What if regeneration took more risk?

When a group of Manchester schoolchildren were asked by workers in their Big Local partnership what equipment they wanted in their local park they asked for a zipwire. The workers didn’t consult their lawyers or Health and Safety handbooks, they talked to the council and agreed that if the kids wanted a zipwire they could have a zipwire.

Risk and challenge are part of the learning experience and children often embrace them with reckless abandon, scream when they fall on their heads and then do it all over again for the fun of it.

Public services are often described as risk averse because they know that if things go horribly wrong the finger of blame will point at them just as soon as it’s finished dialling The Sun and Injury Lawyers 4U.

Everyone knows a story about a hospital or a school that closed down because it wasn’t careful enough with its practices or finances. We’ve all heard the one about the council department that had interim managers drafted in because they’d so badly failed the people they were employed to serve.

‘If we could learn to take more risk and accept failure

the world of regeneration would look very different’

Bad risk is a cost to reputations, to livelihoods, to the services we all rely on. We’re so afraid of bad risk that the risk prevention approach successfully and appropriately applied to some things is successfully, inappropriately applied to areas where it stifles innovation and wreaks havoc.

Studies indicate that some of the most successful New Deal for Communities partnerships were those who knew how to apportion risk. Local authorities in these areas didn’t dump huge capital projects on communities, they took those big decisions themselves. You can interpret that as patronising and paternalistic or sensible and realistic. The fact is that within any partnership taking responsibility is just as important as giving and sharing it.

The concept of rewarded risk is stitched into the fabric of Local Trust, which runs the Big Local programme. Rewarded risk creates value while its twin, unrewarded risk, is ‘all downside and no upside’. As anyone in finance or procurement will tell you, it’s often hard to tell them apart.

Risk aversion is, of course, just another word for fear: fear that you’ll lose more than you’ll gain and it will be all your fault. Worse, that everyone will know it’s all your fault and that you’ll never live it down.

Accepting failure doesn’t come naturally to governments keen to win the next election, but if we could learn to take more risk and accept failure the world of regeneration would look very different. It wouldn’t sanitise or shelve reports, set impossible targets or pull the plug on projects struggling to get off the ground. It wouldn’t chase the latest ‘thing’ or lie to itself so thoroughly as to make any meaningful learning impossible.

A contributor to the New Start and Local Trust’s roundtable event said last week: ‘If you learn something in your personal life you normally change your behaviour whereas in the working environment for some reason it doesn’t seem to happen quite as naturally.’

If that’s true it perhaps suggests that the stimulus-response effects of collective experience can only go at the rate of its slowest or least responsive learner. Or perhaps it suggests that old learning sticks so fast that it’s hard to make way for new learning. But that would suggest, rather depressingly, that we’re destined to make the same mistakes over and over again. Let’s not go there. Let’s hope that we embrace risk with all its potential for learning from mistakes to the extent that we’re, at best, more likely to succeed next time or, the very least, we’re not afraid to make another one.

As one community finance executive puts it: ‘You mitigate risk by going through the fire. Community projects are going to screw up and scare the hell out of everybody but they’ll manage the next project a whole lot better with more confidence and a better skillset if they’re supported in the right way.’

There’s a world of difference between the fear that someone will ‘take the money and run’ and the aspiration to enable them to ‘take the money and run with it’.