VIGDEOCS and CULTURAL CREATIVES # 9

What Business Are We In?

Thinking, acting and learning together.

Let’s just re-cap a bit. So far we’ve touched on Gaia Theory, Systems thinking, Argyris and Schön’s concepts of Espoused Theories and Theories in Use, Lincoln’s vs Schumpeter’s Theories of Democracy, Cybernetics and Viable Systems, Liberating Leadership, Paulo Freire, Problem-posing dialogues and processes such as Charettes and O.R.A.K.E.L,

We’ve skimmed over a lot of ground . And this is just the start. We will never be able to co-create Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations, Communities and Societies without all of these ideas and many more.

But, we are not alone. We are a network of networks of groups of people. We have every chance to think, act and learn together to liberate our individual and collective competence, confidence and creativity.

It will take a lot of work and thousands of hours of your time over the coming decades, Studies show that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to produce a virtuoso pianist or tennis player or chess master, Those who practice less become less proficient than those who practice more. And similarly, if you spend four or eight hours a week thinking, acting and learning together, the results will come more quickly than if you do one or two hours a month.

All the topics that I’ve raised added together are just a few examples of the new ways of thinking that we will need to apply to make our Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations, Communities and Societies into Viable, Innovative and Gaian systems .

For practical examples of how to transform every kind of system you will need to see how people with very clear pro-human values like Peter Checkland, Dee Hock, W. Edwards Deming, John Seddon, Jim Lancaster have applied systems thinking in the real world.

How do we do this?  By mutual support, encouragement and improvement.

The Mutual Improvement Model

The model we try to emulate in our groups is the one that the British working classes developed to think, act and learn together for nearly 400 years, from about the end of the 16^th Century to the middle of the 20th century.

Thanks to King Henry v111th’s over-active sex-drive, England had shaken off dead-hand of the Roman Catholic in the mid-16th Century and soon, labourers and artisans started to form mutual improvement groups. Some were illiterate but they didn’t just want to learn to read and write. They met semi-secretly at first to discuss the Bible in English and the torrent of new books that were challenging traditional interpretations of the scriptures. Soon, they were widening their range to include books of science, mathematics, exploration, philosophy, and then novels, biographies, classical texts in Greek and Latin and much much more besides,

The whole story is told in a wonderful book by Jonathan Rose, with the defiant title, “The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes”. Until the end of the 19^th Century, it usually cost a penny a week to join a mutual improvement group. For a couple of centuries, they had no professional teachers. Each week a member of the group would lead the others in a discussion on something that he – and very occasionally she – had studied.

Over time, the groups became more formalised, created ever-larger libraries, built thousands of halls for their “Mechanics Institutes”and “Literary and Philosophical Societies’, codified rules of procedure, created colleges for the working classes, and Amateur Operatic Societies, sports clubs, and leagues, linked to Trade Unions, supported radical politicians , and were a major force for positive change in Britain.

A penny a week would be equivalent to how much in today’s money? You’ll need to work that out when you start your group. But certainly, it should not be a derisory amount. A penny was between 1% and 2% of an average weekly wage in the 17 to 19^th Centuries.  So, what’s 1 – 2 % of the average weekly wage hereabouts?

At one level that penny a week is a statement of your seriousness in wanting to think, act and learn together to co-create Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations, Communities and Societies.

Then, your group will need those subscriptions to  fund the activities that sustain and expand the business that you and the rest of the VIGDEOCS network is in.

What Business Are We In?

The people who have created the Global Monetocracies that got the human family into the mess we are in, know very well that their business is to get their President in the White House, their Prime Minister in Number 10, their majority in both houses of Congress and the House of Commons, their nominees on the Supreme Court, their protégé(e)s in the Cabinet, their technocrats at the head of major national and international businesses and agencies, their Mayors and Governors running key cities and states, their allies in key positions on radio, TV and the print media, their theorists in key university posts, their publications given prominent exposure in their mass-media.

To change the disastrous and dysfunctional system that they have created, we have to be in the business of putting our President in the White House, our Prime Minister in Number 10, our majority in both houses of Congress and the House of Commons, our protégé(e)s in the Cabinet, our technocrats at the head of major national and international businesses and agencies, our Mayors and Governors running key cities and states, our allies in key positions on radio, TV and the print media, our theorists in key university posts, our views and analysis given prominent exposure in the mass-media.

It won’t happen this year, but the sooner we start to think, act and learn together to co-create Viable Innovative Gaian, Enterprises, Organisations and Communities, the sooner our people will be in the positions they need to be in to lead the co-creation of Viable, Innovative and Gaian Democracies and Societies.

However, as the British working classes insisted on all those years ago, the VIGDEOCS networks must not get stuck in any kind of an ideological or intellectual rut. We must not be boringly intellectual, like  Marxists and neo-liberals.

In order to be seriously effective, we must  enjoy asking difficult questions and having fun,  Boring and solemn we must not be.

The only entrance qualification is a willingness to pay a weekly subscription and want to think, act and learn with you and co-create  VIGDEOCS.

