As a child, I chose to become a physicist because its mathematical clarity brought order into the seemingly chaotic world of the Balkans during the 1990s wars. Today, working as a strategy consultant and AI product leader, I am transforming economic ecosystems to create more value and meaning for all. Physics is still the lens through which I see the world, and in this blog I will try to share what I see, because when you shine a light on the structures – formal and informal – of human society, it becomes clear that so many of the changes we think are impossible are in fact highly possible.
The only physics example in this blog is this one: oscillations, like many physics phenomena, transcend the setting – they can be found in the movements of a pendulum, the compressions of an elastic spring, or in electromagnetic circuits, following exactly the same behavior in any one of these seemingly different contexts. Seeing the entire system, all the invisible strings pulling, pushing and percolating across hierarchies and value chains, community relationships and emotional planes, I recognize that we are all stuck, in different ways, held back by a variety of barriers, some objective, but many artificial. The opportunity lies in removing the artificial systemic barriers together. This is the topic of this blog.
Seeing the same mechanisms across different economic and business contexts, I have observed that the same mindset transformation and new dynamics development is needed, whether we are building a meta movement for a just economy with proponents of different policies finding ways to support and strengthen each other, or building effective business models that address real unmet needs of customers – all require curiosity for understanding the lived experience of others and exploring the intricate networks of interdependence in our economic systems. The power of this approach is universal – it helps us recognize the restrictions acting upon political and business leaders so we can support their reform efforts in new ways and it helps us see the historic pressures that have been exacted on underserved communities (Yellow Vests, BLM, WCCA) and the way political and executive transformation is needed to benefit them.
If you find this vision intriguing, we invite you to engage with the GCC working group on Economy to shape and realize this future together – the more diverse the disciplines and lived experiences, the richer and more resilient our work will be.
Guided by compassion, our focus is on creating a shared humanity. When Rick Hanson founded the Global Compassion Coalition he talked about making the so-called “green zone” accessible to more of humanity. That is our hope.
Creating systemic and sustained change
Most ongoing efforts to evolve more equitable societies focus on intervening to shift behaviors of the current seats of power (government officials and captains of businesses). Alternatively, new dynamics emerge from islands of goodwill in specific communities or organizations. In either scenario, the initiatives have had little systemic or sustained impact beyond those kernels of direct intervention. This limited success has led to a pervasive belief today that fundamental change and a just society for all are impossible. I have observed that a major reason for this belief is that there are no clear pathways to systemic transformation. Additionally, we are also lacking a wide-spread clear vision of how the new equilibrium would benefit everyone, even those currently attached (for a variety of reasons) to the status quo.
Without clear pathways to systemic transformation, most initiatives address the reality in the field only partially, which inevitably leads to outcomes that are not systemic or sustained. To build those pathways, we need to:
- understand interconnectedness of our economic ecosystems (a courageous mindset that can be fueled by compassion), and
- recognize which constraints are artificial, so that we can remove the obstacles holding
people, businesses and politicians away from more meaningful lives.
Some pioneers in this approach are the holistic economic framework by Kate Raworth in Donut cities, Michael Sandel’s Tyranny of Merit approach to fixing the fundamental flaw in society’s value system and narrative which informs all else, and John Jopling’s thinking based on Ostrom’s Commons which applies systems thinking to ensure a holistic transformation.
Artificial barriers holding us all back
“We humans generally do not solve problems we have; we solve the problems we understand. If we have a sense that they are our problems to solve…The problems we face as a species are problems we have created ourselves. Ironically, what created many of these problems was once the solution to something else.”Lene Rachel Andersen, The Nordic Secret Preface 2023
Economy (and economics) are not value-neutral. There are structural elements reinforcing the set of values the current economies are built on. And, there are other artificial structures in place as artefacts of old problems, legacy solutions that are now obsolete but remain in place, per Lene Rachel Andersen’s point.
One of the solutions to a temporary problem that became a permanent part of the structure of human activity system is the single-minded focus on productivity and profits, which led to, among other:
- Dehumanization of employees, exemplified with common Private Equity view of labor as a cost
- Exclusion of everyone but shareholders from being considered under impact of business decisions, even though investors are a minority, and using ownership as the criteria for being taken into account maintains the separation between the haves and the have-nots
- Maintaining in place the legacy value chain exploitation systems from colonial times.
