After the Protests of 1936: Supporting Communal Shifts
Leonard Joy
I was four years old when my father lifted me onto his shoulders and we watched thousands of tired and hungry unemployed miners marching from the north of England to London to appeal to Parliament for relief. It was 1934, one of the larger “hunger marches” which brought thousands of people to the streets over many years had been active since the 1920s. We went to Hyde Park where the marchers were gathering. I vaguely remember scuffles with the police and the protestors, and my father running from the park.
Mostly, though, I remember my father saying to me: “It doesn’t have to be like this.” Looking at inequity, he showed me that something else is possible. Everything started there.
At age 12, I petitioned the headmaster of my school to offer courses in economics. He did so. After attending the London School of Economics, I became an academic who spent most of my time in the field and consulting to heads of governments and the United Nations and World Bank institutions. I started with researching decision making under uncertainly, and shifted as I kept trying to answer to the questions that initial hunger march had implanted in me – if it doesn’t have to be like this, what are the reasons it is like this and how can we change it?
My intellectual and professional search included linear programming and systems thinking, especially Elizabeth Sahtouris’ work on symbiosis and the concept of health and sickness in a living system, leading to reinforcement of distinctions between treating symptoms and causes; right/left brain thinking; Wilber’s concepts of integral evolution; the Hall-Tonna program of values development, and to Quaker faith and practice.
I realized that what I had been taught did not take satisfactory account of the generation of the trade cycle and the exponential growth of inequality. While I retained concern for this, I moved to issues of hunger and malnutrition and the several policy aspects of directly addressing these. Ultimately, I came to see the relationship between global warming, unsustainable eco-footprint and exponential growth in inequality, the trade cycle and hunger/poverty--they were all due to the way in which the economy was funded, capitalized.
Clearly we need to change our myths to create businesses that might be sustaining for life: cultural change and economic change are intimately related.
And now, after asking these questions for nearly 84 years, working with amazing people around the world, I know that I have learned much, but I wonder how much our world has learned. We continue to have gross inequalities. The hunger marches of my childhood might well be seen again. In the mass climate-induced migrations, they are already reappearing. Now, as then, we can recognize the current capitalist economy as failing its people. It produces the following environmental and societal concerns:
Consumerism
Unsustainable environmental footprint
Social and environmental externalities
Income inequality
Exponential wealth inequality
Societal concerns arising from inequality
Powerful vested interests
Erosion of democracy
The boom-and-bust trade cycle
Social stress (unemployment and foreclosure)
Potentially: Authoritarian response to social stress
Actions designed to address these symptoms of our economy will be unable effectively to counter their emergence without changing the basic capitalist character of our economy, the funding--capitalizing--of business.
The key force that drives us to an unsustainable yet growing footprint on planet Earth, that holds us in thrall to dependence on fossil fuels, that drives the exponential growth in the inequality of wealth and income, and the destabilizing trade cycle of boom and slump with the foreclosures, unemployment, and poverty that it brings, the force that drives us, and inevitably brings with it societal and personal pain, is the prospect of profit, the force driving shareholding investment as the basis of capitalizing business.
It is the need to attract and serve investors with the prospect of profit that impels business to realize the goal of maximizing profit. It is the goal of maximizing profit that drives consumerism and growth to the neglect of environmental and social costs. And growth is not only the driver of commerce, it is the success criteria for measuring the performance of our national economies--the GDP.
Yes, businesses could be socially responsible, could decline to be driven to ignore and disrespect nature, pollute water and air, and endanger people’s health and lives. This implies a needed shift in values, but not one that would fundamentally change our economy, not one that stops the trade cycle, or the exponential growth in wealth inequality. And, yes, it implies a change in our criteria of progress. What about personal and cultural fulfillment as purpose?
Business does not need to be funded by profit-seeking shareholders. Fixed interest rate loans could enter as a cost item in the balance sheet. It would mean that profit would no longer be the motivation that drives the economy.
Self-expression in contributing to the common good could be the driver. We have examples of this, especially when associated with community-based worker-owned business. Note that this does not destroy the market, it would still be a market economy.
Without question, a significant shift in cultural values is implied. It implies moving from a managerial to a collaborative stage of values development.
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Today, as people continue to march in the streets for a variety of expressions of inequity, we need to remember that these changes are indeed possible and that we have many examples in recent history of how these changes have occurred.
In my career, I have supported several large systems in creating these kinds of shifts. I offer here three examples of what I refer to as “systemic self-reflection”, which is a key transition towards collaborative efforts. These are examples wherein fundamental shifts in large systems – two of these are countries – occurred.
Papua New Guinea (PNG): The process for participatory planning and implementation
Context: PNG had broken relations with the World Bank. The WB was attempting to get PNG back. PNG agreed to a WB mission to review PNG’s aid needs. WB recruited me to the mission team to report on the natural resources sectors’ needs. I discovered that PNG lacked the capacity to determine its needs and building that capacity was its prime need. The Bank rejected my report and did not include it in the team’s report. PNG would not accept WB report without my chapter. The bank complied and requested they send me to guide capacity building. The Bank reluctantly complied. This is the process I used.
