Building Back Better — getting to the ‘how’
On Friday my work closed for the day — in recognition that these are tough times and everyone needs some rest. I spent the morning lolling in bed and thinking thoughts — the ultimate luxury.
I ended up connecting together a series of things I’ve read and conversations I’ve been having over the last few months— the open tabs that litter my brain. I’m going to try and capture my thought thoughts and write down the links I made so I can metaphorically close some tabs and create some space in my head.
How does change happen?
Even before the extraordinary events caused by Coronavirus took place I was thinking a lot about change. Not least because it’s fundamental to the work I do, but because Nesta itself is going through a period of change. I was considering how we understand change to happen and how the different models that we hold in our heads might be barriers to making change happen, unless we explicitly challenge ourselves to communicate what we believe and how that affects the work that we do.
There are a multitude of change management models — providing a menu card of steps to take organisations through to affect change. But I was looking for more fundamental examples of major societal shifts. Which is how I happened upon a ten year old article written by Lester Brown of the now defunct Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC.
In it he identifies Three models of social change:
- Pearl Harbor — a dramatic event fundamentally changes how we think and behave
- Berlin Wall — a society reaches a tipping point on a particular issue often after an extended period of gradual change in thinking and attitudes
- The Sandwich — a strong grassroots movement pushing for change on a particular issue that is fully supported by strong political leadership at the top.
The context he was writing in is totally different to our current position — he was explicitly thinking about how to shift the world economy onto a sustainable path and was doing so with Obama providing positive leadership in the right direction. Which lead him to emphasise the Sandwich model as the most apt to the times.
But right here, right now, I think we’re experiencing a Pearl Harbor moment.
The surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, was a dramatic wake-up call. It totally changed how Americans thought about the war. If the American people had been asked on Dec. 6 whether the country should enter World War II, probably 95 percent would have said no. By Monday morning, Dec. 8, perhaps 95 percent would have said yes.
The weakness of the Pearl Harbor model is that if we have to wait for a catastrophic event to change our behavior, it might be too late.
The thing about a catastrophic event is that it’s not chosen, it’s not planned — it’s imposed from the outside. But there is a choice both in how you respond — and how you choose to build a ‘new normal’ afterwards.
The Covid-19 pandemic is a Pearl Harbor moment, one that affords us the opportunity to think through what kind of normal we want to live in afterwards. It’s had such far-reaching impacts on everyone’s lives and has shone a light on the limitations of the economy, on social policy and working conditions which hopefully will shift mindsets with the rapidity and sense of purpose that Pearl Harbor did. There is certainly enough commentators calling for us to Build Back Better to suggest so.
But the missing piece is ‘how’. For those providing emergency food relief who want to create a more resilient local food system by connecting consumers to local producers; or business leaders wanting to work with their local system to recreate the local economy to favour fair work opportunities; or cities planing to reduce car use in favour of sustainable transport — how do they make use of the ‘stop’ that lockdown has placed on the new normal to effect lasting positive social change? What tools are available to them? Especially in the face of the inertia that exists in any complex system and the retrograde pressure from a leadership wedded to the past?
Useful answers generally lie in the past. So I had a look.
In 2007 philosopher Roman Krznaric was engaged by Oxfam to explore the approaches to change prevalent in international development and how they affect the development strategies in use. He conducted a survey of a range of academic disciplines, including history, politics, psychology, and geography.
Krznaric’s analysis concludes that there are no generally applicable models of how social change happens (because every context has its own history and its own particularities) and that the past is not a definitive guide to the future.
However, at least one of four major questions of change repeatedly occur, both explicitly and implicitly, across disciplines:
- Who or what was involved in the change? (e.g. individual actors or state institutions)
- What strategies were used to bring about the change? (e.g. reformism, mass mobilisation)
- What were the contexts that affected how the change happened? (e.g. urbanisation, power relationships)
- What was the process or pathway of change? (e.g. demonstration effects, cumulative progress)
This report is useful in helping answer the question of ‘how’ change has happened in the past, providing a tool to help understand and explain historic social changes which is illustrated with a worked example in the form of a case study of the abolition of the British slave trade.
According to Alexis de Tocqueville, the abolitionists achieved ‘something absolutely without precedent in history…If you pore over the histories of all peoples, I doubt that you will find anything more extraordinary’.
In the 1780s over three-quarters of the world’s people were in bondage, across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. British ships dominated the international slave trade and some half-million African slaves were being worked to death growing sugar cane in British colonies in the West Indies. The idea that slavery was legitimate and ‘normal’ was deeply entrenched in public consciousness in Britain, and it was generally accepted that the British economy could not survive without slavery and the slave trade.
‘If you had proposed, in the London of early 1787, to change all of this,’ writes the historian Adam Hochschild, ‘nine out of ten people would have laughed you off as a crackpot’. Yet by 1807 the British Parliament had banned the slave trade, and on 1 August 1838, almost 800,000 slaves throughout the British Empire became free, when slavery itself was abolished. How did such a momentous social change take place?
The case study in particular is well worth a read — in doing so I was reminded of Berkana’s Two Loop model of change and with more time on my hands I could easily enjoy plotting the actions outlined in the case study against model shown below.
The point of this post though is not to get nerdishly into the models, but instead to think about how people trying to effect change in their local systems might go about it.
So if we do find ourselves in a Pearl Harbour moment, and we can see that huge mindset shifts have happened in the past in a relatively short space of time, and that there are tools available to us to help consolidate the positive aspects of the emergency response into a better normal — then what do we do next?
Personally I would find a coalition of the willing, representing a microcosm of the whole system you want to affect. And I would work with them to explore the future that you want to emerge from the current situation.
My first step would be to bring the coalition together for a workshop based on the Three Horizons Framework, described by economist Kate Raworth in the video below and together try to answer the questions posed. This would help to form networks and a community of practice which would hold a shared vision of the emergent system and help it grow.
Understanding the Now (or before)
- A What is business as usual? What are the key characteristics of the prevailing system?
- B Look back — how did we get here? What values, laws, cultures, events lead us to this?
- C Why do we believe it’s not fit for purpose and is failing? Give examples. How fast do we want to see it decline. Collapse is rarely beneficial.
- D Is there anything valuable that we would want to retain, rather than lose? Such as its infrastructure?
Exploring the Preferred Future
- E What is the future we want to bring about — its key characteristics? What would it look like and feel like to be there?
- F What seeds of that future are visible in the present? Give specific examples
- G Looking back — whose work are these present possibilities built upon? What histories, value and culture are embedded within them?
- H How could they be scaled and spread? Give examples of actors who are already working on this
- I What are competing visions for the future being pursued by others? Could we collaborate with them because we share enough core elements or are theirs inherently competing visions? If so, how do we prevent their vision from derailing ours?
- J What is being disruptive? Technological, cultural, political, ecological, economics, social disruptions… What are the roots of those disruptions? For each disruption — what would it look like for it to be captured or harnessed. What can be done strategically to ensure it is harnessed. Give examples of disruptions that you believe have been captured and others that have been harnessed. In each case — why did it happen, what made that possible?
- L Is you are a disruptive actor (social movement, tech innovator, new form of finance) what kind of guidance can you set for yourself to help influence whether your disruption is captured to extend the life of H1 or harnessed to bring about H3? What allies will you seek, what actions will you take, how will you assess potential offers for collaboration or finance, how will you work with others to ensure H2+ disruption scales and spreads?
