Atelier WeekNotes w/c 16 Sep 2024
0/DETECTING. Imagining and enacting alternatives to dominant culture (esp political ontologies). Overshoot Commission. I4S podcast: Amy Wilson.
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.
My September has started with a bang, so I'm somewhat on catch up. This WeekNotes actually misses out on the biggest part of last week, a conference on transformational innovation. That will come into the next one (perhaps even a special edition, there was so much.)
This week covers:
0/DETECTING
Imagining and enacting alternatives to dominant culture
-Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit launch.
-The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin.
-Designs for the Pluriverse by Arturo Escobar.
-Barcelona's bubbles of ontologies.
Overshoot Commission launch
Podcasts
-Innovation for Sustainability: Amy Wilson
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.
0/DETECTING
Imagining and enacting alternatives to dominant culture
Some very different kinds of experiences around imagining and enacting the status quo dominant culture.
Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit launch.
"Tools from Collective Imagination practitioners around the world, for anyone who wants to build the capacity to explore and learn ways of creating better, more hopeful futures, together." It can be found here.
I was at this online launch, coming mainly from Joseph Rowntree Foundation ('we work to speed up and support the transition to a future free from poverty, in which people and planet can flourish') with it's work on Emerging Futures.
Some of the key phrases:
"Collective Imagination is a multidisciplinary practice(s) involving a group or community who come together to dream into, rehearse and enact different possible futures. This has the potential to illuminate pathways forwards, as well as to unsettle the status quo."
"If we are to build alternative futures, we must collectively untether from entrenched ideas and start from a very different foundation."
"Collective Imagination work is the soil upon which that foundation is built. It enables us to engage with and embody different perspectives, weave together diverse perceptions and worldviews, and mobilise to take action."
Six themes to the toolkit:
I've not had a chance to dive deeply into the toolkit. Some familiar things, some things which were new to me.
Unfortunately, I was rather put off by the first half of the launch. There's just too much irony to promoting a participatory approach to changing the world by...having someone read out the words on a slide which the 400 attendees can see for themselves.
And where none of those words were telling stories of specific examples, which could ground all the assertions, but just assertion, claim, proposition, assertion. (To be fair it took me 10+ years to learn to start with a story, as the illustration of my key messages).
I know that various practitioners have been taking these collective imagination approaches into marginalised communities (especially Rob Hopkins). But, I started watching through the eyes of a disaffected working class white man in a town where the jobs have gone; the people who were rioting a few weeks ago. From that vantage point, it felt that the launch was a parody put together by a right-leaning comedian who wanted to show how out of touch the young, woke, metropolitan elite are.
Which isn't to say I'm against the intent or content of the work here. Just, I wish it didn't feel so very deeply inside the bubble.
The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin.
The Imagination Infrastructures website opens with an Ursula Le Guin quote:
“The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.”
By coincidence, my bookclub later on the same day as the launch was Le Guin's own The Dispossessed (wikipedia here).
In short, the book is set far in the future, far from Earth. There is a planet, which is pretty fecund and has a patriarchal capitalist-like state (which we see a lot) and a communist-like state (which we only hear about). There is a moon, which is physically a desert-like region and with a society organised on anarcho-syndicalism lines. The world on the moon was set up 160 years previously, as a way of containing a revolution in the fecund planet. The plot follows a brilliant scientist, who rebels against the anarcho-syndicalism the moon, where he grew up, and goes to the planet with the prospect of epoch-changing theory on the nature of time (which could give the user massively more power than other societies).
The points I'd like to pull out here are about the hard grind of deep imagining, and the fact that she arrived at 'An Ambiguous Utopia' (the subtitle commonly).
Hard grind of deep imagining. Le Guin put in the hard work of imagining how a communitarian society might function, not just in an operational sense of how jobs are distributed or how children are brought up, by into the weft and weave of people's inner lives and of the wider culture. The kind of hard grind which changes your own mind for good, not just producing a bunch of colourful Post-Its.
