Summary
Educational Tools, and especially an enjoyable Game, to support lay volunteers learn to make better decisions in the face of complexity and do more effective team work.
Major Learning point for Citizen Enablement
Lay volunteers, who control much of the development of Britain’s housing stock, learned by themselves and with their fellow citizens, through the use of fun educational aids, how to undertake their statutory ‘duty of care’ in a more effective and efficient way and to form teams with different skills to support the professional leaders of their Housing Associations.
The Case
With a small grant from the joint Science and Engineering and Social Science Research Councils, the Housing Association Research Team (HART), under James co-ordination, undertook in depth studies trying to understand the socio-technical decision making of lay volunteers who are responsible for the running of Britain’s Housing Associations (HA). HAs are typical of a number of organisations run by citizens from local communities who have to make complex decisions involving social ad technical developments in the building of houses for sale and rent. In particular, these volunteers are responsible for developing and managing an increasing proportion of Britain’s housing stock; last year this represented over £800 million or approximately one third of public housing.
A small group with complementary skills (HART) worked closely together for several years to help these voluntary citizens learn key aspects of their necessary skills. The study of these voluntary citizen HA controllers combined the expertise of a number of researchers giving interdisciplinary guidance to a senior research fellow who made a comparative case study of the decision making processes of several housing associations. These studies also determined how the volunteer citizens coped with their decision making responsibilities; what they perceived to; be their role; how successful they were in using advice from their professional and technological ’experts’; how they evaluated their actual achievements; and how successful they had been in the use of public (housing) finance.
The rigour and quality of the case studies enabled HART to identify the training/learning needs of both lay and professional groups, both of whom made major decisions for Housing Associations. As a result, a series of citizen friendly educational aids were developed which appeared to improve decision-making in such organisations.
The cover of the TEAMs Guide book
Illustrative case studies, role playing, a cartoon style guidebook, scenario based exercises and general simulations were the primary aids developed by HART. One learning tool they developed, a game known as HASSLE, was used successfully by the National Federation of Housing Associations on its training courses to improve systemic understanding of the Housing Association system and was widely sold to over thirty HAs. Another aid, known as ‘Teams’, has been shown to help voluntary members of HA committees learn how to form better teams to promote more effective, efficient and meaningful decision making by themselves, how to undertake their role more effectively, efficiently and meaningfully. The cover to the ‘TEAMS’ manual is shown above.
Teams is similar in nature to Whist, see below, and engenders necessary new skills in these voluntary citizens. It is best played by citizen volunteers who know each other and, ideally, have seen each other in action within teams:
- It uses a pack of simple, but purpose made, playing cards with the faces colour coded and with short phrases representing the different team roles.
- It is played like whist with every player first being given 3/5 cards randomly and asked to make up a ‘hand’ that best represents their behaviour in team-working.
- Once each player has seen his first hand, he can pick up either the ‘face up card’ or one from the top of the pack.
- They then reject one of the cards that least represents their team-working.
- Players comment if they see a card rejected or taken if they feel this doesn’t represent the way that player is.
- When all players have a hand they suits them they expose the hand to each other and explain their decisions.
In an extension of the role playing teams can easily be balanced using the colour coding shown on the figure below. Steven Platt, the social scientist originally taken on to undertake the sensitive evaluation of lay volunteer needs in housing associations, led the team to develop the Team games as a formally and successfully product published by Gower which thus reached across to many more people.
A hand of cards from the published TEAMs Game
Both the cartoon book and the TEAMS game try to encourage better ways of working using fun tools which the volunteers actually enjoy using and therefore naturally learn from quite naturally and easily. These learning tools were also introduced to volunteers in helpful gaming sessions in order to prepare them to learn how better to deliver their ‘duty of care’ which is so important to the future of Britain’s affordable housing development. They were both extremely successful in this respect.
Major Learning point for Citizen Enablement
Lay volunteers, who control much of the development of Britain’s housing stock, learned by themselves and with their fellow citizens, through the use of fun educational aids, how to undertake their statutory ‘duty of care’ in a more effective and efficient way and to form teams with different skills to support the professional leaders of their Housing Associations.
The Enabler
James Powell initiated the process, was the main Citizen Enabler who led HART from its inception. Its developments enabled hundreds of citizen controllers of Britain’s myriad housing associations to have a proper ‘duty of care’ on their HA’s organising committees.
