Towards a ‘learning city’
Town &
Country Planning, August 1999
Something rather strange is happening in the
world of international business, and it's all the fault of
the management guru Peter Drucker.
It was Drucker who first coined the phrase 'knowledge workers' and sent the business world on a helter-skelter race to invent what is known these days as 'knowledge management'.
Drucker tells a story about an American defence contractor in the 1980s which wanted to identify what kind of information was needed to do the job well.
"The search for answers soon revealed that whole layers of management - perhaps as many as six out of a total of fourteen - existed only because these questions had not been asked before," he wrote. The rest is history - or down-sizing, at least.
And suddenly most European companies are spending around five per cent of their revenue on this kind of knowledge management. There are strange and highly-paid new job titles like 'Chief Knowledge Officer' or 'Learning Manager', whose task it is to find the know-how, count it and turn it into revenue.
When as much as 96 per cent of the stock market value of a company like Microsoft is made up - not from fixed assets - but from know-how, brand loyalty and information, then knowledge is suddenly the key factor in wealth. No wonder so many companies are trying to turn themselves into 'learning organisations'.
This revolution has yet to translate itself properly into planning terms, but it is worth asking ourselves what a place might be like if it tried to transform itself into a 'learning city', and used these new know-how assets as a base from which to bring in the money. The process hasn't gone beyond setting up universities and science parks and hoping for the best, which still excludes most of the populace - which is not something the multinationals do with most of their employees.
The so-called learning organisations are all about finding the assets they already have, measuring them and enhancing them. It's about building capacity, and you do that - according to the Forum for the Future's local economy programme - by building up a 'mosaic', made up of a mixture of training and capacity building, access to local credit, community business and so on.
This is what Lesley Harding from Forum for the Future told me: "The important thing is that these elements, small in isolation, add up to something much greater than the sum of their parts. Together they build up the capacity of a local economy from within."
They can also, incidentally, offer a lasting counterbalance to the traditional zero-sum competition for inward investment.
What brings this rather broad topic into the remit of this column is because, if cities follow the learning company approach, they start measuring as assets things they have never noticed before. Or certainly never measured - like social capital. Like the ability of people in neighbourhoods to look after each other.
Just one example. With the help of the Kings Fund and others, the New Economics Foundation is setting up a time bank at the Rushey Green Health Centre in London's Lewisham neighbourhood. That means people can earn time money for the contribution they make, visiting, giving lifts, teaching and much else besides.
But it also means that if what a patient really needs is company, or the chance to get out once in a while - things which are normally way beyond the public budget to provide, and not generally very useful when they do - then they can simply write out a prescription for the time bank.
When you measure these things, in other words, they turn into assets. They also turn into assets which you used to use money for, or which money can't provide.
Chaos theory seems to imply, not just that butterflies change weather patterns, but that the more complex a system is, the more it can adapt and grow. It's the same with cities. If you create those networks, somehow the wealth seems to emerge.
That's the truth which the learning companies are struggling towards. So here's my prediction. It won't be long before the new generation of city 'mayors' start talking in very similar language to CEOs in Fortune magazine, and finding systems to "release the value" in their organisations. They mean assets beyond wealth, we all know that. But they also mean money.
It's time for cities to discover the information age, where information is the new money. That means, if you put learning at the heart of your operation, the money follows. It turns things upside down.
David Boyle is an associate of the New Economics Foundation and the author of Funny Money (www.funny-money.co.uk)
