Fabian Wallace-Stephens: Innovative initiatives are emerging to improve the quality of work across the globe. The recently launched Future Work Awards aims to recognise and champion them. What are we looking for? What do we expect to find? And how can you get involved?

A good starting point is the burgeoning WorkerTech scene in the UK. A partnership between The Resolution Trust and Bethnal Green Ventures has spawned initiatives such as Organise, the UK’s first workplace digital campaigning platform. Among their successes, Organise can count helping McDonald’s staff get their biggest pay rise in 10 years.

But traditional trade unions are innovating too. Through a partnership with IndyCube, a network of co-working spaces, Community Union are offering a range of services to self-employed people, including affordable invoice factoring. And the TUC has recently launched WorkSmart, an app to support younger workers who could benefit from union membership.

Even businesses such as Tesco are experimenting with technology to offer workers greater control and flexibility over shift scheduling. While Uber are piloting city-based engagement programs for their drivers.

Previous RSA research has highlighted how across Europe and North America, self-employed workers are banding together to address the challenges they face in the labour market. Based in San Francisco, Loconomics is a platform for booking local services (akin to TaskRabbit), which is cooperatively owned and governed by the service professionals that use it. And in Denver, Colorado, Green Taxi Co-operative has licensed an app which enables them to compete with other platforms.

In the Netherlands, self-employed people can join Breadfunds, a mutual sick pay fund, where members also offer each other practical support in times of ill health. While in France and Belgium, Business and Employment Cooperatives (BECs) such as Coopaname act as umbrella organisations for freelancers, enabling them to pool together business administration and other services such as training and workspace.

There is no one future of work

So far, we have only scratched the surface. Our search for the Future Work Awards is global. And our themes are diverse, spanning skills and training, worker voice and economic security (a full list can be found on our website).

However, we expect that in different countries, different innovations will be having the greatest impacts on workers because of the distinct challenges that they face. For example, many good work initiatives in the UK stem from trade union decline or growth in atypical forms of employment. But for parts of the world struggling with high levels of youth unemployment, the priority may be upskilling and/or job creation.

In our previous research we found that differences in economic and legal context can significantly affect the need for initiatives and their attractiveness to users. One of the reasons Breadfunds has over 12,000 members is because income protection insurance is excessively expensive in the Netherlands. But more reasonably priced services may be available in different markets. While BECs are essential in France because of differences in social security. Self-employed people don’t pay into the Government’s unemployment insurance fund but Coopaname enables them to become an ‘employee’ of the co-operative, meaning they are able to access these benefits.

Looking towards the future, trends can also appear more or less distressing in different places. Take the emergence of the gig economy. In the UK, this is often viewed as one whereby businesses are transferring additional risks onto workers. But in parts of the world such as South Asia, where so many are already independent workers, without employment protections to undermine, we should emphasise the opportunities. Economic activity will be better co-ordinated, with algorithms super efficiently matching supply and demand and creating more work in the process. And, as some commentators have pointed out, platforms can offer informal workers a degree of formalisation, by improving access to financial and digital services. Shifting from cash to e-payments, for instance, creates a transactional history that could help when applying for credit in the future.

How you can get involved

Through the awards, we hope to recognise and reward social innovators who are helping to bring about a better world of work. And by showcasing best practice from around the globe we want to encourage others to consider kick starting similar initiatives in their own communities and sectors.

If you run a good work initiative or know of one that deserves attention, you can submit a nomination through a short online form or find out more from our Future Work Awards site.

Nominations are open until mid-September, after which a panel of global judges will review the entries and announce the winners in November.

The Awards are hosted by the RSA Future of Work Centre and sponsored by Barclays. The RSA’s partners in the venture include the Canadian impact investor Social Capital Partners and systems design agency Alt Now Projects.

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About the event

The 2017 Albert Medal is awarded posthumously to Robin Murray for pioneering work in social innovation.

