1. We have a power problem. We can fix it.

More than anything else, our relationship with power will determine if a kinder way to live will win out

After a very long time, hello to my small but slowly growing huddle of subscribers!

I’m starting again because I have a suggestion. Not for today, but for some point soon, for those of you who keep reading the posts to come. I’m going to suggest you find four friends and give something a try. I think we need it.

But we’ll get back to that…

I started this publication four years ago (I was shocked to note!), with the intent of bringing a bit of a different take to a movement of world-changing potential that was growing and inspiring a lot of people. By way of a reminder, the first post began:

The unintended consequences of our biggest successes are mounting up. What started as a few carbon emissions, a little pesticide leaching into a river and a bit of lost human connection, is now culminating in runaway global warming, a million species at risk of extinction, and a raging mental health crises.

What if we could flip the story, so that helping each other find the things we really need – connection, meaning, growth and joy – was not a side-effect of progress, but the whole point? And what if the businesses and institutions that pulled off this flip ended up more effective and more efficient than before? The shift towards a kinder world might become unstoppable.

Those last two sentences were incredibly exciting to me. If a new idea is to have meaningful positive impact it needs to not only be better for us, it needs to work better too or the old way will continue to win out in the market. At long last it was actually happening!

I love thinking and writing about all this. And yet I abruptly stopped posting. Why would I do that?

Meanwhile, the movement itself has not stopped but has most definitely stumbled. The poster-child companies are the same today as they were ten years ago, when the book that started it all for many of us was first published. Where are the dozens of new spectacular success stories like Buurtzorg and Morning Star, that we read about in Reinventing Organisations?

In a plot twist I did NOT see coming, the reason behind these two regrettable developments, one small one large, turn out to be the same, and understanding why could change everything. Allow me to start with myself.

I stopped posting because I had a problem with power.

My power to be creative, to stand for something, to make a difference, was being constantly undermined by a set of interlocking hidden beliefs that kept me chasing ghosts instead. For emotional reasons that were completely hidden from me, it was easier for me to play complex and never-ending technical games than to actually engage with the world.

Well guess what? You are reading a post from me! I’ve been working on myself with some wonderful help, and I firmly believe that power problems can be fixed. And the timing couldn’t be better, because it all aligns perfectly with everything I’ve come to believe about the “shift towards a kinder world” from that first post: the shift from a world run by machine-like systems that deaden all that they touch, to living systems that bring us and our world back to life.

On the systemic level too, we have a power problem, and we can fix it.

(For our purposes, take systems to mean all the ways people organise themselves to get things done: businesses, charities, universities, hospitals, communities… and all the way up to large scale healthcare systems, food production systems, systems of governance…)

So welcome to the relaunched and renamed Gift Community Substack!

We are here to explore:

• why the most critical block to the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible (to borrow Charles Eisenstein’s wonderful phrase) is all about power.

• that the well known phrase power corrupts captures something vastly more dangerous than we tend to recognise, particularly as it applies to systems rather than individuals.

• how we often conflate two entirely and crucially different things by using the same name for both: power.

• the need to carefully distinguish between external dominion and inner potency, a.k.a. controlling machine power and spontaneous living power.

• how inner potency is not just a property of people, but of systems (think ecosystems), and how profoundly different such systems are to the organisations we are familiar with, including those we consider innovative and progressive.

• how the ideas in Reinventing Organisations and the wider movement have overly focussed on reducing dominion, and why there has been little success in developing potency.

• how the great secret to potency and flourishing life has been hiding in plain sight for thousands of years—the dance between two universal polarities, destructive when separated, life-giving when integrated.

• why true and repeatable systemic potency will not come from businesses of any description, but from community and culture.

• the vital need to return to the deceptively simple bedrock of culture, almost entirely erased from modern life, so fundamental it is as old as language—the gift.

I’ve got a lot to say about all of these topics and more, and to be perfectly honest I’m feeling pretty powerful about it and I’m not afraid to say it, so buckle up!

For now, I’ll offer some thoughts on what might be a burning question: is it really possible, in this world riven with toxic waste, and corporate greed, and warmongering demagogues, that things like community and culture and gifts could really turn the tide?

Firstly and most importantly, as I think many of my readers will already know, this shift is already well underway all over the world. The book I’m currently reading, The Systems View of Life (Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi) gives by far the best history I’ve come across. They trace it right back to DaVinci! A huge boost comes later, when physicists discover the particle/wave duality, and things really come into focus from the late 20th century up to today.

The shift from machine to living systems is in some sense inevitable, but we are still very much at the “small green shoots” stage. In parallel more and more people are using the word “collapse” in serious conversation. So I see it as a kind of a race—is the progress we’ve made so far sufficient to get us to where we need to be before the wheels fall off?

If that is indeed our situation, then I want to do my bit, and the best way I understand that right now is to try and bring a bit more clarity about what’s actually happening, and how best we can help it along. I think the essence of what is changing is often misunderstood. If my writing leads to just a few more people thinking carefully about, say, the difference between dominion and potency, that will be a win.

To take a hot-button example, Trump is often referred to as the most powerful man in the world. He does indeed have dominion over the most powerful dominating force that has ever existed. Does he have inner creative potency? Is he skilled in nourishing the life-giving potency of the USA? We conflate these things at our peril!

Do we even know what such skills look like? I’m not sure I have an answer, but I have some questions that I believe are important.

I wonder if it’s possible, today, to start building a large creative community that is truly potent and alive, that operates entirely on the spontaneous, inner power of a living system, free from the dominion and abstraction of machine systems. A community where the members are “full time”, deriving their livelihood entirely from the creative work they do interdependently with each other.

It could be very difficult. I’m under no illusion about that. There’s really no way to know if it’s even possible or how long it will take. My personal take is that there is no more worthwhile work to do.

If indeed a community like this became large enough—let’s say five thousand people—I have a bunch of strong beliefs about what follows. Firstly I believe such a community would create dramatically more prosperity for people, with dramatically less waste, than a traditional company with the same number of employees. I believe it would do so in a way that is not extractive but regenerative for every living thing within and around it. I believe it would express the best of human nature—kindness, compassion and love—and would flourish financially at the same time.

Please don’t misunderstand this point—this is very important. I am not saying this community should be kind, compassionate and loving, in order to qualify as a living system. “Should” gets us nowhere. I’m saying it would be. You might not agree, but that’s the argument I will be making. I believe all this would be innate and spontaneous, flowing naturally from what the community actually is, free from agreed political or moral positions, or indeed organised purpose of any kind.

And finally, and here perhaps I reveal myself as a bit of a dreamer, I believe that if such a community comes into being, the world will shift on its axis. More such communities will spring up all over the place, simply because they are much, much better than what we have. It will not be possible to get the genie back in the bottle. Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

~

Beliefs aside, I do know with some certainty a thing or two about how such a thing will come into being, if it does at all. Such a community of five thousand people will grow, spontaneously, unpredictably, wildly, from a smaller living community, of say five hundred people. If it is constructed in any other way it must be a kind of machine, and all of the qualities I have mentioned are off the table. Life grows.

And where will that smaller community come from? Only one answer. It will grow organically from a community of say fifty.

And where… Well I think you get the drift.

So, about those four friends of yours…

🐘