Comment

Julian Dobson

There’s a moment in many people’s careers when a light comes on and you realise you can do things differently.

There’s a moment in many people’s careers when a light comes on and you realise you can do things differently. The difference may not be world-changing, but it changes the way you work and the effect of your work on others.

This magazine constantly features stories of people who’ve been inspired to change their outlook or way of working, and of the lessons they’ve learned along the way. Their inspiration may have been a colleague, a mentor, a teacher, even a relative. The common factor has been a realisation that things can be better, and can be done better.

Learning takes countless forms. I hope New Start is part of it; so too is face to face learning and spending time with people who challenge your way of thinking. I declare an interest here, as an growing proportion of my time is spent in such work; but I’m hardly the first to spot the value of that moment when someone realises they can make a difference. It can transform cowed bureaucrats into passionate advocates for their communities, and competent technicians into inspired inventors.

Strange, then, that learning tends to be the first thing to be jettisoned when organisations decide to lighten their load. The budget headed ‘training’ is considered an unaffordable luxury in straitened times.

This isn’t a plea for training to be exempt from scrutiny. Hard times focus the mind, and everything should be up for grabs. Last month the Independent reported that 20,000 council workers were about to be made redundant. Everyone is seeking to justify their job or programme – and some won’t make the cut.

But this is precisely why we need to think more creatively and imaginatively about the future.

Part of that has to be a process of questioning what is worth doing, and why. It’s not good enough to pump millions of pounds into Future Jobs Fund schemes if they don’t lead to future jobs. We can’t afford to pump scarce public funds into shopping centres that will be empty in ten years’ time.

So regeneration practitioners must be thinkers as much as deliverers. That may not require training courses or conferences or one-to-one coaching. It might involve all or none of those. What it does require – and there are no short cuts to this – is space: the space to learn, and to do so in conversation. Learning has to be social because it must be tested, not parroted.

Those conversations lead to more than increased knowledge, useful as knowledge is. They lead to intelligence: smarter decision-making, more perceptive approaches to problems, and wiser use of resources.