As an industrial and environmental economist, Murray was active and influential across several fields, from cooperatives to energy system innovation. He was deeply committed to a democratic, creative and collaborative response to economic and technological change and developed pioneering economic programmes in local, regional and national governments.

In this Albert Medal event, we will hear from close collaborators Geoff Mulgan, Hilary Cottam and Ed Mayo who will offer insights into Murray’s work, and explore how it has inspired and informed a wide range of policy debate and development around the social innovation movement.

The Albert Medal is awarded for innovation in the fields of creativity, commerce and social improvement. This year’s event is organised with Nesta.

Photo by tidefan

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From the notes to the video:

Bestselling author, political adviser and social and ethical prophet Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society. Taken from a lecture given by Jeremy Rifkin as part of the RSA’s free public events programme.

The RSA is a 258 year-old charity devoted to creating social progress and spreading world-changing ideas. For more information about our research, RSA Animates, free events programme and 27,000 strong fellowship.

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The Transition Design Symposium at Dartington Hall was a resounding success. A wonderfully diverse group of practitioners, academics and cultural creatives gathered at Dartington, from June 17th to 19th, to explore the role of design in the societal transition towards sustainability and beyond.

Terry Irwin, herself a graduate of the MSc. in Holistic Science in 2003-04 and now the head of Carnegie Mellon’s prestigious School of Design, and Gideon Kossoff, who administered the Holistic Science Masters during its first 10 years, clearly sounded a note that attracted cultural change agents from all over the world to come together in exploration of change within and through design.

Over one hundred people gathered from as far away as Australia, Japan, India, Taiwan and Brazil to be part of what promises to turn into an impulse that will both transform design academia from within, and perhaps more importantly, help to inspire a new generation of design practitioners in service to the great transition humanity is called to make.

In the face of the converging crises of climate change, resource depletion, environmental degradation, and unacceptable economic inequality and suffering – particularly in the global South – designers everywhere are called to assume a deeper responsibility for the impacts of their work. Designers are finally stepping up to the challenge that David Orr so aptly described in The Nature of Design (link is external). We are challenged to “redesign the human presence on Earth.”

This task falls not just upon design professionals and academics, but asks all of us to become more aware of our co-creative agency and the way our actions and inactions contribute to bringing forth a word in conversation and by design. Ecological design pioneers John Todd (link is external) and Nancy Jack-Todd have told us for decades that “we are all designers”, called upon to co-create “elegant solutions carefully adapted to the uniqueness of place”.

With the outstanding leadership of Terry Irwin (link is external) at the internationally recognized Carnegie Mellon School of Design (link is external) taking these messages to the heart of the design profession, necessary changes within design academia will be greatly accelerated. Finally, designers are beginning to be educated to become active catalysts of transition. The transformative agency of design is beginning to transform design institutions, design as a discipline, and the way design impacts society at large.

Following Transition Design Up-stream

Together with the team from CMU, Schumacher College acted as a co-convener of the Transition Design Symposium – expertly co-organized by Ruth Potts and her colleagues of the MA in Ecological Design Thinking.

Yet Schumacher College had a much deeper influence on the genesis of Transition Design. The scientific and philosophical underpinnings that give Transition Design (link is external) its strength as a (r)evolutionary impulse are informed by many of the brilliant minds and hearts that have taught at Schumacher College over the last 25 years.

My personal epiphany of understanding the power and transformative agency of design occurred in 2002 when I was on the Masters in Holistic Science. Deeply inspired by Brian Goodwin, Stephan Harding, Henri Bortoft and Fritjof Capra, I was keen to see the coherent participatory worldview described by the holistic sciences put into action in society. During a short course with David Orr and John Todd and Nancy Jack-Todd I came to realize that ecological design was in fact the practice-end of holistic science.

