04 – Grouping Principles

[00:00:00] Lily: Hello and welcome to the IDEMS Principle. I’m Lily Clements, an Impact Activation Fellow. I am here with David Stern, a founding director of IDEMS. Hi David.

[00:00:15] David: Hi Lily. What are we discussing today?

[00:00:17] Lily: Well, we’re starting with IDEMS principles and there’s 20 of them, which is a lot.

[00:00:23] David: A lot. Everybody knows that no human is really capable of knowing 20 things or remembering 20 things. It just doesn’t happen.

[00:00:32] Lily: No. And I’m sure we’ll dig in another time on how you can mentally just tick through all 20 in your head when you’re coming up against a decision for the company, .

[00:00:40] David: We might delve into that later, but I mean, the first thing to do is that we very consciously were aware, even before there were 20, when there were only 16, it was already way too many. And so when there were 16, we recognized that there were four groups of four, and four times four is somehow much better than 16.

And four times five is actually still okay. Five times four. Which one have we gone for? We’ve gone for five times four.

[00:01:06] Lily: Five, yeah, five groups with four in each. So you have this grouping and you have your, I guess your key principle. How would you define that first principle, which is like your umbrella?

[00:01:15] David: Well, I mean this was really interesting, the way this emerged, there were two way elements to this. We actually did just have a long list of principles and we also had elements where there was natural grouping emerging. And so some of the principles really can be seen as, sometimes they fit in quite nicely as the umbrella principle, if you want, really captures the elements within it. There’s so much crossover between the principles in general. There’s also this element, if you want to just think about five principles that broadly capture the main ideas, then the five umbrellas are enough. They’re not everything we want to say, they do not capture everything we want to say at all. But five things people can remember.

So, for example, for staff in IDEMS, I would hope that most staff in IDEMS would have the five umbrella principles as something that they can just say, just like that, because it’s part of who they are, it’s part of their understanding of IDEMS as an organization. That they should almost be just, well, intuitive. They’re part of the culture of the organization. And the other principles are then digging into how you actually achieve those five.

[00:02:37] Lily: I do remember I once, it must have been at a team’s meeting. I asked Danny, the other co director of IDEMS if he could list me all 20 principles without looking. It’s quite impressive.

[00:02:48] David: Well, this is the thing for Danny and myself, these principles, they’re not coming from IDEMS, a lot of them predate IDEMS, when we set up IDEMS, this was a lot about how we worked, what we believed in, and we put them together, and that’s what IDEMS was formed, really, partly as a way that these principles didn’t exist with other organizations we were working with, and therefore we didn’t feel the organization was able to serve what we believed was needed in the right way.

And so part of our question when we set up IDEMS is, can we build an organization along these principles that can succeed, first, and second that through abiding by these principles can actually do things differently? Because we don’t see how to prioritize these principles within the organizations that we knew.

And that was an important duality in how and why IDEMS was set up. And the fact that there were 16 of them at the time, the other four came later, as you’re aware, you were there when they came out.

[00:03:58] Lily: Yes, coming up to its third birthday.

[00:04:01] David: Yes, well, it’s actually, is it its third birthday or maybe its second birthday?

[00:04:07] Lily: Ah, it might be its second birthday.

[00:04:09] David: Second birthday, it’s the third IDEMS team meeting, and so it’s two years.

[00:04:13] Lily: That is a classic mathematical mistake I’ve just made there that I should have, of course.

[00:04:20] David: It happens to all of us. I remember making that same mistake a number of years ago for something else, totally unrelated. I think it was number of children.

[00:04:29] Lily: Well done. You know where all of your children are now.

Well, so you kind of had these principles and you built the organisation off them then?

[00:04:36] David: In some sense, yes, and the fact that we couldn’t work, I mean, we were in academia, both of us in different ways, and we felt we couldn’t live up to the principles that we believed and we wanted, and we tried to go through a charity approach, we looked at other things as well, and it really was the fact that there is no organisation which we felt could house what we believe need to happen, and that actually, there was a chance we could succeed, and I think there’s an interesting question here, in spite of the principles.

Sometimes the principles help us, but most of the time, the principles make our life harder. And we accept that and we embrace that. Maybe we should go through the big categories, because the big categories are quite rememberable. People should be able to remember five things.

