Danger Alert: Money, Values and delivering Big Society

There has been predictable upset in response to the government’s spending review.   No-one expected that cuts would be popular or that students would relish paying more for education.

In the words of a famous prayer, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”   The coalition is challenging us to engage with a fundamental shift.   The cuts will clearly create a vacuum in many areas of society.  What has to happen for the gaps to be filled?  Who do we have to be to make a contribution?  What would be a constructive role for second-tier approaches?

The I and the We

One aspect that we need to be alert to arises from the interest many of us have in areas like “conscious evolution” and “evolutionary enlightenment”.   Typically we have come towards Integral and SDi because of an interest in personal expansion, in the collective shift of human consciousness, or both.  This is a very powerful and natural development which arises from our human connectedness, our desire to know ourselves and each other, and our connection through human spirit.   It has strong roots in Green, taking off the Orange matter-oriented perceptual framework and embracing one another.

For many of us, this also connects into the Turquoise Values system, where human connectedness forms a part of our holistic view of the world and our relationship with the Divine.   Turquoise moves further away from scientific materialism, adding the non-ordinary reality of intuitive connection, entering into our engagement with the Akashic field and exloring post-modern shamanism.

This is exciting territory and is a strong piece of the impulse that takes us into second tier, but it contains two major risks  that I want to talk about because they affect how we look at both Money and Big Society.  Potentially both risks could undermine the global shift by creating a disfunctional and unbalanced form of second tier thinking.

So listen up folks!  The shift I have just described moved through the Orange-Green transition and then leapt into Turquoise, often with a mixture of real and aspirational Values.   Many of us are naturally inclined to make our up-spiral journey with a preference for the cool colours – the “We /us/ our” parts of the spectrum.   In the Green phase, this may overbalance into disapproval of the Orange system or into personal failure to maintain financial stability.  But even if we avoid these pitfalls, what happens next?  The next stage is Yellow, right?   What are we doing with Yellow?  

Yellow is the stage at which we must ensure that we have all of the first-tier stack in a healthy balance.  On its way, humanity has grown to almost 7 billion.  Many live in huge cities which are unsustainable without technology.   Billions are dependent on a network of complex global resource relationships based in money, raw materials circulation, manufacture of goods and non-indigenous foods like chocolate, bananas and coffee, some close to addiction-levels.    For some the expression “I like chocolate” has the same weight as “I like to breathe”.

Most of our current difficulties arise in the fragile or broken balancing systems which we all depend on.  Crisis-ridden economics, climatic instability, distorted guttony-famine food distribution, tattered ecological webs, sweat-shop production and political / religious tensions.  All of these are embedded in Values-based conflicts, whether Afghan Red warlords, Blue Iranian Ayatollahs, toxic Orange global finance and mega-corporations or unresourcable Green social care systems.     

The leadership task is presumably to avoid collapse.  Looked at from the planet’s point of view, it might be hard to be certain whether humanity is an evolutionary  step forward.  Species come and species go; does Gaia mourn the dinosaurs?  From her point of view It is at least arguable that the best next step in evolution is a massive cull of our species.   Perhaps just 1 or 2 billion would be sustainable.   Hands up!  Are you voting for this?   Are you happy that the 6 in 7 to die will include your friends, your children or you personally?   Have you reached non-attachment to life itself?

Let’s assume that like me, you haven’t.  And let’s also recognise that it takes a scaled-up world to produce big industries.  Many of the products we value cannot be produced by localised ecnomies.   We need copper mines to produce the winding-wire for wind generators.   We need complex chemical and electronics production to manufacture solar cells.   The oil industry doesn’t just run cars, it makes polytunnels.  Do you know which pieces of this big picture we can do without.  Are you ready to become a smallholding farmer?  

Managing this complex web of relationships, whether logistical, technical, political, economic, social or ecological is the primary task as we emerge from first tier.  We cannot manage this complexity without a new economic system*.  We cannot bring large corporations into balanced decision-making and functionality using Blue-Orange leadership approaches.  These are practical problems demanding practical intelligence. 

Yellow is the second-tier survival Values system – the revisit of Beige.  It is about our collective ability to feed 7 billion people and to preserve the habitat of our species.   It is not about the survival of the planet.   Cockroaches, mole rats, seaweed, bacteria, trees and insects can all outlive us.  It’s about us.

The two major risks I can see manifesting now are ones which afflict the very people who should be the most aware, most capable of making a contribution to the change, and both arise in our transition from Green through Yellow into Turquoise.

Risk 1.   Some people would like to ignore Yellow.   They may be following an Upper Left pathway, developing their consciousness and seeking personal enlightenment.   There is nothing wrong with that in itself.  Like everything, it’s a question of balance.   If we get too stuck in our own wounds, shadow-work and personal issues, we can become narcissistic stuff-junkies.  Imagining that this is the gateway to the Turquoise holy temple, we actually fail to make it out of first tier.  We know everything that there is to know about Orange prosperity affirmations, everything that our parents did that damaged our inner Red and Purple.  Our visualisation maps are filled with tropical beaches, perfect houses and soul-mates who will give to us without pause (expecting nothing).  Not you or me of course, but other people we know, supported by a huge industry of help-yourself gurus in a Green-tinted Ponzi scheme.    