When we look only at a portion of the full system with current imperatives for publicly traded
companies, it often appears to be a zero sum game.
- Internally, this means that safety, human salaries or benefits are seen as a cost, a detriment to measures of the company “health” i.e. short-term profitability. This leads to absurd yet common tradeoffs of preferring to pay product recall or litigation costs rather than invest in process improvement for quality and safety. Overall, this breeds a culture of hostility towards data and information not desired by parts of management. [Greg Satell, Gib Bulloch, Boeing John Oliver case]
- Externally, another manifestation of this zero-sum game perception is the fact that
companies so rarely develop genuine understanding of unmet needs to create value and solve real problems, instead opting to rather just try to capture more value.
Overall, one artificial structure resulting from the single-minded focus on profits and its
consequences, is forcing people into silos, both within the company and between different
players in the ecosystem. Information filters in place laterally and vertically enable individuals to ignore consequences of their decisions and activities, and especially allows decision makers to ignore voices of their employees and customers. I understand the pressure of being the nexus leading change, carrying the weight of everyone’s fears, interests, passions, constraints, amidst ambiguity and uncertainty. However, when not taking into account all voices, business initiatives do not meet even the narrow profit-making objectives. This is why business is a promising area for building understanding of interconnectedness: clarifying customer and employee experiences and unmet needs can create a competitive advantage for a business under the current success metrics, while building capabilities to transform those success metrics and business objectives systemically. But first, we will explore compassion as a motivator to build understanding of interconnectedness with others.
Compassion as a motivator
We turn a blind eye to how our actions affect our colleagues, our suppliers and customers, our co-citizens, and our fellow humans across borders, for many reasons. Actual and perceived scarcity, as well as the many structural reinforcements to focus on profits, make it hard to find time and energy, to locate resources, build relationships and gain insights, and make them actionable. These environmental factors are compounded by the myths we tell ourselves – such as the meritocracy myth, “Global south is “corrupt””; even the framing of “developing” world ignores so many dimensions. And ultimately, we believe it is impossible to build entire systems differently, beyond islands of local experiments. Understanding interconnectedness would address all these barriers to a systemically just society.
We have so many unarticulated assumptions when we make choices, from life choices to product design and business model decisions. Understanding interconnectedness means developing a habit to connect desired outcome to our actions, check if all requisite conditions are in place theoretically, and then check if it is actually happening as theorized. Ensuring that all ingredients and conditions are in place for desired outcomes is universally applicable, from business product development, to governments learning to effectively navigate towards new wellbeing metrics, to more fulfilling decisions in our personal lives [personal conversations with Marina Peneva].
Building the understanding of interconnectedness would enable us to not just have more satisfying professional lives, it would also generate reciprocal solidarity between movements for a just society, and put us more in touch with ourselves leading to more thriving in our personal lives. The meaning starts with us.
Business as an opportunity
Transforming business would play a big role in showing that a systemic transformation to a just economy is possible.
If we want to support the government actions towards a just economy indirectly, helping businesses to change the rules of the game would demonstrate that it is possible, and make it easier for governments to frame the transition in dimensions they can influence (laws, taxes, investment of public funds).
Since governments move only with popular support, business can play a role in generating popular support, by modeling a change in mythology and values at the core of society, transforming both personal and organizational aspirations.
Transforming business could play a role in pioneering systemic economy change.
Firstly, there is a viable continuous path from the current state to a transformed system.
- Deploying the power of compassion, identifying another’s experience and being compelled to take action to improve it, and embracing learning and adaptation approach to solving real problems, can walk us along the path of current success metrics in the near term. It can be a lot more profitable to solve real problems, because this creates a sustainable advantage.
- Additionally, many professionals are already working on developing this mindset, from genuine user research to better than hazard innovation approaches, among many others.
Secondly, silos in business are easier to break than in other domains of the economic system, which is another reason why business is a promising starting point.
At its inception, the working group will listen to executives, managers and workers, and open new space for dialog between them. A space with no labels, no ideologies, no de-legitimization [personal conversation with Prof. Asim Khwaja]. Together, we can develop truly new possibilities for creating value and solving real problems, to everyone’s benefit.
Milja Franck is a consultant and convenor of the Global Compassion Coalition Economy Working Group.