As a marketeer I’ve always been fascinated with behavioural science and how to change the values and beliefs that drive our behaviours.

So far, the only time I’ve seen a real change in beliefs is when someone experiences an issue for themselves. It’s about lived experience, or human to human connection that makes the issue tangible and personal.

Having come from a family that struggled financially, I have the benefit of that lived experience. The knowledge that poverty is not so much a practical challenge, but an emotional one. The shame, helplessness and stress it causes are far more dangerous symptoms than not having food on the table.

It’s that lived experience that drives me and my commitment to building a more equal economy where no one has to live in poverty.

The thing about something like poverty or inequality, is that it’s not contagious. So it’s easy to ignore. It’s something that happens to other people, in other places.

On the other hand, Coronavirus could impact any of us. Rich or poor. Young or old. Black, white or something in between.

World leaders and movie stars have caught the virus. People with steady jobs were stood down overnight. Flourishing industries have been brought to their knees. Some of the richest nations have the highest number of cases.

Coronavirus has equalised us.

Coronavirus has reminded us all that we are all human.

It’s that knowledge – the fear that this could impact me and the people I care about – that has driven us to completely change the way we live our lives. We have seen behaviour change on a worldwide scale, practically overnight.

Therein lies an opportunity. Our society and economy has been upended. We can choose to take this moment to rediscover our shared humanity and use it to shape what we create on the other side of the pandemic.

If we can hang on to our shared humanity as we emerge from the crisis, I hope our collective empathy will grow.

We have unfortunately seen some disgusting examples of people capitalising on this crisis to the detriment of others. Corporate CEOs standing down their staff without pay while they retire to their mansions. Airlines quadrupling the price of flights for people that just need to get home. Fraudsters offering fake testing for the virus as a way to enter people’s homes and steal.

But we have seen so many more examples of hope, support and kindness. From live streaming of concerts, to parents continuing to pay their fees when schools have closed, to Woolworths offering jobs to Qantas staff, to (dare I say it) the conservative government’s fiscal stimulus packages that prioritises the most vulnerable.

Humans have an amazing innate drive to go out of our way to look out for each other. But for some reason, when we put on suits and enter board rooms, we tend to forget our shared humanity. The ‘us and them’ separation blinds us to the view from outside the boardroom walls.

But through this crisis, we are all as vulnerable as each other. We all need to work together and do our bit to get to the other side.

I hope the result of working together and building our empathy will be a commitment across our economy to strengthen the structures that give everyone the opportunity and support to live a decent and dignified life.

Structures like a bigger and more respected social enterprise ecosystem, so that the majority of businesses in our economy are social enterprises that put the health of people and our planet above profit.

Structures like a more expansive safety net – one that provides benefits that any politician themselves feels they could reasonably live on.

Structures like new partnerships (of equals) between the corporate and third sectors, that allow for cross-pollination of skills, experience and resources to increase the ability of both sectors to deliver more social impact.

We can’t let this crisis go to waste.

Let’s use this experience to remind ourselves that when it comes down to it, we are all one global tribe. We all depend on each other. And that when everyone is taken care of, we all benefit.

We have a once in a generation opportunity to hit the reset button on our economy and our society. Let’s use it wisely. And with empathy.

The post Could this crisis create the empathy we need to build a fairer society? appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

1. Resilience

In January 2017, we posted a blog with this introduction: given the political, economic and cultural earthquakes of 2016, the year ahead could look pretty terrifying and uncertain. We may feel anxious. We may have visions of moving to a remote island where we could block out the worry and anger about the increasingly unattractive western world. But there is another option. Resilience. With a big dose of hope.

It can feel like not a lot has changed – except it has! Climate change activism is alive and well. Real poverty in the two-thirds world has been reduced significantly. While democracy is under attack, those committed to its survival are active across the world.

Raymond Williams said that “to be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing”. Resilience is our best antidote to fear, anxiety and withdrawal.

There are four types of resilience (psychological, political, economic and spiritual). Let’s draw on them all in the year to come!

2. Collaboration for collective impact

Working alone, in isolation, as rivals, in silos or as competitors has reduced impact in the social sector where it is most needed. Over the past year we published a series of blogs and articles focused on collective action as a solution that successfully addresses key challenges both locally and globally.

We must work together, not against each other. Poverty for example is one real challenge, but so is distrust, polarisation, competition and personal ego amongst those wanting to end poverty. We could all do with a dose collective impact. Not for our own health, but the health of an economy that works for both people and planet.

3. Leadership

We will have all seen quotes on LinkedIn or Facebook about the attributes of leadership. And we can always look to others to lead. We can also look at our own lives and figure out where we can authentically lead and be part of a solution.

