Our challenge was to sit down and at long last come up with a mission and set of values we all felt happy and comfortable with. We had struggled with this several times before, even soliciting advice from consultants and fellow training course attendees, but always ended up feeling deflated, tired and a bit depressed.

So we were determined to do things differently this time. I mean, one of our goals is to help people enjoy life, and that means ourselves too. If we’re bored out of our minds doing something, we’re just not doing it right.

The official agenda

So we scheduled a full day for this and a few other items and here’s what our initial agenda looked like:

• Mission
• Values
• Objectives
• Lunch
• Personal Development Plan
• Dinner
• Plan for Touchwood Project Friends

The actual agenda

Here’s what actually happened:

• Mission brainstorming — what are you most excited about getting out of Touchwood?
• Waving at big canoe on the sea, watching porpoises cavort for 5 minutes and laughing
• More mission brainstorming
• Tossing a ball outside in the sunshine for 5 minutes and laughing
• Lunch of freshly dived scallops (thanks to Jenni) and wild picked fat hen (Rachel and Jenni), cooked by Malcolm
• Personal development plans done!
• Discussion of costumes to be created for Harry Potter film premiere and laughing
• Values done!
• Frisbee and ball for 5 minutes and laughing
• Mission statement done!
• Impromptu BBQ, lighting of sparklers and much rejoicing at all we achieved

The main thing I learned from yesterday is that meetings don’t have to be, and shouldn’t be, dull and dry. Loosening up, having some fun, and perhaps most importantly, laughing, gets your creative and analytical juices flowing. We all felt we had a far more productive meeting — and crucially, we felt energised at the end of the day rather than drained.

An easy way to get more creative

Not everyone wants to play ball with their colleagues, but what about just using some coloured markers?

When we were drafting our Values, we used several colours of dry erasable pens (TUL brand — outstanding colours) and a dry erase sheet. Each of us grabbed a few different markers and wrote down key words we had brainstormed earlier as a list, grouping them by concept. We needed a way to reduce a list of some 30 values into 5 or 6.

All of us wrote down some of the words, putting them into different groups that seemed to relate to each other. Then each of us drew a little icon to illustrate that value group:

Writing in colours and even drawing a bit

It was then surprisingly easy to see what our values distilled down to, and the icons helped us grasp the concepts much faster and more easily than words.

Sure, I felt a bit shy about drawing like a 5 year-old. But I tell you, get a few brightly coloured markers in your hand and you just can’t help but have a bit of fun.

Coming up with our values felt effortless and easy for the first time ever.

So because of our success yesterday, we deliberately are making play and enjoyment a central part of how we operate. We’ll be putting it in our Operations Manual to encourage these moments of craziness, or “Happy Breaks” as Jenni calls them.

The science behind the effectivess of fun

Lest you think this is all wooly, touch-feely stuff, let me tell you there’s solid science behind incorporating playfulness into something as conservative as board meetings.

Thought-provoking

As Daniel Goleman explains in Social Intelligence, anxiety, worry, stress and fear all inhibit thinking well and creatively. We “frazzle” under pressure. On the other hand, research done by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio shows you think better when you’re in a good mood, with greater speed, accuracy and creativity.

So having fun, enjoying yourself and not worrying helps you be more productive AND end the day feeling good.

Laughter and getting your staff to connect

Another benefit of introducing a bit of play is that people bond much faster when they share a laugh.

Social Intelligence mentions an experiment where one person had to talk through a straw while directing a blindfolded person to toss a Nerf ball back and forth. Every time, the subjects collapsed into guffaws and laughter, and when polled later, reported an immediate sense of closeness and rapport, in direct contrast to the groups who did the same experiment minus the straw and blindfold and who never smiled or laughed.

Laughter smoothes the way for people to connect — especially those who don’t know each other well.

This is where we Adult Recess takes place

This is the outdoor space next to our meeting room where we step outside to have a quick ball toss or frisbee session (very badly thrown).

I hope all this will inspire you to think about ways to have more fun the next time you’re faced with a meeting.

As always, we’d love to hear your suggestions on what works for you or how well you feel you incorporate play into your daily life.

Now back out to the sunshine!

What is social accounting?

The idea is to measure your organisation’s performance in 3 areas:

• social impact
• environmental impact
• economic impact

A traditional business would generally measure only its economic impact, or how much profit it made. Many businesses are starting to add in their environmental impact as well, looking at how their use of resources — office paper, lights, building energy efficiency for example.

With social accounting, you add the third element, the “social” impact, which looks at things like how many people’s lives you’ve affected and the ripple effect you’ve had in the community.

Malcolm calls social accounting the George Bailey Effect: what would life look like for people around you if your organisation had never existed?

Why should I bother to do it?

The main purpose of social accounting is to help your organisation or business do 2 things:
1) Prove the value of what you do — show what actual difference your work is having

2) Find areas to improve so your making even more of an impact

I’d add a third reason: to inspire and motivate you and your colleagues as you tackle the challenges of being a social enterprise.

