Did you say Regenerative Platforms?
Framing “Regeneration” inside the context of business practices: lots of hard to crack questions
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The question of framing “regeneration” inside human organizational practices has been open for decades and it’s hot today as the world of business, governance, and institutions is facing a reckoning with increasing systemic risks. More generally, we’re finally dealing with the expression of the impacts that human society is having on its own habitat, planet earth. Our teammate Lucia Hernandez recently shared a meaty update on the idea of regenerative platforms, and similar work did our event co-organizer David Kish on his recent piece that aimed at addressing what platform innovators often underestimate when approaching the development of platform businesses.
Despite the die is not cast yet on the topic — and progress is definitely an understudied topic —the myth of a society of abundance, mainly driven by technological development, seems caught in a dead-end. While capitalism sometimes thrives on creating artificial scarcity — even for non-competitive goods —it also promotes the idea of endless economic growth, and good outcomes for everybody: these ideas sit at the root of the concept of “sustainable development” and gave birth to controversial ideas such as SDG 8, which sometimes sound like a contradiction in terms. If there is one thing we are increasingly understanding, thanks to supply chain shocks, cascading failures, depletion crises, and geopolitical conflicts over scarce resources is that there is not necessarily always a positive-sum game: “double binds” often prevent positive outcomes to be generated for everyone involved.
New perspectives on Value and Impact
From the perspective of the “value” that a business can create in society, and the “impact” that it generates, organizations have been mostly dealing with the idea of achieving “sustainability”, adopting impact-focused investments practices, getting specific “for-benefit” certifications, and embracing the myth of the triple bottom line. Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) has become such a big trend that many doubts are being expressed that the approach can even go beyond virtue signaling, superficial outcomes, and cosmetic changes: check out the substantial critique that R3.0 founder Ralph Thurm — and a guest of our upcoming event — shared recently to get a glimpse.
R3.0 seems to be today among the most advanced collective effort and experiences in trying to draw a full picture of a regeneration transition and we hosted Bill Baue and Ralph Thurm recently on our podcast to explore by and large r3.0’s thesis around what regenerative business could mean.
R3.0 created nine blueprints that provide a recap of the conversation around all the dimensions that the regenerative challenge entails: the ecological, economic, social, and cultural dimensions are explored, and the envisioned new frames hint that the shift in focus for regenerative business has to feature context-basedness (including awareness of the material flows, mainly through thresholds and allocations), and needs to look into multiple capitals letting go the dominance of financial capital alone. Systemic value creation, r3.0 hints, needs to capture a business’ impact as part of the whole systems it is embedded in, looking for ways to produce what they call “gross-positive” outcomes, where “negative impacts are engineering out”.
In the context of r3.0 and related initiatives, ideas emerging to characterize the “post-transition” hover around place-basedness (bioregions), learning focused-ness (with shared processes of governance, collective capabilities development), post-ownership towards the idea of “lender-ship” (where the idea of the Commons become much more prominent versus privatization), a debt jubilee and the overcoming of the paradigm of mono-capitalistic (financial) growth towards the idea of a “regrowth” that is conscious of all the capitals and seeks growth in the spaces where such growth is not a menace to our habitats.
An evolution: platforms
Now, if we look into the organizational evolution that platforms are representing we see the leading organizations in the world now evolving from being industrial, production-focused organizations, into ecosystem-enabling platforms according to the emergence of key drivers and enablers such as a growing technological pervasivity and a plummeting transaction cost.
On one hand, we must admit, there’s a fundamental continuity between the sociotechnical context of industrial business (pipelines) and post-industrial ones: platforms — most of the time — just execute the same dumbest idea in the world (maximizing shareholder value) at larger and larger scales, they dominate the S&P 500 index and regularly outperform competitors.
