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There’s hope for 2021, but only if governments abandon command-and-control for co-creation

My home town, like many other jurisdictions across the globe, is starting 2021 while under a government-imposed lockdown. And while mitigation measures are certainly required to stem the spread of the virus, a strategy of command-and-control governance is short-sighted and will likely exacerbate the long-term effects of the crisis.

If hope for rebuilding in 2021 is to be justified, governments of all stripes need to wean themselves off of the unprecedented powers exercised over the past year. Power is a dangerous intoxicant. And we need leaders who see themselves first and foremost as partners, privileging co-creation over command-and-control. There is no lockdown severe enough or stimulus generous enough to assure that the society we emerge to after the crisis will be worth living in.

Complicated problems can sometimes be solved with a heavy hand. But the pandemic is a complex one. Complex problems require flexibility and a plethora of innovative partnerships. Governments need to work not only with experts in epidemiology, but policy, psychology, business, ethics, sustainability, education, community-building… really anyone with a window into how we can accurately measure the price of the context specific trade-offs involved in any course of action.

While the widely cited change management failure rate of 70% has dubious origins and is probably wrong, it persists as something of a heuristic because large-scale efforts involving wholesale cultural and strategic change are incredibly difficult to execute, and have significant failure rates.

Make no mistake – rebuilding after the crisis is change management on an unprecedented scale. But what too many officials have forgotten, is that with every action they take, there is responsibility. Responsibility to those impacted by their actions. Responsibility to those who could impact the effectiveness of their actions. Responsibility for the subsequent reactions, expected and not.

Consider one of the few bright lights of 2020: the creation of a vaccine. Pundits on the right and left lauded the news of big pharma finally scoring an important social win. But what has not been explicitly stated is that the creation of the vaccine is a story that needs to be told in the language of co-creation. Government acted as a partner, regulator and customer to support researchers in these efforts.

Meanwhile, so-called "non-essential" industries have been treated with a command-and-control approach. Even worse is the way public officials have been using the language of ethics, stakeholder management and care to justify shifting critical resources to already powerful players, while stifling innovations that are desperately needed in other industries.

For example, early in the pandemic, the National Ballet of Canada partnered with Harbourfront Centre to present socially-distanced performances, a very innovative response, but were shut down. Local restaurants re-conceived what outdoor dining in our inhospitable climate might look like, coming up with really novel solutions, only to see their innovative efforts and substantial investments deemed expendable. Even my local indie bookstore re-conceived what browsing means and innovated a new shopping experience, only to be ordered closed despite no evidence of anyone catching the virus in that setting.

We are losing sustaining innovations and disenfranchising innovators. Most innovation happens when folks seek to get better at what they are already doing. Shooting down these innovators will have catastrophic effects on our social future. 2020 has shown that our varying levels of government have little interest in these innovations... they want to achieve bigger wins by working with the powerful few, encouraging the rest of us to be good and sit quiet.

To start, 2021 needs a moratorium on government and public health officials asking most of us to stay on the side-line while they do the important work. The idea of personal sacrifice for the common good is noble. But it is simply not true that our best effort is to be found in passivity. The mantra for 2021 needs to be “Doing with others.” Only through co-creation can we be well-equipped for the uncertain future.

Imagining a Different Type of Influencer

We are living in an unprecedented era of influence attempts.

Much of what we are seeing in response to the pandemic -- which cannot be separated from business, politics, or the general social sphere -- is an ongoing cycle of attempts to influence a weary and overwhelmed public.

Leaders in all sectors from health to media are flexing their muscles, marshalling the full might of their specialized prowess, reputation and audience size in the hopes of persuasion.

But having conducted research into people’s susceptibility to influence, I believe it’s time to re-think the assumption that power will help force through an agenda. On the contrary: showing power, instead of vulnerability, can destroy your message.

While many might be incentivized by money, fear, clicks, likes or a combination of them all, and thus easy targets for those seeking to influence through the use of power, this type of influence is based in compliance. And the problem with compliance is that the consent it yields is fleeting.

Substantive commitments can only be attained by influencing through principled persuasion or maintaining meaningful personal relationships with the folks you hope to motivate. While this type of influencing the requires considerably more effort, the result is a superior commitment, a better partnership and a more impactful outcome.

Relational motivations are based on the need for identification through social relationships. Personal satisfaction from the relationship is based on either reciprocity or modelling. Only actions that signal authenticity, friendship, esteem and relatedness will work to convince.

Economic power to the relationally-motivated will be aversive and work to prevent normative commitments. Although pragmatically useful relationships based on economic power can be established, a relationally motivated individual seeks human relationships not for their usefulness in terms of material incentives but for their own sake. A relationship based on power rather than reciprocal social connections will not last because this type of relationship is antithetical to the desires of one party.

