A Tribute to a Pioneering MeshWORK Project

Part 2

                                                                                         Flawed Research?
Over the Summer the emphasis moved onto data collation and analysis – and it was here that the delivery team began to have some differences with our Wakefield TEC counterparts.

Donna James had developed an excellent and very structured series of questionnaires. The problem was that they were essentially BLUE in nature.

Those put into Hemsworth High returned a high return of BLUE and ORANGE values. From my experience of talking with teachers in the school and with teachers at other schools, I seriously doubted that so many students were centred in BLUE and ORANGE. My argument was that a BLUE structured approach would tend to return a BLUE-plus response from those capable of stretching that far; while the 40% of non-returns told a story of students not doing the 'right thing' since they had been instructed to complete the questionnaire.

The return rate of the questionnaires put into the community was so low that there was doubt as to whether any statistical significance could be drawn from them.

From two years of working in the SESKU-Hemsworth area, I was convinced that the preponderance of thinking in the local populations was in the PURPLE-RED zones. Since PURPLE and RED do not place a high value on literacy, I felt other means than paper-based questionnaires were needed to track these vMEMES.

In response to my concerns, Cookie conducted some walk-about informal interview sessions in the town centre during the early evenings. From these, he gleaned some valuable information from the kind of youngsters hanging around on street corners that don't complete paper questionnaires. Sadly this and some some of the work Chris and Henrie Lidiard had been doing in the local community brought about further evidence of incest and child sex abuse.( For parents to abuse their own children...? Jim Haley had been absolutely right when he had identified one of the principal probems of the Hemsworth area as being 'fractured PURPLE.!)

Both Cookie and I were frustrated by the sheer amount of time and money HemsMESH put into reports and project meetings. As the 'lead body' for the funding, the TEC had to demonstrate accountability; but the BLUE Move-Away-From and Procedures meta-programmes we had to deal with drained resources we felt could have been used more productively.

HemsMESH as an active project effectively came to an end with the 'Convergence' sessions at Hemsworth Christian Fellowship on 3 October (which focussed on designing future scenarios for Hemsworth in the form of newspaper mock-ups) and the 17-18th when Don Beck gave a rather rambling but inspired presentation on the critical relevance of Spiral Dynamics. (Beck might not have stuck exactly to his brief - but what he had to say had more than a few jaws dropping to the floor!) The final HemsMESH session was on 15 November when Cookie led an Open Space session to identify recommendations for further action.

Final Report disseminations took place in November 2000 and January 2001. However, by this time Wakefield TEC was in the process of being closed down and the Business Links were preparing to be taken into the Small Business Service. (Wakefield would be subsumed into the proposed West Yorkshire 'super' Business Link.) Consequently, despite the enthusiasm of many in the SESKU/Hemsworth area, there were few people in influence interested in taking HemsMESH forward.

If some of the research was flawed, nonetheless HemsMESH was a project which touched lives in a very real way. Personally I took much that I had learned first into Humberside - see Humber MeshWORKS - and then into developing the Integrated SocioPsychology approach. Richard Dunn, Iain Wilkinson and Tim Goodspeed all joined Cookie in his new venture, 5 Deep Ltd. Cookie also forged ever-closer links with Don Beck; and they and Dave Yaffey set up the 'Inspiral World' project.

While HemsMESH as a project terminated in January 2001, strands of it continued. In Autumn 2001 Cookie delivered a series of 6 community coaching sessions to a group from Hemsworth - the result of which was an action plan the group implemented over the following 3 years. In Summer 2004 they approached Cookie to undertake a feasibility study for further work.

He has also continued to do some occasional work with Steve Foster at Hemsworth High. In 2002 the school claimed only 10% of that year's school leavers - now below national average – had got 'lost'.

How much that reduction was influenced by HemsMESH is, of course, a debatable point – but it's a point that begs for serious investigation.