At the same time, although the range of concepts and methodologies offered by  the thinkers I’ve suggested are anything but narrow, they have not written great poetry or novels or music.  Do not under any circumstances neglect the lessons that you can learn from great literature and art and history, even though it comes from a tradition that may seem obsolete.  There can be no fundamentalists or ideological commissars amongst us.  If you think that it would be valuable to spend an occasional evening reflecting on “The Wire” or “The Office” or “Hamlet” or “Carmen” or “The Prince” or “Persuasion” that isn’t some kind of backsliding or apostacy. Its broadening your minds.  Equally, linking up with a sports clubs, forming choirs and holding 1970s discoes,  must be a good thing.

Now, lets break for five minutes and then get down to the business of organising your next meeting.

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VIGDEOCS and CULTURAL CREATIVES # 8

Liberating Leadership Teams

Leadership is one of the most misunderstood terms in any language. So much so that some very well-known anti-globalisation campaigners espouse the theory that

• A truly democratic government is not supposed to lead. It is supposed to respond to the leadership of “We the people.”
• The most accurate answer to the question, “Who is the leader of global civil society?” is, “Every person.”

In other words, if everyone, in that amorphous fantasy, “global civil society”, regardless of their values, their capabilities, their aims, is ‘ the leader’ , then no-one really leads, and the word has no meaning any more.

If I say that everyone can be a composer or a novelist or an architect, you would want me to explain exactly what I meant by such a statement. Without such explanations, these ex-cathedra statements about leadership, are immensely dis-empowering and confusing.

Moreover they are made by people who themselves have undoubtedly claimed and performed leadership roles in many different arenas. How else can we interpret their campaigns, their access to funding from governments, corporations and major foundations, hence their institutes, and their constant presence on the platforms of international conferences, their books, their newspaper articles and interviews,?

Certainly, when we talk about the role of leaders and leadership in Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations, Communities and Societies, we do not mean a single leader or leadership group; a dictator, a messiah, a charismatic spell-binder and his/her disciples.

But, the reality is that we will never have the kinds of INNOVATIVE Democracies,  INNOVATIVE Enterprises,  INNOVATIVE Organisations, INNOVATIVE Communities and  INNOVATIVE Societies we need to become viable and Gaian, without thousands of teams of “Liberating Leaders”

Liberating leaders come in all shapes and sizes. They have many different job-titles: mayor, politician, governor, president, executive, director, professor, manager, consultant, editor, teacher, organiser, even, whisper it not, “leader”.

They will be liberating leaders because they transform their Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations, Communities and Societies by liberating the untapped potential for innovation and creativity in the people that they lead, individually and collectively. They will liberate that untapped potential through the routine use of “problem-posing dialogues” .

Problem-posing dialogues

Problem-posing dialogues can take many forms, depending on the numbers of people involved and the nature and scale of the problems being addressed.

Paulo Freire used them as a vehicle through which he could liberate groups of Brazilian peasants from the oppression and hopelessness caused by their illiteracy and powerlessness. Freire described the “monologues” in which teachers attempt to transfer the knowledge that is stored in their heads into the heads of their students as a form of oppression.

By using Problem-posing Dialogues we can think, act and learn together to initiate and sustain the processes by which our Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations, Communities and Societies can become ever-more Viable Innovative and Gaian.

To be effective, Liberating Leaders have to work as part of a leadership team whose members have shared values, theories in use, vocabulary and purposes for their Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations, Communities or Societies.

Liberating Leaders Teams nurture other teams of Liberating Leaders in every sector and every level of the systems for which they are responsible.

In small-ish groups, meeting regularly with a shared understanding of their purposes and principles, the Liberating Leadership roles can be rotated or allocated by lot. When the Problem-posing dialogues involve groups of relative strangers,  small or large or enormous, without a shared understanding of their purposes and principles, the likelihood of successful outcomes will be small unless legitimated, resourced, designed and facilitated by teams of Liberating Leaders.

If we are to produce the vast range of innovations we will need to make our Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations, Communities and Societies Viable and Gaian, we must learn how to use Problem-posing dialogues and nurture the multitude of Liberating Leaders that will be needed.

It is also important to understand that,through Problem-posing dialogues, Liberating Leadership Teams liberate their own creativity, energy, confidence, capabilities as well as those of  the people they lead.

Among many thousands of possibilities, specific examples of Problem-posing dialogues include:

The O.R.A.K.E.L. Project:

Designed by the Systems Research Study Group at Heidelberg University in collaboration with the Second West German TV channel (ZDF) in 1970. The ZDF cleared their TV schedules for two evenings and transmitted an ORAKEL programme that was designed to enable the viewers to co-create and agree upon a national policy on “Pollution” .

Holistic Management vs Desertification

Holistic Management to date is really the story of Alan Savory’s revolutionary proposal that desertification is being caused by the way that bad decisions being made about land-management. These decision stemmed from dividing the problem into “manageable parts” rather than dealing with the complexity of ‘the whole’. Savory also noted that this type of decision-making was characterised by a lack of listening, respect, and trust.