At the risk of being negative (in an effort to be solutions-focused), we’ve all experienced a lack of leadership whether at an organisational level, a national level or a global level. We know what bad leadership is. Ego, hubris, greed, power, control as well as the out-of-fashion attributes of envy, jealousy, malice and pride all figure highly in bad leadership.

A simple act of leadership can change the world, whether it is local or global. Speak the truth even if your voice shakes – is a simple beginning for all of us.

We don’t have to be courageous, charismatic or a white man to be a leader. We can all lead in finding solutions and be inspired by the ‘not what you’d expect’ examples of leadership – thanks Greta!

4. The social economy

For many in our neoliberal world it is abhorrent when the word ‘social’ is associated in any way with the word ‘economy’. There is plenty of opposition and misunderstanding – it all sounds too ‘political’, and isn’t ‘social’ part of that word ‘social’-ism (short-hand for communism)? Despite this, the ‘social economy’ is maturing and becoming much more than yet another ‘bloody coffee cart social enterprise’ (although we can’t get enough good coffee is our way of thinking).

At its heart, the social economy works for people and profit. Or people before profit – not profit before people. Just like in the market focussed economy, businesses in the social economy seek to make a profit. The difference being that in a social economy, the profit is used to meet social objectives, not generate individual wealth. It’s that last bit which makes this type of economy different. Wealth is more evenly distributed.

By prioritising social objectives, the social economy is an innovative way to tackle social, economic and environmental needs in society that have been overlooked or inadequately addressed by the private or public sectors.

Supporting the social economy in 2020 means purchasing with a purpose and well as selling for a purpose. A simple example is choosing to purchase from a social enterprise even though it might cost more than in the general market. The purchasing provides the economic stimulus to drive the social economy with its social objectives to create greater benefit for more and more people, not just the few.

There are plenty of opportunities to engage with the social economy. Who you buy from as well as what you buy can make a difference. There are social economy businesses everywhere. See what you can find in 2020. Spend your money wisely and make an impact!

5. Discipline and focus

Being a ‘change agent’, wanting to ‘do good’ and have ‘purpose’ is all well and very good and way better than the alternative. But we need to be clear about what we want to do and what impact we want to make. We need to be disciplined and focused in measuring and achieving those outcomes.

Whether it is a social business/enterprise, an ethical business for a social purpose, a cooperative, an employee owned business or an attempt at ‘conscious capitalism’, we need the disciplines of strategic planning, social business modelling, theory of change analysis, impact measurement, good governance and generating profit. Generating profit, as we have argued before, is crucial for the survival of all the above – it is how profit is distributed and who benefits from the profit that’s the central justice issue.

In 2020 we will be working in all these areas. We will be resilient, we will lead where we can, we will collaborate with others fighting for the same cause, and in doing that we hope we will help the social economy to thrive.

Join in! We can all be part of the solutions for 2020.

The post Solutions for 2020 appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

Thinking about the economy and why it’s broken

‘Economies’ are made up of a lot of elements, and involve all of us. The owners of business. The shareholders of business. The workers in the business. The customers who buy products from businesses.

For some the economy is never talked about, just lived with while mindlessly accumulating goods. For some it is political. For others it is a thing made by ‘them’ that affects ‘me’. Who the ‘them’ is remains a mystery, but ‘they’ are the reason it’s not working and I won’t vote for ‘them’.

For those who like Adam Smith it’s about the ‘invisible hand’ and for those who have never heard of Adam Smith it’s about what’s on the television tonight.

For some it’s about free markets. As long as it all leads to profit then the market should be left to its own devices. Everyone benefits. Nobody bludges. Hard work leads to hard profits. For the 1% it is all ‘mine’ to spend.

And for some it’s about living with the effects of austerity. Because the current economic system prevalent in the western world is broken. In-work poverty, child poverty and massive global inequality, and the marketization of education, health care, public transport and housing are leading to reduced opportunities. It’s the outcome of the last 30 years of market fundamentalism in the UK, USA and Australia.

There is an alternative – the social economy

The social economy has been growing now for some years.

For many in our neoliberal world it is abhorrent when the word ‘social’ is associated in any way with the word ‘economy’. There is plenty of opposition and misunderstanding – it all sounds too ‘political’ and isn’t ‘social’ part of that word ‘social’-ism (short-hand for communist)?

Despite this, and its limitation at the outset to social enterprises (a business trading for a social purpose), the ‘social economy’ is maturing and becoming much more than yet another ‘bloody coffee cart social enterprise’ (although we can’t get enough good coffee is my way of thinking).