Those of us who have narrowly avoided or emerged from this swamp may take another Yellow-avoidance route.  Becoming throughly versed in the mechanisms of consciousness, we know that the world changes as it changes.   Rather than being stuck in Upper Left, we imagine that collective consciousness in Lower Left quadrant will get us to the temple.   There’s no need to actually do anything in the external world.  As long as we get ourselves clear, and join in the global meditations we can assure the world’s future by making shifts on the non-material plane.  We don’t have to concern ourselves with how the changes happen because the Universe will do this.  Everything will happen in the quantum realms of the Divine.  Once again, this approach is not wrong in itself – it contains a portion of the truth.   Conscious evolution is a piece of the puzzle, and it deserves our attention; but on its own it’s a dangerous fantasy.  Part of the response from a conscious universe takes place through OUR action.  My favourite quote of all is the Islamic “Trust in Allah, but first tether thy camel”.   In the unbalanced state, there are neither camels, tethers or stakes.   It’s a fantasy world for bliss-ninnies, a paradise where we can enjoy the effortlessly virtuous contribution we make in the comfort and privacy of our own heads .

Yellow and Turquoise come as a pair.   If we skip Yellow we are inclined to miss out the two Right quadrants altogether, arriving at the borders of Turquoise without suitcase or passport.  Rather than being in the world but not of it, we will be neither of nor in it.  We could imagine that we have throughly transcended our material nature, a perspective which is likely to draw some harsh earthly lessons.  I am reminded of the aide who said that “it cost millions to keep Gandhi in poverty”.   I suspect that Gandhi was well aware of this; it is the world’s perceptions that were being adjusted.

Which brings me to Risk 2, which is a repeat in second tier of the arrogance that has caused humans to think themselves masters of the planet.  There is a strand of thinking totally focused on HUMAN conscious emergence.  As supposedly the only species which demonstrates self-awareness, we are truly special.  We are the pinnacle of evolving consciousness.   If we get ourselves clear all problems will be solved.  WE will know what to do.

If you don’t do Turquoise, don’t accept the existence of a holistic reality, of a connected non-material world, of a modern shamanism (Jean Houston) and of mystics without monasteries (Caroline Myss) then skip this paragraph and the next**.  If you do accept it then it should be evident to you that many parts of the natural world also have a spiritual component.  We are not the only creatures with spirit within and we are also not the only parts of the spirit world that know who we are.  

Nature itself is made up of millions of forms of intelligence that work together to manifest the material world – from the devas and nature spirits of the worms, insects and plant life.  These intelligences know how to co-create, responding to the blueprint provided by the universe of natural consciousness that surrounds them***.  They did it before humanity existed and will continue after we have gone – which we will be if we attempt to create a new world which is as ignorant of and disconnected from them as the first-tier one has been.   We are not the only form of self-awareness and it an extreme arrogance to imagine that we can evolve our consciousness in separation from theirs.  And since they are among our greatest and most powerful potential allies it would also be stupid.   They are our key to the world of the right quadrants because they make our natural systems work.

So what is it that we have to do?   Are we, the consciously evolving and integrally aware to be leaders or bystanders in the transition?  Will we raise our voices in shaping the new reality?   I see these issues with our money systems and our social structures as the test beds for brilliant theories like SD and Integral, the opportunities to put our integral consciousness to practical work and to show that we have understood what Jean Houston means by Social Artistry. 

Exteriors:  Money and Big Society

In September, I wrote about the Values system shifts visible within these changes, about how the fragility of the Orange system undermines the funding base for our Green impulses, and how that Green system has been delivered from a Blue process-oriented, centralised and bureaucratic mindset.  This is how I described the need for us to achieve a second-tier approach to these issues:- “The next stage, which SDi labels YELLOW, is characterised by the need for flexible, responsive structures and processes and by the requirement to hold all six preceding stages in a healthy overall balance. That is a complex task. Because each stage has been bigger than the previous, the time of transition coincides with a very complex and interwoven world, one in which change is increasingly rapid. The “Big Society”, with its stated ambition to deliver power and influence back into localities and communities has the potential to facilitate the increased flexibility and responsiveness to local conditions that we will need. The core problem is that very few people know how to engineer such a change”.

More recently I have described issues with money system.  Similar challenges are present there.  I put the problem in personal terms, saying:-  “It’s not about money, it’s about Values.   What is important to you?  Do you want to put the Money first?   Do you want to put Care first?   Do you think that if the taxes were lower and the economy stronger Care would occur automatically?    What will be important to the people of this country as the value of our income and our assets slide inexorably during the years to come?   Will the Nation be willing to spend one hour less in front of the TV, in order to do something for a neighbour?   Can we cope if the iphone becomes a luxury and not a necessity?”

I bring these two extracts together because they illustrate the change we are dealing with.  Britain is being called to move from  a consumer-oriented culture which has relied on the State for many of its societal needs, to a care-oriented culture in which people are able to balance their material aspirations with their collective human needs.   This is equivalent in scale to the 1939 shift from peacetime to wartime thinking, but without the blatant external pressure which ensured a constructive response, and delivered into a more individualistic culture with less allegiance to order.  

