Change within SU’s: drawing inspiration from unlikely sources

Today we have our guest writer, George Blake , who contends that SUs often have a narrow scope of reference for change, usually limited to other similar organisations - George argues how that may hinder their potential for innovation.

Expanding Horizons

Students’ Unions are wanting to constantly change and improve. They are stocked full of young and enthusiastic staff and students who are passionate about changing their university and the world. But in my experience the range of places SU’s look to for inspiration for that change can be very limited. Staff and students at SU’s have often got limited experience of other organisations and sectors and our imagination about the range of tools, processes and ideas is often more limited than we realise. People rightly highlight the uniqueness of students’ unions, but often let that convince them that what works elsewhere simply has no chance of working in SU’s.

The aim of this article is to inspire people to think differently about the kinds of places people working in students’ unions might look to for inspiration when thinking about how we improve our organisations and the work we do. I’ve drawn on a few diverse examples from my own time working in SU’s as to organisations and ideas that might be more useful than an initial glance would initially suggest. This isn’t an attempt to suggest immediate improvements from these organisations that you should implement in your SU tomorrow, but rather an attempt to help people think about a much wider range of potential sources of inspiration. In some cases, I know a few people are already looking to these sources and I wanted to share them more widely.? In other cases, I wanted to share ideas that I hope to see other people take forward over the years ahead.

Jim Dickinson and Scandi SU’s

I first started thinking about this when I met WonkHE’s Jim Dickinson for coffee about a year ago, and he was enthusing about the benefits of thinking about Scandinavian and Baltic students’ unions. Having spent time visiting various institutions and organisations he was filled with enthusiasm for challenging perceived absolutes and non-negotiables within students’ unions. It wasn’t that he was proposing overhauling all of UK SU’s and redesigning student representation so that it mirrored the structure in Aarhus or Oslo, but rather as he put it,

“It’s not so much that SUs in other countries have answers – it’s that they can provide the questions that are needed to stimulate deeper thinking, and better strategy.”

The idea that by looking further afield than just other UK SU’s is one that stuck with me and has shaped my own work since. As time passed, I started to see other organisations doing work that looked oddly similar to SU’s and started to expand my thinking about where we might look next for inspiration. And one popped up seemingly out of the blue when having a conversation with my mother about her book club.

Mum joins the U3A

I will admit that prior to my mum’s retirement I was only vaguely aware of the University of the Third Age’s existence. An organisation founded to promote “non-formal learning through self-help interest groups” the organisation is primarily (although not exclusively) aimed at retirees looking to learn, socialise and take part in activities. I joked early on that it sounded like a student activities department at a students’ union. But the more we talked, the more obvious the similarities became.

While U3A members will have different needs and desires the primary structure is almost identical, with each local U3A having a series of groups (read societies or clubs) which people sign up to and attend once a week for little or no cost. The bulk of the work is done by people with a passion for whatever activity is being organised with some volunteers helping with the individual activities and others heling with the finances and governance. These volunteers essentially represent the staff within student voice departments. The U3A has no paid staff at a local level across the 1000+ U3A branches across the country and a small team of about twentyish staff working nationally to support every single one of those branches. Yet despite the massively differing levels of staff support, I was struck by how similar the challenges the local organisations faced were. Whether it was getting members interested in the democracy, finding storage space for equipment, or managing risk assessments and GDPR, is clearly managing many of the challenges that SU activities departments up and down the country manage, often at a fraction of the cost, with members with a wider and more complex range of needs and no massive parent organisation from which to receive funding, space and support.

What the U3A demonstrates is that other kinds of membership organisations have the potential to be rich veins of exploration in our quest for inspiration in improving students Unions. A look at the 100 largest membership organisations in the UK shows a plethora of different kinds of organisations, almost all of which will share some functionality and approach to students’ unions. It might not be immediately obvious, but I suspect that there are lessons to be learned and inspiration to be taken from organisations as diverse as the TUC and the Caravan and Motorhome Club. In particular when thinking about communications, governance and activities, many of these membership organisations will have all sorts of strategies and approaches that is charted and explore din more detail SU’s could really benefit from.

Different Models of Organising: from BLM to Citizens UK

What about other aspects of student’s unions that need inspiration? When it comes to campaigning methods and organising amongst students SU’s tend to look at what they perceive to be successful campaigns elsewhere in the sector. But a look outside the sector might help SU’s increase the impact and scope of their campaigning.

As student political party membership has declined (my most recent student union had 20000 members and no labour or conservative party society on campus), students are less and less likely to have campaigning skills or experience. Here we can look to successful movements and organisations of the last decade in the UK and beyond to see where differential practice might be achieving similar aims.

While the BLM movement has had a substantial presence on UK university campuses the types of organising that underpinned its emergence in the US were not commonplace in UK SU’s, which have tended to be very centralised and top-down organisations. As the decade since has progressed there has been a move to start examining whether community organising principles could help underpin new approaches to organising students on UK university campuses. This was first mentioned to me by a former colleague, Tom Snape, who was doing work on the subject at Birmingham Guild, before moving on to work for Citizens UK after working in partnership with them. This kind of collaborative exploration of new methods from outside of SU’s is the kind of work that could be explored with other organisations. Whether its Citizens UK, Community Organisers, or other types of campaigning organisations, the opportunity for learning and inspiration is clear.

Japanese Production Lines and Big Tech

So how far afield could we look and still find useful and valuable inspiration for SU’s? Here I have an example that’s been instructive in my own career, despite the work emerging from a source that I’d have considered unlikely prior to my engagement with it a few years ago.

I first came across agile project management methodology while talking to my brother and reading about project management in anticipation of starting a new role a few years ago. Fascinated by how ideas from Japanese production lines had shaped big projects from the US Government to big tech I came across the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and its 4 key principles:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan.

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

At first, I struggled to see how I might apply these principles in an SU setting. I don’t much like the framing of students as consumers and was worried that an overly business-like approach would only contribute further to the creeping marketisation of HE.

But agile principles are a response to the fact that traditional project management philosophies tend to run counter to people’s base instincts and behaviours and struggle in rapidly changing environments, a problem I had encountered a lot when trying to organise anything in students’ unions. As time went on, lots of these principles started to creep into work we were doing. Officer schedules and campaign planning started to look a lot like sprints, with flexibility and responsiveness valued over an unchanging and unyielding focus on a solitary objective. Projects started to have a wide range of deliverables that could be completed and add value individually rather than as a complete package, so that interruptions and challenges to projects didn’t derail the entire programme.

Conclusion

My mind had been opened to the possibility that despite coming from environments I considered entirely unlike students’ unions, there were a range of ideas here that could have huge and substantial benefits to them, in every aspect, from campaign planning to daily routines. In practice not all attempts at implementing this into my work were successful, but I’m confident that SU’s are only scratching the surface of methods and processes that could be learned from thinking about how a much broader range of organisations work.

What other organisations, ideas, places, and philosophies could we look to? Let me know in the comments about any successes or failure you’ve had in looking further afield for inspiration for SU’s. Or if there is an organisation you’d like to see potential similarities with explored in more depth, drop me a message and you might inspire the next article!