Richard Sage

spaltonsketchnotes:

Got my driving test soon, feel kinda confident about it, but know that if I fail, it will be because of something really dumb and basic.  Jotted down a couple of reminders to help make sure they stick in my mind.

At #HseParty14 I curated the creation of a Museum of Future Housing Technology, groups of people came together using various gamestorming and service design techniques to re-imagine business problems through the lenses of disruptive technology trends. I’ll blog in full at a later date, but for now here are the video exhibits

spaltonsketchnotes:

My #sketchnotes from the awesome Paper Prototyping demo @syncnorwich by the guys at @neontribe.

What would a housing association look like if it started up today?

I often find this sort of thought experiment useful in my work to explore the optimum solution and the gap between it and the present state. The specific question above has been on my mind recently and then reading this recent post prompted me to write this short post.

So what would a housing association look like if it started up today?

Would it have no offices?

Would it have no contact centres?

Would its non-face to face transaction happen primarily online?

Would its staff to property ratio match Or beat Dutch peers?

How would it do repairs and maintenance, would it even do repairs and maintenance?

Would its systems be mobile first and cloud first?

Would it fully understand the macroeconomic and microeconomic impact of its decisions around its rent mix and tenure types?

Would it only develop houses that meet the passivhaus standard?

Would it pioneer sustainable, cheap home building, e.g. Structural panel techniques?

Would its homes be ‘smart’? Would the brains of the housing association not only be the people who work for it, but the analytical insight it mines automagically to inform and guide pro-active service delivery?

Would the contention between its social conscience and commercial existence be resolved?

Would its choice of revenue diversification targets be different from the low risk, low margin choices of many?

I’m sure many of you could think of many other questions that grow from asking ourselves the seed question. What are your thoughts? @ me and/or tweet use #HAversX 

(btw, the title of the post is X.0 rather than 2.0 or 3.0 because, as Calum Mercer mentioned, some Housing Associations have been around in one version or another for a very longtime)

On June 24th I’ll be at House Party 2014 ’Curating’ a ‘Museum of Future Housing Technology’.

What is a museum of future housing technology?

Well, that is up to whoever visits the museum! The visitors will be creating the exhibits!

During the day visitors to the museum will have the opportunity to:

1. Join a group of interesting people
2. Share and discuss their problems and those of their customers
3. Pick an interesting area or theme from the discussion
4. Prototype a technology enabled solution to their problem. Each team will create a prototype of an idea using Post-it’s, paper, cardboard, plasticine, role play, video, storyboards and whatever else can be found lying around.
5. The prototype will become an exhibit in the ‘Museum of Future Housing Tech’

Hopefully over the day we’ll build up an interesting and thought provoking collection of exhibits as together we explore how technology might help us solve problems for ourselves and our customers.

Sessions will run at set times throughout the day and will last approximately 30 minutes, so hopefully there be lots of opportunity to drop in and contribute to the museum and view the freshly created exhibits.

The end collection of exhibits will hopefully be

• A representation of some key challenges that the housing sector faces
• A manifestation of some interesting and innovative thinking about how technology might enable solutions to those challenges

Sound interesting? then if you haven’t already head over here to get your ticket.

Fancy helping out and/or contributing to the ‘Museum of Future Housing Technology’? then please get in touch here

A couple of weeks ago I met up with Martin Howitt for the first time. We’ve been ‘twitter friends’ for a while so it was good to meet in real life and talk about stuff. At the time Martin was on PS Launchpad and we talked about presentations and introversion (I think we’d probably exchanged tweets about it previously).

During our conversation I said something along the lines of “I like to try and desensitise my introvert”. Saying these words out loud to myself for the first time really resonated with me and i’ve been mulling over a blog post ever since, so here it is.

The Young Introvert

I was very shy when i was young and very quiet. I think a lot of people thought I was rude because i was so quiet. Still today i’m pretty sure that there are people i know and like who think that i’m rude and/or don’t like them because i’m shy.

My introversion used to manifest itself in odd ways.

Once when I was a kid my extended family had a get together at a holiday cottage. We got there late and there was a buffet laid out. I was starving, but the thought of going across a room of people into another room full of people where the food was and possibly having to talk to someone was so scary i just sat where i was and didn’t move until it was time to go to bed.

