Musing on Mariana Mazzucato’s Challenge to Consultants, Business and Government
Mariana Mazzucato is among the progressive economists and thought leaders speaking compellingly (at the upper echelons,) raising important issues and questions and proposing wide-scale change. She’s not alone climbing this steep mountain challenging the deeply-flawed economic system. (For additional context, check out Dr. Steven Keen’s brilliant job debunking deep-rooted myths.)
Not afraid to call it the way she sees it, she’s been shining a spotlight on inconvenient truths for many years, with plenty of expertise and hard data to back up her provocations. She’s highly respected, an articulate public speaker, and has authored often cited books and articles. (See links to an interview video, her latest book and articles below.)
Why are we — society — still here, stuck in the crosshairs of her stark truths? Surely this warrants deeper examination and some alternative pathways, incorporating her insights and those of others working diligently — in order to make real progress!
She speaks to the consulting industry’s steadily creeping shift over decades from advising at the sidelines to doing from the centre. This is another classic shifting the burden (of responsibility) pattern — whereby consultants have gained more and more influence as they compensate (and are compensated,) occupying the gap for the systemic inadequacies of government and business organizations. She speaks to recurring failures caused by not asking questions and not learning — in essence — outsourcing brains.
She uses the the term infantalizing to make the point about the consulting industry’s role perpetuating the functional inability of organizations (people) to learn.
When the core work (exercise of sound discretion) is outsourced to consultants — no matter how experienced or intelligent, they cannot compensate for systemic dysfunctions. Organizational accountability weakens and erodes.
Mariana also references the need for collaboration and collective intelligence at the outset.
Her comments and queries about the health of ecosystems reverberate:
“You can have parasitic or predator-prey ecosystems. How do you really develop symbiotic, mutualistic ecosystems or partnerships between the public, private AND civil society sectors and how do we foster collective intelligence?”
Bingo. This is a fundamental question that points to the heartland of our mission critical commons work, catalyzing and activating from the space between at the intersections of all three sectors and across the divides. This is where we’ve also observed serious imbalance and gaps, where overlapping issues historically and routinely fall through the cracks and important work isn’t getting done or done well.
The AND in this question particularly jumps out. Taking it further we ask,
“Where is civil society in all this?”
If we hope to move the needle and with a human population of 8 billion, we must surely open up pathways for many more people — all citizens — to gain agency and play a role in their own lives, communities and organizations. That cannot be outsourced.
And so yes, high time to take a hard look at the role of consultants, as we rethink and reframe alternative ways to navigate wisely.
A reframing of consultancy purpose and practice, in the context of meaningful impact in society — is warranted. It is no wonder many people have grown weary and cynical, observing or on the receiving end of yet another survey, report, reorganization or the latest pricey buzz-worthy slickly packaged methodology. When this kind of help strikes again, it’s rarely experienced as helpful.
Too often the outcomes are fleeting and questionable. Too often dysfunctional patterns are reinforced. This manifests in many ways: reductionist, extractive and exploitive practices, deeper colonization and injustices, prescriptive solutionism that fails to consider downstream consequences. Wicked problems grow more wicked. (More on consulting farther down.)
A reframing of leadership, making space for its many manifestations and forms — is also warranted. The complexity of overlapping meta-poly-perma challenges we face calls for a fresh take.
Isn’t it time to view leadership through a much wider kaleidoscopic lens? Flexibility and accountability and the changing nature of work and role relationships required? (Co-)creativity and passion and collaboration and learning exchange? Vulnerability and empathy and a huge dose of humility? Coherent agency and co-intelligence and gifts differing — toward wisdom and life-affrming value in society? And- and…
The need to embed collaborative capacity and learning exchange across functions, organizations, industries, sectors, cultures, and generations, deserves a serious shift in the way we think about and do leadership.
Diverse, fluid forms, capabilities and manifestations of leadership are potentially more effective and adaptive than conventionally boxed-in leadership roles.
How do we break with the tired patterns that keep things stuck and fail to mobilize? Who are missing from the equation?
Time to disrupt ourselves…and that means breaking out of our own expert bubbles and welcoming a much wider spectrum of leaders into the conversations and the places and spaces where leading and contributing can potentially take on new forms, and deliver meaningful outcomes. (More on that at some other time…)
A reframing of governance — alternative models, structures and practices that steward and safeguard the rights and obligations of all key stakeholders — perhaps better defined as careholders — is fundamental. Governance — designed with criteria that fosters a moral compass and systemic trust — also warrants attention well beyond the scope of this article. There is considerable foundational commons-based work from which to draw, that can help shape the pathways toward healthy balanced interdependent mutually invested ecosystem partnership relationships. (Phew…that was another mouthful. Complex, but not as complex as it sounds, when folks begin to work together in earnest. We uncover healthier interconnected pathways that are systemic, practical, sensible, learnable, doable and adaptive — under ever-changing conditions. Additional links at the end of this article contain insights toward alternative viable pathways forward.)
