#BeyondTheRules

This blog is part of a partnership exploring practical tools for a new type of organising with the purpose of creating ‘public good’. In it we set out a couple dominant assumptions and the impact we believe they’ve had for how we govern and organise. We then put forward a couple of alternative assumptions and the impact they could have, and explore alternative ‘21st century’ principles for governing and organising for ‘public good’. We lay out the actions planned by this partnership and invite you to take part.

When we organise with the explicit purpose of creating public good/value — ‘public good’ used here as an imperfect term to describe an intention of collective benefit distinct from, say, organising for the purpose of profit creation — the good/value that we create is often undermined or inhibited by the way we govern and how we organise.

How we organise has always been interwoven with how we perceive ourselves. Our prevalent models of organisation are heavily designed with a bias to self-reinforcing ideas of humans as separate and self-interested individuals and our systems designed with an emphasis to stratify and control. When we apply these principles to the purpose of creating ‘public good’ it leads to ‘good’ that is entangled with deep harm.

There is a reinforcing cycle in all directions between what we bias in how we conceive human nature, how that guides our organisational design, and how those structures shape human behaviour and attitudes. When we intend to create ‘public good’ it is important that we intentionally choose which concepts we design around.

Choosing to bias our concepts of humans as being entangled, pro-social beings and designing our systems with an emphasis to dynamic leadership to unleash potential may enable us to organise for the ‘good’ in more fruitful ways to meet the demands of tomorrow’s world.

In this blog we share some design concepts for twenty-first-century organising for good, anchored in networks and movements, shared agency, trust and continuous learning. A way of governing and organising that goes beyond the rules that currently inhibit us.

This blog is part of a partnership exploring the practical tools for this type of governing and organising. Together we intend to create an open-source space where structures, tools, processes, philosophies, and systems can be shared openly, learnt from, and built upon collectively. We aim to learn and experiment together in how we govern and organise for ‘good’ for the 21st Century.

THE STATUS QUO

Dominant assumptions in the status quo

Human nature is layered, nuanced and difficult to comprehend. We tend to simplify this complexity and to bias particular aspects of our nature when we seek to understand and design around it. When we design our social and economic structures and systems the concepts they bias can become mutually reinforcing — influencing, in turn, how we think and behave in relation to them.

There are some mutually reinforcing concepts about humans that have played a driving role in the systems — social, economic and organisational — that are currently prevalent, and their conclusions have led us to a particular way of operating.

One is that humans and the world around them are distinct and separate, or the earth is the ‘background against which humans live out our history’ (to quote Aaron Mills). This sort of object–subject view of the world was a particular feature of imperial, colonising nations and has continued to gain traction since the Enlightenment.

Another is that humans are interested in self above and beyond the collective. The emphasis on individual self-interest gained traction as a designing principle in western approaches in governance (influenced by thinkers like Thomas Hobbes) and economics (influenced by concepts like John Stuart Mill’s ‘homo economicus’), among other social fields. The approach creates a vicious cycle, in that as we organise with a focus on curtailing self-interest, we further internalise views of ourselves as self-interested.

Not only this, but we are more likely to view others as self-interested, because there is a human inclination that is relevant here — one linked to our desire to belong, connect and share identity — which is to negatively project onto groups to which we don’t belong — to ‘othering’. This tendency has led to a rainbow of ways that we have conceived certain groups of people as lesser in worth or value — constructing concepts to categorise the ‘otherness’, whether in the lines of gender, race, nationality or caste. The power structures created around these concepts — and the stratification of societies, organisations, families into fixed roles and hierarchies — are self-reinforcing: as those at top of the stratification gain more power through their position, the existence of that power fuels ideas of inherent superiority.

When it comes to how we govern, and how we organise — from imperialism to meritocracy — much of our status quo is designed around some groups of people exerting control over others and, collectively, in our escalating dominion and extraction from nature.