It can be so easy to get caught up in the daily things to do, so it’s rejuvenating to step back and see the bigger picture of just how big the difference your blood, sweat and tears are making.

How does it work?

Only you can decide what you want to measure, for which things you want to hold your organisation accountable. The best way to do that is to start with your Mission, Values, Objectives and Activities. We spent most of the 2 days just on these, and even then, we’re planning to hold an all-day session in a few weeks to finish drafting these.

Your mission is the core of what you do. It tells your employees, volunteers, and funders what you care about and why your work matters.

To be honest, our mission statement has gone through so many changes and I’m still not completely happy with it. What helped me this time is to realise that it’s what you say internally as an organisation, not what you necessarily say to your guests or customers.

So the latest version of our mission is:

Promoting happiness by teaching skills that develop self-reliance and eco-friendly living.

Most everyone in the class was skeptical about the word “happiness” and the idea of promoting it, but that’s what we care about. On the other hand, we probably won’t put it quite like that on our brochures, since we don’t want to come off hippy-dippy. That’s where the “elevator pitch” comes in, the 30-second description of what we do that’s aimed at our target audience which should sound a bit different from the mission.

This is a huge area, so if you want to find out more, check out FirstPort’s Resource Library.

Next: decide what you want to measure

Once you’ve got your mission, values, objectives and activities in place, decide how you want to measure your success in those areas. In our exercise, we broke down the impacts into the 3 areas again: social, environmental and economic.

For Touchwood, one social impact I want to measure is how much people’s quality of life or happiness has increased as a result of coming on a holiday with us. So we will design a questionnaire to be given to guests that ask them to rate this in some way.

An environmental impact will be to reduce food miles on Orkney by X%.

An economic impact will be assessing the “local multiplier effect“, or how much money filters to other businesses as a result of people coming on a Touchwood Project holiday.

Since we’re only just beginning, most of these indicators are hypothetical and won’t be put into place for a few years. It’s just another example of how social accounting is designed entirely for you, your needs and what level of development your organisation has.

Where can I get Social Accounting training or learn more?

Social Accounting is far too big a subject for me to cover in a blog post, so find out more by taking a course. Our course was facilitated by Clive Sheppard via the Scottish Social Enterprise Academy, which offers these sessions free at your location if you can pull together 8 attendees. So find yourself some other people interested, and contact SSEA to set up a course straightaway.

The materials were developed by the Social Audit Network and sponsored by the brilliant New Economics Foundation (I love their tagline: “Economics as if people and the planet mattered.”) The nef website in particular has some excellent resources and a newsletter.

And if you’ve already done social accounting in your organisation, share it here so we can hear what it was like.

What is a CIC?

Community interest companies (“CICs”) are a new form of limited company set up by the UK government which may be able to help you get more funding, advice and trust from your community and potential partners. They require your organisation to be verified by a government agent, the impressively titled ‘the Regulator’, pass a ‘community test’, and have all of your assets ‘locked’, or owned by the community.

More on this in a moment, but first, why should you consider bothering to become a CIC?

Social enterprises falling between the cracks

One of the biggest challenges we’ve faced in starting up and developing Touchwood is credibility.

Since we’re a business with a social mission whose profits are invested in that mission, we’re neither a traditional business nor a charity. That means we tend to fall between the cracks for advice and funding: most people we meet with on the government and charity side are nervous about our business aims and background and don’t see why we should get grant funding, and those on the business side can’t believe we’d do all the work and hand over most of the profits to the community and don’t want to invest in something they can’t get a huge financial return on.

But social enterprise is about taking the best of a charity or non-profit (its mission and dedicated staff) and the best of business (its dynamism and financial self-sufficiency) and using them for the greater good.

However, most people familiar with social enterprise come from the charity or government side, and so tend to think of social enterprises as either the Red Cross charity shop or members of a community wanting a wind turbine or local shop.

The space for two businesspeople like Malcolm and I to come in and do a social enterprise is much less established. So we’ve had more than our share of initial awkward meetings with local authorities and voluntary organisation support groups, thanks to this lack of understanding about what social enterprise is and can be.

When I moaned about all of this to our social enterprise consultant Clive, he told me to become a CIC pronto, which would help alleviate some of the skepticism we encounter.

Is a CIC right for you?

From the CIC Regulator website:

The CIC is for organisations which:

• Trade with a social purpose (social enterprises) or carry on other activities which benefit the community
• Want to make it clear that they are established for the benefit of the community rather than their members
• Wish to enjoy the benefits of limited company status
• Do not wish to be charities

The first CIC was registered in August 2005. By August 2006, over 400 CICs had been registered.

Among the activities carried on by community interest companies are:

• Working with disadvantaged groups to increase their employability
• Recycling and other projects of benefit to the environment
• Providing enabling facilities to disadvantaged communities
• Regulation of professional and other services
• Running schools for children excluded from mainstream education
• Providing care facilities for children and the elderly
• Community arts and educational projects

The legislation on CICs was presented as part of the Government’s strategy to promote social enterprise.