Participatory Budgeting

Participatory budgeting is a process of democratic deliberation and decision-making, in which ordinary residents decide how to allocate part of a municipal or public budget. Participatory budgeting allows citizens to identify, discuss, and prioritize public spending projects. ( Wikipedia)

The Charrette Process

Many municipalities around the world develop long term city plans or visions through multiple charrettes – both communal and professional. Notable successes include the city of Vancouver, British Columbia. (from Wikipedia)

The British Columbia Citizens Assembly

The Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform is a group created by the government of British Columbia, Canada to investigate and recommend changes to the provincial electoral system. It was composed 160 members, one man and one woman from each of BC’s 79 electoral districts, plus two Aboriginal members. Assembly members were selected by a civic lottery that ensured a gender balance and a fair representation of the population’s age and geographical distribution. (from Wikipedia)

Paulo Freire on Leadership

The “liberating” part of Liberating Leadership comes from Paulo Freire’s insistence that “Dialogue is Liberating and Monologue is Oppressing”.

In the 1950s, Freire was one of many young Brazilian professionals who were searching for ways to transform the desperate circumstances that had to be endured by the oppressed majority of Brazilians. As he saw it, the main purpose of leadership was

• To free the oppressed from twin thraldom of silence and monologue.
• To prepare the ground for democracy and radical social transformation.
• To recover people’s stolen humanity.
• To increase men’s (sic) ability to perceive the challenges of their time
• To predispose men (sic) to re-evaluate constantly, to analyse “findings”, to adopt scientific methods and processes.
• To help men (sic) to assume an increasingly critical attitude towards the world and so to transform it.
• To enable men (sic) to discuss courageously the problems of their context – and to intervene in that context (by) offering them the confidence and strength to confront those dangers instead of surrendering to the decisions of others.

Freire specifically rejected, for instance;

• Forcing men to behave as machines

• Prefabricated, technocratic approaches. Narrowly-defined, prescriptive, formulaic, once-for-all solutions to complex problems that reinforce the oppressive status quo.
• Ideology and Sectarianism of either the left or the right
• Monologue in all its forms: slogans: communiqués, strongly emotional communications: polemics vs dialogue. Manoevering people via propaganda to win them over to “our side” and support our goals without question.
• The idea that ‘the leaders are the thinkers, the people are the doers’.
• The oversimplification of problems.
• A naïve nostalgia for the past : a taste for fanciful – magical , illogical, irrational explanations:
• Underestimating the people:
• Despotism via huge imbalances of power
• Educational practices that failed to offer opportunities for the analysis and debate of problems or for genuine participation.
• Populist manifestations (demos, marches. riots etc.) that exemplify a naïve. illogical, irrational type of behaviour by the oppressed.

Let’s take another five minute break before we end the first half of the evening.

VIGDEOCS AND CULTURAL CREATIVES. # 7

What will we mean by  INNOVATIVE Democracies,  INNOVATIVE Enterprises,  INNOVATIVE Organisations, INNOVATIVE Communities and  INNOVATIVE Societies

You’ll note that “Innovative Technologies” is missing from the list and yet, of course the rate of technological innovation over the past few hundred years has been incredibly fast and is constantly accelerating.

Since the invention of the steam engine 300 years ago, our Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations, Communities and Societies have been shaped by a constant flow of technological innovations.

We now understand, however, that no matter how impressive, elegant or seductive they may be, technological innovations have been increasingly anti-Gaian and anti-human.

In all that time, with the exception of innovations in medicine and public health, technological innovations have mainly served the interests of the commercial, financial and military elites.

In adapting to those innovations our Enterprises, Organisations, Communities and Societies have seen many non-technological innovations: income taxes, trade unions, a huge range of public services, and a vast expansion of bureaucracy in all its forms.

By contrast, since the English, American and European revolutions of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, most of the non-technological components of our Democracies, remain much as they were 200 years ago.

This is where we will need to devise and implement many radical innovations if we are to come through the 21^st century in good shape.

Not that the human family will be able to survive the 21st Century without a lot of technological innovation, but they will happen in order to fulfil the purposes of achieving and sustaining (all together now!!) Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations, Communities and Societies.

As we’ve already discussed. Viable and Gaian are terms with specific, objective meanings from cybernetics and earth sciences.

In the context of 21^st Century Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations, Communities and Societies, however. “Innovative”, will have to carry a wide range of meanings.

It is impossible to predict where the innovations will come from that will make our Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations, Communities and Societies increasingly – even triumphantly – Viable and Gaian.

BUT we can predict that  they will come from people like us. Millions of people like us. People who have decided that they want to think, act and learn together, to make our Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations, Communities and Societies, ever-more Viable and Gaian. People who stick at it for years and years and get better and better at understanding – and doing – what needs to be done.

That in itself will be a major, a revolutionary, a hugely complex, innovation. And, in spite of what you may have heard, or would like ot believe, such innovations do not just happen by some sort of spontaneous evolutionary process.  They are the result of the determined values, the skills, the efforts  and the purposes of teams of liberating leaders, as is explained in VIGDEOCS AND CULTURAL CREATIVES. # 8,

VIGDEOCs and CULTURAL CREATIVES. PART 6

CYBERNETICS FOR DUMMIES.

We now come to what might be called “Cybernetics for Dummies”.

CYBERNETICS is not about Cyborgs or any kind of science fiction or computer-controlled organisations or societies.