When i was a kid i did Judo, for a bit. The second grading i had was in a big local sports hall with about 100 other kids and several hundred parents sitting watching the fights. As you can imagine this was not a scenario in which i was comfortable. My first fight was with a much shorter kid. before the fight started i’d decided i would try and lunge forward grab his lower leg and lift him up and backwards onto his back to win.It didn’t go to plan and i somehow managed to get kicked hard in the groin. I cried, but the intensity and duration of my tears was of a magnitude much greater than the pain. The kick had broken the facade i was maintaining of being ok with being watched by dozens of people. The kick had woken up my introvert and now it (I) was crying.

Being an introvert doesn’t mean you act like an introvert all the time. sometimes you have a rush of misplaced courage.

When i was 16/17 i was in a band, we were called Battenburg and we got a gig supporting Mogwai. The singer wanted to be damon albarn, the other guitarist wanted to be graham coxon, the bass player wanted to be noel gallagher, the drummer wanted to be in a boy band and I wanted to be anywhere else on earth other than on a stage. And yet, I loved being on the stage. I liken this apparent contradiction to my childhood love of abseiling, whilst being shit scared of height (to the point of being frozen and embarrassingly immobile for prolonged periods whilst trying to climb things). It scares you and it gives you a buzz, adrenalin I guess.

So, we were doing this gig, but we didn’t have enough material for a set. One day during a practice I played and sang ‘Champagne Supernova’ by Oasis and the rest of the band convinced me to sing this during our set as a way of padding out the time.

I f***ed it up completely. About 30 seconds into the song I realised what i was doing and it fell apart. I played the wrong chord, my throat decided it was a good time to try and close itself up, I managed a half recovery and limped to the end of the song and got a charitable round of applause at the end. This story is the reason why there is a picture of Wile E Coyote at the top of this post. because sometimes I make the leap that my introvert wouldn’t let me make and its ok for a bit, but then your introvert finds out you look down and find you aren’t standing on anything, the ledge of confidence you had just peters out.

But guess what, I spent the rest of the night oscillating between buzzing and cringing, buzzing and cringing. This is a pattern I repeat constantly.

The Shower Cringe

Say I’m in a meeting/interview/meeting someone new/out with friends/doing something that involves any social interaction, the next morning i can guarantee what will happen. I’ll get up, have some breakfast, get in the shower and what i said the day/night before will be processed in my mind and i’ll cringe (mentally mostly, but sometimes physically), why did i say that? why did i do that? what was i thinking? what an idiot? and then its gone and i get on with what i’m doing, safe in the knowledge that this will happen next time. So much so that i often have a pre-cringe cringe, whilst i’m doing or saying something, my mind goes ‘oh hang on i’m going to remember that so you can have a cringey shower tomorrow’ and I then pre-cringe ‘you f-ing prat, why did you say that?’ 

Desensitising My Introvert

Looking back over the last few paragraphs i’m already cringing to myself. what if someone reads this drivel? what if someone i know/like/respect reads this? I’m going to take a deep breath and blow that idea out of my head via my mouth.

Over the last couple of years i’ve started a new hobby and its the hobby that my chat with Martin helped me name, I like to desensitise my introvert.

A couple of years ago I set myself a 10 week challenge to write and record 1 song a week based on ideas submitted on a facebook page. i called it ‘songs as a service’ and its here. It was a lot of fun but also very scary. friends, family, work colleagues were all aware that i was doing it the thought of it filled me with anxiety, nervousness and dread, but i did it and since i did it i feel my introvert is slightly smaller than it used to be. 

Over the past couple of years i wrote a few ebooks, one about ‘How to be a dick‘ and one documenting 30 days using Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies at work Both were meant to be humorous and light-hearted, but both required putting myself out there in a way i’d not done before. Again, I feel like my introvert is a little smaller thanks to doing this.

At work, presentations used to give me the same feeling I had when I did the Judo grading, but over the past few years i’ve consciously sought out any opportunity to present, i’m now at the stage where it feels more like the buzz when i sang ‘Champagne Supernova’ but without the f*** up. I see that as an improvement 🙂

Recently a choir has started at work. the thought of singing in front of work colleagues filled me with dread and still does every time i do it. but i get the buzz and I deal with the cringes.