[00:05:24] Lily: Is this you testing me to see if I know all five?

[00:05:26] David: No, I’m not. There’s no test. It is Scalable Impact, Options by Context, Systems Thinking, Inherently Inclusive and Informed Decision Making. Those are our five big ones. And all five of them are, well, the final one, Informed Decision Making, we owe that, as you know, to Chiara and her recognising that we were missing a whole big chunk of what’s important to us as an organisation and pointing that out at our first full team meeting. And so we have a big debt to her for that.

[00:06:02] Lily: 2021.

[00:06:04] David: Yes, back in 2021. And basically these five, I think, do capture the essence of things that everybody in IDEMS should be aware of and thinking about when they’re making decisions. Thinking about scalability and Scalable Impact, therefore, everything that implies.

This element of Options by Context, not looking for silver bullet solutions, looking for things which are contextual, looking for ways to contextualize them, looking for ways to work in that approach, which supports multiple options being available across context and within them.

Systems Thinking, not thinking just about components, but thinking about the whole system and how activities we take, what impacts they have on other elements of the system, how we might be affecting the system as a whole through our activities.

Inherently Inclusive. This is not just the idea of the company being inclusive, but it’s this idea that actually it should almost inherit that inclusivity from the company culture, from everything else we do, that if ever we’re having to put in place structures to enforce inclusivity, then probably we’ve got it wrong somewhere else. And so the inclusivity should be inherited from how we work and so on. And this is in all, all our forms, we really should not have, if we find discrimination, we really need to find ways to sort of re-evaluate and look at ourselves to make sure that inclusivity in everything we do, in what we create, in who we are, is inherited from our company culture and so on.

And then finally, this Informed Decision Making, which is really central to the fact that decision making should be coming from something, it should be coming from various forms of information, and a diverse set of information, mixture of sort of things which are very evidence driven in certain cases to actually things which are, if you want, coming from assessment of others, coming from people critiquing us, actually having ways to inform our decision making is really important, and so making informed decisions.

And that’s our five big ones. I should really have let you dig into those.

[00:08:44] Lily: No, no, no. It’s very interesting and very good to hear, thank you. So, so we have these kind of five big principles and then they all, they all link a lot to that kind of three sub or three, three umbrella.

[00:08:58] David: Yes.

[00:08:59] Lily: And then they link with one another. The 20 principles overall, are they in such a way that you feel that you kind of need, I know that you feel, I know that we need all 20. You can’t take one up, because otherwise the structure falls.

[00:09:15] David: Well, no, I think it’s not that the structure falls down, it’s that I believe that all 20 capture something which would not be captured by the others. So, I believe that there’s now how important that is compared to what would be captured by the others. Let’s take a very simple example related to Scalable Impact.

[00:09:35] Lily: Okay.

[00:09:36] David: Under Scalable Impact, there’s Viral Scaling. Now, Viral Scaling has a number of different components to it, including relationships to things like Continually Evolving. But the point is that Viral Scaling, by highlighting that as a principle in its own right, it does put it in opposition with other elements of scaling.

And so Scalable Impact could lead to all sorts of different types of scaling. And we’re not saying which one is better or not, but we’re saying that we as an organization are making a conscious choice of focusing our efforts on viral scale.

[00:10:15] Lily: I see.

[00:10:15] David: So if we didn’t say Viral Scaling, then a lot of the elements of Viral Scaling would be captured by Local Innovation, Continually Evolving and so on, Open by Default is related to Viral Scaling in different ways.

And all of those are part of the Options by Context group. And so the whole Options by Context is tied in with Viral Scaling in different ways. But Viral Scaling, without it there, we’re not actually putting our flag anywhere. We’re not making this concrete statement of we are prioritizing this over this, which is concrete.

Doing that 20 times is maybe unnecessary in terms of actually somebody trying to understand what we’re about. There is repetition from a reader’s perspective. But it’s not excessive in terms of decision making. Internally, and this is the thing, the principals aren’t there to advertise us. They’re not there to tell others what we do. They’re there for two main reasons: they’re there to guide us, and they’re there to help us evaluate, are we doing what we said we’d do? Are we really behaving in the way we want to behave? That’s what they’re there for.