Stafford Beer called it “the science of effective organisation” and the more we think, and act and learn together, the more you will realise the importance of cybernetics in co-creating networks of Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies Enterprises Organisations and Communities.

True,  the founding fathers of cybernetics were all whizzes at mathematics and pioneers in artificial intelligence and computers. But don’t be alarmed. As long as you can count up to five that’s all the maths you’ll need to understand why our Democracies Enterprises Organisations and Communities have to be Viable

A Viable System is any complex, biological or quasi-biological system that is organised so as to meet the demands of surviving in a changing environment.

And its a basic rule of cybernetics that all viable systems are RECURSIVE: they all contain and are contained within other – higher and lower level – systems.

Think of any biological organism – you, me, cats. flies. trees, worms, bacteria. We have many lower level systems: muscles, and eyes, nerves and brains stomachs, lungs and lots of other organs, all of which have their own lower-level systems, all with the same DNA, all combining together to be the unique complex adaptive viable systems that are you and me. Within those sub-systems are sub-sub-systems each with their own sub-systems and so on down to individual molecules of matter. That’s what Recursive means.

And in our turn we are sub-systems of other complex, adaptive systems: families, Enterprises Organisations and Communities. They are all recursive systems too.

But are those recursive systems VIABLE? Can our families, our Enterprises, Organisations and Communities meet the demands of surviving in a changing environment or will they only remain viable as long as the environment – which is itself a complex, adaptive system – continues more or less unchanged.

Of course, all viable, recursive, complex, adaptive systems vary constantly as they adjust to variations in their higher and lower systems. Some small degree of variation is normal and natural and necessary to maintain the systems’ viability.

But, if the systems’ environments change in ways that are outside their normal ranges of variation, then the systems and their sub-systems will cease to be viable and they will die, unless they can rapidly adapt to their new environments.

Thus, as global warming forces the Gaian systems to change in ways that are far outside the range of variation that we, and our Democracies Enterprises Organisations and Communities have known for the whole of recorded history, we and they will only continue to be Viable if we and they vastly improve our capacity to adapt to our new environments.

Thanks to the great Stafford Beer, we have a model with which we can think, act and learn together to co-create many thousands of VIGDEOCS that will maximise their capacity to adapt and maintain their viability.

By the time Stafford started applying his Viable Systems Model as a major international consultant he had already been a Production Controller, a Director of Management Science, a Managing Director of various companies. So, his ideas are based on and tested and refined by many decades of applications in the real world, at every level from the individual enterprise to a whole national economy.

The model has Five levels of sub-systems, each of which usually consists of other Viable systems.

System 1 is the level where the rubber hits the road: where, , depending on the kind of system we’re talking about, the patient meets the doctor or gets an operation, the products are designed and made: the city council collects the garbage: the teachers meet the students: the state collects its taxes: the company meets its customers and so on: These are the “primary activities” of a complex system. And you can see that there would be other viable sub-systems within those primary activities. That’s because all viable systems are, of course, RECURSIVE.

Another way of looking at System One is to see it as the boundary between the System as a whole and its environment, which might be the market, or the patient, or the electorate, or, as we now understand, the Gaian systems.

System 2 represents the information channels and bodies that allow the primary activities in System 1 to communicate between each other.

System 3 monitors and co-ordinates the activities within System 1. by establishing the rules, resources, rights and responsibilities of System 1 and also provides an interface with Systems 4 and 5.

System 4 covers the bodies that are responsible for looking outwards to the environment to monitor how the system  needs to adapt to remain viable.

System 5 is responsible for policy decisions produced within the other four levels through which the system as a whole maintains its viability.\

The table below summarises how VIGDEOCs might fit with the Viable Systems Model in order for our societies to our societies to be constantly aware of and adapt be the challenges they face.

Over the coming months you’ll have plenty of chances to discuss and modify the chart and relate it to the world we live in, but over the next few minutes let’s try to use it as a basis for clarifying why cybernetics is so important to working out the future of the human family.

	SYSTEM 1	SYSTEM2	SYSTEM3	SYSTEM4	SYSTEM5
GAIA	X	X	X	X	X
DEMOCRACIES	X	X	X	X	X
ENTERPRISES	X
ORGANISATIONS	X	X	X
COMMUNITIES			X	X

VIGDEOCs and CULTURAL CREATIVES. PART 5

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GAIA AND DEMOCRACY.

As I said earlier, networks of VIGDEOCs have also to be thought of as networks of

Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies which cannot function without networks of

Viable Innovative Gaian Enterprises

and

Viable Innovative Gaian Organisations

and

Viable Innovative Gaian Communities.

Together they will add up to an immensely diverse array of Viable Innovative Gaian Societies that are constantly learning how to adapt to, and live in harmony with the natural world of which they are a part.

And that constant learning process has to start with people like you in meetings like this.

For the next ten minutes let’s look at the links between Gaia and Democracy. .

Do we all know what Gaia means? More or less?

Originally, Gaia was the Goddess of the Universe for the Ancient Greeks’, the Mother of all the Gods.

Now, thanks to James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, Gaia has a profoundly scientific meaning: their Gaia hypothesis, proposes that all the living and the nonliving parts of the earth combine to form a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism,

That qualification ‘thought of‘ is important, because, unlike real organisms, Gaia can’t reproduce itself. It’s a 4.5 billion year-old planet, after all.

