school, students
and employers.
Meanwhile Cookie and Henrie Lidiard were occupied on community issues and delivering
an NLP Diploma programme as an empowerment exercise for the Hemsworth Community Initiative
and the West End Residents Group.