Just this week due to a bizarre mix up a colleague at work was under the misapprehension that I might be up for doing a bit of acting in his local amateur dramatics group. It is not something I’d thought about (except maybe in nightmares), but as he was talking to me about it I thought, this is exactly the sort of thing i wouldn’t do (introvert in my head says ‘run! run for your life!), which i why i’m now going to do it 🙂

Hell is other People

So wrote Sartre. I like people but i am, deep down, quite scared of them. People have written before about how extroverts get energy from interactions with other people whilst introverts give energy to interactions with other people and i think there is some truth in it.

My best, most invigorating days are when I’ve spent the most time talking to people I find interesting about interesting topics and/or collaborating on interesting work with them, they are also the days in which I’m most drained. 

Being introverted will always be my default position, I am much more likely to say ‘Hi!’ to someone i know if i meet them in the street and keep on walking, than I am to stop and have a 5 minute conversation with them. But I feel that by consciously trying to desensitise my introvert i’m slowly changing the ratio against the introvert.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote this post trying to pin down some ideas about a different approach that the housing community might take to supporting service delivery through information systems.

It was a bit out there and not fully formed, but seemed to get a good response and sparked some debate. The intention of this post is to try and layer on some more detail from the previous post (although it’ll still be pretty abstract)

Looking at a service and capability viewpoint most housing associations look like this

There will be exceptions and additions, some will include care and support services, some telecare, some even leisure centre management (!?) but at the housing core they all look pretty similar.

(NB this isn’t an organisational/structural view, this is about services)

Due to the history of where housing associations originated from (through mergers and transfers), the age of some of them and the source of growth for some of the larger ones, many also look like this from an information systems perspective:

With lots of duplicate information systems delivering the the same or similar capabilities.

E.g. the RP that brought over its Local authority legacy, The RP that fought for a semblance of independence when it got subsumed, The integration project that didn’t integrate everything.

So for many housing associations one of the aims (some may have achieved it, some may be on the journey, some may be unaware of the need for the journey but are no doubt feeling seeing the symptoms of the status quo) is this

Rationalisation.

Those that are already on the rationalisation route may also  be doing some consolidation of capabilities through abstraction. what does that mean?

e.g. lets not silo identity for each app, lets do it once.

e.g. Lets manage documents one way rather than 10

e.g. if we are going to manage a customer case lets do it once for the organisation

e.g. scheduling person, with skills, in a location, at a time, lets do that once for the organisation

Others, thinking themselves advanced beyond these sort of considerations might be heading towards what i’d like to term ‘homogenised housing’. Dropping a big box on lots of the common capabilities of business execution

You might call this ERP and it might look like this

Where generic business capabilities that are common to business execution are ‘solved’ by the ERP box and the ‘specialised’ elements outside of the box are much reduced.

So currently we are in this world

Where lots of similar organisations, doing similar things are individually spending time, effort and money attempting to solve the common problems of the industry.

How is this maximising the value that individual housing associations delivers to its customers?

How is this maximising the value that the #ukhousing community delivers to its customers and society?

Whilst writing my previous post I had something like this in my head

A shared platform of for housing services, shared by the community, built for the communities customers needs, led by the community, funded by the community

This would enable organisations to:

• Acquire capabilities at a lower cost
• Integrate with whatever stuff they want to keep control of
• Multiply the value of the insight they can get from their data by pooling
• Disrupt a turgid marketplace for the good of the community

Next

Assuming that what I’ve described above a) makes sense and b) is a good idea, what then do we need to do to get started?

First, i think we need to think about Ego and Altruism.

Lets remove the ego that lets us pretend that the services we deliver to our customers are unique.

Lets remove the ego that drives us to feel good about solving problems for ‘our customers’.

Lets think about altruism and the benefits of pooling our resources for all ‘our customers’. Lets think about how larger organisations with the capacity to sponsor such an endeavour might aid smaller ones.

Second/3rd/4th/5th/etc, there are loads of questions e.g.:

What would the first services of the platform be?

What would the platform technology be?

Would it be open source?

Would it be offered as Software as a Service?

What is the business model?

Who would sponsor it?

How would this be organised?

But before we answer those questions I guess the vision and principles need to be validated. So, community, what do we think?