But the interplay of Gaia’s biological and physical systems means that in many ways she resembles a living organism. She adapts and evolves and gets sick and recovers. And like all but the most primitive of real organisms, she has billions of other organisms as her working parts and sub-systems. And they constantly adapt and evolve and reproduce and ingest and excrete, and die and … die-off.

Over billions of years, Gaia has been through many dramatic variations. Very hot, very cold, very friendly, very hostile. She has been wounded by asteroids and comets. Billions of species have evolved and died off and sometimes been killed off. But still she continues to adjust and adapt and new species evolve and die-off, and on and on it goes.

Human beings, like every other living thing on Earth, are all part of the Gaian system. And those systems have been more or less stable for about 15,000 years,  but, today, as James Lovelock says:

The climate centres around the world, which are the equivalent of the pathology lab of a hospital, have reported on the Earth’s physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years. I have to tell you, as members of the Earth’s family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave danger.

Now that global warming (to name just one of the ways we are de-stabilising the Gaian Systems) has passed the tipping point, “catastrophe is unstoppable” , he says.

Moreover, in his view, all the standard green things, like sustainable development, and cap-and-trade, are just words that mean nothing. “They might make us feel better, but they won’t make any difference.”

But when people tell him “You can’t say that, because it gives us nothing to do!” ,  he replies, “On the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do.”

On the other hand, he also said in 2008, “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.” although, “ I think that our best course of action is to spend at least as much effort adapting to global heating as in attempts to slow or stop it happening.”

Lovelock never spells out what he means by “adapting to global heating”, but, he seems to think that Gaia may do it for us by reducing our numbers from around 7 Billion to one billion or less. over the next few generations.

Not a pretty prospect. And in future meetings, we need to  thoroughly understand why Lovelock  and every other serious natural scientist, takes that view or something very close to it.  No point in burying our heads in the sand.

But, in terms of politics and economics, he is assuming that our societies will continue with “business as usual” because they know no better.

In fact in political terms he’s something of a dinosaur. Lovelock’s political Theories in Use seem to be  aligned with those of the global elites as John McMurtry summarised them.

Thus, although Lovelock,  above all,  has clearly established that –

• the world is a system of interacting subsystems that have evolved together and depend on each other

and that

• Viable Societies depend on a functioning ecological base and a finite, partly renewable resource-base.

He seems not to think that

• The principle of partnership applies (or could apply) to present and future human and non-human systems.

Still less would he go so far as to say that

• The self-organising potential and diversity of natural systems is the model for the co-creation of a global network of VIGDEOCs.

Lovelock is an extraordinarily brilliant and original natural scientist, but in the political and social arena, we have to reject his theories in use in favour of alternatives that enable us both to set in train effective processes of adaptation before, ‘it hits the fan’ AND have a pretty good time while we do it.

Lets move on now to what we understand by “democracy”.

Is it, “Government of the people by the people and for the people”, as Abraham Lincoln espoused?

Well, no, it isn’t.  Nowhere in the world are there  “democracies” that fits Lincoln’s description. .

Rather they are best described as

“that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.”  as Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist said in his classic work “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy’.(1942)

The role of the people in this “Competing Elites” model of democracy’, in Schumpeter’s view, is simply to produce a government of their betters. The people are sovereign only on election day. Once they have done their job, they should go back to their private affairs and leave governing to the elite they have selected. Dim ill-informed, easily-manipulated and feckless as they are, that is all that the people – that’s you and me, dear friend – are fit for, in Schumpeter’s model of ‘democracy’. And it is a view that is accepted as gospel, as their working ‘theories in use’, by almost all politicians, political commentators and political scientists today.

Moreover, for Schumpeter and his followers, these views are accepted as objective, scientific theory when they are actually an ideological justification for the domination and mismanagement of our societies by incompetent and corrupt elites.

The various ‘competing elites‘ models of democracy, could never fit our vision of using the self-organising potential and diversity of natural systems as the model for the co-creation of a global network of VIGDEOCs.

Rather, we need models of democracy that are ‘about the possibility of collective decision making about collective action for a common good.`as Cliff DuRand puts it

To be Viable, Innovative and Gaian, such democracies would also have to have the self-organising potential and diversity of natural systems

In Viable, Innovative, Gaian Democracies, citizens would learn through their collective decision-making in participatory system-change processes how to re-configure their Enterprises, Organisations and Communities so as to co-exist symbiotically with the Gaian systems on which we depend.

Thus, the adaptability of Viable, Innovative, Gaian Democracies would depend on them having Viable, Innovative Enterprises, Organisations and Communities as their sub-systems.

Which brings us to the topic of Viable Systems and Cybernetics, the science of effective organisation.

Time to stretch our legs again.

model

VIGDEOCs and CULTURAL CREATIVES. Part 4

NELSON MANDELA’S THEORIES IN USE.

Is anyone feeling a bit uncomfortable? Wondering whether you should make an excuse and leave? I ask, because if you are highly educated and/or have enjoyed a successful managerial or academic career, you will probably have agreed with both the world view of the power elites AND the alternative, ecological world view.

