The Global Forum On Cities Q1 2021 -Social Impact, Mark Nield, Founder, Grow Inspires (UK).
“Youth, Jobs, Entrepreneurship, In Cities, and Inner Cities.”
The Global Forum On Cities Q1 2021 theme.
About “The Global Forum On Cities”
INSPIRING CITIES
The Global Forum On Cities is the global business and policy forum on cities organised by Things Growth. The platform partners with 100+ global leading cities, technology and innovation organisations, corporates, public entities, start-ups, incubators and industry experts.
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Speaker 5, Mark Neild is the Founder of Grow Inspires — a social venture on a mission to inspire and facilitate social equality through enterprise education. Grow Inspires believe that with the right training, support and guidance we can create sustainable income streams for even the most marginalised people.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Good morning, Mark. I’m great, yourself?
Mark Neild (Grow Inspires): Yes, very well. Happy Monday morning.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Thank you. Happy Monday morning to you too. I’m glad that you’ve made time to join this conversation, which is a part of our series focusing on The Global Forum on Cities overarching theme of this quarter, which is Youth and Employment. Today, we have the pleasure to have this brief conversation with you so that you share with us what your company does, the industry insights you want to share, things you are challenged with particularly in this time of Covid and in other subjects which might arise from our conversation. Would you like to kindly introduce maybe the company, yourself and we can take it from there if you like?
Mark Neild (Grow Inspires): Sure, my name is Mark Neild and I founded a social venture called Grown Spires, and this is essentially about social inclusion through entrepreneurship. One of the things that we’ve observed is that there are a lot of people with unique skills that aren’t necessarily valued either by society or by employers. That sometimes leaves them on the shelves marginalised or excluded from mainstream employment and as a result, excluded from the rest of society. Now, some of the people are, for example, women. One of my clients is a woman who is a carpenter and that is a job for a man in many people’s respect. She was finding it hard to get employment because she had children to manage and look after. So, she dropped them to school at nine and collected them at three o’clock and no one would let her work between nine thirty and half past two. So, we helped her start a business so that she could dictate the hours that she wanted to go. What was interesting was that she ended up working with a lot of women who were quite scared about having macho men around the house, particularly if they’re single mothers. So, she has managed to find something that is most in demand, but also fulfilling for her. Now, we also work quite a lot with ex-offenders and one of the things about them is that they have a huge stigma attached, even though one might think that rehabilitation is about giving them a second chance. Everything in the job market is about telling people your history and your CV — what have you done before? Whereas if you are an entrepreneur, people care about your product — will this product deliver what I’m looking for? If I believe you can deliver value for me, then I’m interested. Anything else is irrelevant. So, this is a really great way of getting rid of the labels attached to certain people and allowing people to be seen for who they are rather than what they might have been in the past.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Well, thank you so much. That’s really interesting, and yourself? What about your background, things you did before, you were talking about all these conversations about backgrounds and things people have done — tell us about your experience and things you’ve done before.
Mark Neild (Grow Inspires): Okay, so when I look back at my career now, I started the workplace in nineteen eighty-one which is quite scary and makes me feel really old. So, if I go back through it, I think there are two themes that run through. One of them is social justice and the other one is innovation. So, my first 15 years I was flying helicopters in the Royal Navy. I used to fly what was called a Sea King and that was something that was created in about eight weeks flat during the Falklands War. Now, I’d been in the Navy for all of six months and I wanted to get involved — 18 year old’s, incredibly naïve. I really wanted to play my part. Unfortunately our ship broke down so I had to spend the whole of the time in Gibraltar thinking I’m really wasting my life. But it got me thinking about innovation and the innovation that we did in the Navy was fabulous because often we were making use of things with very limited resources and I really learnt how to value the resources you have and make best use of them. In terms of the social justice, towards the end of my career I was a flying instructor and later the chief flying instructor and the people who I most wanted to fly with were the least confident interestingly, because often they had great workings of their mind, but they just weren’t very confident and they didn’t come across as very capable. By helping them to develop that confidence and make use of their incredible resources that they had they would quite often become the star performers rather than the ones who were incredibly confident. They give the impression of knowing what they’re talking about, but often actually what’s inside is much less sophisticated. So, that was my time in the Navy. Moving on, I worked for management consultant called PA Consulting.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): They are growing nicely. They are at the very forefront of innovation and particularly in the aerospace sector. That’s aerospace, defense and related sectors, so that’s probably how you made the transition to them?