This huge shift will not happen by itself.  Public sector organisations are not equipped with the skills and understanding that will be needed.  The corporate sector  generally still lacks the societal awareness or the systemic complexity to embrace the new agenda easily.  The established third sector is over-stretched, and much of it lacks the managerial skills (or the regulatory permission) to expand its capacity and to shift from process-oriented compliance with standards into outcome-focused and locally responsive service delivery.     Community impulses will need significant support if they are to create forms which are not stuck in old-style mini- bureaucracies, distorted by personal fiefdoms or paralysed by indecisive consensual direction-finding.    “Dad’s Army” is not what’s needed. 

If my prediction of worsening economic conditions is even half-way right, we will be trying to make this shift during a time of increased survival fears which will push us down-spiral.  Some of these responses may be healthy;  we may see a re-emergence of duty to contain the me-first Red and Orange impulses and a stimulus to community care activities.  Some may not.  Such times provide fertile soil for the growth of demagogues, for scapegoating of minorities.  Some Blue zealots will think that a police state is the answer and some Red warlords will seek to usurp the power that this offers.   Just as WWII brought a banding together, it also brought black markets and corruption.   Our widespread surveillance capability could equally easily be used to support a police state or to restrict criminality.  What determines the outcome?

One answer is that fear will be greater if our leaders (at all levels) are not prepared for such scenarios.  There will need to be some very well-thought and well-crafted messages, channelling each values system into healthful responses.   But messages will be mere propaganda and dismissed as such, without a parallel stream of action which moves rapidly and radically, first to maintain as much of normal life as possible and second to begin delivering the new world at speed.   It will be these actions which inhibit a collective down-spiral response.  It has been encouraging in this regard to see how fast the coalition are able to operate and to hear that there are some complex thinkers among them (take a look, for example at Francis Maude’s presentation on www.thersa.org).  But they will need an unprecedented level of responsible support from news media, and to make expert use of the social technology channels.

The Centre for Human Emergence has expertise in the kinds of organisational structure, leadership thinking and cultural awareness that these new times will need at every level****.   It will need many like us to provide support with training, consultancy and direct assistance.  This will not be a time for faint-heartedness and neither is it a time for being stuck in our individual upper-left quadrant self-doubt.  We will need the self-esteem to recognise that we are at least partially-sighted kings in a land full of blindness.  We will need to employ our tolerance and humility to listen and learn, but not to hand over power to those who merely spout old dogmas.  We will need our balance of heart, soul and wisdom, both in making today’s decisions and in the flexibility to change them in response to tomorrow’s events.  We will need to challenge our level of enlightenment in the mirror of real-world engagement. 

For sure, we will need to be adept at presencing, at sensing what to do next, at being light on our feet, focussing on today’s problems and the most pressing solutions.   At the same time we will need to see the whole picture, to embrace action in many directions at once.  We will have to maintain our strong focus on our own chosen tasks while keeping a sharp peripheral vision in order to mesh with the tasks of others, thinking collectively, acting individually.   This calls for new systems that provide connectivity between the hundreds of worthy causes.  When we see something that needs doing, don’t start a new movement; find out who is already doing it and join in.  It’s up to us to join the dots, provide the string that weaves the mesh.   

This will be a world in which enlightened is as enlightened does.  We need to see the change that is coming, be the change that we wish to see in the world and do the change that the world needs done.

Many are called.   Who will stand up?

 * To find out about the characteristics of the new money system, download “Future Money” from www.spiralworld.net .  Go on, you’re worth it.

** If you don’t think that the holisitic perspective is real then you are trapped in a matter-oriented worldview and need to read “God’s Ecology” for an eyes-open perspective on the the non-material world.  Also, coincidentally, available from www.spiralworld.net

***  There are numerous references for this, many of which are in the back of “God’s Ecology”.   Machaelle Small Wright’s Perelandra books, Malidoma Some’s “Of Water and the Spirit” and the writings of Dorothy Maclean are good places to start.

**** For a view of the kind of changes that are needed in organisations in order to deliver a functional future read the CHE policy paper “Managing the cultural shift: Complex challenges, societal change and the collaborative future.”    To be found on www.humanemergence.org.uk

Meeting the bankruptcy challenge

In this third post about money, I have changed the title to one which accepts that bankruptcy is already here.   By way of reminder, global indebtedness exceeds ten years of global production.   If you need another statistic, the UK national debt is now £77,000 for every inhabitant of this country.  We have mortgaged our own future and that of our children.

There are those who would paint this as a national tragedy, which it would be if most other countries were not in the same position.    Bizarrely, since starting this series, the stockmarket has risen because the US Federal reserve has pumped another $0.6 trillion into the punctured tyre.  The Bank of England speaks of following suit with Quantitative Easing 2.   Madness continues.  We are faced with a very big challenge, and this posting is about the big questions that are about to be asked of each of us.  The price of failure could be high.  It isn’t easy, and I hope that you will bear with its message through to the end.  