In modern organising, our status quo is to stratify companies into fixed hierarchies, with a controlling central planner at the top. Responsibilities are bounded according to roles in the organisational machine. As we build structures grounded in these concepts and they further reinforce daily habits and cultural norms, we internalise these ideas and they shape our internal compass.

Creating ‘Public Good’ under these dominant assumptions

What we consider ‘public good’ to be, how we design our infrastructure, governance mechanisms and organising principles at both a societal, sectoral and organisational level for this work are also deeply embedded in these norms. The current status quo remains centered on single-point delivery, bounded responsibility and methodologies of control which — when addressing matters so interconnected — creates ways of operating that are ineffective and, often, harmful.

Under neoliberal economic theory, creating ‘public good’ is not a shared responsibility of all actors in the economy, but a bounded responsibility largely ‘delivered’ by the public sector and not-for-profit groups. What is considered a public ‘good’ in this system is pre-prescribed and constrained by bodies such as the UK charities commission which lists thirteen public benefits to which all charities must have regard. Reporting is designed to ensure that people adhere to the categories and requirements (not to make sense of connected issues) which incentivises organisations to maximise one of these predetermined goods over others — think of a zoo which forces families to depart via a shop where plastic toys are marketed to children; a sustainable products delivery service which uses non-recyclable styrofoam; or the 25% of charities who pay less than the living wage.

When it comes to our relationship with nature, this approach also encourages institutions to commodify, financialise, and price the potential of environmental goods into their models (think carbon pricing), offering ways to offset externalities rather than to deeply change how they interact with the world.

Funding for these organisations ‘for good’ is traditionally structured to encourage charitable organisations to compete against each other, demonstrating that they are the most ‘efficient’ or best ‘value for money’. In this reality, charities build relationships with each other in order to fundraise (collaboration for the sake of delivering shared missions gets sidelined). Grant contracts and monitoring structures are set up in order to avoid mismanagement of funds — prioritising accountability above all else to funders. Decision-making and risk management are concentrated in charity trustees, representing small subsections of society (in 2017 in the UK, 64% were male, 92% white, and 75% with incomes above the national median) that cannot possibly have the ability to see, understand, and represent the whole system of individuals, relationships, and communities that they are mandated to support.

With regard to organisational practices, the ‘status quo’ principles of seeking control (of people, situations, outcomes, our environment) and of designing systems to curtail expected bad behaviour are still widespread. This might be in creating management hierarchies to stop people from abusing knowledge. Using planning and decision-making as internal functions to ensure what we do can be funded. Issuing employment contracts to bound employees around what and how they can work. Monitoring time and behaviour, creating performance metrics and other rules to ensure that people are not abusing a system. Evaluating work as a method to justify past performance, rather than to enhance learning.

Far from exempt from these ways of operating, charities and other ‘for good’ organisations are particularly stuck within them. Their need to be ‘efficient’ to secure funding, and the large role of volunteers at both governance and operational levels (among other factors) often makes it difficult to invest in trialing different ways of working. The time and resource required to break out of the status quo and discover ways of organising and governing fit for the 21st century leaves organisations ‘for good’ in many aspects trailing far behind private sector counterparts. To quote this assessment of the challenges by Creating the Future, “the social change arena is actually modeling and perpetuating the very conditions it is seeking to change”.

With these norms of governing and organising we lose our accountability to the communities we are set up to serve; to the planet that we rely upon to deliver it; and to the future generations that will inherit what we create. It is not possible to ‘do good’ in a sustainable or just way in the 21st Century within its constraints.

AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH

Alternative assumptions

There are of course other elements of human nature that we may bias when we design our systems. And there are of course many cultures and societies that have developed alternative systems, tools, behaviours and cultures designed around a different emphasis on what it means to be human. Discovering 21st century ways of organising and governing ‘for good’ is as much about uncovering and learning from edge alternatives that have been developed throughout history as it is about developing new ways of doing. It requires braiding this learning with what we know about the world today.

And there are some aspects of human nature that feel particularly relevant to our current reality and the world that is unfolding before us.