And for that, this is not excessive. You know, having 20 things which help guide your thinking, help you when you’re making decisions, probably you only need two or three of them for any given decision, but two or three of them might be meaningful. And so actually having a few more helps guide the decision more than it would otherwise.

Similarly, when we’re wanting to evaluate, actually having 20 things where we’re able to ask, are we doing this? If we’re not doing this, what does it mean? If we’re not following Viral Scaling as an approach, if the scaling we’re approaching is a different way, does that mean we’ve, we’re going against our principles? They’re not rules, you’re allowed to go against them. Does that mean we should correct? Does that mean we should change what we do? Or does that mean that actually our principles as an organization need to change so they reflect us as an organization?

I believe very strongly in Viral Scaling for a number of different reasons. It’s something which I found value to that approach in context, but that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily going to be the right principle for the organization forever. Principles can evolve, Continually Evolving, this is another one of our principles. And you’re seeing how, although Viral Scaling and Continually Evolving are lower down principles, they are meaningful for us when we’re discussing our decision making, when we’re guiding our decisions. And this is our Informed Decision Making.

Being able to make informed decisions is much easier if you have the guiding principles to help guide your decision making. So you’re understanding what should you be using, what sort of information do you need to guide your decision making? And that sort of thing. So the, the principles, again, they guide us in this, and they help us to evaluate what we do, how we do it, and whether it’s aligned with what we want to do.

[00:13:21] Lily: And so then I guess linking to that question at the start, is it that when a decision comes up for you and Danny, is it that you kind of tick through all 20 in your head? Do you tick through the five? Or is it just natural?

[00:13:32] David: For Danny and myself the principles are deeply ingrained and really rather intuitive. But what they do give is, and where they do come up is, we want to sort of pass on decision making as much as possible within the organization, but that’s hard because of the complexity. When people come to us with suggestions, we can almost always, if we disagree with what’s being proposed, we can almost always point to the guiding principle.

Very obvious one, within Options by Context, we have a principle called Open by Default. The number of times I’ve been able to go back to people and say, consider Open by Default. Ah, we want to use this software. And I say, okay, great, consider Open by Default. What are the open alternatives? Consider those first. Have you done your due diligence and so on?

Or, you know, we have this business model we want to take in terms of what we’re developing, the software we’re developing. And I say, again, consider Open by Default. Have we got openness within it? This sort of thing.

So it really is a very useful way of getting coherence across the organization. That I’m not just saying, no, I don’t like your idea. I’m asking you to consider one of the company principles with respect to your idea. And that’s really important in terms of enabling people to make decisions on behalf of or for the organisation.

And the principles can empower them to do that. What’s very interesting is everybody within the organisation resonates when they read the principles. But most people within, I think everyone except Danny and myself, these principles are not deeply understood or deeply ingrained. And so they still get surprised by the principles.

I had a wonderful discussion with someone recently about the Inherently Inclusive principle, where we had a business model for something and he said it’s not inherently inclusive, and then we discussed it, and we saw that it actually changed how they were thinking about what they were going to do based on that discussion of the principle.

And so that to me is when I knew, yes, the principles are starting to work, but it’s, you know, a concrete manifestation where other people now weren’t able to do what Danny and I tend to do quite naturally, which is just live the principles. But people were able to pick out a principle or two and say, I don’t understand how what I’m suggesting relates to this.

And that discussion was extremely effective and efficient. So being able to use the principles for decision making, for informed decision making by other people, not necessarily by Danny and myself, but in a way which is aligned with how we think and how we believe, that’s, that’s what the principles are helping to give us.

And I would argue that my criteria, really, we’ve been wanting to have more directors for a long time, and my criteria for other executive directors is really that they know and they understand and they have a deep understanding of the principles. And that’s really what we’re looking for.

[00:16:51] Lily: Well, so then that, that makes me then think, you’re talking about within IDEMS and the principles. How about, how about collaborators? When you collaborate with someone, you can’t expect them to, presumably adhere by your principles.

[00:17:05] David: No, not at all. This is one of the things which is so interesting, actually. I do not know a partner who can live by our principles, because the infrastructures they live in… IDEMS exists so that we can live by these principles. If you live in a university, you can’t live by all of these principles in the way that we do, because your structures aren’t set up to enable it. And I think this is really interesting.