I was a teenager when Harold Wilson’s government devalued sterling and he made the infamous statement that “the pound in your pocket has not been devalued”.  Today, we do not explicitly devalue because currencies are all floating relative to one another.  There is no fixed point to devalue against.   Instead, when countries print more money (the reality of QE2) they simply reduce the worth of the money that previously existed.  The pound in your pocket is not being devalued – not as such.   It is simply worth less today than it was yesterday, and you can count on that trend continuing.   To some extent you may expect that to continue in all countries.

Even so, nerves are frayed out there in money-land.  Ireland is being baled out again.  US investors have not responded as the Fed hoped they would and are not buying the new Treasury bonds (and are being blamed for their irrational behaviour).   If (or rather when) sentiment turns down, the whole world is likely to slide together.   At this point, the pound in your pocket does start to lose value, but your debts do not reduce.   Internally (and this is what Wilson meant) your mortgage will still take just as many pounds to pay.  But more of your money will be required to meet other basic needs (food, fuel) as inflation takes hold again.   And house prices will drop, leaving many more in negative equity.   If you have the option, now is a very good time to pay off all debts and avoid new ones.   I wish that I could.

Meanwhile, the hard-line economists will sing their traditional song about how it is public expenditure that has caused this problem.  They will tell you that the public sector is now larger than the private sector, so that too much of our income is not “productive”.  Most of service sector output cannot be exported because it needs its customers present.  We cannot earn enough to pay for our imports.  Our taxes increase, so making less incentive for entrepreneurs.  They will tell you how we should be like Hong Kong with its 15% top income tax and its lack of government activity.  Then everything would be just perfect.

Of course, there is some truth inside all that they say, but it misses the real point.  The question for each citizen of the UK concerns what kind of world we want to create for ourselves and our children.  Are you ready for the end of state-funded elder care?   Are you willing to see the communities which educate severely autistic children closed down?  Are you willing to pay directly for services which your local council currently provides?

There is little doubt that the state has become rigid, over-regulated, tick-box driven and with so many standards and accountabilities that it is hugely inefficient.  But remember that it only did so because many private sector organisations could not be trusted to maintain adequate standards of service.  Only today, the news speaks of the Care Quality Commission  (CQC) closing down sub-standard care homes, only to see them re-open under new names with the same management, and all their inspection history wiped clean?

I am abbreviating some complex issues here, and hope that readers can follow the plot, which in summary is one about balances and choices.   Please bear with me, because the goal is worth reaching.  Many of the actions which national or local government takes exist because we believe that they need to be done.  We outrage over Victoria Climbie and baby Peter.  We are distressed by pensioners found in a state of decay because no-one even knew that they had died.  Most of us also have some belief in fairness, in the financial support of those who are out of work, or long-term sick, or mentally ill.

Economists will present these choices as if they are all about the money.  Don’t be fooled by this.  Money does not measure quality of life.   As Bobby Kennedy said in 1968, “Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” That may sound like a romantic presentation, and perhaps there is a tinge of sentiment there.  But GNP also does not account for our care of the elderly, prevention of abuse and support of the weakest.   Some of that now looks to us like basic civilized behaviour.

It’s not about money, it’s about Values.   What is important to you?  Do you want to put the Money first?   Do you want to put Care first?   Do you think that if the taxes were lower and the economy stronger Care would occur automatically?    What will be important to the people of this country as the value of our income and our assets slide inexorably during the years to come?   Will the Nation be willing to spend one hour less in front  of the TV, in order to do something for a neighbour?   Can we cope if the iphone becomes a luxury and not a necessity?

We have made many aspects of social care into an industry, outsourced the job that Terry Pratchett describes as “Grasp for them as can’t bend, reach for them as can’t stretch and wipe for them as can’t twist”.  It now requires professionals to do these things.   People with NVQ’s under the guidance of registered organisations under the CQC with “nominated individuals” who ensure that all the boxes are ticked.

In Spiral terms, it is not only the economy which has gone over the edge.  While the economy lost its way through weak Blue failing to contain rampant Orange materialism, our care systems have seen Blue order combine with an Orange belief that everything can be measured objectively.  Anything that cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no importance.   There is no room for quality, no possibility to include the intelligence of our public debate, the integrity of our public officials or the care that we give to our elders.  Industry is similarly afflicted with quality kitemarks based on processes rather than outcomes. 

Out social care systems were Green Value impulses, but they do not run from those Green values.  They are dominated by the Blue-Orange culture.  They are mechanized, institutionalized versions of the Green Value system.   For sure, many individuals within the professions concerned really do care, and live their Green values, but as a society we are not there yet because we are stuck in the Orange belief that money comes first.  That is about to be put to the test.

While I am comfortable to predict that the slide will come, I am not clever enough to think that I know what it will look like.   I find it interesting that Downton Abbey, with its depiction of a benevolent, caring class system, is to be followed onto the airwaves by the return of “Upstairs Downstairs”, another such portrayal of the old order, but set in the middle of the 1930’s depression.   We are exploring our relationship with the values of the past and hunkering down more deeply, going back yet further than the Cath Kidston fashion echoes of the 1950’s.  The collective intelligence is a wonderful and mysterious thing.