What makes a CIC different from a regular Company Limited by Guarantee or Shares

What makes CICs different is that it is:

1. Independently verified by a government Regulator through a “community test”
2. All the assets owned by the organisation or business are “locked”, meaning they can only be owned by the community or organisation, not individuals.

Where to get help and advice

The two people who really know CICs inside and out and not just the theory are social enterprise consultant Clive Sheppard and the CIC Regulator.

Clive is a man on a mission to get as many people, businesses and organisations as possible starting social enterprises which take the best parts of the non-profit and business worlds. What’s great about him is that he knows how to work with creative types and people who find it boring/daunting to deal with paperwork and process and he’s passionate about social enterprise and how it will make the world a better place.

Clive sympathized with our difficulties and was the person who urged us to get people from both sides on board by becoming a Community Interest Company. He works with the Scottish Social Enterprise Academy running free (!) courses in Understanding Social Enterprise and with HISEZ (Highlands and Islands Social Enterprise Zone) as well as consulting freelance.

The best way to get his services are to approach HISEZ, if you’re in the Highlands of Scotland, and ask for an initial consultation. If you’re outside of the Highlands, contact him directly at c.sheppard962 [at] btinternet.com.

The CIC Regulator website will give you all the info (though it’s pretty long-winded and in pdf form) you need. It’s only about £30 – £50 to become a CIC so not a huge financial investment.

More on CICs to come

I’m still researching, so will share what I learn as I go. I’d love to hear from anyone who’s actually become a CIC and how it’s made a difference. I’ll be looking into the Shares model as well, since we may decide to open up Touchwood to community share ownership — very exciting!

The cover of the book, StrengthsFinder 2.0

That’s according to research conducted by Gallup of over 10 million people over the past 30 years. Out of these findings, they’ve developed StrengthsFinder, an online survey to assess your top 5 “strengths” out of 34 different possibilities.

What we’re interested in is: can StrengthsFinder help community projects and social enterprises be more successful? We’ll be asking a test group that question this weekend for Touchwood.

My experience with StrengthsFinder

Having done the survey 3 times over the past 6 years, I can definitely say it’s helped me.

I first discovered the book when I worked for Sprint, a telecommunications corporation in Washington, D.C. Back in those days, I struggled to get up in time to go to work. I remember dreading the sound of the alarm clock, the shuffle to put a suit on.

Once I was at the office, my days seemed miles of meetings about nothing. I felt hamstrung by the slow pace of change, the lack of vision. Though initially I was  promoted, eventually my performance started to suffer as I cared less and less about my job. I’m sure if I had stayed much longer, I would have been given the boot or quietly sidelined.

The biggest problem at my old job was that I rarely used my talents. I’m a big ideas person and a voracious learner, and there’s limited scope for either when you’re a corporate website manager.

What happens when you don’t use your strengths?

By all accounts, my experience wasn’t unusual. In a recent poll of 1,000 people, among those who “strongly disagreed” or “disagreed” with the statement “At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day”, not one single person felt emotionally engaged on the job.

According to Gallup’s research, if you don’t use your strengths at work, you likely:

• dread going to work
• have more negative than positive interactions with your colleagues
• treat your customers poorly
• tell your friends what an awful company you work for
• achieve less daily
• have fewer positive and creative moments

Have you ever been part of a volunteer project that seemed to sap your will to live? Meetings drag on, people bicker, action moves at a glacial pace. A good idea, something you’re excited about and eager to help work, slowly becomes a chore, something you dread.

This happens all too often, and I think part of it is because we as a group don’t know our own strengths — and we don’t know anyone else’s.

Using your strengths

Now that I’m starting up Touchwood with Malcolm, I get to use my strengths just about every day. This won’t mean much if you haven’t read the book, but mine are:

• Input (collecting information)
• Ideation (love of new ideas)
• Intellection (love of thinking — getting the theme here?)
• Learner (love of learning) and
• Futuristic (envisioning the future).

At this early stage, Touchwood is a lot of big ideas and planning for the future, so I’m enjoying it. I also learn new skills constantly, from knitting to creating a WordPress blog like this one that all, however tangentially, tie into what we’re doing. I’m far happier, more energized, and productive.

Malcolm’s taking his test today, so he can post his take on things later.

Gallup’s research shows people who use their strengths regularly in their jobs are “six times as likely to be engaged in their jobs, and three times as likely to report having a better quality of life in general.”

I have a personal belief in StrengthsFinder and what I think it can do for people. The question is, is it too corporate, too American, to work in such a different setting?

Have you taken the StrengthsFinder test?

If you’ve taken the StrengthsFinder test, post your results here if you feel like sharing them. I’d be particularly interested to hear how you think knowing your strengths has helped you and how you think it could help social enterprises and community projects be more effective. I’ll post once we’ve run the first pilot Sunday as well.