This social economy has – like all economic systems – a set of beliefs in the broadest sense.

At its heart is people and profit, or people before profit – not profit before people.

Just like in the market focussed economy, businesses in the social economy seek to make a profit. The difference being that in a social economy, the profit gained goes toward meeting social objectives, not primarily toward generating individual wealth. It’s that last bit which makes this type of economy different. Wealth is more evenly distributed with direct benefit for the many, not just the few.

By prioritising social objectives, the social economy contributes in an innovative way to tackling social, economic and environmental needs in society that have been overlooked or inadequately addressed by the private or public sectors.

The social economyincludes social enterprises, cooperatives, owner employed businesses with a social purpose, as well as self-employed women and men. It combines everything from the supply chain through to the end customer into one complete mosaic – a social economy.

We can all help the social economy to grow

Supporting the social economy means purchasing with a purpose and well as selling for a purpose. A simple example is choosing to purchase from a social enterprise even though that cost is greater than in the general market. The purchasing provides the economic stimulus to drive the social economy with its social objectives generating greater benefit for more and more people not just the few.

The Dragonfly Collective has been working with Caritas Westminster, and with its European partners, to help build the social economy and develop a range of new social enterprises in London., that provide social purchase choices for people looking for everything from training, to co-working space to painting and decorating.

While Adam Smith may give this a vague if not slight nod, Friedrich Hayek would choke on his Viennese roll. But that’s another story and the exact opposite of the social economy!

There are plenty of opportunities to engage with the social economy. Who you buy from as well as what you buy can make a huge difference.

There are social economy businesses everywhere. See what you can find in your community!

The post Why we all need to pay attention to the social economy appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta, a young Catholic priest, arrived in Mondragón in 1941, a town with a population of 7,000 that had not yet recovered from the poverty, hunger, exile, and tension of the Spanish Civil War. One year later he set up a technical college that became a training ground for local companies. Arizmendiarrieta included in the curriculum teaching on solidarity, participation and the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively.

In 1955, he selected five young people to set up the first company of the co-operative now known as the Mondragon Corporation. Today the Mondragon Corporation is the tenth-largest Spanish company in terms of turnover and the leading business group in the Basque Country. It employs over 74,000 people in 257 companies and organisations in four areas of activity: finance, industry, retail and knowledge.

Every member of staff is an owner of the company.

Their labour does not provide capital for distant and external shareholders.

It is no accident that the Mondragon Corporation website starts with Mondragon People!

This ‘employee owned business’ has four corporate values: co-operation between staff as owners and protagonists; participation, which takes shape as a commitment to management; social responsibility by means of the distribution of wealth based on solidarity; and, innovation, focusing on constant renewal in all areas.

Let’s now shift to Scotland, where the founders of a company called Novograf were considering selling the business after a combined sixty years of personal investment. From small beginnings in 1986 Novograf had developed their original signage business into a major brand realisation company with some of the UK’s biggest companies as their customers.

An American company offered to buy them out for a significant sum. Just prior to signing off on the deal, a conversation with the potential buyers revealed that Novograf would more than likely be swallowed up into a new entity and moved out of Glasgow. That would end the employment of over sixty people who the founders had worked with for many years.

Then out of the blue a postcard from Scottish Enterprise dropped into their mailbox and drew their attention to an alternative – employee owned businesses. They discovered there was a different option to selling their company to anyone with a big enough chequebook: to sell the company to their employees. Of course the employees could not come up with the cash to collectively purchase the company and no major bank was interested in funding this ‘radical’ scheme. So the founders turned themselves into a bank, handing over the company shares while allowing employees to pay them back over several years with one condition – a limitation that excluded the relocation of the business.

At the end of is first year as an employee owned business Novograf’s sales increased by 20% and the company employed an extra 22 staff.

It sounds almost commonsense when you consider the benefits of employee owned businesses. The benefits have been proven through the experience of over 300 employee owned businesses from Arup to John Lewis. They include a competitive price and guaranteed exit for the owner to safeguard the future of the business, ownership and leadership transfer at low risk, enhanced employee engagement, increased productivity and innovation and attracting and retaining high-quality talent.

However as Aditya Chakrabortty makes clear, the model of employee owned businesses sits at odds with current market economics in the West to such a degree that little can be found to promote the concept and precious few can be found to provide advice on how to move a company into this space (Coops UK is one good example). When it comes to selling a company the overwhelming doctrine surrounding options is the almost fanatical adherence to the concept of the free and open market where the staff, suppliers and the public count for little.