One is that humans are deeply entangled in our natural environments. This has been a core concept in many cultures (particularly those outside of western hegemony) for centuries. As modern science discovers that more than half of human bodies are made up of non-human cells or that air pollution impacts a child’s ability to learn, the impact of this entanglement and how we design for it becomes increasingly tangible. We may think of nature as less like a resource for our consumption but more like — in the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer — an elder relative.

Another is that we are inherently pro-social, or ‘ultrasocial learning machines…born to learn, to play and to bond’ (to quote Rutger Bregman), with clinical research increasingly evidencing that the desire to support others is a fundamental part of our psychological make-up. Many cultures bias their understanding of humans towards our collective and prosocial tendencies over our self-interest and organise driven by these concepts. As we face a world of realities in which collective action is necessary — from climate breakdown to governing AI — we will need to rely on these aspects of our nature to design for collective good.

If we consider that humans are created of equal inherent worth and that each human has different attributes, gifts, and characteristics to offer the world, then fixed stratification (whether by class, caste, gender, race or ‘role’ in an organisation) has no place. This is particularly evident as identities that we have socially constructed in order to justify stratification are increasingly shown to have no scientific base (whether that be through the existence of female hunter gatherers, or the lack of scientific basis of race). This reality requires systems wherein power and hierarchy and modes of operating can be dynamic and shift in order to unleash the full flourishing of each of our capacity according to circumstance. In this type of system, responsibility and accountability is distributed and to the whole, as any person may need to take a leadership or a servant role depending on the situation. In this system we manifest more as stewards than as owners.

Twenty-first-century organising for good

Above we have laid out some alternative traits of human nature that we might bias in our system design for the 21st century, which are notably contrasting to what is biased in the prevalent ways that we organise. Let us not fall into the trap of assuming these concepts are all a dichotomy or a binary representation of good and bad/ true and false. Humans can be fundamentally pro-social and also self-interested even in the same moment or according to circumstance. We are deeply entangled in nature and with each other, but also have the capacity to affect other species and societies in a way unique to humankind.

Our ability to acknowledge this places the onus upon us to take responsibility for what we design.

The moment we find ourselves in forcing us to acknowledge this. The Covid-19 outbreak alongside climate breakdown and escalating socioeconomic inequality have revealed some of the entangled challenges ahead of us; challenges that require our institutions, economies, social structures and relationships with nature to be better aligned and connected, democratic and adaptive — arguably more so than in all of human history.

Technology is also enabling us to respond to this unique moment. We can choose to wield technology and machines in symbiosis with nature rather than to extract from it. For example, we are developing a new generation of highly networked technologies — from new forms of communication to new trust and sense-making infrastructures such as sensor devices and smart contracts — which, if designed well and deployed in a particular way, could enable us to grow our awareness of our interconnectedness.

We need to think nimbly, to respond appropriately, and act dynamically to our context. Designing structures for simplified versions of the human or static notions of context is not the answer. The art — we propose — is not in simplifying, but in recognising that the structures we build will reinforce the assumptions under which they were built. If our beliefs — behaviours — cultures — structures are self-reinforcing loops, then we also need to choose what to reinforce for the future ahead of us.

We propose that our dominant approach to organising for good must be radically reoriented if we are to be good ancestors to the generations that follow us. We need to enable the unique brilliance of each and every one of us, openly sharing and exchanging insight, building upon each other’s differing and interconnected contributions.

Rethinking Boundaries: Networks and movements

We are more globally entangled than we have ever been, and our challenges ahead require systems thinking and an interconnected approach to a level of complexity beyond what we’ve ever had to design for before. Our tools and structures must help to reinforce our accountability to the whole and to enable us to see ourselves within wider ecosystems. Meaningful change will require a whole system, a network and movement of interdependent change agents and organisations and we must build our systems to enable this (this cannot be siloed to charities or single-point maximisation).

What if we could unlock a shared infrastructure across all types of actors in a place — a city, say — to collaborate and share data and insight in reaching targets for needs like carbon reduction?

