Atelier WeekNotes TIPC / Deep Transition Lab conference
Influential Trajectories: invitation to test a user's guide. TIPC / Deep Transitions conference.
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.
At the tail end of last week I was in Barcelona for a conference organised by the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (aka TIPC, pronounced as if a bit drunk, 'tipsy') and the Deep Transitions Lab. It was a rich experience and I have many reflections. So many that it gets its own WeekNote. Huzza!
This week covers:
ANNOUNCEMENT Influential Trajectories: invitation to test a user's guide
The conference
-Introduction
-Second Deep Transition: like the Industrial Revolution, only more so.
-Focusing on degrowth or postgrowth is a serious mistake.
-Lessons from TIPC initiative: Field-building
-Global finance: can neoliberalism's enforcer become sustainability's enabler?
-Where's the cultural / worldview / ontological layer?
-What next?
This newsletter is too long for some email accounts. You can read it online here.
ANNOUNCEMENT
Influential Trajectories: invitation to test a user's guide
In the coming weeks I will be writing an Influential Trajectories users guide, as an output of the work with the Sustainable Shipping Initiative. I'd love to test (drafts of) the user's guide. If that could be with you or your organisation, get in touch (davidbent@atelierwhatsnext.org).
As a reminder, Influential Trajectories is a way to create shared commitment to investments and initiatives that drive towards transformative outcomes. It does this by getting many actors across a situation to imagine different trajectories from today to a future goal together (informed by latest systems transition theories). They come up with tests for each trajectory to see if the pre-conditions for exist. Then they use the evidence to create a portfolio of investments and initiatives
The key thesis is that people are more willing to commit to investments and initiatives where they have devised the test of whether to proceed themselves. ('Oh, I had thought everything was ready for Trajectory A, but it isn't. We'll just watch that. I was sceptical of Trajectory B, but it jumped my high hurdle. Let's put effort into that.')
Acknowledgement: I am very grateful for the opportunity to create the Influential Trajectories approach that was provided by Sustainable Shipping Initiative (SSI), and funding from Lloyd's Register Foundation.
If you'd like to try Influential Trajectories out -- help me write the user's guide and yourself to stir for systemic change -- then get in touch.
The conference
Introduction
In about 2010, Forum for the Future was developing a 'systems innovation' approach. One of the academic theories we leaned on heavily was then called sociotechnical transitions theory, but now is more often referred to as the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP).
(MLP short version: usually the mainstream way of doing things is doing well-enough. (Put another way, the habitual rules of the Regime level do not need large change for current incumbents to be satisfied.) Consequently, new innovations, developed in the Niche level, struggle to get widely adopted. However, when there are pressures from the wider political and economic context, or the Landscape level, then the Regime struggles and mature innovations come out of Niches and change the mainstream. More, including a case study, in this interview I did with Dr Anna Birney.)
One of the authors of the MLP is Johan Schott (wikipedia, personal website), Professor of Global History and Sustainability Transitions at the Utrecht University Centre for Global Challenges. Over the last ten years he has been at the centre of creating two initiatives (on the Atelier sense of 'deliberate attempts, usually well-bounded, to generate a better future') which bring academia out into the world, as part of having wide impact.
The oldest is the one which engages with policy makers in governments, which is the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (aka TIPC). The lessons from TIPC so far have been turned into a Resource Lab with tools, actions and learnings. The more newer one engages with investors, and is called the Deep Transitions Lab (DTL).
I attended the last day of their engagement week, which had been themed on Scaling Experimentation.
By all accounts, the previous days, for those working in TIPC and DTL, were interactive and fun. Alas, the day I attended was more a more standard academic conference: people presenting slides (often with lots of text) which were based on academic papers. (The two most common phrases: "We are very short of time, so I will be brief in what I say"* and "there's much more detail on this in the paper". Both of which manage to be true, already known to the audience, and so add no value while telling us that we are missing out on important stuff.)