The foundation of society is out-of-balance [in wrong relationship] on a runaway degenerative trajectory lacking essential safeguards or brakes to self-correct. Rather than feed and perpetuate a system that is seriously out-of-wack — how can we gain and sustain reasonable balance — social justice and wellbeing across all sectors, regions and cultures? How can we reconstitute the commons — discovering common purpose toward the common good while honouring differentiated roles, lived experience, capabilities and responsibilities? What are the multitudes of ways to restore balance and develop deeper collaboration, co-creativity and collective intelligence?
Cycling back to collaboration, collective intelligence and ecosystems — terms bandied around with increasing frequency — there is much to learn to truly bring these to healthy functional reality.
It is essential for people to work together across all the divides to address, unpick and recontextualize complex wicked problems. If, as Mariana exclaims, “the economy is an outcome of what we do,” surely WE can and must do better! This cannot be achieved in isolation, within the insular boundaries of individual organizations, institutions, industries or sectors. Top level talks and negotiations are not enough. Pointing fingers of blame, deflecting or lobbing responsibility over the wall — for all kinds of reasons — are familiar circular dysfunctional patterns that have become normalized.
There’s a need for diverse, multi-pronged and interconnected initiatives — local, regional, global, top-down, bottom-up, grassroots and side-to-side.
All of it!
Many of our organizations and institutions can potentially become more viable and fit-for-meaningful-purpose when their boundaries become more permeable, when they are [re]configured, governed and and mutually invested within nested ecosystems that exist to serve society — people, planet and economic wellbeing.
A reality that must also be faced, concerns the organizations and institutions that need to fundamentally change their business models or be phased out and shut down altogether — those that no longer serve real needs and/or are perpetuating degenerative extractive conditions for people and planet. The upheaval that is inherent in changing course, hospicing and dealing with grief — is also real work that must be recognized and supported.
There are no f*cking silver bullets or cookie-cutter answers. Some shifts can evolve over time. There are also many changes that require decisive action. While navigating wisely and well within ever-changing, uncertain complex environments, is necessarily messy, nonlinear and iterative — this doesn’t mean incoherent. Being ‘Roughly Right’ is ‘Always’ and is ‘Never’… ‘Good Enough,’ speaks to ongoing challenges and recurring patterns observed as we navigate through these turbulent messy times.
The dance of emergence and strategy calls for strategic foresight, sometimes described as futures literacy. (This short video offers an excellent primer: Global Futures Literacy Design Forum — an Introduction by Dr Riel Miller)
The pathways to the triple bottom line for people, planet and prosperity — as coined and further developed by John Elkington, with greater emphasis on responsibility, resilience and regeneration — have been embraced by many in a variety of ways. A learning journey for us all, we’ve observed awkward starts, missteps and stalls along the way. Lots of questions. Lots of listening. Lots of connective tissue — initiatives, mechanisms, stories and examples — that support learning exchange, but not nearly enough sustainable progress or traction.
We can continue to build on the good work underway that began decades ago. We can pick up the pace, with grounded pilots that demonstrate meaningful progress— quantitatively and qualitatively. We can amplify learning and spawn more initiatives and ventures — right scaling and growing deeper roots.
Lots of many things. AND-AND…
This challenges us to rethink, reframe and unlearn many of our reductionist Industrial Age programmed ways. Systemic change requires some discontinuity and willingness for many more of us to uncover and (co-)discover new, alternative patterns, as well as recover, restore and honour life-affirming Indigenous ways of living…being…knowing. Momentum is potentially gained through collective coherent agency whereby people anywhere in the world are inspired and empowered to mindfully activate — spawning many synergistic initiatives.
Mariana Mazzucato is compelling…yes. And the kind of systemic change that she advocates must seep and emanate from many places, take many forms and gain traction through wider engagement.
Whether people are in business, government or civil society, no matter what role or walk of life — we are all citizens on a planet that is our home. This might be one of the most profound and gritty awakenings for humanity.
Additional paraphrased quotes from Mariana, excerpted from the video, resonate and tantalize, inviting us to reflect on the system and our roles within it:
🔷 “Money comes and goes, but organization competence doesn’t.”
🔷 “Indiscriminately defunding all the social fabric creates all sorts of social problems that are also bad for the economy since it costs more to pick up the mess later.”