I can see heads nodding. It’s odd isn’t it. Here we have world views that are incompatible, yet many people can happily agree with and argue for both of them. What’s going on? Well here’s where our Theories of Action split into two parts. “Espoused Theories” and “Theories in Use”

Theories-in-use govern our actual behaviour and tend to be so internalised that we don’t really know they are there. They are a complex set of analytical rules we have acquired since the womb and use to understand ourselves, other people and the world we live in and decide what actions to take. Deep down, our ‘Theories in Use’ provide us with a set of what we take to be practical guidelines, rules, methodologies, that add up to a science of everyday life.  The more educated we are the more complex  our Theories in Use are likely to be.

Our Theories-in-use always determine the extent to which we can act upon our Espoused Theories.

Thus we can espouse an ecological and/or socialist or even anarchist world-view, but live by theories in use that make it impossible to turn our alternative world view into a reality.

The more radical the world view we espouse, the more important it is to examine the world view we actually use to go about the business of our daily lives. Going back Mandela for a moment, was INVICTUS any use when it came to choosing his economic Ministers and advisers? Many of the years he and his fellow-prisoners had spent reading and discussing the great thinkers would have been dominated by the ideas of Marx, Trotsky, Lenin, Gramsci, Che, Castro and other revolutionary theorists.

Then, just as they got the chance to put their ideas into practice, the whole Communist-Socialist project implodes and turns to the USA and its allies for advice as to how to adopt and implement free-market policies. What a bummer!! All the theories in use they had been acquiring in their prison university had been shown to be useless in the real world.

The only other alternative, Keynesian social democracy (aka capitalism-lite), had been more or less abandoned in the USA and its friends and satellites in the 1980s. So, Mandela’s speeches on economics – like Obama’s today – reflect the hard-line free-market Theories in Use that have dominated the USA and its friends since the 1980s.

The failure of Mandela, and every other would-be radical leader to deliver the revolutionary agendas that they genuinely believe when they espouse them, stems from their lack of Theories in Use that fit with and enable them to implement successfully, their ideals.

And this applies at every level and in every sector of society. None of us could have reached maturity without Theories in Use that are mostly rooted in the distant past, a past dominated by the ideas of – to name but a few – Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, John Locke, Adam Smith, James Madison, Karl Marx, Abraham Lincoln, J.M. Keynes, and a few dozen other great thinkers. But all of those great thinkers were theorising at a time when no-one had articulated, still less adopted, a world view in which human societies had to learn how to co-exist with the ecological systems on which they depend and are a part. Concepts such as ecology,  theories of action, viability, systems thinking, complexity, self-organisation, participatory democracy, problem-posing dialogues, learning organisations, sustainability, were totally unknown to them.

Yet those concepts and methodologies need to be the core components of the “Theories in Use” through which we can co-create Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies Enterprises Organisations and Communities.

For the moment, we don’t need to begin to  discuss how our current Theories in Use have affected the way we act and behave and think.  That  can wait to our next meeting. For the rest of this evening we just need to run through what we mean by Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies Enterprises Organisations and Communities.

Let’s start with “GAIAN” after we’ve stretched our legs and had another glass of something.

VIGDEOCs and CULTURAL CREATIVES. Part 3.

ESPOUSED THEORIES vs THEORIES IN USE

Before the break we looked at the dominant world view of today’s power-elites and an alternative world view that relates the survival of our societies to their connection to a functioning ecological base. Duh.

This opposing world view is so sensible and understandable that you’d think that any sane and intelligent member of society – and especially those highly-educated and nurtured members of the power-elites – would adopt it as the basis for their policies and decisions.

But of course they don’t. Why not? Because – unlike any of us – they’re cowards? And/or deeply corrupt and dishonest? Many of them, probably, but there is another explanation that we need to be aware of and think about before we cast the first stone.

The more likely explanation for the failure of our power-elites to adopt and act upon an ecologically-based world view is that their unexamined mental maps, their “Theories of Action” stop them learning how to do so.

These are not just ideological issues. We all have world views, mental models, “Theories of Action”, that can stop us from learning how to tackle complex issues and when you start coming to VIGDEOC network meetings they will be the first things you’ll talk about, explore, evaluate.

Of course, not all world views, mental models, get in your way. Without them we couldn’t get through a normal day at home or at work or with our friends. They are what enable us to fit in, feel comfortable, have confidence that we’re doing the right thing, that people will trust and respect us.

So where do those theories and mental models come from?

Think who or what has shaped – and is shaping – the way you think? Parents, teachers, friends, films, books, plays, newspapers, blogs, radio and TV, sports people, neighbours.

We all have them. You don’t have to be an intellectual. Jenni Diski the British writer tells this story of teaching in a tough London girls’ school.

Most of the pupils were planning to get married or pregnant as soon as they left school, and they were worried about Ms.Diski’s future. One day, a sixteen year-old asked ‘Miss’ :

‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-eight.’
‘Why aren’t you married?’
‘I don’t want to get married.’
The rest of the class joined in.

‘At least have a baby, miss. Because it’ll look after you when you’re old.’
‘At least get engaged, miss, and get a ring. Then you’ve got something to sell.’