Unfortunately hunkering down will not be enough, and the 1930’s also witnessed the fascist blackshirts and anti-Semitism.   Aspirations were different, families, communities and neighbourhoods more cohesive and stable.   We were not dependent on global food distribution systems to feed our cities.  We were not addicted to technological fixes.   To survive global bankruptcy will require humanity to make the Gravesian leap to Yellow, to integrate its first-tier systems.  We will need to take personal ownership of our impulse to care.  We will need leadership that understands how to support that cultural shift.  Are the Sun and the Daily Mail ready to get behind that change?

More importantly, are you?  Beneath all of this cultural shift is our upper-left quadrant personal relationship with money.  In my new book, I explore in depth the way that our first-tier engagement with fear of lack, desire for power, selfish control and systemic greed have built the world we live in.   The socio-economic challenges described here come together with global challenges of sustainability, ecological damage and political instability.  If we are to get out of these, we will have to make a big transition.  We will have to make our Green caring strong enough to balance our self-centred fear and greed.  We will have to use that lever to take us beyond the first-tier limits and into a second-tier relationship with money and with society.

This may well be the first practical test of our journey to enlightenment.  Do we, the integrally literate, spirally educated and spiritually intelligent people who are supposed to understand these things, have the willingness to deal with our money shadow.  Are we ready to show those around us some leadership and help them through the challenges?

My book “Future Money” is intended to help with this journey.  It gets inside both our personal relationship with money and the systemic changes which we need to bring about.   These things go hand in hand.  Our systems are reflections of our thinking and if we do not change, the systems cannot.   Money is the keystone holding up the arch of our systemic rigidity.  It is the reason that Copenhagen failed and that Cancun may do no better.   “Future Money presents a manifesto for surviving global bankruptcy.  It is intended as a support and a road-map for our journey.  I think that we need all the help we can get.

Jon

Future Money is available only as an e-book, currently in pdf form through www.spiralworld.net .  It has a “cover” price of £15, but readers of this blog can reduce that price by £5 by entering the discount code “LIC” at the checkout stage.   It is also available for Kindle through (of course) Amazon.  

Preparing for Global Bankruptcy (Part 2)

In Part 1 I stated that we will all have to take part in “the great rebalancing” as the world adapts to global insolvency.   The picture I am attempting to build describes the remapping of Values and priorities as the Western world gets to grips with the pressures which will either drive our “momentous leap” into second tier Values, or see us fall over that hurdle.  Clare Graves offered no guaranteed outcomes, describing three possible scenarios.  The first is failure and catastrophic regression, possibly as far as pre-industrial conditions.  The second is that we become stuck in the Red-Blue-Orange bands as society attempts to control the chaos using old thinking.  Only the third, in which we emerge into the Yellow sunshine was enticing.  Here said Graves, man “becomes truly a co-operative individual and ceases being a competitive one”.   Here mankind truly sees its interdependence and “uses the knowledge gained through his first-ladder trek in efforts to put his world together again, systematically”.

So that’s our challenge.   And in order to accomplish it, we will need to understand our money systems and our relationship with them in as much depth as we can.

If you listen to economic news you may recently have heard the Brazilian finance minster describe a global currency war, as countries devalue their currencies to drive export competitiveness.  Behind this, conscious or unconscious, is the recognition that the value of our money is not based on anything real.   The fight to survive is driving the value of money down.  When governments print money, they devalue the currency.   

Have you ever put something onto eBay that no-one wanted to buy?   I have.  That is when you discover something fundamental about the value of goods and the value of money.  If you own a house, your equity and your mortgage are based on a perceived value.   If the perception changes (i.e. no-one wants to buy your house) its financial value disappears.   As a shelter you may value it, but its money value has gone.   Likewise, if all the money in pockets and bank accounts vanishes tomorrow, the world will be left physically unchanged.   

In recent decades we have experienced material growth.  There is huge manufacturing capacity and we are supporting more people on the earth than we ever have.   That’s the good news.  But the bad news is that we grew paper money much faster, issuing massive debts based on a fantasy about the inevitability that growth would never stop.  The reason that a stock market slide is inevitable (see Part 1) is that our money is not worth what it was supposed to be worth and those debts cannot be repaid.  The perceptual bubble has burst.    Some people have their heads in the sand and refuse to recognise this.    But the evidence suggests that many major investors are pulling out their investments in the productive economy.   The amount of money lodged in the US Federal Reserve at very low interest returns has leapt in the past year from its historically steady $200 billion, to $1200 billion.   Others are trying to make money for as long as they can from a broken system, either cynically or out of the desperation that they don’t know what else they can do, and they will call for more money to be injected into the system by governments in order to postpone the inevitable.   We may all be addicts who will fight with the determination of the alcoholic whose gin bottle is being taken.    

We are dealing here with a very complex system.   It is globally interlocked, requires an ongoing balance between Blue Order, Orange material success and a Green social care which is deliverable in its current form only if there is Orange surplus to pay for it.   It also requires a balance between stakeholders including not only multiple countries and human beings, but encompassing the planet itself, where both resource availability and environmental considerations exert pressure.