In doing that hard work, she created at least two societies which are not just in opposition (like capitalism vs communism) but based on utterly different assumptions about being, about how things exist and relate to each other. Not just different political economies, but different political ontologies.
For example, the capitalist world acts as if people exist as independent billiard balls that interact through transactions; the anarcho-syndicalist world as if people exist because they are in relation to each other, and the wider word.
(As might be obvious, I did not experience that sense of hard grind, of going deeply down, in the Collective Imagination Practices launch.)
Ambigious Utopias. At first, the book presents as if it will be obvious that Le Guin favours the anarcho-syndicalist world. But the book makes clear that the capitalist world has many advantages, not least the enhanced capabilities that come from having compound economic growth. The people there more freedoms in how to live, in some dimensions, than those on the anarcho-syndicalist moon.
At the same time, both the capitalist and anarcho-syndicalist worlds have ways to control people, despite the rhetorics of freedom, especially through internalising of locally-dominant culture. The two worlds have un-freedom in different ways, just as they have different freedoms. But the implication is that total freedom is not possible, whether in a rich world or a world without a State to impose formal rules. There is always power, power always gets concentrate, and people use the power they have for their own intentions.
Again, that kind of future -- different, better but still disappointing, or even tragic -- didn't feel available from the Imagination Practices Toolkit.
Designs for the Pluriverse by Arturo Escobar
The stars were aligning this week, because I also finished Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds is a 2018 book by the Colombian-American anthropologist Arturo Escobar.
I won't claim to have processed it all yet. I suspect it is a great book, but, alas, it is not a book written to help the reader understand.
My current short version is:
One of the biggest violences you can perform to a society is to remove the chance for it to have its own way of being, its own assumptions about how the world exists and how society should be organised. To have its own ontology1.
A huge effect of colonialism and neoliberalism was to remove that choice from societies, whether by taking over directly or through the operation of financial markets and global corporations.
Our global current unsustainability in part comes from the content of the dominant socio-economic culture (basically: that humankind can be separate and in charge of nature, and men over women, and white over non-white) but also from the fact there is only one dominant culture. Without requisite variety, the blindspots in the dominant culture will be magnified to a global scale.
We need to move away from a 'One-World World' to a 'World where many worlds fit'. Put another way, from a world where only one political ontology is possible (globalising capitalism) to one where many ontologies are co-existing. A pluriverse.
There is a 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.
I have more thoughts about this line of thought, including weaknesses. But, it clearly relates to the Collective Imagination Practices toolkit (in principle, it could help with full stack interventions) and to The Dispossessed (each world had fully realised, different ontologies; which could both exist because of physical separate on (planet-moon), strong legal agreement, and active founding myths on both sides).
Barcelona's bubbles of ontologies
At the tail end of the week I was in Barcelona for a conference organised by the Transformational Innovation Policy Consortium (aka TIPC) and the Deep Transitions Lab. It was a rich experience and I have many reflections. More on that in the next WeekNotes (otherwise this one wil just get too long).
While in Barcelona I had a chance to visit two places which enact values very different from the mainstream of modernity (profit-seeking, transactional and so on).
1/Can Batlló Self-Managed Community and Neighborhood Space (translation via Google) is a "social and cultural facility located in different buildings, in the old textile factory of Can Batlló, in the Bordeta neighborhood". It is in pretty central block.
While we were there, one of the elders gave us a potted history (via an interpreter and an echoing microphone, so forgive my errors and vagueness). The authorities were going to redevelop the area into something the community couldn't use. There was a crescendo of protests, which led to the authorities handing control over to the community in 2011.
It now practices self-management as a basic organizational model, enhances social and solidarity economy experiences to become an alternative based on self-financing and other communitarian concerns. In practice there is a bar, library, art creation space, food network and so on.
The Spanish attendees of the conference told us that Can Batlló had had a wider impact. Many other communities across the country had been inspired by the example to take control of their local redevelopment/regeneration along cooperative or communitarian principles.
