I also quoted the McKinsey study showing that there do seem to be differences between men’s and women’s approaches to leadership – but nothing to do with having an eye for detail. Women are more likely than men to focus on three particular aspects of leadership behaviour: one, developing people through mentoring and teaching, two, being a role model – that is, building respect and thinking about the ethics of decision-making, and three, being clear about expectations and rewards. The really interesting thing is that according to this survey, these are the sorts of behaviours that are needed to get industry through the economic crisis.

Oh, I also mentioned that one of our three boys does half the cleaning in our house and is really good at it…he does get paid though…that reminds me, whatever happened to the Wages for Housework Campaign? A quick web search suggests they have gone underground. Anybody know?

Oxfam supporters often have an opportunity to convince someone else to become more of a supporter than they already are. Supporters say that Oxfam could be doing more to help them make the most of these opportunities. The Community and Activism team, where I’m volunteering one day a week, have asked me to work on a toolkit whose purpose is

to help supporters talk convincingly, inspiringly and practically about Oxfam, so that their passion communicates itself to others and they go on to support Oxfam in whatever way works for them (e.g. volunteer, donate, campaign and/or fund-raise).

I want to know what supporters would want the toolkit to do for them, when they might use it, what information it should include, and what format would work best for them and other supporters they know.

The toolkit will need to stay useful for as long as possible. It will be produced in both web-based and printed form, and will complement other more detailed resources and toolkits. We think that it should include key information about Oxfam (such as ‘mythbusters’, where we work, impact stories, where the money comes from and goes to) as well as “how to’s” about getting people involved with Oxfam (giving ideas on the range of things people can do).

We’re aiming the toolkit at the widest possible range of Oxfam’s strong supporters: shop staff and volunteers, Oxfam group members, Oxfam supporters in schools, activists and campaigners, regular donors and fund-raisers, and speakers.

I’d really welcome ideas and advice on the toolkit. Please complete the survey at http://tiny.cc/y8uuh, email rnestor@oxfam.org.uk with your thoughts, or place a comment in response to this blog – by 31 October 2010 please. Thank you!

• Insulate front and back doors
• Check double glazing
• Insulate under wooden floors
• New shower head that mixes air with water
• Get pressure cooker
• Check remaining light bulbs
• Device to switch my study devices off at the wall
• Consider moving little fridge to colder place (er, it’s next to the oven), or replacing three items with one efficient fridge-freezer
• Brick up old back door if permitted
• Whistling kettle?
• Rationalise TVs and games consoles (we have so, so many)
• Pump up car tyres often, or at least occasionally
• Careful driving: stick to speed limits, avoid braking
• Keep car till it’s scrappable, then join car club using diesel or LPG (oh, but I do want a nice elegant little car…)
• Reduce packaged and processed food (someone warn my younger stepson)
• Reduce meat and dairy (will the boys go for this…?)
• Reduce clothes purchase and washing (that’s me and my son)
• Reduce replacement frequency of mobile phones (er, that’s just me)
• Cut flying (allow longer to get to my sister’s)

One aspect of the frames we have of the world comes from the schemas we create. Virginia Valian, in her gender tutorials, has this to say about schemas:

What are schemas? Schemas are similar to stereotypes, but I prefer the term schema because it is more inclusive and more neutral. We can have schemas about social groups, such as men or women, or different age groups or different ethnic groups; we can have schemas about things that have nothing to do with people, such as chairs and skyscrapers. A schema is a hypothesis about the basics of some category. Schemas are useful. They allow us to categorize the people and objects and events in our environment. They help us orient ourselves, know what to expect, and make predictions. Schemas are proto-scientific.

Gender schemas, she goes on to say, are hypotheses about what it means to be male or female.

It’s hard to know what schemas we hold, because schemas are largely unconscious and when researchers ask us about them, we give them what we think is a socially acceptable response. One way of accessing our schemas is to take the Harvard Implicit Association Test (IAT), which bypasses our assumptions about what people want to hear and tests how easy or difficult we find it to associate positive descriptors with members of particular groups. There are tests for race, gender, and a range of other categories. Great if you are prepared to find out something about yourself that you may not find comfortable!

In yesterday’s post I reported the research finding that certain values can be activated by instruction. It appears that schemas can be activated and de-activated through the same process. For example, there is a schema that women are less good at maths than men. When women studying maths are told before sitting a maths test that women do less well in the test than men do, they perform less well in the test than women who are not given this ‘instruction’. (This is stereotype threat: Virginia Valian gives an example of  it in her gender tutorials.) And Pearn Kandola, the occupational psychologists, ran an experiment in which participants were able to eliminate unconscious bias – as measured by the IAT – by simply setting themselves a clear intention (e.g. ‘when I meet a black candidate, I will ignore skin colour’). This experiment is described in Binna Kandola’s excellent book The Value of Difference. Kandola describes the clear intentions as ‘a memory of the future’: visualising what we want to happen as clearly as we visualise past events. Note that when participants used a less clear statement (e.g. ‘I will not be biased’) their bias was reduced but not eliminated.

I wonder if schema and bias research has found the same pattern as reported on values: that activating a bias in one direction reduces a bias in the opposite direction? Or is it bias itself (rather than a bias) that is reduced?

George Lakoff”s work on frames has been very influential in US political spheres. His book Don’t Think of an Elephant! is a clear, if rather repetitive, explanation of how humans use metaphors that activate and reinforce certain deeply-held worldviews (or frames), how conservatives have understood and exploited this fact and how those of a progressive cast can redefine the political debate in terms of our own frame through the use of alternative metaphors. Lakoff thinks that in the US, the abiding metaphor for the nation and its politics is that of the family (think ‘founding fathers’), and that the choice is between a strict-father frame (conservative) and a nurturing-parent frame (liberal). Language that activates the former might include ‘tax burden’ (people should be self-reliant and put their family first: tax is used to support people outside the immediate family, especially those who are feckless: tax is a burden on the self-reliant); language that activates the latter might include ‘tax contribution’ (people should work together to support each other: tax enables collective efforts: tax is a means by which we make our contribution to the collective good).