You may be wondering by now if there is a way out of this gloomy scenario.   I believe there is, but it is not only systems that must change.   Humans will have to change their Values and their behaviours.   The slide may now be inevitable, but our survival and the speed of our recovery will depend on how quickly we can accomplish such a radical realignment. 

I am not an economist.  But in my recent journeys into economic life I have discovered that few economists truly understand the world of money and that there is little agreement to be found among them.  This is because they think that money is in some way real and not perceptual.  They think that by manipulating money you can change the underlying reality.  This thinking is what drove the massive “derivatives” fantasy and it has not ended with the crash.   Those of us aspiring to functional second-tier thinking will need to become literate about how money works, not just as a lower-right system but in our upper and lower-left personal and cultural thinking.   I will take this further in Part 3 of this series.

Preparing for Global Bankruptcy (Part 1)

I want to focus the theme of complexity, which I said from the outset would be central to this blog, quite specifically towards money, finance and economics.  As also stated then, we need to take a close look at the new relationships with money that are demanded by a system which is beyond redemption.

Do I need to justify that last statement?   I suspect that within months that question will not apply.  At the risk of making myself a hostage to fortune, I believe that the stock market recovery reached its peak last April.  It dropped by 18% over the following two months.  The recovery since then of the majority of that drop may well be its last hurrah.   The only reason it sustains is because both US and UK governments promise to print more money (known as quantitative easing) if it does not.  

Should you care?   Only if you own a house, or might want to.  Only if you have a pension plan.   Oh yes, and only if you are concerned about human survival, about sustainability, about peace.   The way that we think about money, and the systems that we live are fundamentally influencing our lives and our prospects.

It should not surprise anyone who knows SDi or Integral thinking, that our attitudes to money have reflected our Values systems shifts over time.  For Purple, money (where it exists at all) typically facilitated dowry systems and other social relationships.  Red hoards money and shows it off in conspicuous displays of power and wealth.   For Blue, prosperity may be a reward for personal diligence and industry, except for those who turn their backs on it and make poverty a part of their spiritual discipline.  Blue also introduces written accounts, contracts and commercial laws.

The last two centuries have witnessed the rise of Orange Values.  As we exploited our scientific inventiveness, first with productive machinery and railroads, then with telegraphy, mass road and air transport and domestic technology, finally with mass communications and the digital economies, we shared in a collective triumph over the material world.   The culture came to value possessions.  He who dies with the most toys wins.

For over a century there has been recognition that materialism could go too far, bringing more human-centred Green responses, including pensions systems, unemployment benefit and healthcare.  But only more recently have we fully recognised that our dominance over the material world was an illusion, that prices have been paid not only in human happiness but also in ecological damage and conflict, and finally in a systematic weakness that was self-destructive.  Orange strategy outsmarted Blue regulation and created paper investments whose roots were not in real physical assets but in mathematical fantasies.  

Most of us have been caught in the fantasy world and still are.   But growing money has not worked.   The world today has an annual Gross Product  of $50 trillion.   World debts are hard to pin down, since they fluctuate with currencies, national economies and property values, but a conservative estimate would be $500 trillion.  

So imagine that situation as a description of your own personal or domestic economy.  Imagine an annual income £50K alongside mortgage, loan and credit card debt of £500K.   When it will take all of your income for ten years just to pay your debts, the accurate description is “insolvent”, unable ever to pay creditors, and leads to bankruptcy.

The government is making a huge song and dance about the need to balance the UK budget and I am writing as the spending review is receiving its verdict in the papers.   Amidst the varying political perspectives – I defy anyone to get clear guidance on whether the middle-class or the poor will suffer most – sits one widely shared perception – that this is a gamble.  Sticking my neck out again, I don’t believe that it is.   We are in trouble either way;   It is only the trajectory of our fall that varies.   The world has manufactured money and expanded debt, and we each have our share of the debt.   One way or another, the rebalancing has to come.   In Part 2 we will begin to look at what this means in more detail.  

Now that the parties are over

It’s hardly news that the last UK election delivered a coalition government.   And while the press have been looking for splits and rifts, that too is nothing new.  They would have done that with a one-party outcome, just as they explored and dramatised the wedge between Brown and Blair, or talked up the euro-split of the previous Tory administration.

What may be more of a novelty is the speed and energy of the new administration.   It has hit the ground running.  Having put together its heads of agreement in just a few days, it seems to be capable of delivering policy proposals and discussion documents at a rapid rate.   And despite the internal resistance from the fringes of both parties (Cameron’s right wing and Clegg’s more doctrinaire members) the centre-ground is holding up.

 Perhaps no-one is clear who the enemy is any more!   Both might consider the Labour party to be the enemy, but it is currently on the sidelines and even leadership candidate David Miliband is warning that Labour may be out of office for ten years.  That leadership contest itself has two brothers as leaders who, while they are not identical in viewpoints, hardly represent a struggle for the soul of the party.  The contest itself does not appear to be a fundamental review of Labour identity.