🔷 “The cost of inaction is greater than the cost of action. E.g. it costs less to educate someone than it costs to imprison them.”
🔷 “Human tragedy in terms of lack of services and wellbeing is also bad for the economy.”
🔷 “Public sector careers (in contrast with private sector opportunities) are geared to fix market system and government failures and do not attract young people.”
🔷 “If you’re not willing to experiment, you can’t learn.”
🔷 “The public sector role is/should be more than facilitate. (She refers to the Italian root meaning.) If you are only facilitating, you are probably in an abusive relationship. One side is just going to keep asking to make things easier. E.g. just keep increasing profits.”
🔷 She references the Kennedy quote: “We’re doing this because it’s hard…not because it’s easy.”
🔷 “The people aren’t deeply flawed; the institutions…the systems…the incentives are deeply flawed.”
🔷 “Missions are about designing policy in a way that actually really fosters cross-sector and cross-actor innovation toward a goal and then redesigning all the levers that government has towards galvanizing and catalyzing experimentation to get there. E.g. the SDGs having metrics that allow openness for many actors to get there (targeted outcomes) through bottom-up experimentation.”
🔷 “Shifting government’s role to a clear mission focus which isn’t comfortable; it isn’t to be business friendly.”
🔷 “There is strong inequity embedded in our system. How do we redesign the capitalistic system? I do believe there are varieties of capital systems” (mission critical.)
🔷 “Need to change the narrative of ‘bureaucracies’…we need that ‘craziness’ on both sides…(public and private sectors.)
Near the close, the interviewer challenges Mariana, questioning the consulting role that she plays. She clearly isn’t trashing all consultancy work and consultants …just casting a justifiably harsh light on a pervasive systemic pattern where the big consulting houses, in particular, have snowballed into a parasitic industry that isn’t adding up to real societal value.
We agree. Excellent consultative work is guided by sound underlying principles and practices that don’t subscribe to or slide into a parasitic model of (co)dependency or collusion. Those who take a true partnership approach of joint enquiry, learning and action — build (and regularly review) clear mutual contracts that safeguard healthy transparent relationships toward (client) accountability…and the ongoing internal and transcontextual capacity to apply learnings (and continue to learn) beyond the contract period.
For example, participatory action research, applied and adapted as a true partnership model, is grounded in and guided by a wide reservoir of sound social science and cultural knowledge. Action research seeks to understand the patterns of human systems— organizational and cultural life and change. Carried out effectively and with humility, this work is always open to reciprocal learning and exchange, engaging and drawing from multiple sources.
Additionally (external or internal) consultants and practitioners working with (or within) client organizations (and entities of all kinds) need adaptive, creative strategy thinking lenses to address complex challenges.
This also applies to the increasingly prevalent shift to fractional consultants and others who offer a pair-of-hands service to fulfil defined organization work/role resource requirements. While the flexible freelance gig economy offers many mutual benefits, there are gaping pitfalls that can be avoided.
This is a vast field with ongoing research, models and tools geared to understand the complex and chaotic (and chaordic) patterns of living systems and organizations.
Everyone is well-advised to continually reflect on the limits of our lived experience, the contextual perspectives that shape our world views and influence blindspots and biases. We can update our own knowledge, competence and experience, drawing from transdisciplinary fields including adaptive living/complex systems theory and practice, social justice, and living labs— stepping outside our usual contexts, cultures and comfort zones. Congruently walking-the-talk-listening-while-we-walk is ongoing work.
The acronyms VUCA — Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous and additionally RUPT — Rapid, Unpredictable, Paradoxical and Tangled — have entered the lexicon as a recognized shorthand. (And TUNA — no, not the fish — Turbulent, Uncertain, Novel and Ambiguous — is another less common variant.)
Nothing short of empowering and tapping a much wider, deeper, culturally diverse reservoir of human capability and spirit across all domains of work and life — can gain momentum. This challenges us to widen our lens and approaches well beyond powerful individual leaders, expert consultants and practitioners…to shift way beyond talks, interviews, white papers and incremental change. We are in deep SHfT… Perhaps that is why some call for (r)evolution.
Well worth watching this excellent video interview — also to hear Mariana’s perspective on how consultants can (potentially) contribute as a force-for-good. We are all for reinforcing and stepping up truly helpful, healthy and-and ways to navigate and gain momentum.