Those girls – and millions like them – had such powerful “Theories of Action” that nothing said by their teachers, had any relevance to their mental models of the real world, and the Theories of Action that shaped their behaviours and actions.

Or think for a moment about sports. If you spent your formative years playing American Football, Ice-Hockey and Basketball, your world-view would be very different to contemporaries brought up on soccer, hurling, cricket, tennis and even rugby.

Which brings me to the film about the South African team’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup: INVICTUS. Did you see it?  Why INVICTUS? Yes, its the poem that President Mandela recommends to the team captain, François Pienaar as a guiding philosophy that sustained him through 27 years of harsh imprisonment.

INVICTUS starts

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

And ends

I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul

Powerful stuff. And we see Pienaar inspired by words that had sustained Mandela to lead his team of underdogs to victory in the competition – and in the process seemed to create a joyously united nation out of the bitter embers of the apartheid system.

But noble sentiments, goodwill and sporting success can take you only so far. Fifteen years later, South Africa is falling apart: economically, socially, culturally, ecologically. No doubt, Mandela and his successors have done some good things. However the Theories of Action they brought to the vast array of problems and opportunities they inherited have not enabled them to transform the fortunes of the vast majority of their fellow-citizens.

Whatever they may say about justice and change and however sincerely they say it, they, and every other democratically elected leader in the world today operates within something similar to the mental models that John McMurtry outlined.

Often, like Mandela, their mental models operate alongside a quasi-spiritual view of their role in the world. Yet, in another part of INVICTUS we see Mandela making a speech that almost explicitly endorses the dominant power-elite world view that:

• Each country is first and foremost a competitor in the global market and should act according to its own interests.
• All states have a right to use all resources within their reach.
• Governments should encourage trans-national companies to play a full part in all national and international decisions affecting global trade and development.
• Permanent economic growth is desirable and necessary, with no inherent environmental or human limits to the conversion of life into saleable commodities.

Remember that Mandela was a brilliant lawyer and had spent thousands of days in mutual-education classes with his fellow-inmates during his 27 years in prison. If, after all that, even a great man and a good leader like Mandela shares the same world-view as the rest of the global power elites, we have to start by trying to understand the limitations of our own Theories of Action before we can co-create Viable, Innovative and Gaian Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations and Communities.

VIGDEOCs and Cultural Creatives: Part 2.

THE POWER ELITES’ WORLD-VIEW

VIGDEOC = Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies Enterprises Organisations and Communities.

Look at this photo. What do you see? Not a trick question.

INSERT  PHOTO of FROCK-COATED 19th

CENTURY SURGEONS

Surgeons at work in the mid-19^th century? Yes.

What are their patients’ chances of survival? About 50%. Until about 1870, 48 – 50% of surgical patients died. This percentage had not changed in hundreds of years. Now look at this picture of a 20^th Century surgical team at work.

INSERT PHOTO OF  MID 20th.   CENTURY  SURGICAL OPERATION

What are this patient’s chances of survival? Better than 99% even for the kind of hugely-complicated surgery that was beyond the wildest imaginings of the gentlemen in the first picture.

Yet, this improvement did not take long to happen. The patients chances of survival had improved to around 99% within a few decades of that ‘first picture being taken.

Mortality rates today are only marginally better than they were at the end of the 19^th century. So, tell me, what happened?

After hundreds – even thousands – of years of stasis, had surgeons suddenly got better, cleverer, more dedicated? Had their training changed drastically? Had their instruments improved?

What happened around 1870 to make even the most difficult surgical operations vastly safer than they had been a decade or two earlier? Any suggestions? Any theories?

The answer is that surgeons everywhere started to apply the scientific knowledge that had just become available from Joseph Lister in England about Hygiene, using Carbolic Acid and Hydrogen Peroxide as Disinfectants, about Bacteriology from the work of Louis Pasteur in France, and about the Sterilisation of their instruments from Robert Koch in Germany.

Interestingly, because surgeons were all private practitioners at that time, it was market forces that drove even the most hidebound and blinkered of them to rush to implement the entirely non-surgical innovations that were making their more scientifically-minded colleagues very wealthy.

How does this relate to the VIGDEOC networks?

Remember the Questionnaire? We are agreed that

our current systems of  government and democracy do not know how to respond to crises we are facing

The reason today’s politicians, economists, business leaders, academics, administrators and commentators are failing so badly is because they have yet to use the scientific knowledge that has become available in the past half century to co-create VIGDEOCs that can define and eliminate the problems that baffle the current system.

Just as the 19^th Century surgeons before Lister, Pasteur and Koch, they are working within a set of theories and practices that go back hundreds of years. Here is a summary of how they see the world by the Canadian philosopher, John McMurtry.

• Each country is first and foremost a competitor in the global market and should act according to its own interests.

• All states have a right to use all resources within their reach.

State governments

• Are the ultimate source of civil order.

• Should keep out of the markets.

• Should encourage trans-national companies to play a full part in all national and international decisions affecting global trade and development.

Representative democracy

• is the nearest approach to an ideal democracy that is practicable in the real world and is the true guardian of a free society.