If you live in a normal commercial organization, which is for profit, where your CEO has to maximize profit, you cannot live by these principles. There are elements of the principles which contradict almost every organisational structure I know. A UK charity, I don’t believe, could live by these principles in the way that we can.

We’re set up deliberately to enable us to live by these principles. Whether we can succeed or not in doing that is still, we’ve survived five, almost six years now. And so we’re doing okay. We’ve grown immensely in that time. So we’ve done pretty well, but it’s a tough ask. But the principles themselves are not designed for others to adopt.

If they adopt some of them or all of them or whatever they want, that’s their choice. What we’re asking is to hold ourselves to this account and almost always what we find is the people who we collaborate with overlap on our principles. They don’t need to have all of them but there will almost certainly be some of them which they feel really strongly about and that is the point of overlap. And that point of overlap leads to really strong long term collaborations.

Most of our collaborations are long term. And it is almost always because of an alignment on a subset of the principles. They have only some of them, they might care about some of them more than others, and I don’t know anyone who would have all of them, but where we have alignment, that often is what leads to that long term collaboration.

[00:19:17] Lily: Okay. And so is the same true for when you I can’t remember the word, when you give work to someone else, when you…

[00:19:23] David: Subcontract.

[00:19:24] Lily: Subcontract.

[00:19:25] David: Absolutely, but those are collaborators, I would see them as collaborators in the same way.

[00:19:29] Lily: Yes.

[00:19:29] David: More than that, we have gone a step further there. So we have two organisations now, which we support. They don’t have our principles. But they are aligned with our principles and we try to help and guide them in that same way. There’s an organisation in Kenya, there’s another one in Ghana. And for them, we do go a step further. We’re trying to help them to basically build on, hopefully, all of our principles. We’re not enforcing that, but we are trying to build that capacity to be able to sort of work within this principled system because we believe that actually if we can succeed, we can bring others with us.

And so if others could do this as well, then actually more organisations that follow these principles could be really powerful. They could offer a genuine alternative in many different ways. So we are looking to get others. Not all our subcontractors, but some of our subcontractors. The more our subcontractors follow the principles, the more we want to work with them. That’s the interesting sort of point because we do have an agenda, that we have chosen these principles for a reason. We believe that by following these principles, we will build an organisation which will be sustainable and scalable, in a way which will be highly impactful.

And therefore, if others can follow these same principles, we hope that they could succeed. In fact, I would be delighted if 20 years down the line, there were lots of organisations that were following our principles, even if IDEMS had failed. But if we had organisations that could live by these principles, they’d have to be social enterprises, because you couldn’t do them otherwise.

[00:21:13] Lily: Sure.

[00:21:13] David: And if they were living by these principles, I believe there would be a genuine alternative, in a way that there currently isn’t, to Scalable Impact, one of our principles.

[00:21:25] Lily: Yeah, very nice. Very nice.

Is there any kind of final bits you’d want to say before we close off this podcast?

[00:21:31] David: I guess the final thing I want to say is, we’ve discussed the whole, we’re going to have now a whole set of individual elements or podcasts on each individual principle, but I do think the grouping of them is more powerful than just the individuals.

So although the way we’re going to do the podcast is looking at them individually, and now we’ve looked at them sort of as a whole, and you’ve noticed that we’ve not actually gone through and listed all 20, that would serve no purpose. We’ve listed five, and we’ve mentioned a few others, but we haven’t listed all 20 because nobody can take that in.

I do think that as well as as people listen to the different podcasts, we’ve organised them in order of the ones that go together. And so I think there’s a reason to listen to them, maybe in groups of four, not necessarily at one go, but understanding at least the grouping. So maybe as people listen to them, thinking about not trying to just get on top of all 20, that doesn’t make sense, maybe think, looking at a group of four and then thinking about that group of four.

Maybe we’re actually getting this podcast, as we’re thinking about it at the moment, we need to think about how can we help people to think about maybe the five sets of four, more than just 20, because 20 is too much. But there’s a reason for them. So I guess for the listeners out there, if you’re going on this marathon to listen to this, is that it’s about half an hour each.

So that’s 10 hours of individual, podcasts on individual principles. That’s a mammoth effort. If you’re going to make that mammoth effort, break it down into two hour chunks. You know, four of them at a time, and then take a break, not just take a break from listening, think about it, think about those four together, how they interrelate.

