Why real change comes from the bottom up

You can see our current favorite quote a little further down the email.

It's a quote that explains why we must change how we do business to enable companies to better drive change from the bottom up. Otherwise, a just, green transition is unlikely. 

In today's email, we'll go over:

1. Business as a barrier and enabler
2. How the Danish Welfare Society is built bottom up
3. Our Online Meetup: Game-changing Ownership Models

Business as a barrier and enabler

Here goes the paraphrase of Upton Sinclair's famous quote:

It's difficult to change a person's understanding, when their salary depends upon them not understanding it.

It highlights the influence that companies wield over their employees. If a person is afraid to lose their job, it naturally influences what they do at work and beyond. That's one way a business can be a barrier - or an enabler, because the quote's message works both ways. Another way business influence works is through supply. We must change it so businesses can proactively drive positive change instead of leaning on the old excuse of "we have to wait for there to be demand." 

It's a false truth; demand doesn't come out of nowhere. 

Demand comes from somewhere, from someone making something accessible despite how the system works, to show that the system can be different. Accessibility is one of the strongest drivers of behavioural change.

Real change doesn't come from a genius at the top. 

Real change comes from the bottom up, and when it's too great to ignore, it may be anchored at the top. The story of the much-celebrated Danish Welfare Society proves that.

How the Danish Welfare Society is built bottom up

Many believe that the Danish Welfare System, famous for its excellent schools, free healthcare, and so on, is built top-down by a genius in parliament. But that's not true.

The Danish Welfare System was built by the people who initiated it, got together in small organizations, made it work, made it matter, and made it easy to replicate, and then it spread from village to village, city to city, until eventually it was too great a thing to be ignored at the top.

Here are 3 examples; you can look them up yourself afterward.

Schools: For a long time, people thought it was a Danish King who founded schools many centuries ago, but recent research found that, a whole century before the King got into it, parents hired injured soldiers to come into their homes to teach their children to read. Soon, more and more were taught under a roof, and the idea spread from village to village.

Free Healthcare: In a village, people got together and agreed that it was bad for the community that people didn't go to the doctors when they were ill because they couldn't afford it. So, they agreed that everyone who could afford it put some money into a cigar box, and then when people had to go to the doctor, they would come and get some money from the cigar box. That practice again spread from village to village, until more than a century later, it was made a nationwide program.

Social Housing: In the 19th century, a major cholera outbreak hit Copenhagen. More than 5,000 people died. The doctors could see that the main problem was the awful hygienic conditions in the poor people's homes. They went around to see what could be done, but no one acted on improving their living conditions, so the Doctors' Association got together to raise money for the first social housing in Denmark. Again, that practice spread from city to city, and as with the other cases, it took more than 100 years before it was anchored at the top and became a nationwide phenomenon.

It would be nice if real change could be made swiftly, all at once, from the top. But that's not how the world works. Real change is made from the bottom up; it's messy, it's hard, it takes a long time, and when it goes fastest, it's organized in small units, made easy to replicate, so that other small organizations can take it up and adapt to their unique setting (it's the economies of small at play).

Large problems do not require large-scale solutions, but small-scale solutions within a large framework, as economist David Fleming once said.

So, be proud when you start something. Be proud when you work on making something small work, like, really work. And when you make it easy for others to replicate. 

Don't listen to those who say it doesn't matter or that it won't make a difference. They haven't studied how change comes about.

Our Online Meetup: Not-for-profit business

We have really looked forward to getting back to doing Online Meetups.

The first one we have is with one of the leading (if not THE leading) researchers on ownership and not-for-profit business: Jennifer Hinton (find more info about her below).

It's something that speaks to the theme of this email: being a not-for-profit business is a game-changer, making it natural for the company to focus on pursuing its purpose and to prioritize driving positive change. To change the system into something better, instead of doing what you can to maximize shareholder value within the current system, because that's what your ownership model dictates.

The Online Meetup will be going down on January 23, 2 - 3 pm CET.

If you are already a member of our online community, you can sign up for the meetup here.

If you are not a member, sign up for the online community first (that's the platform where the online meetup will take place) and then find "Meetups" in the menu in the left side of the screen.

Who is Jennifer Hinton?

Jennifer is a systems researcher and activist in the field of sustainable economy. Her work focuses on how societies relate to profit and how this relationship affects global sustainability challenges. She developed the relationship-to-profit theory, which uses systems thinking and institutional economics to explain how key aspects of business and markets drive social and ecological sustainability outcomes. She started developing this theory in the book How on Earth, which outlines a conceptual model of a not-for-profit market economy – the Not-for-Profit World model. She holds a double PhD in Sustainability Science (from Stockholm University, Sweden) and Economics (from the University of Clermont Auvergne, France), and she has published several papers afterwards. She is writing a new book that offers an updated model of an entirely not-for-profit economy as a viable and desirable alternative to the for-profit economy we currently have (where we are fortunate enough to be test-readers).