Doubtless there is a lot more to the story than we heard. For one thing, the long history of rebellion in Barcelona (Catalyna vs Espana; Republican vs Fascist) plus the shadow side to any organisation (even well-intentioned organisations run on community lines have shadow sides). But overall I was impressed, if only with keeping the forces of commercial property redevelopment at bay.
2/La Figuera is a co-living initiative started by Francesca Pick & Manel Heredero. They run their house, up the coast north of Barcelona, as a combined space for living space, visiting and working.
Fran, who I know through the Edmund Hillary Fellowship ('500+ innovators, entrepreneurs and investors committed to New Zealand as a basecamp for global impact'), and Manel are both key figures in Greater Than, "a place for those who dare to seek new organising structures & cultures that contribute to healthy systems for all".
One of their sources is Laloux's Reinventing Organisations, which proposes that there is an organisational form beyond command-and-control or family-like approaches, one which is rooted in principles of self-management, wholeness and evolutionary purpose. Laloux called this Teal.
You won't be surprised to learn that La Figuera is run along those lines, with a combination of private and shared spaces, clear principles on behaviour, and a way of contributing for your stay based on the Happy Money Story approach.
Despite the rain and the hill up from the station, it was a lovely place to stay. As is often the case with these things, the tone of how it is organised influenced the whole feel of the experience. This could only be true if there was a high congruence between the espoused values and the values-in-action.
I left feeling that Fran and Manel had created a bubble of ontological difference, one which is also a gathering place which can help the difference to grow. I had said to Fran that it was a bubble of difference. But that can also mean something about to pop. I meant more like bubble in the foam of a growing wave, both riding and creating the dynamism.
WHAT NEXT
Dive more into the Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit.
Work through what 'ontological design' might mean for my work. Have Designs for the Pluriverse as an example of 'Deep Transformation' in the Depth of Change Spectrum.
Overshoot Commission launch
Earlier in September I attended an online event on the Overshoot Commission. It was formed to answer the question "How should the world reduce the risk of temperature overshoot?" and consisted of (self-declared) eminent, global independent commissioners, with a pretty good Global North vs Global South split.
Here are the Overshoot Commission's key messages:
Limiting warming to 1.5°C remains an essential goal, but the risks of overshoot are high and rising.
Governments, the private sector and civil society need to take action to reduce the probability, magnitude, and duration of any overshoot.
Cutting emissions remains the priority. Because the use of fossil fuels is the primary cause of climate change, fossil fuels should be phased out, through national actions coordinated internationally.
Adaptation is necessary to cope with impacts. New tools and mechanisms should be created, such as country-level partnerships for adaptation and robust metrics for assessing adaptation strategies.
Carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere will be needed. Governance and government support is needed to define and help finance the roll-out of high-integrity carbon removal methods.
Solar radiation modification should be researched, and its governance discussed. Countries should adopt a moratorium on the deployment of solar radiation modification and large-scale outdoor experiments that would carry risk of significant transboundary harm.
Climate finance must be increased to prevent or limit climate overshoot. Financing needs are greatest for lower-income countries.
They summarise this as CARE agenda: Cut, Adapt, Remove, Experiment in radiation solar management.
So, the good news is that this is a high-level of folks from the heart of the global technocracy admitting that we're going to overshoot, and the consequences will be dire. That's a contrast to the event I went to in July 2024. There people were still attached to "1.5 to stay alive" and worried that saying anything else was giving up, rather than accepting reality.
In horizon scanning terms, the content of the report does not add to what we know, but that the messages are coming from the global technocrat community new.
The bad news, quite apart from the facts on the ground, is just how slow and feeble the response of the global technocracy is.
First, I looked back at old Forum for the Future reports I co-wrote in 2008 ('Acting now for a positive 2018, preparing for radical change: the next decade of business and sustainability' here and 'Climate Futures: responses to climate change in 2030' here; WeekNotes subscriber James Goodman was the lead author). Our recommendations were less precise but basically the same substance and direction.