🔷 Mariana Mazzucato joins Krishnan Guru-Murthy on Ways to Change the World
🔷 An earlier article covering some interesting background info: This economist has a plan to fix capitalism. It’s time we all listened
🔷 Co-authors Dan Hill and Mariana Mazzucato nail it, in a thoughtful, thought-provoking well-researched and documented paper, Modern Housing: an environmental common good. Goes to the heart of underlying housing and built environment issues that wrap-around the world, finding us spinning and regurgitating problems that span decades. They paint the picture, pointing to systemic pathways with balanced accountability and engagement of business, government and civil society — required to make meaningful, tangible, sustainable progress. Their paper is comprehensive, bringing in many overlapping problems while shining a bright light on systemic ways to reimagine, redesign and retrofit — fundamentally shifting patterns for people and planet. The full discussion paper published 02/24 digs in deeply. It underscores the integral connectedness between the [human built] environment, community, social justice, planetary health and economic and societal wellbeing — with a long view to future generations.
The various points raised in this article bump up against other compelling considerations as we navigate. The following references/links round things out further:
🔷 Beyond Polarization…It’s a Dance!
🔷 Underneath the Labels…Billions of Stories
🔷 Finding the Common[s] Ground
🔷 The beauty and reality of being a messy human
🔷 Being ‘Roughly Right’ is ‘Always’ and is ‘Never’… ‘Good Enough’
The links offered here are by no means all-encompassing. There are many other sources and resources from which to draw. We stand with, and on the shoulders of many who came before, are diligently contributing and the unusual suspects bringing fresh new perspectives.
🔷 In this short introductory video Graham Boyd describes the underlying foundation for his work and book, coauthored with Jack Reardon — Rebuild: the Economy, Leadership and You. He outlines key enabling components to [re]build and steward regenerative ecosystems of companies/entities that flourish, working toward common[s] good. He speaks to the original meaning and purpose of the company as a living being [not property] and the resilience of the FairShares Commons framework. He opens the way toward governed cooperative profit pooling among ecosystem stakeholders. To cultivate deep regenerative roots that move the needle and transcend the flawed economic system — workable structure and adaptive pathways are here — with benefits for all stakeholders, including people, nature and investors too!
🔷 Mariana Mazzucato is not alone in her efforts to rethink, revitalize and breathe life into the public sector’s vital role in society. The work of The Centre for Public Impact, another source of inspiration, reflects the important bridging and rebalancing role that the public sector can potentially play reimagining and engaging with people across sectors, disciplines and contexts in more systemic, holistic ways. This March 2024 article widens our lens, pointing to integrative, multimodal ways we can all help to change the story.
Note 1: Many of the references included invite us to access, develop, engage and combine all our senses and sense-making to the best of our individual and collective capacity. In essence we’re challenged to reframe rightness and wrongness beyond the atomized decontextualized problem solving/solutionist programming of the Industrial Age. This formidable juncture of our civilization history calls upon us to widen and deepen our co-intelligence, as Tom Atlee explores and implores in his superb new book Co-intelligence: The Applied Wisdom of Wholeness, Interconnectedness, and Co-Creativity. This compendium, synthesizing decades of research and work, builds from the wise democracy pattern language. Co-intelligence illuminates multiple patterns and pathways available to expand our horizons of possibilities. Retrospective and forward-facing, we can enrich our learning, co-activating co-intelligence as engaged participants in our wiser human evolution — within the [nested] contexts of ongoing every day work and life!
Note 2: Originally published on LinkedIn in June/2023, this article continues to inspire engagement. The commentary found there indicates that Mariana Mazzucato’s perspectives and the overlapping themes we explore, resonate and provoke further thinking, concerns and ideas. This version, updated again April 2024, reflects additional links, ongoing thinking and action research, as we continue to observe, listen, assimilate, curate and adapt — a learning journey for us all.
Unstitution was birthed as a collective creative commons and nested ecosystem. Working from the space between, these reflections, questions and decades of research underlie a big hairy co-creative mission to reboot society’s operating system. We (co-)catalyze and support collaborative communities, initiatives and coalitions where people from across sectors, disciplines, cultures, generations and walks-of-life work together on mission critical issues and opportunities. From readiness through to regenerative progress — moving beyond polarization — is how we roll. The links embedded throughout this article are a warm invitation to go a bit deeper, at any time. For more insights reflecting our ongoing journey, our suite of Unstitution articles are published on Medium. They portray a small sample of the ways we are adapting and contributing among ever-expanding commons-based communities and initiatives inspired and fuelled by citizens — perhaps better described as denizens— anywhere in the world — living into the principles and spirit that govern our collaborative work.
You can follow Unstitution and engage with us on LinkedIn. Many of our posts and perspectives also pop up under hashtags #messyhumanness and #wisdomwithteeth.
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