How have we done? Critique us for it, you know, that’s one of our principles. Critically Assessed. If you’ve actually done the hard work of listening to four podcasts, for two hours give or take worth of listening send us a message, send us a critique of what you’ve thought, what you’ve taken out from those four, and take them as five sets of four rather than ten hours of just on and on.

A lot of me droning on, isn’t it? So maybe a better way to do that would be to listen to them in groups of four, and we, we’d have to think through how we can help people to do this.

[00:24:07] Lily: To add, as someone who obviously is learning, and I use that kind of I guess, very loosely, but learning…

[00:24:13] David: I like your quotes that no one could see.

[00:24:16] Lily: Yes, that no one could see. But yes, learning these principles is to just kind of test them in just day to day decisions of, you know, you’re going out and you go to a supermarket and just to really kind of test them in your, I don’t know.

[00:24:34] David: And some of them just don’t make sense in that context. Well, why would you put yourself through this in your day to day decisions? Because they can be really challenging, taken as a whole, especially.

[00:24:45] Lily: Well, I think, yes, yeah, no, absolutely. I think I’ve told you before about the umbrella one, which we’ve gone through and I’m sure that, you know, will be dug into, but it’s…

[00:24:54] David: Go on, you’ve mentioned umbrellas, people need to know. Go on, tell us about the umbrella and we’ll discuss it briefly now as a way to close this out.

[00:25:02] Lily: Sure. Well, I was with my family over Christmas and we went out and there were two umbrellas, but six of us. I don’t need an umbrella, I don’t mind, I’ll get wet, it’s fine. But then it’s kind of, who, who gets the umbrellas? Who chooses the umbrellas, you know?

Is it better that just no one has the umbrellas so we don’t have inequality? So that we don’t create any inequality there? And as it is, the people that we found were, well the people that probably need the umbrellas more would have been the older members, generally, so would have been like the parents.

The people that ended up having the umbrellas were the two boys. Because all the girls kind of were like, oh no, we don’t need them, it’s fine. And the boys were like, great, then I can have them. And okay, I’m, this might be a huge stereotype, but that was just the dynamic in the family at that particular instance.

And it just kind of makes you think, well, what, what is the correct thing to do here? Is it the, you know, putting this into those IDEMS principles? Is it that we don’t have, no one has an umbrella?

[00:26:03] David: Absolutely not. I mean, that would not be thinking sensibly. In particular, you’re not Enabling Opportunity. Somebody has the opportunity to seize an umbrella and you’re not enabling it. So that would be the wrong approach.

[00:26:16] Lily: Sure, but then it creates, it creates these inequalities.

[00:26:21] David: Yes. And you’ll notice that there’s nowhere where being equal is mentioned. You know, this is one of the big discussions around equity versus equality. Actually, equality is not fair. So it isn’t necessarily what we should be aiming for.

[00:26:37] Lily: Sure.

[00:26:38] David: So equity is much more important than equality.

[00:26:42] Lily: Then it’s not I guess, Inherently Inclusive.

[00:26:45] David: Well, that’s a really interesting question, you know. Was there a form of discrimination? Possibly, as you say, there was possibly an element of discrimination that came from the internal biases within the decision making process. So was there an Informed Decision Making process? I’d argue no, that your decision making process was not an Informed Decision Making process because basically some people said I don’t need it and then the other said okay I’ll take it.

So it wasn’t actually an Informed Decision Making process, it was a sort of relatively opportunistic decision making. Now should you have gone through and done a fully Informed Decision Making process, who needs the umbrellas most? Probably in that particular context, not. But I would argue that you didn’t have an Informed Decision Making process from what you’ve described. You had a decision making process where it just happened. Some people said something and other people acted accordingly.

Should you, for example, have had a more collaborative approach? Collaborative by Nature. Should there have been an element of actually, well, if you’re using the umbrellas, maybe different people might use them or need them at different times and so you could have collaborated more and had this, maybe even had somebody, more than one person under the same umbrella. So could you have been more collaborative in your approach to using the umbrellas? I don’t know. And so, is that the nature of your family engagement? Who knows?

[00:28:06] Lily: As it was, it was one of their birthday as well, so the person whose birthday it was got the umbrella.

[00:28:11] David: Ah.

[00:28:12] Lily: But anyway.

