Atelier WeekNotes w/c 8 July 2024
INITIATIVES -Event: 'Exploring What's Next: generating a better future'. -Influential Trajectories. -Hard Investigations: a recovering technocrat reflects.
I am writing newsletter of #weeknotes of starting the Atelier of What’s Next (a studio for initiatives at the frontier of generating a better future). For my rationale for starting the Atelier see here.
This week covers:
INITIATIVES
-Event: 'Exploring What's Next: generating a better future'.
-Influential Trajectories.
-Hard Investigations: a recovering technocrat reflects.
How can the Atelier of What's Next be of service to you, and your purposes? We'd love to hear from you. Perhaps you have a challenge or idea to put in the studio. Maybe one of our existing topics appeals to you. What if you love to make new things happen by being part of the studio? Or if you have feedback or comments that would improve this deck. Either click the button below or email davidbent@atelierwhatsnext.org.
INITIATIVES
Event: 'Exploring What's Next: generating a better future'
I'm delighted to say that I have been invited to give a seminar by the Wellington School of Business and Government, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. It is being co-hosted by Institute of Public Administration New Zealand (IPANZ).
The date: Wed 7 August, 5pm local time (which is 6am in the UK). I will be in Wellington in person, as part of 4 week tri with my children. About one week of that will be work; the rest holiday.
You can register for the event here. To my amazement, it is already full for in-person (though we might see if there is another room).
The invitation came from Prof Jonathan Boston, who used to be Director of the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies. He is now focused on the governance issues around climate adaptation. I spoke with him during his recent visit to London.
Like any talk, this is a chance to work through some ideas (which others stay half-formed in my head) and test them with an engaged audience.
You won't be surprised that the content is about applying cutting-edge ideas about social-economic transformation. I'm creatig a format which is more than just Important Person Tells You Things. There will be a chance for people to apply for their own work.
Key parts of the blurb:
We are living in a time of connected, escalating crises, of which climate change is but one example. The normal way of doing things is both a cause of these crises, and a barrier to moving ahead. How can we go about transforming our social, political and economic context?
Our speaker, David Bent, is an international strategy adviser, catalyst and facilitator on sustainability. During his brief visit to Aotearoa NZ, he will share stories, methods and lessons from his attempts at socio-economic transformation.
Attendees will be able to ask questions of David and a chance to apply some of the latest transformation theories to their own work and practices – this forms a significant part of the seminar.
I haven't fully worked out what I'm going to say yet. I'll be building on my March 2023 talk in conversation with the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources:
My experience of the recent history of corporate sustainability. Roughly:
2003-2006: 'Be responsible and stop the negative impact!'
2006-2013: 'The issues will come and get you!"
2013-onwards: 'System change not climate change'
The only viable story of the future is transformation (and 'postgrowth' isn't enough).
We will need to learn our way into transformations.
Let's imagine there is a emerging 'transformative practice', as described by a Depth of Change Spectrum.
There is a response to our situation which is more than 'Strong Reform', uses the insights of ‘Radical Resistance’ but not retreating to 'Make Good Ruins'. I'm giving that strategy zone the working title of 'Deep Transformation'.
While Strong Reform is necessary, and Make Good Ruins a legitimate back-up, I think we need to develop more and more initiatives in this Deep Transformation zone.
Let's imagine we can shape the future by combining the analytical scaffolding of transition theory with the art of possibility. Aka Influential Trajectories.
Just writing that out tells me two things:
Need stories to illustrate, not just theory to advocate.
Too long!
Ans so the writing process begins.
WHAT NEXT. Write the talk!
Influential Trajectories
An update about the Influential Trajectories method. First a reminder:
Purpose: To create shared commitment to investments and initiatives that drive towards ambitious outcomes.
How: Imagine different trajectories from today to a future goal together (informed by latest systems transition theories), test each to see if the pre-conditions for exist, and then invest based on the results.
Acknowledgment. We are very grateful for the opportunity provided by Sustainable Shipping Initiative, and funding from Lloyd's Register Foundation, for the first pilot use in the State of Sustainable Shipping (SoSS).
I had to walk a group of people through the Influential Trajectories approach. We are planning to use it with [currently redacted] bank, on electrifying the major economic sector of an OECD nation.