As an attendee, I believe I would have got more value from not defaulting to this mainstream way approach. But hey.
Still I did get a lot of value. There were three parallel tracks (roughly: public policy; finance; and, scaling). Consequently, I only attended a third of the sessions. Other attendees would have a different experience and insights.
Second Deep Transition: like the Industrial Revolution, only more so.
Focusing on degrowth or postgrowth is a serious mistake.
Lessons from TIPC initiative: Field-building
Global finance: can neoliberalism's enforcer become sustainability's enabler?
Where's the cultural / worldview / ontological layer?
What next?
Second Deep Transition: like the Industrial Revolution, only more so.
It is worth unpacking the core thesis, taken from 'A Guide to Deep Transitions':
Definition: a series of connected individual transitions in a wide range of socio-technical systems.
These connected transitions interrelate and interdepend to inform a series of rules and meta-rules shared amongst different socio-technical systems that in turn provide the backbone of contemporary societies.
A series of transitions can be defined as one “Deep Transition” when they meet a three-point criteria:
That the related transitions change an already established and embedded set of met-rules within existing socio-technical systems.
That the changing of these meta-rules inform a new phase in the history of industrialisation, modernity or industrial consumption.
That the transitions and shift to a new phase is a gradual process taking longer than a century.
In this approach, the Industrial Revolution is the First Deep Transition. It was not just the economic layer, but the 'full stack' of layers, including power, culture, and down into fundamental beliefs about the nature of the world and humankind’s place in it.
The contention is that we have already started the Second Deep Transition:
"Beginning in the 1970s, we have witnessed a growing comprehension amongst key actors (governments, international organisations, businesses, and NGOs) that any future industrial progress must be sustainable in that it provides wealth and economic growth to all without exceeding our environment’s limits. This has led to policies and initiatives directly tackling the issues of climate change and inequality, with the most notable recent initiative being the wide-scale acceptance of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals."
Quite the contention. (Fingers crossed!) While we are in the middle of the tumult, this contention is hard to prove conclusively; we could easily be a period of Deep Regression, with the scale and complexity of global-scale society reducing significantly. (In a century's time we will be able to say for certain.)
For me, this is the kind of claim which can become more true the more we act as if it is true. Potentially, a self-fulfilling perspective, which is also part of the way I hope the Influential Trajectories method can work.
Focusing on degrowth or postgrowth is a serious mistake.
The opening key note was from the Head of Economics at Triodos Bank. He argued that we are in an unprecedented polycrisis (agree), which is being caused by economic growth (agree). Therefore, any and all types of economic growth are bad (does not logically follow at all) and the only way out is through post-growth (disagree), which is now the orientation of Triodos Bank.
His fundamental belief was that all growth curves saturate, they are S-curves, which have a slow start, a near-vertical lift-off and then a plateau. Therefore, in his view, we need to now to move into that plateau.
Some people in the audience expressed relief that at last the questioning of growth was happening. (My thought: I can't move for people shouting at each other about growth / degrowth!) The on-stage responder made some excellent rejoiners, which I'll come to.
Let's start with the describing the dynamics of the growth/degrowth debate. It is very polarised. Both sides believe their are very right, and use someone's position as proof of something important, a kind of shibboleth. For the pro-growthers (like Noah Smith here), if you're a degrowther you just don't understand people, politics or how economies function. For the degrowthers, the pro-growthers just don't understand the depth of crisis we are facing.
The result of this polarising dynamic is it is difficult to express other positions without fear of being turfed out of your in-group. As it happens, I have a different position.
>Puts on hard hat and kevlar vest<
I think both sides are a bit right, and also completely wrong. For me, degrowthers are right that the current form of dominant economic activity (which relies on both growth and being extractive of nature and people) is leading to disaster. But the growthers are right that does not mean reducing the value of economic activity is the way forward.
In other WeekNotes I've expanded on reasons why I've come to this view. To summarise:
How would any postgrowth/degrowth economic activities out-compete currently existing economic systems? (First written about here.)