I worked with Management Development Team members, whom I coached to work in pairs in each province. I modeled the first provincial effort for the team. On this occasion I was engaging 30 senior officials from each of the provincial government departments while modeling how to do this. The stages of work were:
Each official tells how his department is seeing the state of East Sepik province—what is happening; problems and opportunities. This takes all day.
Overnight, I draw a systems map showing the interdependence of departments’ concerns and work.
Next day, I present the map and ask for comments: have I missed anything? have I misrepresented anything? We do this until there is agreement that the map shows interdependence of concerns, and of departmental roles--a shared view of 30 senior officials.
We then discuss what are the 10 most important planning objectives.
We circulate the administration's idea of 10 most important objectives throughout the province calling for responses from the public—churches, Chamber of Commerce, villages, … Result is overwhelming support for the administration’s proposals.
The next step is for the administrators to return to the systems map to identify the groups of departments that should be responsible for plan design and implementation for each of the objectives.
The groups of departments together design and budget for implementation. Public comment is elicited.
Each team is now granted a budget for the program it proposes (Finance Ministry approves) and implementation commenced.
2. Hospital in Texas USA: poor morale and inefficiencies in the hospital.
It was a Catholic hospital following the healing ministry of Jesus. It had been persuaded to modernize, to use computers, and to downsize to become efficient. Consultants had attempted, and failed, to improve morale through kumbaya events. My client was the CEO and his management team.
I interviewed most everybody in the hospital, mostly by functional teams.
Nurses, whom I saw in groups of ten, had commonly served many years in the hospital.
Within ten minutes of asking them of their experience in the hospital in the past and now, one or more of them were in tears. Other teams (X-ray etc.) had similar response and told painful stories of things not right.
I presented my report to the CEO and management team. They admitted that they were not surprised but they were overwhelmed and asked what they should do.
I suggested that they should publish the report for hospital staff and call a meeting saying that they accepted the report and offer their list of priority concerns for comment. This they did.
The list was discussed and approved. The CEO then asked the staff to recommend teams to work with management to address each concern.
This was reported as having changed hospital administration and lifted morale.
3. Post-Soviet Georgia: redesign of the public sector
Client: President Schervenadzy of Georgia.
Context: Georgia was suddenly no longer part of the Soviet Union and no longer was its public sector part of the Soviet Union’s public sector. The UN Develop Programme was called to support the recreation of a public sector in Georgia (in the context of the ending of the civil war that followed USSR collapse). UNDP sent me to apply systems self-reflection. The UN country office and the new president--Schervenadzy--were both very supportive and work proceeded well. But a senior UN official was shocked, outraged, that they had sent not a credible Organization Development consulting firm and its experts but me who was proposing to help the public sector to redesign itself. Of all crazy things! But we survived to the point of producing a report that Schervenadzy proudly adopted and presented successfully as his mandate for re-election.
A team--the Change Management Support Unit--was nominated by the client.
The team was coached in effective decision-making, drawing on Quaker practice of coming to unity. They were unfamiliar with Quaker process, so I taught it to them.
The team worked with ministries and departments singly and in groups to define goals, functions, structure, and processes for a redesigned public sector.
The work was reported periodically to the President who was very supportive. However, he did not take Presidential action to undertake proposed changes as the work continued.
The process produced a report with a proposed program for the redesign of the public sector.
While the President failed to act immediately, he used the report as a manifesto to support his re-election as president.
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I have been working on these bigger questions of changing the economy since I nominally retired for the past two decades. As I said above, we need to re-capitalize the economy and see it motivated by people fulfilling themselves by their fulfilling contribution to the common good not by profit maximization.
If, as my father taught me all those years ago, ‘it didn’t have to be like this’, how did we change? And to what? So many elements came together in shaping for my response: the dynamic of values shift; left and right--material and feeling--brains; genetic inheritance and cultural evolution; collective decision-making……
Conscious, evolutionary change requires coming to a place of epiphany. Epiphanies are not simply events. They are processes. The stages of coming to epiphany and to acting for change needed to be understood: awareness; concern; deep concern; acceptance of personal responsibility are basic to change. For groups, especially, it is helpful for their to be a shared vision to change to, as well as strategy/plans/ objectives and goals.
For community change, the whole process needs to be inclusive and shared.
So, my task now is to contribute to the process of communal shifts, especially where it is stalled. It seems that my contribution needs to be recruiting inclusion and credible advocacy, or at least supporting the next generation of those who can do help to bring about a more inclusive process. The process is what is critical, and is part of the skills that so many people need to learn from. We can – we absolutely can. My life-long experience is that my father was correct. And my children, it seems, are finding their own way of expressing this. This is good. I too need to keep going on this. Too much is at stake to not do all that we can.
Leonard Joy is a recovering economist who works to enable systems to come into right relationship with Earth. He was an academic at the London School of Economics, and ran extensive research and advisory missions for UN agencies. He is active on the board of the Quaker Institute for the Future and is involved in multiple writing projects. He is also a father, grandfather, and beloved elder in Strawberry Creek Friends Meeting.