The global technocracy is just about catching up with the callow youths of the sustainability movement from 15 years ago. Whoopty fuckin' doo. (Though may be the shift over the last year is going from Hemingway's gradually to suddenly.)
Second, in the launch Pascal Lamy said we now needed to think the unthinkable. Examples of that he had none, except geoengineering and carbon removal.
Clearly they are both coming. I don't object to geoengineering and carbon removal per se. Indeed, we will need both (to be deployed very carefully indeed). But, if they are used just to keep the rest of the show on the road, then they will be massive mis-use of resources, and a godsend to the rent-seeking incumbents in the fossil fuel economy. I see every chance both removal and geoengineering will be deployed in a febrile way, perhaps by a rogue actor like a billionaire, with massive unintended negative consequences, as well as the intended negative consequence of propping up oil revenues.
One audience member said if we're thinking the unthinkable, what about population control? Lamy didn't like it but couldn't say why. (My answer would be: 'OK, I have a modest proposal. To be most efficient we should focus on where each avoided birth has the most avoided environmental damage, which is the US and Europe. Reduce their populations now! What, you object? Oh, you meant population control for them, unrestricted consumption for us. I see...')
In the terms of the Depth of Change spectrum, Lamy's 'unthinkable' is Strong Reform: industrial policy, carbon border tarifs, controlling global finance. Unthinkable compared to the recent neoliberal Washington Consensus. But still keeping the fundamental tenets of global capitalism going: extractive growth, success to the successful and resulting concentration of power.
Lamy's 'unthinkable' doesn't mean accepting the insights of the Radical Resistance position (degrowth, decolonialism). I still think that generating a future based on what something is not doesn't work. If you defining things in terms of (de-X, anti-X, post-X you are still defining things in terms of X! So, while degrowth has insights, the unthinkable I want to reach for integrates those insights into a positive proposition which has its own character (what I've been calling the Deep Transformation position).
In short, Lamy hasn't read about the pluriverse.
WHAT NEXT
Carbon Removal and Geoengineering. Get involved with things which put these in their place.
Going to have to do some ruggedisation (Alex Steffan).
What is a practice of Deep Transformation in a time when dislocations and disruptions mean people are giving up on Strong Reform, and on achieving national or community goals together?
Podcasts
Innovation for Sustainability: Amy Wilson
Amy Wilson is a consultant on commercial marketing strategies to early-stage startups (or, as her LinkedIn page puts it: “Venture Lead/Portfolio CCO/CMO & Advisory Board Member for Startups & Scaleups 🚀 Fundraising Support 💰 Founder Mentor 🌱 Ethical Investor”). Episode page here. Listen on Apple, Spotify and elsewhere.
The interview is part of a series about innovation for sustainability conducted for the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources, as a contribution to a module in this Masters. You can find out more about these interviews, and the module, here.
This episode is a little different. The vast majority of the Innovation for Sustainability interviews are with someone who is working on sustainability directly and exclusively. Amy tries to bring her environmental and activist beliefs into her work, but that isn’t always possible.
One of the things we explore is the challenge that we all face about how to make good choices in the direction of the values that we have in a complex world where there are many forces which make it hard to deliver a just sustainable transition.
Another is how the personality of the founder and their behaviour dictates whether company is going to be viable or not. In particular, we talk about two behaviours: exaggeration / lying makes it harder to learn and adjust quickly; and only allowing narrow life experiences into senior positions makes a team vulnerable to groupthink and blindspots.
Amy has an innovation case study with a circular economy startup.
She also talks about how a small business can struggle when an employee goes on maternity leave, and so the importance of statutory payments to support diversity in the startup ecosystem.
Ironically, the Right in the UK would argue this for the UK (think of the role of sovereignty in the Brexit fandango) but never for the places brought into the British Empire. Then, the British taking control was good for those we conquered. They lost their ontology, but gained a representative democracy and a railway. Well done us!
Thanks David I really enjoyed this edition, some v.interesting stuff and ULG always good!