Speak with One Voice - Part1

Since starting my research into regenerative business in February 2023, three things have struck me:

1. The enormity and scope of this multi-faceted research challenge. I naively expected it to last three or so months; I’m now in month fifteen, and I’ve only scratched the surface.
2. There is an ever-growing fragmented cacophony of movements and institutes, each advocating their selected path for a better, fairer, and more sustainable future for civilisation before it’s too late. This fragmentation is a significant weakness because of my next observation.
3. An absence of public interest, as citizens barely see the relevance in their lives. Most movements appear to be speaking to the converted. Sadly, despite their noble intent and content, their communications are just white noise or a minor case of tinnitus to the general population. Instead, most people’s attention, except for hermits, monks and the sick, is fed a daily diet of economic woes, wars, wokism, local disasters, and political platitudes.

There is rarely any positive news and no vision of what the world could be or should be. And, even if occasionally, the public’s attention is grabbed by global warming and climate change, most feel that they lack any agency or know-how at the individual, family, or community levels to make a significant difference. Upcoming general and local elections provide a vestigial whiff of agency, a heavily diluted democratic power. It’s just how the world is for the majority — a daily treadmill with occasional sparks of enjoyment that temporarily mask their anxieties about their futures.

But it doesn’t have to be like that.

While time may not be on our side, there is much that we can do to shift the global mindset from despair to hope.

A hope that the late R. Buckminster Fuller articulated so eloquently way back in 1969:

‘To make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone.’¹

His vision in the Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth encompassed humanity, planetary health and biosystem services, and the essential components of collaboration and fairness for everyone. Creating a better world where everyone wins and the world is repaired and reinvigorated. A Heaven on Earth.

This sounds like common ground among all movements — a rallying call. However, we need a louder, more compelling, cheerful voice to capture everyone’s attention and convert individual paralysis into Buckminster Fuller’s spontaneous cooperation.

Stop Oil is a classic example. Their disruptive, puerile actions just irritate the public, and if I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d suspect they were bankrolled by the companies they claim to oppose.

Mostly, western vested interests are masters at extracting and protecting their ever-growing wealth. They are modern-day pirates and alchemists, but no one seems to notice as they operate in the arcane world of private equity and opaque finance.

As economist Marjorie Kelly forcefully pointed out in her book Wealth Supremacy,³ neoliberalism’s true nature is its insatiable extractive greed through the financialisation of the Commons. She cites findings from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System that US financial assets were five times the size of the nation’s GDP. That’s parasitic wealth extraction on a stratospheric scale.

Worse and suitably wrapped in green jargon, Wall Street turned its attention to natural assets and ecosystem services as the next outrageous piracy of the Commons. This will be accomplished through the vehicle of Natural Asset Companies (NACs).

It sounds harmless enough, but the idea behind it is to acquire the rights to natural resources like water, forests, farmlands, fisheries and the like. Set up NACs sponsored by huge corporate investors worldwide and rent natural assets back to communities that have owned them for generations. The financial prize is massive.

According to the NYSE, natural assets produce around $125 trillion annually from the world’s ecosystem services. Fortunately, this new asset class proposal was withdrawn in January 2024. The reason was not given, but the likelihood is one or two sharp-witted observers like Margaret Byfield, Executive Director at American Stewards of Liberty. Her article in RealClear Markets, December 2023,⁴ drew attention to the underlying threat:

''If this Proposed Rule is finalised, private investors who have neither America’s best interests nor the public’s economic well-being in mind would be handed both.''

Nevertheless, the spectre remains. These extractive and piratical alchemists will return, especially if the public, oblivious of this financial trickery, remains ambivalent.

To a great extent, this already happened in the UK when publicly owned water companies were sold off in 1989 to foreign investors that extracted around £75bn and provided little infrastructure investment. Instead, hiking water prices and routinely polluting water courses with untreated effluent. The UK press covered this travesty extensively in March of this year. Apart from a few diehard campaigners, the public has barely whimpered. Perhaps the worm will finally turn once water bills rise by the anticipated 40%-70% to pay for remedial work that should have been carried out over the last thirty-five years. The Consumer Council for Water (CCW) report⁵ found that only 16% of consumers felt that the increases were justified.

The point is that even when the public is hit in the pocket, it barely squeaks in protest. We’ve become too accepting of the status quo. How, then, are we to change the prevailing mindset from grudging acquiescence to active concern? How do we overcome this collective Stockholm syndrome?

                                           Primary focus of influencers Source: Orbis Sacri

So far, I have identified fifty-one influencer organisations with global reach. I’m sure there are many more, probably at least double the number.

The doughnut chart ( a nod to Kate Raworth) illustrates the primary focus of the fifty-one influential organisations. As they all recognise the importance of a holistic and systems view of the challenges, most will also have other areas of interest. A complete list of these organisations and their areas of interest can be found in the appendix.

As expected, the majority (45%) are primarily concerned with climate change and the biosphere. That provides the fundamental context for regenerative economics (19%) and regenerative business (12%). Fighting injustice, while a smaller percentage (8%), is a universal concern of almost all organisations, as the poor and powerless suffer the greatest impact from climate, food security, and the modern piracy/alchemy outlined above. There is, therefore, considerable common ground between all influential movements.

If there are a hundred or so influential global movements, it is reasonable to assume there are probably another five hundred to a thousand regionally focused organisations — perhaps a thousand times that number of community movements — maybe a hundred thousand plus and growing.

That represents an enormous well of influence that needs some mechanism to channel and amplify their messages so that everyone at a local level feels involved and becomes engaged.

So, what might that mechanism be, and how might it work to counter the extractive forces and harness the voice of ordinary people?

On a recent members’ call at WEALL (Wellbeing for All), Stewart Wallis, Executive Chair, explained that he came to a similar conclusion that movements were fragmented and lacked a voice with sufficient punch to change the minds of policymakers and the public. He felt that every movement should get behind a common vision. In terms of a common ‘flag’, he was taken by the title Ecological Civilisation, a term first coined in 1984 by a Soviet environmentalist and since used by various ecological authors and, according to Wikipedia,⁶ a national development goal of the Chinese Communist Party.

My view is that the term is opaque from the public’s perspective but worthy of debate among movements if they can develop some form of collective council. 

Wallis also warned against the formation of a hierarchical movement of movements at a global level, as that would likely disenfranchise regional and local voices. A potential mirror organisation to the UN.

Decades studying and participating in corporate enterprises, I’ve noticed that over time and chiefly through rigid hierarchies, they often become sclerotic and cannot cope with the accelerated pace of change. I see no reason to believe that a movement of movements wouldn’t suffer the same fate.

So what might work?

A decentralised, collaborative network has distinct advantages over traditional hierarchies. If we take a leaf out of nature’s book, fractals scale up and down, exhibiting the same pattern at the macro and micro scales.

In our world of the human collaborative network, if we embed an agreed-upon visionary purpose in the ‘pattern’, it will be faithfully replicated at the local, regional, and global levels. This has the advantage of accelerated co-innovation, addressing local needs, and developing and sharing knowledge.

In Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) International Business article: Why Global Companies Need to Become Fractal Innovators by Arindam Bhattacharya et al., January 2023,⁷ the authors highlighted the advantages of fractal organisations over traditional ones. Rather than produce one-size-fits-all for global markets to minimise costs, a fractal organisation, which can include ecosystem partners, can create innovative products that neatly fit local needs.