Research has shown that outside of monopolies, companies that rely on instrumental power, meaning financial or material incentives and threats, to obtain desired behaviours fail in achieving their objectives over the long term. Why? Because this approach has an alienating effect. In contrast, companies that embrace actions which symbolize esteem, relatedness and acceptance without threats, achieve their objectives without an aversive effect.

How can those who have achieved successes in the business or political world by hiding their vulnerabilities and signalling power begin the process of shifting their paradigms? Re-embrace the power of imagination. Dare to experience being powerless, even briefly. Reject the urge to privilege command and control leadership. Celebrate vulnerability and seek to share it with those willing to be vulnerable as well.

Most importantly — never be self-conscious about the power of imagination.

The Work of Forgiveness

Tonight, Jewish folks will mark a Day of Atonement.

A central theme of Connected Capitalism is thinking strategically about the spiritual work of forgiveness. Within the ancient Jewish spiritual tradition, there are a number of explorations of the topic, along with related discussions around atonement, absolution, and forgiveness granted from God.

Selicha, freeing the party who has wronged us from an emotional obligation operates at the intersection of meaning and connection. Mechila, wiping the slate clean, is situated at the intersection of connection and wonder. Here, the spiritual work is putting the relationship back to the level it was at before the offending incident. It involves empathy, rooted not in a selfish desire to make ourselves feel better by releasing our anger, but born of work and reaching the conclusion that human frailty is forgivable. This is the forgiveness of renewal.

As I discussed with my friend Rabbi Tzvi Freeman in Fifteen Paths, the very notions of repentance and forgiveness are wild social innovations. Every society constructs for itself a script of how to be “good.” In religious societies, this script is viewed as a revelation — we follow the script and we’re good.

But one of the truly radical ideas that we find in ancient Judaism is that humanity following the script gets kind of boring to God. The Torah is full of stories of the major characters messing up. And when they mess up, God says, “Well, it’s not in the script. So I guess you’re going to have to write your own script. You wrote yourself out of the script, write yourself back into the script.”

The penitent has to do that. And when they do, God says, “It’s amazing! Deep down inside my vision, that’s what was really there. And I didn’t even know it.”

Can we forgive those who have exploited their economic power? Might we consider a new transformative cooperative relationship with them? Can we forgive those at our own company who made unethical decisions and tarnished all of us who work there? Can we forgive those on the other side of our political divide, those who we believe supported immoral political positions in order to enter a deep and trusting relationship with them? Can we forgive those who once subscribed to or benefited from discriminatory practices?

In our highly polarized times, where civil discussions between people who disagree with each other is a near impossibility and deplatforming has come to replace civilized debate, the question of how to forgive is of the utmost importance. What cannot be in question is the possibility of forgiveness.

Unsafe Conversations

Really excited to launch a new YouTube series with my friend Amelia Sargisson in the next few days. Amid the noise and dissonance of an increasingly normalized political incivility, creating a space to have meaningful social conversations across ideological divides has become necessary spiritual work. When honest folks lose the ability to understand and respect intellectual differences, they are unlikely to be able to make sense of a complicated world. Meaningful conversations no longer take place on campus, cable news or social media, venues that prefer a cult of victimhood, confirmation bias and de-platforming. While prior to the pandemic they were still taking place in galleries, concert halls and theatres, many of those venues have now been shuttered.

Moral progress is driven by imagination — hearing and telling stories that increase our sensitivity -- not winning rational arguments. As a culture, we have historically put our trust in the imaginative expressions of artists to offer leadership in the task of extending societal sympathies. Our video series is rooted in three assumptions:

First, as Tim Leary taught in regards to the psychedelic experience, the physical environment matters. As does having a guide. In many ways, the sort of conversations we need to have as a society are very much like an LSD trip - dissonant, disorienting, but potentially life-changing as we come out the other side. Even today, people still associate concert halls, theatres and galleries as spaces associated with dissonance and the inviting possibility of temporarily stepping outside of ourselves. Folks are programmed to be ready for the weird sounds, unusual colours and strange ideas that they are likely to encounter in these types of spaces. If for the time being we can’t meet artists in their natural environment, then let’s bring them here.

Second, throughout history we turned to artists to be our social guides for a reason. There is a romantic instinct in the commitment to living an artistic life, and this instinct allows the artist to access feelings that are beyond the reach of calculative logic. Artists look for integration, and can assimilate a multiplicity of viewpoints more naturally than others. The type of art being discussed here celebrates the deep possibilities of our humanness.

Third, the mindset brought to the experience matters as much as the setting. Our set up is not binary – not right/left, old/young or any other opposition. Instead, the “set” shared by all participants is a desire to facilitate conversation, not have an argument. We need to refine our listening skills in the same way that many of us have refined our visual perception. We are not thrown off-balance when encountering a surprising colour. But why are we so much more sensitive to unexpected words or ideas? Dissonance can be integrated so that it is simply another colour on the palette of sense-making.

We hope this series empowers the viewer to be somewhat more hopeful and join our conversation as a participant in creating something transformational.