Mark Neild (Grow Inspires): Actually, I was working for a company that was at the time NTL which is now perhaps better known as Virgin Media and it was in real problems. This was in the Internet boom of the late 90s, early 2000s. A big cable company we were working with got into Chapter 11 bankruptcy because they hadn’t thought about how they were going to sell their products. They came along and I got chatting to them so, they know me much more in telecoms than in MOD.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): And just out of curiosity, what did you do at PA? Obviously consulting, but were you in a consulting role?
Mark Neild (Grow Inspires): Definitely, I was in a consulting role. Mostly infrastructure transformation for IT. Did quite a lot of work for telecoms, a lot of that was about making best use of the technology. A fair bit of procurement so, for example, I bought a 3G network for one of the companies in Ireland. Yes, I did get dragged into the MOD. I was one of the chief negotiators for their biggest IT outsourcing programs — a two billion one. Took two years out of my life negotiating this particular thing and in that process, used a bit of innovation to save them about 50 or 60 million just by helping them to reframe their requirements. But I think the thing I liked most about PA consulting, bizarrely, was I used to run a program called Essential Consulting Skills and would work with the junior consultants to help them become better at consulting. Again, running the leadership training and the problem solving training. What I found is so often people forget the problem, they rush straight to a solution. Let’s get this thing solved without working out what the problem is. That’s a real part of innovation.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): It can be frustrating as well, sometimes for some of us who have a career in consulting. The fact that sometimes you do a lot of things, but you probably missed the target.
Mark Neild (Grow Inspires): Absolutely. So, you put in place a solution that doesn’t actually achieve any outcomes, that’s the danger. So, part of my innovation love was to help folks to focus on the problem, because if you don’t know what it is, you can’t solve it so you just put a sticking plaster on something but the real problem doesn’t go away. The other joy again, it is the quiet people. What Belbin would describe as the plants, the people who have got all the ideas but don’t always have the share of voice, and helping them to be heard was the big part of what we did on Essential Consulting skills, because consulting is in many ways quite an intellectual but also quite a people focused aspect. Getting the ideas out is really important rather than being shouted over by the people who again are very noisy, out there and not at all shy, not necessarily thinking before they speak.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): True. How did you make the transition from consulting to social enterprise and particularly this company, your organisation? I am and certainly others would be curious about the shift. How did the shift happen and what prompted you to feel like maybe now is the right time to make this transition?
Mark Neild (Grow Inspires): Let me explain that. So, I was looking to do an executive coaching qualification and was struggling a little bit for clients to do this, so I volunteered with a charity called Grow Movement. Grow Movement essentially do Skype coaching for micro enterprises in Africa, working in Uganda, Rwanda and Malawi. I got onto this and I was working with a chap called Douglas who, to this day, I’ve never met face to face, we’ve only spoken electronically. I started working with him and I had all these preconceptions about Africa that there were poor people that were a bit clueless, needed our pity and us to save them. Then I met Douglas and I realised this is a bright, articulate person who’s just got no resources and if I can help him to see some of those entrepreneurial skills, then away he goes. The big eye opener for me was that it’s very easy to dismiss people into a bucket who just need to be pitied and helped when actually they might need a bit of help but what they really need is to be helped to achieve their own potential because the potential is there. That, to me, was a real eye opener. I thought here’s me, the big management consultant, I know everything. Actually working with him and taking away the relationship whereby you are in control and you’re just working with someone entirely as an equal, it’s a whole different ball game and it’s a very humbling experience and was a massive education for me. What I saw having done several of these was people that we were working with were not to be pitied. They were just to be given some resources that some of the rest of us take for granted and if they had those resources, then they could flourish. That got me thinking, well, there’s lots of people out there who just need a little bit of help to become the people that they can be when the systems in society don’t necessarily allow that to happen.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Yes, I definitely agree. The company itself, so, how did it become something you felt like this is the specific mission I want? Beyond that experience, the moment you told yourself, this is what I’m going to create to fix this problem — was there a particular trigger?