On the other hand, techno-social evolution is not stopping at the so-called web 2.0 paradigm of centralized, shareholder-focused, digital players that thrive on amassing data and crushing the competition with network effects: the evolution is progressing and it may end up somewhat disruptive for the perpetuation of the traditional approaches to measuring business success and running organizations.
In the background, indeed, the continuous evolution of technology and radical innovations in organizational models, ownership structures, and governance is not slowing down: blockchain and the DAOs are promising radical decentralization and organization-as-code, platformcoop is focusing on transitioning the organization’s ownership to communities with initiatives such as exit to community, the 3EO (or EEEO) model — that Boundaryless is now developing in collaboration with other pioneers — points out to a potential emergence of a common protocol of organizing that may open new possibilities in inter-organizational cooperation and innovation. These patterns, furthermore, see their applicability way beyond the traditional corporate context and may bring on radical new possibilities in drawing into the platform landscape new constituents: localities, tribes, communities, cooperatives. In turn, by leveraging these new technologies that are now effectively indistinguishable from organizing, these new constituents could likely fire up a radical institutional innovation process, one that has been evoked by many over the years, and that questions and transcends many of the organizational forms we have adopted in the 20th century. Things are certainly bubbling on this front.
“I think that’s what this is really about. It’s about power and money on the internet. Who has that? How is it governed? How is it controlled? How does the money flow? What’s the economic model? Those are really important questions. This is why crypto and blockchains matter.”
Chris Dixon
According to our recently released whitepaper, we’ve identified several spaces where technosocial impacts of platforms and enabling technologies such as AI and Blockchain can generate a radical set of new opportunities for development. In our related Future of Platform update we explain how we may expect that platform dynamics will emerge not only in the DTC, globalized market of internet-enabled vertical marketplaces space (that is supposed to power the passion economy and the revolution in B2B markets) but also at the layer of interoperable reputation and identity systems, white-label and integrated work coordination structures, open-source architectures to enable local nodes of production that interconnect with each other to tackle the production of essential parts of our economy such as our food, welfare, energy and more. These new developments, we assume, are going to unfold under an emergent new driver of economic activity: building resilience towards the disruptions that we anticipate in the chaotic age the human race have stepped into, perhaps almost blindfolded.
Unsolved questions
Of course, the outlook is not rosy: lots of unsolved questions sit there on our table as we look into rethinking business models and organizational structures for regenerative outcomes. Two of them stand more visible than others: our societies’ structural lock-ins and the inherently destructive nature of technology.
I’ll never forget how Indy Johar (that will be one of our guests in the upcoming event, in a conversation with John Hagel III) framed the issue in our podcast conversation in 2020:
“if you’re a farmer, you can own a piece of land but in order to make a day to day living, you have to destroy that land slowly, because that’s the only way you can survive”
Indy Johar
As structural lock-ins of poverty, precariousness and isolation can transform those that should act as steward into ruthless exploiters, we must then questions how addressing those deals more with the social context of economic activity, the policies, the regulations, the political decisions, and not with the context of a single organization.
Unless we do not intervene at the social frame that defines the constraints that organizational and economic activities develop within — for example with initiatives such as universal basic income or even universal basic asset like Marina Gorbis hinted — if we don’t tackle these structural lock-ins, also the most well-formed intentions will end up in producing toxic outcomes. Simply hypothesizing that one single organization can recast itself into regenerative outcomes by living inside the frames of exploitation sounds like a naive idea that just won’t make it.
Do we have the agency to change these lock-ins? Who’s we in this? What is our in-group in the discussion of how we change the policy frame? That’s for sure a set of outstanding questions, and more exist as we can’t leave aside acknowledging the geopolitical frictions and the culture wars we’re inherently immersed in and, more importantly, that a perspective in which we magically solve these multip-polar traps and their related issues may not be possible, at all.
On the other hand, technology — and business and organizational models are technologies — has an intrinsically destructive nature. I’ve introduced Heidegger’s take on technology previously on this blog: inasmuch as discussed as he is, the German philosopher helps us recognize the deep friction between technology and nature and how technological progress inherently leaves nature to play the role of a “standing reserve” of materials we can transform and consume for our pleasure.