Social enterprise has been promoted for many years as the new way to both trade as a business and ‘do good’. But perilously few adopt any alternative business model to that of the standard owner-employee hierarchy that has been developed to reflect the Lord and serf, labour and capital, rich and poor reality of the current dominate form of neoliberal capitalism across the West. It may be no coincidence that by the mid 1990’s western governments – especially in the UK – were promoting social enterprises and demoting cooperatives.

Employee owned businesses challenge the very heart of the open market’s reason for being – the generation of profit for external shareholders who benefit from the labour of others.

Employee owned businesses generate profit for the owners of the business – the employees.

As we suggested in our last blog, profit is not evil in and of itself – it is how it is made and how it is distributed that matters above all else.

Employee owned businesses are a tangible example of how profit and people can be combined in a manner that benefits those whose labour generates the profit.

The post Profit and people: is that possible? appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

I recently read a short article on why kids should learn philosophy and immediately thought the same about economics – but not for kids – but for all the grown ups currently working feverishly to do good and change the world through socially innovative entrepreneurial enterprises.

In fact it occurred to me that there was a business opportunity or gap in the market as they say, to have a whole semester or two added on economics to all MBA and equivalent courses that now exist for social entrepreneurs.

By now you’re yawning because as Richard Denis recalls in his article in The Monthly “I remember my first lesson in economics like it was yesterday. I’d never heard a bigger bunch of crap in my life. It made no sense. The assumptions were flawed. The examples were ridiculous and the conclusions worse.”

And that’s about where we leave economics – back in high school.

Not that we don’t hear a lot about ‘the economy’. But economics – no thanks!

Let’s just get on and do it! Economics has nothing to do with changing the world. The solution lies with new business models to challenge and solve social problems. Poverty and inequality – all solved with scaling up, volumes, price point, marketing, distribution points, strategic planning, supply chains, market segmentation and financial modeling, and more financial modeling.

In the meantime while we all learn about ‘good’ business (or is it ‘business for good’?) the economy runs on, adjusted from time to time by the invisible hand of the ‘market’.

And we know as much as we need to know about ‘the economy’ because everyday we are educated about ‘the economy’ by politicians and media to such an extent that we know all we need to about economics. Right?

Richard Denis calls this constant everyday education “econospeak” noting that “the primary purpose of the econospeak that fills our airwaves, most of which is complete nonsense, is to keep ordinary people out of the big debates about tax, fairness, climate change and the provision of essential services. Econospeak is a great way to limit the options on our democratic menu. Would you like a small tax cut and a small cut in services or a big tax cut and a big cut in services? What? You want to spend more money in health and education? You must be mad. Just imagine how “the markets” would react to such a suggestion.”

What’s really startling is that while we have all been learning about ‘good’ business to solve social challenges, we’ve taken our daily dose of econospeak and swallowed it hook, line and balanced budget. As Denis notes “the whole strategy has worked a treat for the past few decades”.

Swallowing econospeak allows us to live with myths like, it is the lifestyle of the poor that threaten the economy, or, that tax concessions to the super rich will create more jobs, or, that the great financial crisis was caused by governments spending recklessly on public services, and that business above all else is how all our problems will be solved. Ignorance produced by econospeak is a powerful tool – after all, how can you criticize economic policy when you don’t understand economics?

Perhaps that’s where education is needed.

What if all of us who want to change the world for the better took some time to educate ourselves beyond econospeak so we had some tools to use when we critically consider the economy we are part of? What if every aspiring social entrepreneur had to complete a year of study in economics before studying business tools? What if this education allowed us all to understand why even the best intentions to change the world informed by econospeak, actually just perpetuate the very challenges we want to solve?

So where to begin? Here’s a sample of some really good economic thinking – and if you don’t want to read the whole book, look for articles that discuss the thoughts of the authors – even Wikipedia is better than gulping down headfuls of econospeak. So have a look at:

John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money

Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: The User’s Guide

Joseph Stiglitz, The Great Divide

Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Anthony Atkinson, Inequality: What can be done?

And after some reading, consider afresh Richard Denis’ final words: “you don’t need to be an economist to call out crap when you hear it. But unless people start calling it out and stop worrying about “what the markets think”, then one of the richest countries in the world, living at the richest point in world history, might continue to believe that we “can’t afford” to invest in a better health or education system . . . Economics doesn’t tell us that we need to cut taxes for the rich or cause climate change if we really want to help the poor. And “the markets” don’t tell us that either. Those are the sentiments of some wealthy people, and some politicians who represent them. But they say it in econospeak because it sounds so ridiculous in plain English.”

The post ‘Just do it’ and forget economics! appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.