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.

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.

Manor Farm is renamed Animal Farm.

Animalism – the ideological manifesto developed by the new pig order to ensure a ‘complete system of thought’ was in place – marked out how the new Animal Farm political economy would work. Above all else the goal was to eradicate all human systems of thought and replace them with new socially innovative approaches encapsulated in such dictates as:

• Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
• No animal shall wear clothes.
• No animal shall sleep in a bed.
• No animal shall drink alcohol.
• No animal shall kill any other animal.

New ways of doing business were developed on the farm, and over time without too many animals noticing (critical reflection was not encouraged on the farm – more a just do it approach really) these new ways of doing business, and indeed how farm society was shaped and developed, were more and more based on the original ideas of the humans that were eradicated from farm society in the first place.

The pigs became the established ruling class on the farm – the CEOs and senior executives – and quickly asserted themselves eventually competing with each other for power. The pig Napoleon gets rid of this rival pig Snowball, and promotes the pig Squealer to Deputy CEO, and they take their new innovative approach to farming, politics, the economy and society, well in hand.

Without giving it too much thought, and more often than not driven by their own egos and acting in their own interests than the interests of the farm, Napoleon and Squealer reshape their approach to the farm economy, its culture and how things were to be done to achieve their socially innovative goals.

Old Animalism began to become more and more like New Animalism and the original ideological manifesto shaped more and more by the persistent older ideological position of the humans. Eventually the manifesto was rewritten in the name of progress to encapsulate new dictates like:

• Four legs good, two legs better.
• No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.
• No animal shall drink alcohol to excess.
• No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.

Years pass, and the pigs start to resemble humans, as they walk upright, carry whips, and wear clothes. Systemic social innovation is achieved and the social economy of the farm consolidated by the abridgment of the original manifesto into a single phrase: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others“. Napoleon holds a dinner party for the pigs and local farmers, with whom he celebrates a new alliance. He abolishes the practice of the revolutionary traditions and restores the name “The Manor Farm”. As the animals look from pigs to humans, they realise they can no longer distinguish between the two.

Across the span of years that frames the movement of Manor Farm to Animal Farm and back to Manor Farm again is the compelling description of how the new and the different became more and more a mirror image of the old that it originally was designed to replace. The very inequalities Animalism was designed to change were eventually replicated by Animalism itself. The very ideological positions Animalism was designed to change were eventually adopted and replicated unthinkingly by Animalism itself.

Hang on a minute . . . what’s Animal Farm got to do with the social economy?

You’re not suggesting that what was originally a new way of achieving a more just and equitable society by combining selected approaches from the business sector with a social mission to take on major social challenges has been high-jacked by some form of Animalism are you?

You’re not suggesting that the social economy has been reshaped from its original intentions – just like original Animalism was – to become more and more a tool for an ideological position that perhaps could be called Neo-Animalism are you?

You’re not suggesting that the social economy has been or could be coopted by the dominant political economy to somehow uncritically reflect all its basic ideological commitments and so replicate the very thing it was designed to eradicate are you?

You’re not suggesting that the very system that creates vast challenges for both people and planet and grinds the wheels of inequality, also promotes the social economy as the solution to the very problems it creates are you?

That’s as fanciful rubbish as George Orwell’s Animal Farm was in the first place.

I’ll take these ideas back to 1945 and stay there.

The post Animal Farm and the Social Economy appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

Most of us apparently remember Albert for his hair – or at least how eccentric he looked. And then we leave it at that. Certainly we are taught about Albert’ science – not his hair – during our school years. And we leave it at that – just another academic, clever type person. Yawn.

But apparently there was a little more going on with Albert’s hair.

So what did Einstein’s hair signify you may ask? According to this biography it was a political statement – Albert refused to conform to social standards of personal appearance. He was unapologetic in his individuality and unashamed of being different.

Didn’t know that about Albert?

Well here is more that perhaps we were not taught about Albert. Here is what we learn from Steven Gimbel’s Einstein: His Space and Times:

Einstein’s science made him a worldwide celebrity, a status others might have enjoyed, but which Einstein despised. He was no shrinking violet, yet he detested the shallowness and meaningless absurdity that came with his universal adoration. But he realised that it could be handy.

He was given a cultural megaphone and he decided that its best use was to amplify the concerns of those whose voices were least heard. Whether it was his own Jewish brethren suffering the insults of antisemitism, African-Americans suffering systematic racism, the poor kept down by structural barriers to advancement, or political dissidents in the Soviet Union who were being repressed, Einstein was unabashedly vocal in trying to change the institutions that led to inequality and injustice. His standing provided him with a unique place to speak for those who were silenced and he made great use of it in the name of universal human dignity.

Einstein never lacked confidence. Strengthened by his convictions, he was impervious to the power of those with superior social or professional standing, and resolute in his willingness to state his beliefs publicly. As social psychologists have shown, humans are greatly influenced by the opinions of those around us, especially those who occupy positions of authority. We can shy away from reasonable and ethical beliefs, if we sense that we are in the minority for holding those views.

But Einstein stands as an example of intellectual commitment. His revolutionary physical theories and his advocacy for peace at times of war and for better treatment of those in need were often unpopular. Einstein was investigated by the FBI for his views, and he received death threats from Nazi sympathisers. He was threatened with the loss of his position at the Institute for Advanced Study for his vocal support for his beliefs and causes. Yet he steadfastly refused to give in to fashion, expedience or groupthink. It is a cliché to say someone has the “courage of his convictions”, but Einstein is a figure of great courage in publicly expounding views he thought correct and morally necessary when such positions were dangerously unpopular.

Einstein, with his wild hair, signalled that human advancement comes not from the conformity the authorities demand, but from difference – and that all of us at various times in our lives feel a sense of alienation. Einstein gives us pride in ourselves as individuals who can make a difference; we can revel in free thought, but there is no need in doing so to reject our shared humanity.

Perhaps Albert was a social innovation – well before the term became fashionable – unlike his hair.

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