Does anyone remember the polemic reception of the recent Planet of the Humans? a documentary pointing out the shortcomings of techno-optimism in the face of the climate and ecological crisis? As often happens, at the time the movie was released, critiques focused on the scarce quality of the data, or how much the information presented wasn’t precisely updated: few captured the core message, the questioning of the very idea of using technology to solve a “problem” that technology itself is, or more specifically, to solve a predicament where humanity finds itself as a consequence of having a rational, technology productive mind.
The intrinsic “pharmacological” nature of technology can’t be overlooked as we delve deep into the question of regenerative business: as Bernard Stigler taught us technology protects and poisons us at the same time, and the very idea that the spread of covid-19 could have been an effect of gain-of-function research (aiming at finding ways to protect the human species from such viruses) should make us think. Watch Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke and let your kids enjoy it for a telling story of how “humans, forest animals and nature gods all fight for their share of the new emerging order” as Roger Ebert explained once.
(Temporary) conclusions
As we engage with these outstanding questions on the very nature of technology and organizing we seem to see some convergence imagining a future of regenerative, platform-based ways of organizing. We seem to envision patterns of organizing that are increasingly place-based, culturally integrated into a particular community and landscape, that foster relational economics where consumption is not detached from ownership and production — and thus where the value of goods and services is to be experienced as embedded in a relationship — where the economy of essentials is not marginalized but put at the core of a new human development thesis.
In this way — evoked in the work of Bruno Latour and his hint towards the “terrestrial”, or Yuk Hui’s work in pointing out the need to develop multiple, local cosmo-technics (ways to integrate technology in a cosmological, embedded view of the world) — the socio-economic expression of our organizing becomes much more pluralistic. It becomes pluralistic from a regional perspective, with the overcoming of the universalizing, globalized, techno-centric, monocultural idea of progress that enslaved all human cultures; it becomes pluralistic in terms of virtue ethics — as we had the chance to explore with Alicia Hennig in our podcast — it eventually becomes pluralistic in terms of letting us imagine different ways to develop human capabilities, as part of collective, ecosystem-driven and community-led endeavors.
A good example of this emergent institutional innovation, and a case study in our whitepaper, was indeed “Participatory city” a showoff of how you can catalyze place-based innovation on essentials, while at the same time presenting an opportunity to express a new human development thesis that accounts for many more types of contributions and not only for the entrepreneurial one, creating space for different types of leaderships.
In conclusion, there’s a lot to explore and discover around developing a credible thesis of what it means to create a regenerative business — let alone a regenerative platform — and unfortunately some of the questions we have on the table point directly double binds, intrinsic teleological questions, and possibly to having to recast our expectations as entrepreneurs and leaders, towards new forms of entrepreneurship and leadership that seeks a different equilibrium, one of holobiontic nature, rooted in the acceptance of limits, in a feeling of “austerity” and of an idea of enough that is certainly not particularly familiar to the human race — and especially its Western liberal democracy incarnation.
One thing we must admit is that none of these emerging ideas on regeneration offer a framing that is devoid of blind spots, and that the road to regeneration might entail the need to sacrifice some relevant sides of our current beings or, at least, of the idea of us we inherited from the industrial economy.
“Austerity,” which says something about people, has also been degraded and has acquired a bitter taste, while for Aristotle or Aquinas it marked the foundation of friendship[…]
[Aquinas] defines “austerity” as a virtue which does not exclude all enjoyments, but only those which are distracting from or destructive of personal relatedness. For Thomas “austerity” is a complementary part of a more embracing virtue, which he calls friendship or joyfulness. It is the fruit of an apprehension that things or tools could destroy rather than enhance […] graceful playfulness in personal relations”
Ivan Illich — Tools For Conviviality
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