[00:28:13] David: Well that is sort of definitely Enabling Opportunity. So that opportunity that was presented to be nice to the person whose birthday it was, was seized. So maybe everything worked out fine. And remember these are principles and not rules. You don’t have to follow all of them all the time with every decision making. But, you know, it is interesting, as you say, to just take a trivial example like that and then try and think through. Were there elements of this where in the future we could do better?

And I think thinking and noticing the gender bias aspect, that’s a really interesting one. That actually having noticed the bias, if you want to be Consciously Ethical in the future, then you really need to dig into that. You need to think through, is this something which was incorrect. Did we actually get this wrong? Because we had, maybe in terms again of the Inherently Inclusive, maybe we had a form of discrimination. Maybe there was somebody who needed the umbrella but didn’t have it. Was that the case? Was that not the case? Was it good enough?

Again, we’re not looking to maximise or optimise. So it could be that actually the solution was good enough and it was taken efficiently in a way which was sensible. So, again, we have 20 principles, using them all on a decision making process for taking umbrellas is of limited use, but I do think it’s interesting how many of them we can apply and some of them It seems maybe you followed and others maybe it would be useful to think about, well, the decision making process itself if it was as you put it just individuals sort of saying I don’t need it and then the others said okay, well, if nobody else is using it, I’ll use it.

Maybe that’s not an informed decision making process. Maybe there would have been a better way to make decisions as a family, but maybe you’re not together enough to be able to figure out that better way and to make that investment in time to get a better way of making decisions. So who knows?

[00:30:06] Lily: Who knows? And they’ve all certainly definitely forgotten about this by now, because to them, it was just, we’re going for a walk and we have two umbrellas and it’s raining.

[00:30:14] David: But I love the fact that you’re thinking about that with respect to our principles. This, to me, is all it takes to actually get people to engage, to actually get them to think through, you know, are these even the right principles?

Maybe, you don’t like the Enabling Opportunity principle. This is in opposition in some sense to things like equal opportunity. You’d have preferred an equal opportunity principle where everybody gets the same. Maybe that’s what feels right for you. Whereas , if you feel either nobody or everyone should have had umbrellas, then Enabling Opportunity is a very bad principle for you.

And that would be that it’s the wrong one because there is an inherent unfairness to it.

[00:30:56] Lily: Sure, yeah.

[00:30:57] David: Now, the aim of enabling opportunity is to go beyond just equal opportunities, to say there’s two umbrellas, it’s silly to leave them lying there, you know, you may as well enable the opportunity and use the umbrellas for those who need it most, who will benefit the most in some way, and to make the situation better for those who can benefit.

Anyway, we’ve got really rather distracted, but I do like your example, and thank you for using it on something so trivial. I don’t know that the principles are actually useful for deciding whether you should take umbrellas or not on a rainy day when there’s only two umbrellas and there are six of you.

But I would not recommend our principles for that decision making process. But it is interesting that elements of it can apply.

[00:31:43] Lily: Well, it’s a fun exercise, I think, to try and test it because you talk about these decision making choices. Which, obviously, you make a lot with IDEMS, and I don’t have to make as much, or I don’t have to make with IDEMS, so I can, I can just test them out elsewhere.

[00:31:59] David: And see if they resonate. And this is the whole point, do they resonate, do they feel right, do they feel wrong? If they feel wrong, we need to challenge them, we need them to be challenged, we need them to evolve, they should be continually evolving. And so actually people using that in trivial ways will mean that when you are making decisions on behalf of IDEMS, then you’re probably better placed to do so because you’ve been challenged to use the principles in your daily life. So thank you.

[00:32:26] Lily: We’ll see. When we have a teams meeting next, I’ll make sure I bring two umbrellas and we can have conversations.

[00:32:33] David: I’m afraid I won’t use an umbrella. I’m quite happy to get wet.

[00:32:35] Lily: Yeah, me too.

[00:32:38] David: Well, but let’s see what happens and let’s see whether they just get left and everyone does that. I don’t think so. I think we have other team members who will value the umbrellas and who would therefore seize the opportunity and we would enable them to seize that opportunity to stay dry.

[00:32:52] Lily: Sorry for going self tracked, but no, thank you very much. We’ll, we’ll leave it there.

[00:32:57] David: Great. I enjoyed that. Thank you.