Mark Neild (Grow Inspires): Yes, well that was in a way. So, having volunteered for the Growth Movement and having failed to keep my mouth shut, I ended up becoming a trustee and later the chairman of the charity. The thing that frustrated me most about the charity sector was actually getting funding. The thing that was bugging me most is that a lot of the funders, the people who had the money just had completely the wrong attitude and were much more about this pity business. They were much more about helping the poor people, the drama triangle, the rescuer syndrome, if you’re familiar with that. I just couldn’t get to them the fact that actually these were very capable people. I didn’t want to just write begging letters for this, that and the other. So, I thought the only way around this is to set up a social venture and try to get to the point of being self-funded. So, that’s really what formed the genesis for Grow Inspires to be a social venture rather than a charity. Then we once worked with the USO to do some work with people in Bangladesh and we had some volunteers from Rolls Royce on that grad scheme to try to help the folks in Bangladesh setting up some businesses as a trial. Then I met with my current business partner, O’Leary, who’s an ex-offender and we started to work in the UK with ex-offenders. Again, the thing about that was all of these people were kind of written off. People say to them ‘you’ll never amount to very much’ and yet, if you can get their innermost capabilities out and turn them into products for customers, then it’s amazing what they can do. One of the guys who I’ve worked with, an ex-drug dealer, he was the most fabulous persuader of people. I guess it goes with the turf if you’re a drug dealer, but by helping him to have the confidence and also to start to see things from the other side, he was able to develop the most amazing partnership. So, this is a guy who kept getting turned down — ‘you’re an ex-offender we can’t possibly fund you’. So, we helped him to partner with someone and he’s now running a six-figure business. This is about 18 months on this because he had this amazing talent. He just didn’t know how to direct it. I worked with folks like that all the time. Another one who’s been long-term unemployed living in a caravan and he has this amazing talent for understanding what you’re looking for. So, when he does graphic design, it’s right first time because he’s just seeing what you want and he’s created it. Now that, to me, is an amazingly rare talent and yet most people write him off because he looks a bit unorthodox. But so what, why not?
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Yes, so in terms of the organisations you work with, how do you engage with them? It was the idea here to provide an overview on ideas about the ecosystem and who you reach out to and what’s the approach that you use to engage with those stakeholders.
Mark Neild (Grow Inspires): Yes okay, so in terms of working with ex-offenders, we’ve had a huge challenge working with the Ministry of Justice. We’ve had long discussions without getting into the details of the whole transforming rehabilitation thing, which for those of you who don’t know, basically was a great idea to privatise probation, and it’s been wound back because it was a complete and utter failure. That has really caused us some big difficulties because probation would be the obvious people for us to work with, but they’ve been not in evidenced. So, we worked hard at getting them to refer but in the end, we end up working with the Jobcentre.
So, we do work with the department for work pensions. We were about to get a big contract and then this magical thing called Covid came in the way and they cancelled everything. They basically hunkered down, shut up all the Jobcentres, and they were spending their whole time processing benefits claims for all the people who would be made redundant or lost their work. So, we finally got onto what they call their dynamic purchasing system, which is an amazingly complicated way of buying small pieces of work. We’re hoping that we’re going to get permission from them on that. We’ve had some funding from the lottery, but essentially we’ve done mostly volunteering in the Jobcentre and working again with people who they call ‘have complex barriers to employment’, which means that they’re misunderstood. If we can help to understand them and help them to show the real depth that they’ve got to the public, to people who might buy stuff from them, then they can go from strength to strength. So, we created this program called Phoenix, which is literally helping people to rise up from the ashes and to blossom.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): What about women and young people? What do you see in terms of the needs are there? Obviously, you mentioned earlier this person who works as a carpenter and is faced with adversity, basically. What about women in general? Where do you think or there’s still a strong stigma, despite all the progress society is making? We have in the US a team involving Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and this is sending a message to the world. Where do you think we still have a long way to go, particularly about women and young people?
Mark Neild (Grow Inspires): I think particularly in the case of women, they are obviously the people who take most of the responsibility for childcare, and that creates a lot of fear amongst employers that they’ll get started, they’ll be working for a couple of weeks and then they’ll go off forever on maternity leave. Well, I mean, to a certain extent that is true and that is inevitable and I can understand from an employer’s perspective the fear of that. But at the same time, if you just write them off, then we are losing a huge amount of talent and skill there. In particular, women generally tend to be more empathetic than men. Men tend to be more competitive and we’re moving into a world where empathy is becoming more important.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Do you think this is a bias, is it backed by research or is it something that’s widely observed because what I’m thinking of right now is that some women may be thinking, who tells you that women are not competitive and are more empathetic to men, for example?