Rethinking Incentives: Trust and shared agency

If we are to have a chance to — for example, avert widespread climate breakdown — this requires us to unleash widespread brilliance, across sectors, ages, nations, sexes — across all of our traditional divides. The level and breadth of change required cannot be achieved by the few. This work requires us to lean on and reinforce the prosocial tendencies of humans; we need to design trust, distributed agency, and intentionality into our interdependencies. As we increase our recognition of our desire, and capacity to collaborate, trust rises which in turn allows us to act more autonomously (as argued by Bonnita Roy). Autonomy, alone, can be damaging, but if it is done with awareness of our entanglement and power relations, it can have a hugely positive effect.

What if organisations for ‘good’ were able to easily implement alternative systems and tools — from employment contracts, organising protocols, meetings practices, financial management systems — that enable them to create the conditions for distributed agency among their teams and the wider communities they serve?

Rethinking Complexity: Continuous Learning

Many of the challenges that we look to create different outcomes around — whether it be obesity, climate breakdown, rates of depression, or gender pay gaps — are symptoms of multiple deeply interconnected and complex adaptive systems. The picture is constantly moving, the pieces and their relationships constantly adapting — we can not hope to understand the system in its whole but rather must sense some of its “realities.. associatively and indirectly, at the edges of perception.” By this we mean we need constant and compounded learning across many perspectives. It requires us to move from a place of purely intended learning — which measures progress against a set of specific goals — to a place of emergent learning — which incorporates capabilities from the heart gut, body and intuition (see more on this from Sahana Chattopadhyay in this article). It also requires the infrastructure, data and peer-to-peer accountability for feedback loops and constant iteration.

What if our operations were aligned to our evolving purpose, so that we rewrote our systems of delivery and reporting to focus on what we are learning and how we will be using this emerging understanding to reorient?

This work demands a different collaborative paradigm, covering protocols, contracts, investment, incentives, data and accountability.

Evolution of the rules that restrict and govern us — from employment law to the rules of the Charities Commission — is essential to enable us to effectively address the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Plenty of questions remain about how the various levels of organising (if we use sector terms — public, private, third etc) for this future work together. Such as, how are public utilities factored into the bigger picture? How do we distinguish between doing good and providing public utilities or services (how do we classify, say, water supply or a hospital)? How do we invest in discovering new public goods that are as yet unpriced or costed in what is currently deemed socially valuable? If what we consider ‘doing good’ is driven by what people are asking for, how do we create the conditions for meaningful deliberation?

The limitations of organisational design

We cannot ignore that we are not starting with a blank canvas — the effectiveness of these forms of organising are limited by the structured inequalities and social constructs prevalent in the present.

Alternate forms of organising play a role to address injustices — they aim to dismantle dominant forms of power to bring richness, depth, accessibility, and possibility for us all. Yet, organisations alone have limited efficacy in a society still rife with structural inequality, including in the political domain, which is as in need of reform as any other. Building trust is limited when power is concentrated in particular groups of people, and when some are still fighting for their right to exist without hostility. Unlocking shared agency is limited when some people struggle to feed their children whilst others own more wealth than nations. Continuous and open learning is impeded when some people’s knowledge is still extracted and commodified and used for financial gain by others.

The restructuring of our organisations is unleashed when sat within and alongside wider changes in how we organise — politically, economically, socially. As a spectrum, the more organisational change sits alongside wider change, the easier it becomes. When it is fighting against the systems, norms and rules around it, the change will always be limited, not good enough, costly and hard (particularly for organisations focused on ‘public good’, as outlined above). This makes it even more important to share tools, experiments, ideas and examples in an open source way to learn together.

21st Century Organising ‘for good’ — who can we learn from?

There is much to learn from present and historic groups and individuals who have pioneered many of these ideas, cultures, systems and tools on a organisational/movement level.