Science and technology

• We can ignore the ‘doom-mongers’ because science and technology will always find solutions to the problems that worry them.

The market economy

• All human needs express themselves in the market place in monetary terms and therefore the market will lead to optimal solutions for all problems.

• Permanent economic growth is desirable and necessary, with no inherent environmental or human limits to the conversion of life into saleable commodities.

• Individual consumer desires are permanently increasing, unlimited and good.

• Those who do not or cannot express themselves in the competitive process are a problem, but not one that calls for radical reflection.

• The great majority who have only their labour to sell must do so.

• Ever larger trans-national corporations are perfectly natural.

Market forces

• Competition is the dominant principle governing relationships of all kinds.

• Freedom to buy and sell in money exchanges is the basis of human liberty and justice.

• Profit maximisation is the engine of social well-being and is not to be hedged by public regulation or ownership.

• Private property s good in all things.

• Information is a proprietary and marketable good and a legitimate means for acquiring wealth, power and privilege.

• Aggressive individualism on the part of individuals, companies and states is acceptable.

With minor variations, those ideas have dominated human affairs for at least 200 years and have their roots in much earlier times. They go back 2500 years to Plato and Aristotle, 500 years to Machiavelli, to the Westphalian Treaty of 1659, and the thinking of John Locke and Isaac Newton, and, of course, to the free-market theories of the French Physiocrats and Adam Smith and Ricardo that have shaped the dominant economic paradigms for well over 200 years.

If there were less than a Billion people on Earth, if wars were fought with muskets and swords, if the highest form of technology were the steam engine, that world view would not immediately threaten the future of either the human family or of the species we evolved with.

Today, however, with over 6 Billion people on the planet, with wars waged by horrific high-tech weapons, and technologies that rip off the tops of mountains or scour the coral reefs off the ocean floor, those values and assumptions have to be consigned to the trashcan of history.

In the 21st. Century,  our societies have to tackle the complex systemic new threats we face within a new world view,  one that assumes:

• The world is a system of interacting subsystems that have evolved together and depend on each other
• Viable Societies depend on a functioning ecological base and a finite, partly renewable resource-base.
• The principle of partnership applies to present and future human and non-human systems.
• The self-organising potential and diversity of natural systems is the model for the co-creation of a global network of VIGDEOCs.

Time for another little break, I think. Then,we’ll outline how being part of a global network of VIGDEOCs could  affect your lives and the lives of everyone you come into contact with and the future of every living thing on Earth.

VIGDEOCs and Cultural Creatives: Part 1.

WELCOMING POTENTIAL MEMBERS OF A LOCAL VIGDEOC NETWORK

Have you all had something to eat?  Food plays an important part in all the activities of the VIGDEOC networks, not just at these introductory events.  Not always as brilliant as that we’ve had this evening but always good and wholesome.  So, can we start then by thanking Mushir and Jenny for the delicious food they prepared  for us this evening.
Now to business

My job is to explain why this could be the most important evening of your lives and your children’s lives.  If I am successful you will leave here as a new member of your local VIGDEOC group.
I have to start by reminding you that you’re here because you ticked  the “Agree” boxes in the questionnaire on the VIGDEOC’s leaflet.

Can I just check that everyone in this room agrees that

• the whole human family is faced by a bewildering combination of  complex social, economic, ecological, managerial, security crises.

• our current systems of  government and democracy do not know how to respond to crises such as fossil-fuel emissions, global warming, over-population, rising sea-levels, species extinction, terrorism, drug abuse, gross social and economic inequality, inefficient public services,  street crime and much more besides.
• our democratic and governmental systems need to be re- configured so that our societies can tackle the complex crises we face effectively, creatively and intelligently and learn how to co-exist symbiotically with the Gaian Systems to which we all belong.
• all human enterprises, organisations and communities (from Amazonian tribes to  Google to the EU) are complex, self-organising, quasi-biological systems.
• companies who model their operations on natural systems, not machines. can lead our economic systems onto a path that is harmonious with the Earth’s ecosystem.

Why is this questionnaire so important? Because VIGDEOC networks are not in the business of debating either scientific evidence  that has already been adequately researched and peer-reviewed by the appropriate specialists or obsolete and irrelevant doctrines and dogmas. That would be, to coin a phrase, “Hamster-work”; lots of noise and energy but always finishing up where you started.We have far more important and interesting and fun things to do.

Later, I will be blunt about the  business that we have to be in, but for the moment, let’s just explain what a network of VIGDEOCs means.

(USING FLIP CHARTS OR POWER-POINT

Networks of VIGDEOCs are combinations of

• Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies and
• Viable Innovative Gaian Enterprises and
• Viable Innovative Gaian Organisations and
• Viable Innovative Gaian Communities

Put together tens, then hundreds of each category and, in time, they will  add up to global networks of VIGDEOCs.
The meanings of Enterprise, Organisation and Community are pretty flexible. They are intended to cover all the formal and informal human systems to which we belong.

But Viable, Innovative and Gaian are different. They all have specialised meanings within the context of the VIGDEOC networks and I’ll  explain why those meanings are so important in a minute.

First, though, is there anything you’d like me to clarify so far?

TO BE CONTINUED

by specialists