Mark Neild (Grow Inspires): There is definitely some research and I mean, it goes back, I believe we’re going back to the fact that the men always went out to do the hunting and the gathering and the women would stay by the fireplace, keeping the home fires burning and all the rest and looking after the kids. They do it much more collectively, whereas there was always this business of the alpha male. So, there’s quite a lot of evidence now to show that on many measures, women are more empathic, they communicate better so there is a lot of value in all of that. I think, I am for equality, but I don’t think that means we should be assumed to be exactly the same because we’re not, we’ve all got different skills. It’s dangerous to generalise about these things because you could be accused of bigotry and all sorts of things. But I think I am constantly amazed by some of the skills that would implement what I do amongst women. So, they happily work with them and I think for many of them, when they are looking after children in particular, they need something else to do because being a mother isn’t the only thing that defines them.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Great. Please, go ahead.
Mark Neild (Grow Inspires): I was going to say the other thing I’ve observed, working particularly with women entrepreneurs in Africa, is that where the men will quite often make some money and they’ll go out and spend it, women will save it and they will make sure that it goes into their children’s education to give them the chances that maybe they liked. So, again, this is quite well known in the international development area.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Do you think this is a stigma then, affecting men if men are generally portrayed as these gender, who would earn money and spend it on the spot same day and then struggle and put their families in serious difficulties? Did you think this could also be a stigma men are faced with when we assume this as there are men who are actually very responsible?
Mark Neild (Grow Inspires): Of course there are and again, of course I make no apologies for generalising and I’m not suggesting that all women do this and all men do that because that is far from the case. It’s not like we’ve got a positive and negative and there’s no middle ground. Most of us will be on a continuum somewhere between the extreme competitive and extreme narcissistic to the extreme empathic. So, all I would say is that towards the empathy scale it is more heavily weighted towards women and towards the aggressive and competitive scale is more heavily weighted towards men, but we get some very aggressive women around and in a way, they have to out-aggress men to get to the top of the tree. Sometimes, they’re just amazingly aggressive and that’s not necessarily their nature. It’s the only way they can survive in a world that is still very much dominated by men.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): How about young people and the need for them to be supported by the entire ecosystem and be enabled empowered to access jobs eventually better jobs that correspond to what they actually aspire to? This global challenge, which is becoming an increasing issue, as in some parts of the world, young people are set to become the majority in others, that they already are the majority because of all the progress we’ve made in science, etc. So, what do you think of this need for us as a society to take this issue seriously and empower the youth, enabling them to access jobs, created first by society and our various sectors and industries?
Mark Neild (Grow Inspires): I think the world is changing quite rapidly. In the days of old, in the industrial area, if I can call it that, the need for experience in many ways is paramount. But now we’re moving into a world which is moving a lot quicker, where the need for innovation is far more paramount than the need for experience. So, a lot of the stigma that’s attached to young people is that they’re not capable of working because they don’t have the experience of working in the workplace. Now, my big counterargument to that is, the problem with lots of experience working in workplaces is you get set in your ways and it becomes incredibly difficult to change. So, I’m looking forward to taking on four people actually across my two businesses who are aged between 18 and 24. And what I want from them is their creativity. I don’t want their experience. I want them to show me how they would solve the problem that I’m facing in the hope that maybe they’d say to me, ‘well look, have you thought about it this way?’, the chances are I haven’t. So, they’ve got enquiring minds. Also, most of them are particularly good at digital in a way that maybe more senior generations are not so therefore helping them to do things like social media. So, they’ve got some innate skills that I think they’re being undervalued because they don’t have five years on their CV saying they’ve done exactly the same thing. So, if we can see them as creative resources, as counterpoints possibly to those of us who’ve become set in our ways, potentially, then I think we can realise a lot more of the potential rather than saying, ‘well, you haven’t got five years working with this particular product, so therefore we can’t possibly know anything’.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Yeah, I do agree with you regarding this being, let’s say, the overarching issue or challenge that we need to fix in terms of our thinking. But more practically, what do you think are the barriers young people are faced with in terms of very practically think of this young person with a background of living in the inner cities and not being equipped with these other types of skills and eventually in terms of training they receive and these sometimes not matching the demand or is it just a shortage of opportunities and the challenges as well they are faced with when it comes to the right people being presented the right opportunities? So, to structure this, what do you think are the main challenges? Maybe we could take it from the perspective of economic, social, political challenges, environmental opportunities. So what do you see as challenges and opportunities for young people to access effective jobs created for them?
