Workshop 4 Speaker Notes - Creating Community Margins

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We don't have the same level of agreement as to how to measure community margins vs. how we measure financial margins. We are just at the beginning of this process and there is much more to learn and to develop in the idea of community margin.

Triple Bottom Line:

  • Economic Profitability
  • Community Wellbeing
  • Environmental Sustainability

All these together make a sustainable business. "All businesses are triple bottom line, some know it and some don't."


Focusing on Community Wellbeing - Community Margins:

  1. Relationships
  2. Learning
  3. Purposeful work
  4. Health
  5. Accessibility

Relationships: This comprises all relationships - customers, employees, the city, and your own relationship with your business.

Learning: This is our primary human capacity - we learn through play.

Purposeful work: The reason people do the work they do; making a difference

Health: Health and safety

Accessibility: How accessible is your work to the community?

The above 5 elements lead to yield in community well being.


What is community? How do we define it? (Name of the book about nature of community and who makes up the core (Tom))

  • It is anything that has the sense of being larger than the individual.
  • All businesses are living organisms and all businesses are communities.
Anatomy of a Community.png
  • In a large group, a small number of people will be at the core of the community, the stewards of the mission (or seed idea). For example, in a community of 100 people, there might be a core of 10 people.
  • When the core says there's something the community needs to work on, the builders will be the first they go to for implementation.
  • Members at large
  • The edge - The people on the edge are critical. They might be people who know a lot about the business and its mission, but are not part of it.


Businesses are in ecosystems.png

Ecosystems:

  • Businesses exist in ecosystems. For example, your business may exist within the city ecosystem as well as within an industry ecosystem.
  • Your business community is nested in a wider group of other communities. This is where the edge is most important - they help to knit the communities together.
  • The people that are work for you or with you also form your community. Each person comes from a larger community, thereby intersecting their community with your business community.
  • All of these connected communities form the ecosystem of your business.
Relationships.png

So how do we create community margins in these kinds of community structures?

Relationships : Inner (micro), Meso relationships (employees, you and your family) - those we selected or chose to work with, then the macro - the communities that we exist within (city, industry)

Interaction types.png

Transaction vs. relationship continuum: If we move our interaction to the relationship level, where we are sharing ideas, outcomes together (REd Panda affecting the sounds of a musician and their music). Now we have something measurable, some yield. This kind of yield is Measured in energy.

A small sustainable business, measure the relationships you have in the community margin, and measure the truncations you have in the economic margins. In a small business, it can't be just an economic relationship because you will wear yourself out - their needs to be a real energy relationship.

Same as when we have relationships with people - we get more energy from some people than from others.


Learning: Am I helping the industry learn and evolve? the City learn and evolve?

Purposeful work: In the micro primarily - purposeful work gives employees energy, they might take that

Accessibility: this is where managing of the edge is critical. Is what you're doing accessible? Open source information? Shared table space at GG is there to encourage accessibility.

Food Lab: What do we mean by community wellness? community resilience - how does business, community, city react to changes, problems, opportunity? Edge is important because they work with what they have but they are also open to letting new things come in. Who is involved and what you do with your edge really impacts what they can achieve in the area of community wellness. If your core is homogeneous, they will connect to similar homogeneous groups on the edge and then who are you really serving? Importance of having a core reflective of who you want to serve.

Part of being a healthy system is allowing things to come in and go out - a closed system isn't healthy. (Kim)

The customers you have can have the means to help you to

Who are the stakeholders and are they represented and are you talking to them? Many times people swoop in and start a project without even talking to the community and those involved and then the project doesn't work out.

Often a mismatch between your intentions and who you are actually serving. - alignment (or misalignment) of who you are with your intentions in that area.


Measurement:

1. All that is important cannot be measured. Not everything that is important can be measured, but it doesn't mean it's less important. 2. Measurement 's purpose is to promote learning or growth. This is the only reason you would measure.

Measuring is about learning, there is an element of accountability also.

See Measurement Diagram:

  • Avoid category: people get stuck here all the time
  • Very Select: only selective things are measured here
  • Strategic Qualitative: Typically in business, this is avoided, but shouldn't be, even though it's hard. This is where leadership makes the connection. Leadership needs to share stories around the creation around that great relationship, that margin. They need to create the conversations around that. Use quotes, use the exact words are that someone used when talking about something - an issue. You can support some of these things that can't be measured with quantitative support. Use quantitative to support context?

Bob's comments: Just measuring how many people participated in your event, for example, doesn't measure the quality of the event, just the quantity. Measuring quantitative measures Potential for impact but not the impact itself.

  • Strategic Quantitative: Can and should be measured

If you don't measure something, even quantity, you never can come to measure quality because you never measured the quantity to begin with., the potential for impact.

Gina: qualitative is so key. storytelling was key to helping to evaluate impact of a program. Important to evaluate both before and after a project to be able to measure when the impact lies. Can we baseline the qualitative like we baseline the quantitative? You can measure learning through storytelling.

Strategic back casting: Look at where we want to be in the future and where we are right now. The Blueprint of We (look this up)

There are organizations that are trying to measure these kinds of things.

Much of this quantitative measurement is based on very subjective numbers.

Boundary between quantitative and qualitative measurements isn't very clear (Minjung) Businesses poll people on how they see their brand image. Within the boundary of a community, these are interchangeable.

Quantitative measurement makes us feel as if we are in control. But we must yield to the fact that our businesses are living organisms and that measurement is more about accountability.

In order to measure you have to have a stable data source, and many small businesses don't have stable data to start from, to make decisions off of. You can't let the measurement become the business, taking over leadership and decision-making. The measurement industrial complex can be totally separated from the business.

Businesses are pressured to quantify everything and are putting too much energy and time on this and not enough time on simply running their business. (Kirsten)

We should be measuring, but using the results for learning, not as an absolute to hold up as true. Measuring if it can lead to learning can be very important.

Before you measure something, ask your question, "what should I use this information to do?"

Social ROI (look up): Engaging the public and who you might be impacting and having them help you to identify what you will measure - what are the most meaningful metrics.