Good news: I have better slides to introduce the entire thing. Also, I have the start of the collateral needed for workshops: possible playing cards for the systems thinking elements, draft templates for caturing what people come up with. Also, a real deadline for turning those into an agenda and other real things for a first use.
Bad news: the clock is ticking. Still in the messy creative period.
WHAT NEXT. Create a workshop pack.
Hard Investigations: a recovering technocrat reflects
In the last WeekNotes, here I mentioned Hard Investigations, an off-shoot of Hard Art, 'a cultural collective standing in solidarity in the face of climate and democratic collapse'. Hard Investigations is the think tank / publishing house / some'rt (we are still figuring out what the right category is) that dives into difficult questions in ways that aim to shift the mainstream cultural narrative, all as a precursor to wider transformation.
In the week just gone I was working with the rest of the Hard Investigations team on, well, I can't really say. But I can share some reflections.
I left university in 1998, having done a 4 year course. Most of my friends did a 3 year course, and so were looking for jobs in the summer of 1997. Just after New Labour were elected in a landslide. Being publicly minded, many of my friends went into the civil service.
It was a moment when change felt possible. And that there was a government which prized what worked over a blinkered preference for only markets, or only for the state. We didn't know at the time that the Third Way would play out as Thatcherism which took the edge off things without addressing deep structural challenges.
I had a period of accountancy (as I said to my friends at the time, I wasn't selling my soul, just mortgaging it for a while), and then joined Forum for the Future in 2003.Â
Forum itself had been started in 1996. The co-founders all had a campaigning background, and had spent the previous 15 years battling against the status quo.
Forum was deliberately different: an NGO which partnered with incumbent businesses and public bodies for wider change. It was a manifestation of that Third Way moment, and rode that wave.
Very nearly all of my milieu also became technocrats for change, whether in the civil service, think tanks, charities, regulators and so on.
The folks in Hard Investigation are, mostly, of a similar age but with a very different life path. More art schools and design colleges. More campaigning and activism. More solidarity. They have retained and honed that edge, that hardness (the clue is in the name), that resolve.
So, I find myself coming across to them as the Centrist Dad of the group, the least radical, the most compromising, and least likely to use the word 'solidarity'. I find this amusing as in most other situations I am the most radical voice.
It's been 27 years since New Labour came in. It is hard to argue that the technocratic approach was successful. Or will be with the new Labour government now.
Until 2016, I had hoped that there could be a smooth-ish transition. The referendum and the US election knocked that for six. I was realising that technocratic-led change wouldn't work.
At the same time, I'm still trained by, honed by, my experiences of being an advisor in the technocrat style. It is difficult to step out of that suit.
The purpose of Hard Art (and Hard Investigation) is inspired by many things, including the Buckminster Fuller quote:
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
So, they are not just campaigning against the status quo, they are wanting to construct a better alternative.
This was one of the things I was trying to articulate (to myself, if no one else) in the Depth of Change spectrum. Strong Reform, while necessary, is not enough. Radical Resistance is insightful, but can't build a different future. There is a zone beyond both, using insights from both, which is where we need to be acting and being. At least, that's my intuition.
All of which means that I'm appreciating the Hard Investigations as expanding my domain of practice. It is a test of whether I can bring the right elements of that technocratic training, and grow other faculties.
Added after the email version went out:
A difference I have noticed between the activist types and the recovering technocrats is the move into, well, action. The recovering technocrats (of whom I am one, of course) have a habit of focussing on ‘about the about’, for instance trying to define terms like ‘narrative’ perfectly, or getting to better questions.
The Hard Investigations people do ‘go meta’ a bit, but then try stuff out. They move quickly into probing whether the new thinking might work in practice.
At the risk of writing ‘about the about’. this very much reminds me of the different modes describe in the Cynefin Framework.
Technocrats are used to a Complicated situation, where you can analyse to come to good practices.
The Activists operating as if we are in a Complex situation, which is too unknowable for analysis (at least yet). Instead you have to experiment forward (which might mean you can turn what was complex into complicated).
Below is the diagram also from the talk I gave to UCL ISR in March 2023, on how we will need to learn our way into transformation.
WHAT NEXT. More working as part of the Hard Investigations team.