A generation of civic institutions and movements are generating impact through open and social models of adoption and adaptation. They have organised themselves to be distributed and autonomous, globally networked but deeply embedded in place. These include Anonymous, Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, MeToo, Stop Ecocide, and the Umbrella Movement. Founders and makers have learned from models such as the rhizome, the franchise, and the social movement, adapting their strategies and tactics in order to catalyse diverse opportunities for shared outcomes at scale. There are also attempts to codify decentralised forms of organising, for example DisCO provides a feminist economic alternative to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs. Local and globally connected, they are driving alternatives to transnational or market-led paradigms of globalisation.

When it comes to organisational structures, Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations has awoken and connected a plethora of organisations either already operating or seeking to operate around ‘Teal’ principles, developing the structures, tools, and processes to enable this. Enspiral and Gini are among the innovative organisations progressing this work. In addition, there are a range of overlapping, complimentary models and strategies – from Bioteams to lattice management more details of which can be found online on the interactive Periodic Table of The Future of Work. TAs well as a host of more traditional organisations experimenting with processes, from open hiring to meeting cultures.

Beyond organisations, towards networks of systems change, there are also initiatives focused on growing movements across the work of ’public good’. For example Creating the Future, whose founder Hilldy Gottlieb’s article on Building Movements not organizations has already been a big inspiration. And more recently, and closer to our UK home, OpenOD was launched to explore radically different organisational development for the UK nonprofit sector. Meanwhile, hybrid partnerships between public, private, and civic actors are working to consolidate their activities through a shared understanding of needs. New frameworks include Movement Generation’s Just Transition strategy and Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Typology. The latter has resulted in the recent launch of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) to help groups seeking to work within planetary boundaries while meeting basic human needs.

Sitting alongside all of this are organisations working on some of the fundamental areas of justice for the social and economic conditions that shape what we build. There are far too many to even seek to mention. Even just on the fight against anti-black racism, organisations such as People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond and Black Thrive; funding initiatives such as Black Land & Spatial Fund and Kwanda’s technology enabled collective funding pot; as well profession-specific social justice networks such as Black Females in Architecture are a nod to only a few. There are many but we need many, many more.

The above names are only a selection. We would love to hear from you about who is inspiring you and who we can all learn from in this work.

WHAT ARE WE DOING?

A bit more about the project

#Beyond the Rules is a collaborative expedition involving Black Thrive, Dark Matter Laboratories, Democratic Society, Lankelly Chase, and York MCN. We share a desire to organise and govern better within our work ‘for good’, and collectively seek to learn and experiment in how we might do this. As we embark upon our journey, we propose to:

1. Invite deeper insights and other proposals to the theory around some of the principles required for 21st century organising for good.
2. Build a supportive map and framework of how a 21st century means of doing good is emerging, charting needs for further experimentation and research.
3. Gain insight of the challenges currently faced by people working within the constraints of these rules and explore what needs to change.
4. Compile an open source compendium of experiments charting this route, complementing and filling the gaps of similar initiatives.
5. Initiate and support a series of experiments in our own organisations, sharing our findings with our collaborators.
6. Continuously share our learning (mistakes and all) while building a shared conversation with many of you who are leading at the edge of this reality.

Intervention points — an initial list of experiments

Some of the experiments that we intend to advance within our own organisations (within the next 6 months) include:

1. Reimagining the employment contract
2. Reimagining the grant contract
3. Reimagining governance structures and roles with an appreciation of explicit and implicit power dynamics.
4. Imagining the infrastructure and protocols for complex deep collaboration
5. Addressing structural inequality through anti-oppressive organisational practices
6. Reimagining pay structures

We will be exploring these and sharing them openly and invite your insight and reflections to them before, during and after.

We extend an open invitation to co-shape this thinking, challenge its hypothesis, contribute great examples into the open source compilation, identify structural challenges that require solutions, and suggest experiments that you believe are necessary.

If you’d like to be involved in this project please fill in this short form to let us know a bit more about you — it should only take a couple minutes!

For some of our partners blogs please see Democratic Society’s blog and York MCN’s blog about what’s leading them to take part in this project.