Nina Montgomery — Does capitalism need a radical redesign to become more inclusive?

Earlier this year, I worked on two books—featuring insights from 40 executives—exploring corporate purpose and impact. A clear theme emerged: To ensure that new capitalism doesn’t look a lot like old capitalism, we need more than just good intentions. We need a radical redesign of business at the structural level. Here are three big design questions that I encourage all leaders to ask themselves if they’re serious about inclusive capitalism:

I don't think that use of highly abstract terms like "capitalism" and "socialism" are helpful without careful definition that involves articulation of the fundamentals of social, political and economic systems, in particular in relation to contemporary living and emergent opportunities/challenges.

This is about revisiting the design of a life-support system that developed organically but not naturally in the sense of not being influenced by human intervention.

Assumption that "natural laws" comparable to natural systems studied by the natural science also govern complex adaptive systems has not played well so far, especially in the case of social systems and the social systems, including economics.

The organic approach has not worked out satisfactorily either, as humanity now faces several existential crises of its own making — climate change, epidemics and technological poisoning, and nuclear winter.

There are three major issues to face. The first is analyzing the design problem correctly, the second is developing a satisfactory solution, and the third is scaling it up. This latter involves two major issues, the first being technological, scaling at this level is a huge challenge, and the second being political, getting global concerted action from governments of nations with diverse interests has been elusive.

Fast Company

Does capitalism need a radical redesign to become more inclusive?
Nina Montgomery, designer at IDEO and a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford where she studies business and systems change

Neil Wilson — Musings on MMT - Firming Up The Soft Bits

Many moons ago I did a post about the soft bits of MMT - those where it wasn't 100% clear precisely what happens. I've had a few people mention these points recently and this post brings my thoughts up to date. 

It's important to realise that you can never understand the current system completely, and you certainly can't be 100% sure what will happen when you change it. It's always a balance of probabilities game.

In systems design this leads to the classic barrier to change - knowns as 'analysis paralysis'.

You spend ever increasing amounts of time studying the current way of doing things because fundamentally you're frightened of proposing a change and getting it wrong. So nothing ever happens, or things change underneath you rendering your studies obsolete.

So you can only ever get to a point where you know enough so that you can manage the risks. Then you've got to try something and see if it works - backing out if it doesn't. Otherwise nothing every changes.

I think we're at that point now where we know enough about the current model that we can get on and build solid proposals for a brave new world.

We're ready to try something.
So let's see where the state of the art suggests we are at the moment.

3spoken
Musings on MMT - Firming Up The Soft Bits
Neil Wilson

Winterspeak — Don't trust the data

Read it at Winterspeak.com
Don't trust the data

by Winterspeak