Mark Neild (Grow Inspires): So, I think there were a number of things here. I think the first one is about our education. I think one of the fundamental challenges with the way we do education in this country and in many other places of the world is a very narrow view of what attainment looks like. Your success is measured by the number of GCSEs or A Levels you’ve got and I think there’s so much more to people than a piece of paper with a bunch of numbers or letters on it. It’s just the wrong way of looking at things. Again, it’s all there about working out who should or shouldn’t go to university, because what use is an A Level apart from to put on your UCAS form to get into university? I know a lot of people who have just checked out of that system. I’ve got one of the guys who I mentored actually, he couldn’t get through his GCSE’s and then he got into a gang, got into a lot of trouble. He distanced himself from the social norms, got himself into trouble and ended up in prison for quite a long period of time. Now, I’m not going to condone the behaviour that got him there, but I would say the education system failed him to the extent that he’s now doing an Open University degree and he’s getting 80 and 90 percent in all of his assignments. So, this is a boy who couldn’t apparently get a GCSE. What does that tell you about whether the GCSE is a good measure of folks who have real attainment and it’s not about vocational stuff it is also considered to be very much second class and I think that’s absolutely wrong.
If you look at the way the Germans do it, they really value their engineers as opposed to us having much more value the professionals. Actually, engineering is where all the problems are solved and that’s where a lot of the value is created, not just the service industry. So, I think we have some structural problems in that we’re valuing the wrong things. We would rather have someone who could measure things than someone who can do things and that is not a sustainable way of running a society. So, I think if we look much more broadly at what young people can offer, that would be tremendously useful. The other thing is we measure things very much in economic terms and we think about what contribution someone could make to the place of work. What we don’t think about is the downside of not being able to make a contribution and the fact that sometimes they’re going to rebel against that. Sometimes we’re going to get folks who are just so excluded that they take the law into their own hands because they don’t think that society is for them. So, they rebel against it and the downside of that in terms of shattered lives and all sorts of things like that is huge. So, I have got a huge amount of respect for the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and some of the programmes he’s putting in place to help that, because I think he realises there is a real danger with it, that there will be a forgotten generation who have just fallen out of education at the wrong time and they’ve been left on the scrapheap from which they can’t escape because two years later they’ll be people who’ve just left school and move straight into a job and there is a huge danger that we end up with this kind of forgotten two years of people who just move gradually, getting older and never getting any opportunities.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Yes and what do you think are the opportunities for us as a society and for young people, maybe opportunities already existing? Basically the work that has been done and opportunities for us to create to really move forward, obviously, you mentioned a number of programs which the government has been implementing, Kickstart is one of them, but there are a few others. So, taking a step back, what do you think if there were two or three things, that would be your suggestion for anyone, any policymakers to consider in terms of concrete programs or policies?
Mark Neild (Grow Inspires): I absolutely think that enterprise is a big part to all of this and I think a lot of people see enterprise and self-employment is effectively becoming self-supporting through your own efforts, and that is definitely part of it. But if you look at the surveys of what makes people become entrepreneurs, by far the biggest factor in four or five different studies is self-actualisation. The ability for people to be who they are rather than trying to fit into a stereotypical job that doesn’t necessarily suit them. So, this is what I found with enterprise and all the work that I’ve been doing. It isn’t about getting people the ability to make money. That comes, but what it does is it allows them to be themselves. It allows authenticity. It allows people to develop their own unique potential rather than trying to fit in the mould created for them by somebody else and that, to me, is where the opportunities lie, because we as a society and a world face huge challenges in terms of climate change, inequality and poverty. The list goes on and if you look at the sustainable development goals you get clues as to all the stuff that needs doing and maybe the young folks are the ones to do it. Maybe they’ve got the will, and I certainly see that with students who I work with, there are four innovation students. They are all about sustainability and they’re very happy to create programs that will help that to happen. So, why don’t we let these folks do some of that? If the only way of doing that is to let them bound together and form their own world, then let’s give them the help to do it because I firmly believe the next generation are much more likely to solve the world’s problems than the current one.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Definitely. Thank you very much, Mark, for this very interesting conversation. I really enjoyed it. I hope our audience have also enjoyed it and we hope this is the first, but not the last time we have you here with us to share about the amazing work you’re doing with great social impact, helping people facing adversities to fix their lives and get into sustainable jobs, be proud of themselves and be good contributors to society. So, we could wrap up, unless you have a specific question or contribution or something you think of which we’ve not covered yet.
Mark Neild (Grow Inspires): No, I think we’ve covered quite a lot in this actually. Thank you for the opportunity to speak passionately about some of the stuff that I do and the stuff that I really believe in, because I think we’re missing a trick here.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): I’m really amazed by your career journey, the impact you have in the transition you’ve made from consulting to social impact, social enterprise and I’m sure this will inspire many people and beyond this. Thank you very much for what you’re doing and see you very soon.
Mark Neild (Grow Inspires): Okay, thank you. Bye.