Historically, growth-orientated capitalisms have been able to, well, grow. To a first approximation, non-capitalist societies either reorientate to being part of the capitalist world-system, or get colonised. See the recent Past Present Future episode on the fall of the Berlin Wall for a discussion of how most then-communist countries ended up capitalist (Easter European countries via shock therapy; China and Vietnam through internal reform).
Any large-scale alternative will need an inner dynamic, a flywheel, which delivers for citizens, draws in the resources that it needs, creates the knowhow it needs, and resists the responses of the capitalist world system.
Note that it is not enough to describe the the Doughnut of environmental limits and social floors. That tells you the boundaries within which your economic system needs to operate. That is useful! But, it does not describe the inner dynamic by which that system succeeds, and not just on its own terms, but in terms which means it can at the least hold capitalist alternatives at arms' length (better: convert capitalist activities into your postgrowth/degrowth ones).
How would a degrowth/postgrowth economic system endure when there are distruptions and bad actors? (First written about here.)
Even if many of the largest players accepted rules and discipline, it would not take many bad actors to free ride. International law did not stop Russia from invading Ukraine. What would stop Russia from keeping to producing oil and gas, and selling it on a black market? Or any of the other petrostates, which are currently very dependent on fossil fuels? As the polycrisis deepens, and societies are hit by extreme events and chronic trends, how will any international law or other disciplines be maintained?
Are there really natural limits, so that humankind will have to plateau, defined by unchangable scientific realities for all forms of human society? (First written about here and here)
Common assertion: infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet. Ergo, degrowth/postgrowth is a scientific requirement. QED.
Except, how true is that? We know that the Earth has gone from no life to teeming with life in the last 4.5 billion years. And that nature has more than recovered from at least 5 mass extinction events. What evolution can always find a way? What if the planetary boundaries changed over time, based on the capability of nature?
Put another way, what were the Planetary Boundaries 600 million years ago? If nature had kept to those limits, would we have had the Cambrian Explosion, which led to dinosaurs, mammals and, eventually, humans?
After all, our planet is not finite. Well, yes it is finite in the materials that are here (barring the odd meteorite in and spaceship out). But, on long timescales, our planet is receiving a nigh-on infinite amount of energy from the sun.
We have billions of years of evidence that the energy input allows nature to keep on converting 'dead' matter into living organisms, and also keep going with the random walks of evolution, generating new species and ecosystems over time. (Ironically, here capitalism and nature share a dynamic: bringing adjacencies inside and converting them.)
Hence, the speaker's belief that we must be on an S-curve, and a plateau must come soon, is, in my view, extremely flawed. I think that nature's own performance over time shows that "infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet" is wrong in some very important ways.
Yes, infinite extractive growth is not possible on this planet, because it undermines the natural basis on which humankind relies. But what if human activity does not undermine the natural basis on which humankind relies? Why would there be a limit on the financial value of such human activity? Then what limits us is our alignment with nature, not nature's current limits.
Of course, it might turn out to be impossible to for us to go from where we are today into large and complex societies that can co-evolve with nature. But the limitation there is humankind's capacity to change, not planetary boundaries.
How can we build allies between many actors, especially from the Global South?
This is the excellent point the responder made. As Martin Wolf put it, in a column about the supposed middle-income trap, "Which of these middle-income countries will accept such stagnation [of degrowth]? Will India?".
At this point, degrowthers say: we only mean rich countries. Which is fine. But another sign that they have chosen an extremely bad label for their proposals.
Where I've got to is that more of current-form growth leads to collapse, limits are not stable, and so the only viable story of the future is transformation. One where there is an inner dynamic which outcompetes capitalism, makes discipline of second-order importance, and which aligns ever more of humankind with nature.
Note that I am not saying 'green growth'. Making the next 3% of the economy green is not enough. We need to change the entire composition of our societies and economies. A deep transition, if you will.