Key to Lakoff’s message is an understanding of the way in which language reinforces our deepest assumptions about the world around us. This body of work has been expanded on recently in a paper for a group of environmental charities, which calls for a change in the way such charities communicate their messages. Common Cause by Tom Crompton at WWF quotes research on how our values and goals can be activated by reminders and instructions, and – fascinatingly – how a community-spirited set of values works in opposition to a self-focused set of values, such that if one set of values is activated this reduces the presence of the opposite set. So for example, if you give people a task and tell them they need to succeed at it (activating a self-focused value), they are less likely to say yes when asked to help out with the same task later for no payment.

Crompton and his colleagues Joe Brewer at Cognitive Policy Works, Paul Chilton at Lancaster University and Tim Kasser at Knox, Illinois argue that charities must set out in their communications to activate the values that are helpful to their cause, not the ones that are unhelpful. This means they must stop appealing to self-interest (to win short-term battles) and should instead appeal to community spirit (to win the war – interesting metaphor, hey?). They have set up a great blog on this subject which I’ve linked to in my sidebar. I want to understand how I can represent this thinking in the work I’m doing for Oxfam: can the toolkit for supporters that I’m working on somehow get this message across in ways that work for the audience and the purpose?

Another implication of the finding about how opposing values work is a personal one for me. I’m a freelance consultant: I have to think about money and fees. In doing so I need to keep aware of the way in which paying attention to these things actively reduces the power of the ‘community-spirit’ value in me, and keep the money focus to the minimum needed to enable me to earn a living.

My post a couple of days ago about one-to-ones is relevant here, and I’ve also had the following thoughts, based largely on my experience of thinking about teams in the employment context, but also on what I’ve been learning at Oxfam about supporter engagement.

• The club needs to give managers the tools to welcome new parents and give them a sense that there’s something they can contribute. A standard email that managers can adapt, perhaps; a welcome pack that they can give out
• Managers themselves need to hear from other managers about how they engage parents – they need to meet regularly to talk about this aspect of their job
• Each team could have a designated ‘buddy’ for new parents, who would look out for them at training and matches, introduce them to other parents and explain how things work
• The club website could be better used, with interactive tools like a car-sharing database or the ability to discuss that week’s matches, as well as regularly updated information
• There could be a ‘managers’ support centre’ on the website, containing some of the tools suggested above and also a discussion board and the facility for managers to post what they’re doing
• We should be able to tell new parents about the club’s values and what makes it distinctive
• We should have a clear list of things that parents can help with, and it should include really easy, limited-commitment activities and much more engaged activities

What else might work?

London Citizens is a dynamic charity working with local people for social, economic and environmental justice in London. Go to their website and you see immediately how active and energetic they are. I was in London at the end of July with Oxfam’s Community and Activism team (see my earlier post about this) for an awayday, and we had a talk from an inspiring young woman (I’m sorry that I’ve lost her contact details) about one-to-ones.

As I understood it, what this means is that instead of focusing on mailouts and other multiple-recipient, one-way communication methods to recruit new supporters, London Citizens people make it their business – say at an event, or after an initial approach – to spot people with potential and invite them in for a one-to-one conversation. During this forty-minute encounter, they share something about themselves, get to know the individual, find out what makes them angry or joyful, try to find a next step for the individual to take towards engagement with London Citizens, and ask them for the name of someone else they know who might be interested in getting involved. It’s something like an interview and something like a career counselling session and something like a networking meeting, but more personal and more two-way than any of those. London Citizens put a lot of time into this approach: it’s essentially what our speaker and her colleagues do for 70 per cent of their time.

The idea is as old as humankind, probably. But I wonder if we’ve tended to forget about the power and focus of face-to-face contact with one other person in all our excitement over electronic contact with millions?

I’ve found that this old and simple idea keeps coming back to me:

• It has been very influential in defining the approach I’m taking for the supporter toolkit I am working on for Oxfam
• Earlier this week I was talking to the chair of Summertown Stars, my local children’s football club, about how to get parents more engaged with and supporting the club, and found myself suggesting that we should ask each parent who is already engaged to find one other person and get them involved
• Ever since I decided to leave my former job last year, I have been having one-to-one conversations which have all led to other one-to-one conversations, most of which have led to work or ideas or inspiration of some kind.

So isn’t blogging about this a contradiction in terms? Well, maybe: not too many people read my blog yet anyway, and by definition it’s hard to get across the power of the one-to-one unless you can talk to people about it. But London Citizens haven’t ignored the potential of the electronic: they do that (brilliantly) as well, and the one complements the other. And for me, blogging is something I do, and perhaps by writing this down I’ve clarified my own thinking about it in a way that will help me use the idea in future.

Like Oxfam, Magic Breakfast starts by dealing with the emergency: just making sure the children get food, so they can concentrate. This costs £60 per child per year. Then Magic Breakfast works with the school over a period of five years, building the school’s capacity to fund the scheme itself: long term development, also like Oxfam. Alongside these two approaches they lobby and campaign, like Oxfam, to convince government and the public that £60 per child per year creates a saving in the long term, boosting the child’s chances of a decent education, leading to earning power and the ability to contribute to society.

Oxfam has a UK poverty programme and the two organisations are discussing partnership arrangements. Not surprising when they have such similar aims and approaches.

If you want to donate to Magic Breakfast, you can do so here at their Justgiving page.