TLDR:

We all do the same things, lets stop pretending we are unique and start pooling our resources to multiply the value we can deliver to our customers. What would a ‘platform for housing’ look like?

Housing associations are funny things:

We all do the same things.

The hierarchy of our customers needs doesn’t change much from organisation to organisation.

We often do the same things differently.

We all do the same things with differing degrees of outcome and efficiency.

Example? Recognise some of these terms?

• Mobile working
• Digital
• Online self services
• Multi/Omni channel
• Channel shift
• Customer relationship management
• Business intelligence
• Data quality
• (the list goes on and on)

We do all do the same things.

We organise ourselves similarly, we support processes with a similar information system architecture. If (as I have) you view the pattern of the architecture of different housing associations side by side, often the only things that change are the names of the suppliers providing the systems.

We all fish in a small pool of suppliers, from talking to peers within the industry the general consensus is a feeling that ranges from disenchantment, through resentment to outright animosity towards the incumbent suppliers serving the sector.

Just as I believe social housing in general is ripe for disruption (in fact we see government policy is already exerting a transformative if not disruptive influence on the industry, but that’s a topic for another post), so too the supplier landscape is also ripe for disruption.

There are two trends i’m aware of within our sector (other than moaning about incumbent suppliers)

1) Some providers are dipping their toes into building their own systems or looking outside of traditional housing applications e.g. CRM

2) Recently there has been a move by larger associations to look to ERP to ‘solve the solved problems’ related to business operation

Its easy to snipe at both these approaches 1) might be driven by a naivety of the complexity and overhead of the challenged such an undertaking presents.

For 2) its the fact that some of these are big, multi-year, multi-million waterfall, big bang implementations with a far-off ROI

Both fail to address the bigger point – that too much of our technology in housing simply seeks to digitise business approaches that have been fundamentally unquestioned over decades, when what we need is technology driven transformation of the way we do business – not least around the way we use data across everything we do.

But picking at these initiatives sort of misses the point.  Rather they are symptoms of a problem that has been bugging me for a while and which I’ll try and reduce down to a few questions:

Q1: Why are we attempting to solve the same problems individually?

Q2: Why can’t we solve some of these problems once, for all?

Q3: Isn’t there value in pooling our resources?

Q4: What would a ‘Platform for Housing’ look like and how could we achieve it?

I don’t pretend to have the answers to these questions, but i think they are questions are should ask ourselves.

What do I think a ‘Platform for Housing’ like?

I haven’t got a definition in my head yet, but in a sentence it would be something along the lines of:

A multi-tenanted, cloud based platform for use by #ukhousing organisations to deliver better services, more efficiently by solving the common problems around #ukhousing information system capability and maximising the value of sharing data assets.

Some principles of the platform might be:

1) Community driven: not quite ‘For housing by housing’ but a platform that is developed and evolved for the good of the housing community with the community supporting (through usage, funding, resource)

2) Pooled data to maximise insight: whilst each housing providers core data would be sacrosanct, all could benefit from mashing subsets of their data with the community, imagine turning patch insight into national insight

3) Born in the cloud:  designed for scalability, taking advantage of cloud economics

4) API all the things:

The platform would not be just a new silo, it would be designed from the ground up to enable interoperability because of the recognition that any new system needs to be part of a wider ecosystem not the ecosystem.  In fact, current technology providers could go a long way towards improving where we are now by more effectively opening up systems too often closed to the outside world for reasons of cynical commerciality (but that’s another blog for another time).

5) Human centred: The development of the platform is not just driven from the perspective of business efficiency or ‘what we can do’, but those perspectives combined with an understanding of customer need.

I’m really conscious that this post may not be very coherent, but lots of conversations with people in our industry finally spurred me to try and nail something down. We can see some of these ideas being explored tentatively at HACT through their Housing Big Data collaboration and emerging work on cloud based next generation housing management emerging from UCL.

My hope is, in putting some sort of sketch down that, through discussion, interrogation, argument and collaboration we might get to something coherent; that there may be an opportunity for our community to help itself do better for our customers through rethinking our relationship with technology. I appreciate that tech is only part of that story, but its a start….

Please get in touch on twitter bakedidea

And I’ll be hosting a workshop on the “Housing platform of the future” at HouseParty in Manchester in June – follow @Hseparty for information on tickets and programme as soon as they come out