There may be good reason for this.   The deeper history of the three parties would show some degree of divergence.   Conservative, as the name suggests, was about preserving the status quo and changing as little as possible.  Broadly speaking its founding Value system was core BLUE order, with a nod to Red aristocratic hierarchy – the fruits of earlier conquest.     The Liberal party, over the past 150 years was characterised by a more radical and reformist stance and by a strong social conscience.  Their position was economically laissez-faire ORANGE, plus a “BLUE with fairness” social conscience that may even have hinted at GREEN.  They introduced the first health insurance, unemployment assistance and old age pension schemes before WW1, but their economic freedom did nothing to change working conditions.

The Labour party was born out of demands for improved working conditions and propelled by the trade unions.    With this background came the fear of a communist-inspired socialism that was central to the struggle between Labour and Conservative during the past 80 years.  That socialism is a mix of GREEN egalitarian human values and BLUE “right way” which was hostile to much of entrepreneurial ORANGE, resulting in ineffective nationalisation and progress through conflict.

So where are we now?    Socialism is a remnant with decreasing amounts of traction, smashed by Thatcher and quietly buried by Blair with his “third way” politics and his flirtation with Ashdown’s Lib-Dems.   If you watched the TV election hustings you may have found it hard to see any difference in most policy arenas because the parties have converged on a centre ground.   This was evidenced by the belief that both Con-Lib and Lab-Lib alliances were possible last May, and liberal deputy leader Simon Hughes is still advocating the latter.   It was not policy differences which drove the decision but tactics over leadership and voting systems.   There is no sign of any fundamental shift underway within the Labour debate and their identity may well be defined now by attempts to find some distinction from the coalition.

Where there was divergence in the party histories, now all three are fighting for the middle ground between the BLUE edge of entering strategic ORANGE and the GREEN edge of its exit.   There are some complex thinkers talking in YELLOW ways, but not many.    And there is now as much divergence within the parties as between them.  Some Labour looks like Liberal (or vice versa) and Cameron is closer to Clegg than to some of his own party backwoodsmen.

The point of this posting is to say that this is not just accident.   I am suggesting that it is a natural outcome as we approach society’s transition into second tier.    Management of a complex society requires the ability to address the entire bandwidth of social groups and Values systems.  It demands that we end the oscillation between two poles of thinking.   The same polarity is built into US politics, and even more entrenched there, with Republicans deeply opposed to social programs and Democrats attempting a progressive agenda.  The swings from one to the other were always disruptive and expensive.  Now the scale of provision and the complexity of relationships between multiple agencies for service delivery impose longer timescales on any change and the pendulum is dysfunctional.

In my view the party system cannot deliver the intelligence for a second-tier version of democracy.   Its existence is part of what inhibits the emergence of second-tier leaders since they must first navigate the constrictions of their first-tier party dogmas.   In the absence of a proportional voting system this effect is compounded; even the current coalition does not in its balance reflect the support for the Lib-Dems.   The whole mechanism is clumsy and inadequate to a responsive, culturally diverse and flex-flow future.   Replacing it may not be easy, but it is no longer fit for purpose and needs to go.    We might even have to start knowing who our candidates are, what they think and voting for people, not platforms.

Crisis as Opportunity

“What talents may be dormant in you, and just waiting for these circumstances to call them forth?”

There will be a recurring theme through this series of blogs on social dynamics. That theme is complexity. Integral and Spiral Dynamics approaches both portray our time as one of major transition, driven in large measure by an evolutionary crisis. Our ways of thinking and being are challenged to attain a new level in order to manage a global society characterised by huge and potentially unsustainable cities, ecological pressure, political imbalance and terrorism, economic breakdown, cultural complexity and a sloppy mix of anti-religious scientism with eclectic and holistic spirituality.

Each of these topics impacts our lives and those of our families and friends. This blog will focus on the issues that are close to home. It can be tempting to focus on the inner journey. Many people are now persuaded that there is some form of “field”, a pervading consciousness that both surrounds and inhabits us. It may be labelled “quantum” or characterised as Divine, but the traditional human impulse towards prayer now generalises through multiple approaches of visualisation, attunement, meditation and creative engagement. It can seem that we are being told that if we harmonise ourselves sufficiently, the world will take care of itself.

I am a great believer in the importance of the inner journey. At the same time, one of my favourite sayings comes from the prophet Mohammed, who said “Trust in Allah, but first tether thy camel”. And from oriental traditions of enlightenment comes another such saying, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” Hence these commentaries on the state of the UK and the world. Once we might have said “no man is an island”. No island is an island any more either; air travel has made the physical image redundant and global connectedness has made it obsolete at an informational and emotional level too. This morning’s news makes me simultaneously aware of 14 million souls affected by Pakistan flooding, 700 separate drought-induced fires wiping out Russian grain-harvests and a 10 square mile piece of ice that yesterday was called Greenland now floating free in the North Atlantic.

So we have many camels in need of tethering. They are big and small, young and old, short-term and long, local and distant. It can be hard to have a sense of proportion. Even to consider them all threatens overwhelm and one response might be to undertake our spiritual preparation for the end of days. The view through these blogs is that there are patterns to be found and that there is a simplicity that emerges beyond the complexity which will equip us to make the connections and find solutions. We do not each need to do everything and we can find our own individual acupressure point to massage. We can look at 6 billion people as a problem, or as 6 billion problem-solvers.

