Making connections across an emerging landscape of ideas
Over the past year we have been working with Deep Transitions Lab to explore the connections between the ideas that underpin our work, both of which seek to transform our economies and societies. This blog shares some reflections on the work, why we did it and what has come out of it. It also shares some thoughts on the broader implications of how ideas-based organisations should be working to build a movement.
What does collaboration look like beween two ideas-based organisations?
The Transformation Capital Initiative (TCI) came into existence with the publication of our White Paper, which set out the foundations of why investment logic should be reconceived and redesigned in order to better address the complex nature of the multiple crises we face. Our current activities seek to make the overarching idea of systemic investing tangible, and implementable, for investors.
In a strong parallel, Prof Johan Schot and his team of researchers have created the Deep Transitions Lab (DTL), an initiative that builds on a set of ideas about the nature of socio-technical transitions. DTL’s practice is based on decades of scholarship, which includes the creation of the influential multi-level perspective, and the Lab seeks to bring this thinking into contact with the practice of investors, via the idea of transformative investment.
The ideas we use share much common ground. Both systemic investing and transformative investment draw attention to the importance of investors adapting their understanding of how change happens, and then revising the logic driving investment decisions to reflect this new perspective.
Given this overlap, we decided to work together to explore the connections between these ideas. This document gives a summary of what we found.
Ideas and creating change
The work with DTL prompted us to ask: why is it important to spend time on exploring the connections between ideas? What does it achieve, especially given the urgent need for action? Answering this question requires taking a step back and looking at the broader context for this work.
We are living in a moment of new ideas. As the sense of polycrisis deepens, many of us are looking for positive ways forward. This recent LinkedIn post identifies 14 new economic schools of thought/frameworks, a sign of the flourishing of alternative ways of thinking about what futures are possible.
My colleague Dominic has written about why ideas are important. We believe the work of ideas-based organisations is needed, where time is taken to explore the conceptual underpinnings of a proposed course of action. As we turn our attention to potential collaborations, it has become clearer to us that the connections between ideas are also important. This is based on a simple logic: lots of ideas, and lots of initiatives, are needed to bring about transformation of our economy. No single set of ideas, or group of people, will be able to bring about transformation alone. Moreover, those ideas need to speak to each other, for collective momentum to build.
For TCI, this means taking an active look across the landscape of emerging ideas for a new economy, and working to articulate how systemic investing fits into that landscape. Crucially, this connecting up needs to happen at multiple levels, from the overarching vision down to the granularity of implementation.
Moving between ‘visionary’ and ‘implementable’ ideas
Some ideas are visionary, painting a picture of how our world could be different. The Doughnut Economics vision of the ‘safe operating space’ for humanity, where needs are met within planetary boundaries, provides such a vision. Other ideas are specific, contained, and granular, providing guidance for a new way of doing things that can be put into practice today. The idea of a systems map, for example, can be used by investors to fairly quickly gain a different perspective on investment decisions.
We can visualise a kind of spectrum between these two extremes of ‘visionary’ and ‘implementable’: the more high-level the idea, the more different the future it describes, the harder it is to implement. Inversely, the more implementable an idea (framework or tool) is, the less it will speak to a broadly conceived vision of the future.
The way we understand this spectrum, the same underlying ideas can be articulated at different points along it. Indeed, some of the most powerful and influential ideas manage to operate all along the spectrum. One of the all-time great ideas, ‘the market’, does this spectacularly well. It has structured visions of how society should work at national and international levels — the promised land of a ‘free market economy’ — and it also works at the granular, everyday level. For example, it is familiar to those of us in Western market economies to think of ourselves as consumers generating demand for a good or service, in a way that might shape our behaviour.
For many of the new ideas which are now emerging, the challenge is to articulate and develop them in such a way that they both provide a broad, motivating vision, and a path forward that can be acted on today. That is, they need to ensure the idea manifests at multiple points along the spectrum. This is the challenge TCI is currently grappling with. Our starting point is a set of ideas presented in our White Paper that have proven to be compelling and intriguing with certain audiences. Our focus now is to demonstrate how these ideas work in practice, and to produce materials that make the doing of systemic investing tangible, and actionable, to those sold on the overarching idea.
In other words, we are striving to move along the sliding scale towards the ‘implementable’ end. The team at Doughnut Economics Action Lab, to take another example, are going on a similar journey of exploring how the high level vision of the Doughnut can be translated into action by businesses today. As, indeed, are the Deep Transitions Lab.
Connecting ideas at multiple levels
The notion of the visionary / implementable spectrum helps to explain the importance of connecting ideas. Many of the ideas for a new economy are compatible at the ‘visionary’ end of the scale. The question is how they relate when they are brought together at the ‘implementable’ end of the scale.
In the first instance, this form of enquiry is about the ability to communicate well. If two organisations are to collaborate effectively, they need to understand each other’s use of terminology and underlying concepts. The potential for miscommunication, misunderstanding and wasted time and effort is enormous if two potential collaborators don’t take the time to understand each other’s thinking.
More generally, exploring the connections between two sets of ideas in their ‘implementable’ form also serves to surface similarities and differences that might otherwise remain under the surface. By making them visible, it becomes possible to have a deeper and more nuanced conversation about whether two sets of ideas are really pulling towards the same vision of transformation. The goal shouldn’t be to make sure we all agree, but to be aware of where we are talking about different things.
For example, in exploring and comparing TCI’s and DTL’s approaches to mapping, it became clear that there are some differences in the underlying assumptions being made. TCI understands the process of mapping to be a product of the particular sources we manage to access: the stakeholders we talk to, the documents we read, and so on. And the analysis is specific to the boundaries we have drawn. We are not seeking to define deeper or broader ‘rules’ or system dynamics that extend outside our area of interest.
DTL, in contrast, seeks to map ‘rules’, some of which are context specific, and some of which are relevant across contexts. There is a degree of rigour in the mapping process, relying on expert input, with greater reliance on academic insight.
As a result, the experience of an investor doing systemic investing is potentially quite different to an investor doing transformative investment. We’re planning to publish more detail on this in due course, as one of a series of ‘Joining the Dots’ publications.
Joining the dots
Our hunch is that this kind of sensemaking is valuable for the community of practitioners and researchers working in this space. As we try to collectively figure out a way forward, others will be encountering these ideas, attempting to bring them into their own practice, and spending considerable time trying to work out how they fit together.
Inspired in part by our work with DTL, we are therefore planning a set of short briefing documents, called ‘Joining the Dots’ publications, that will explore these similarities and differences. We will publish them as a contribution to the collective effort to move forward the debate on what it means to put visionary ideas into practice.
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