In my broad take on what is needed last year I had three pillars (italics = added since last year):
Out with the old. The managed decline of destructive industries and disrupting rent-seeking investors and incumbents.
In with the new. Industrial strategies for mitigation and adaptation, using missions, nurturing niches, and driving diffusion of ready innovations, so remaining sectors become aligned to nature. We will need to keep accumulating the capabilities and capacities to do new things.
Multi-layered resilience. Making our societies anti-fragile at supra-national, national and sub-national levels.
Ironically, the Triodos speaker had something similar to the first two pillars, in that he had certain sectors going into decline, while others were growing. (Which had been part of my work on the EIRIS Foundation strategy in 2016; good to have some validation for what I thought 8 years ago, I suppose.)
My guess is that the important 'limit' is the rate at which humankind can change the 'full stack' of our societies (from cosmological worldviews up through culture, governance, economic configuration to the daily operating realities of how people live).
Having said all that, I don't know what the all-solving inner dynamic is. Indeed, I'm deeply sceptical about what we can know about this future. Especially if it is truly a deep transformation, then the categories of thought we have available now will be obsolete once we get there. So, we won't be able to describe it in detail. We will need to experiment our way forward.
System mapping: often a trap.
There were at least two kinds of systems mapping presented. The first from Reimagined Futures ('we help organisations make sense of complexity and collaborate towards systems change') was familiar causal loop diagrams, showing the way relationships reinforce each other in a system.
Here is one of theirs on how Catalonia's knowledge creation system can contribute to accelerate the transition towards a green, resilient and just socio-economic model.
My reaction to this was a quick reliving of when Forum tried to use system maps in the early 2010s. Started with excitement, that at last we could 'see' the entire system, identify leverage points and have confidence to act. Then lots of doubts creep in. Is the diagram really complete? Given how long it takes to make, is it up to date? How does it cope with change over time?
The answer to that last is: badly, in my view, in at least 2 ways. First, over time relationships change (perhaps what was once a strong driver become weaker). Second, what to do about emergence, where the current system is replaced by another?
As is often the case, the diagram's biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. The diagram shows how a stable system does not have simplistic linear causality but instead goes about continuously recreating itself. But that then makes the status quo look inevitable and unchangeable. (What physicists call 'block time'.)
A million years ago (or 2018) I did some work a UN agency where I tried to overcome this system mapping problem by instead having the system dynamics at different slices of time: before, during and after a transition to an SDG-aligned economy.
Before. The 'success to the successful' pattern holds the anti-SDG status quo economy in place.
During. New interventions from the UN agency and others strengthen the SDG-aligned economy so it can outcompete the status quo.
After. The SDG-aligned economy is the new status quo, and keeps recreating itself through its own 'success to the successful' inner dynamic.
My view: a systems map is a trap unless you can model change over time, and especially the additionality of what can happen because of extra interventions.
The other mapping presentation did have this feature. It was by Dr Laur Kanger of SPRU and focused on the mapping habitual rules that make up the mainstream (the Regime, in MLP speak).
Map the current regime rules, using five categories:
Science and technology infrastructure
Policy
Markets and consumers
Industry
Culture
Use one or more scenarios for the future to create at least one version of what the future Regime rules would be.
Look for the brittle rules in the current status quo, and interventions that might turn those into the rules of a desired future Regime.
Lessons from TIPC initiative: field-building
There was an extended session on how to use the experience of TIPC (the policy-facing initiative) in Deep Transitions Lab (the finance-facing initiative). For me the main thing was the attitude of the core people (including Schot as the main academic) to field-building.
I've been in various university settings where a senior academic is trying to drive change in the wider world using their research and concepts. All too often that becomes about controlling a new field, by having PhD students who deepen the core notion in allowed ways, and Masters students who become ambassadors for approved messages, plus setting up a Centre and a Journal and a Book series -- again, with ability to veto. A generous take is that the lead academic is curating in a complex and competitive world. A different take is they are on an ego-ride, which can mutate into forms of bullying.