This is a time of conscious evolution. Ken Wilber speaks of our special position as the first species to be consciously aware of its part in an evolutionary process, and exhorts us to take Divine Pride in ourselves that we are here now, aware of the time and actively engaged in its unfolding. Amen to that. But evolution is a co-creative process. When one species changes it alters the environment for other species, influencing their change in turn. Evolution is not driven simply by genetic code change. Actions are involved.

So at a time of unprecedented pressure, of complexity compounded by diversity compounded by urgency we have a choice in how we look at our surroundings and at the process of social change. Is it a crisis or an opportunity? Well, of course it is both. We could fail to do what is needed. But according to Roman poet Horace, “Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant”.

Over the coming weeks we will look at the opportunities being presented to us – the “Big Society” agenda that accompanies government cutbacks, the new relationships with money demanded by a system which is beyond redemption and at whatever themes present themselves from the many touched on in this introduction. This journey can start with some personal questions:-

Are you a problem, or a problem-solver?

To what extent do you perceive the need for action?

Do you see yourself as empowered to make a difference, or is all the power with governments and corporate interests?

What talents may be dormant in you, and just waiting for these circumstances to call them forth?

A few things to ponder as we embark on this journey together. Never waste a good crisis!

Jon

This Blog first appeared on Wholelifewholeworld.com
http://spiral-dynamics.wholelifewholeworld.com/2010/08/19/crisis-as-opportunity/

Second Tier Money

As Clare W. Graves predicted, the world is in the transition to second-tier human existence.  This is not another colour shift like Blue-Orange or Orange-Green.   There is a change of Values for sure, but something else besides.  It is a shift from the fear-based individual Survival strategies of the first tier into the level of Being.   The challenge to our survival is not the simple physicality of Beige.  Its echo in Yellow is now more existential and collective.  Our future as a species depends on our ability to blend and balance the first tier Values so that in Yellow, we can recognise our interdependence with the planetary ecology and with each other.   In Turquoise we may even aspire to recognise our oneness.

The Orange world has brought global interconnection which touches even the societies which are still predominantly living from Red and Blue systems.   The Green overlay has brought an element of social care arising from our common humanity, something beyond “charity”.   The size of our cities, our global industries and our economic interdependence all exhibit a complexity that we can barely manage, and all operate using systems that were established from first tier thinking.  Our world is unable to assess risks and our organisations lack the meshed intelligence that will be adequately responsive to rapid and complex change.

This transition cannot be accomplished using the thinking systems that arose from first-tier Values perspectives.   Just as second tier requires a science that gets beyond the battle between Orange materialism and Blue religious dogma; it requires a fundamentally new view of economics.   First tier money is based deeply in fear – fear of lack and fear of exploitation.   Our current economic situation is visibly an outcome of Orange overbalance into greed.   Our thinking about money needs to rise above fear and greed.  It must transcend the battle between money-first capitalism and Christian or communist impulses towards alms-houses or egalitarian ownership.   None of these are adequate.

In recent months, Rachel, Ian and I spent several days in Holland working on the development of MeshWORKS together with Don and many others, particularly from the Dutch group.   The embedded intelligence of MeshWORKS and the Organisational Design capability which sits at the heart of the mesh will be a critical need at every level as we move forward.   As Ian says elsewhere, conversations are underway with people in the Finance sector connected with their need for improved risk and complex scenario management.

It is also apparent that the requirement for cultural change will be on the agenda.  Hector Sants is current chair of the FSA and designated head of its replacement function within the Bank of England which will in the future be responsible for regulatory mechanisms for the finance sector.   In a recent conference speech he stated the following:-  “So at the least, I would assert that regulators have an obligation to consider the question of whether they should have a role to play in relation to the ethics and culture of the firms they regulate.” If there is to be a new approach to corporate culture, you might question as I do who is in a position to facilitate such a change?     I know of very few other organisations or approaches which have the comprehensive view of culture change that SDi can bring or the sense of direction that will be required to help people orient themselves within it.  We should be prepared.

More personally, I am feeling very strongly about the need for a fresh consciousness around money as we enter second tier.    To my own surprise I found myself writing a book on the subject, and the first draft is complete.   Titled “Future Money” and with a strapline “A manifesto for surviving Global bankruptcy”, it has messages for both our personal change and that of our culture and systems.   The bankruptcy is not speculation.   It is a statement of an existing reality, where the $600 trillion plus of global debt represents 12 to 15 years of our global production (approx $50 trillion).   That is like you and I carrying mortgages of over ten times our annual salary.    “Deficit reduction” does not deal with this situation where our money has no relationship to physical reality and cannot sustain.

The future will require different personal attitudes that are beyond both Orange and Green Values systems.   Recognising the planet as a stakeholder goes way past carbon trading schemes.    Future money systems will have to deal with the imbalances of power which repeatedly bring climate change conferences to collapse, which propel political instability and terrorism and which threaten in a prolonged recession to cause internal social unrest resembling that of the 1930’s.     The personal changes and the systemic ones will be interdependent and both are essential.   Our Dutch colleagues are taking a central role in the climate and ecology conversation.  We see CHE-UK as taking a parallel and equally essential one in supporting both the corporate and the cultural shifts that this time demands.

Jon