That was not my impression of this group. There was lots of openness. They avoided trying to create one Centre, or have a new Journal. They brought research and practice very close together. They deliberately said that there is existing phenomena in the world, which exist independent of their initiative, and they want to understand and enhance that. (Contrast with my other experience, which tended to assume that the phenomena in the world only existed because of the lead academic, and if they were not directly invovled, then the quality was bound to be weak.)
Made me wonder hard on what could be my humble contribution to field-building for 'initiatives at the frontier of generating a better future' would be (very much where the Atelier of What's Next is one of many efforts, not the centre at all).
Global finance: can neoliberalism's enforcers become sustainability's enablers?
"I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody." -- Clinton political adviser James Carville here.
Any government which moves too far from the orthodoxy gets in to trouble on the currency and bond markets. As the Talking Politics podcast has about Adam Tooze's book on the 2008 financial crisis, economists had thought they had protected the economy from political discretion.
Also, as the story of Unilever's retreat on sustainability ("the backsliding going on in Unilever at the moment marks the definitive end of a period of “win-win” ESG/ corporate sustainability that has lasted for more than 20 years" says an angry Jonathon Porritt) comes from shareholder demands for good-enough financial returns now.
Global financial markets have been the enforces of neoliberalism.
So, the Deep Transition Lab approach to engage with investors is fraught with challenges. Any large finance house is going to be deeply involved in creating and maintaining the current, deeply extractive status quo, whether through pressure on corporates or countries.
The great hope of working with finance is that it can become an enabler of a sustainable world, by moving financial capital out of the old and into the new and needed.
At the level of political economy, of the set up of power and how it recreates itself, I'm struggling to see that happening. But maybe that's a fault of my imagination (after all, it easier to imagine the end of the world than capitalism).
Where's the cultural / worldview / ontological layer?
All models are wrong, some models are useful. All frameworks are a result of the path taken to reach them.
As I understand it, in the case of Deep Transitions, that path was economic history and STS (science and technology studies). The focus is on the economic set up, the rules and incentives of behaviour and change usually has a significant technological component.
Last week I wrote about Imagining and enacting alternatives to dominant culture. I read a big chunk of Designs for the Pluriverse while in the 2 hour passport queue on the way in to Barcelona (thank you Brexit).
So, on my mind was the need for ontological design, for initiating and support change in ways that create new places where different cultures thrive, and enact their own social, political and technological way of organising.
Put another way, any transition design needs to be 'full stack', from worldview up through culture, governance, politics, economics, technology and so on. But most transition design does not go all the way down to different worldviews.
The presentations and things I've read from the Deep Transitions core do not really go down into the culture / worldview / ontological layer. I don't doubt that they would say that they think deep values and assumptions are important. But, currently I don't see them in the practice. (I might be looking in the wrong places.)
For instance, over dinner I spoke with one person who has a relationship manager in a university, not a researcher. But her doctorate had been in women protest singers of the early 20th century. They had formed groups, catalysed support networks, and transitioned in to movements for women's right to vote and more. Women's changing economic role in rich countries is one of the huge changes of the 20th century. How would that be expressed in the Deep Transition approach.
As far as I can see, there's no way of bringing in the role of culture in profound changes (Douglad Hine gives a starting list here).
Also, as much as I liked the Regime mapping, the method did assume a single, global sector which could be described by 5 white men in Brighton. Not much space for local variation and different understandings of the world there.
What next?
Atelier of What's Next
What could be my humble contribution to field-building for 'initiatives at the frontier of generating a better future' would be (very much where the Atelier of What's Next is one of many efforts, not the centre at all)?
Learn about ontological design.
Integrate the perspectives on growth/de- and post-growth into something useful (not just a rant that annoys people).
Influential Trajectories
Learn from other parallel initiatives:
Try out Regime rule mapping for the way to understand the future milestone, and the current status quo.