In that moment I joined the large group of people who gained insights at Schumacher College that not only transformed their lives forever, but also enabled them to become more effective global-local agents of change. The effective alchemical cauldron that is Schumacher College has transformed so many people who have gone on to play their role in the great transition that is already unfolding within and through the more than 10,000 people fortunate enough to have had the privilege to be educated and transformed at this remarkable place.

I wrote my masters thesis, entitled ‘Exploring Participation (link is external)’, on holistic science and ecological design. It lead to Professor Seaton Baxter at the Centre for the Study of Natural Design (University of Dundee) finding me a scholarship and offering his deeply supportive mentorship to complete a PhD in ‘Design for Human and Planetary Health (link is external)’ in 2006.

In subsequent years, both Terry Irwin and Gideon Kossoff undertook their PhD research with Seaton Baxter. Terry worked on developing the content for a Masters in Holistic Design Ecology, which was never implemented because she took up her post at CMU. Gideon’s 2011 doctoral thesis (link is external) can be regarded as the founding document of Transition Design.

The insights and scientific frameworks so expertly curated into the Masters in Holistic Science by Brian Goodwin and Stephan Harding, have deeply informed the roots of Transition Design and of my own work over the last 15 years. I hope that my recently published book, Designing Regenerative Cultures (link is external), will serve the growing Transition Design movement as a useful resource.

Sustainability is no longer enough. We have degenerated our planetary life support system for so long and at such a scale that to be only sustainable – what William McDonough calls “100% less bad” – does not suffice. We urgently need to transition towards a diversity of regenerative cultures elegantly adapted to the bio-cultural diversity of the places they inhabit.

The transition ahead challenges us to transform the human impact on Earth from our current degenerative practices to the widespread regeneration of healthy ecosystems, vibrant regional economies, and thriving local communities everywhere. This 90 second video (link is external) explains the transition from business as usual, to “green”, sustainable, restorative, reconciliatory and regenerative design.

The new masters and doctoral programmes (link is external) in Transition Design at Carnegie Mellon School of Design and Schumacher College’s MA in Ecological Design Thinking (link is external), headed by Seaton Baxter, are offering transition designers an opportunity to deepen in their thinking and their practice so they can be effective catalysts of transformative innovation. Holistic Science provides a theoretical framework that all  these programmes and my own work as an educator and consultant have in common. One could say that Transition Design is Holistic Science in action.

Living the Future Today – a historical gathering of global-local agents of change

I arrived at the Transition Design Symposium after two intensive days of work with the Dubai Futures Foundation working on the possible content for next year’s Museum of the Future exhibition.  During these days we explored shifting the proposed theme of the exhibition from floating cities and space stations to large-scale ecosystems regeneration, biomimetic design and technology, and green chemistry.

So it was surprisingly synchronistic for me that Andrew Simms opened the Transition Design Symposium by reminding us of the urgency of responding to the immanent dangers of run-away climate change and the fact that the closest Earth-like planet – Wolf 106 1C – is so distant to our fragile home planet that it would take us roughly 206,192 years to travel there. We best sort out our own behaviour on this planet rather than setting our eyes on new planets – turning into the locust of the known universe.

Terry Irwin’s opening remarks highlighted the importance of moving designers from “the design of posters and toasters to design as a driver of societal change.” This was echoed  by her colleague Cameron Tonkinwise, who called upon the academics present to “change design, so design becomes an agent of change.”

Ingrid Mulder’s, who works on participatory city making, offered an important reminder that in order to be successful in this project designers need to leave behind the hubris of being the shapers of the world that everyone else only inhabits. Designers have to shift into the role of facilitators of social transformation by enabling transdisciplinary dialogue and widespread citizens participation in the co-visioning and co-design of our collective future.

Tony Greenham – director of economy, enterprise and manufacturing at the RSA – warned everyone to accept the current economic system as an inevitable given and highlighted that “the economy is designed.” He argued that we need “more design thinking in economics” and have to regard the redesign of our economic and monetary systems “as a design challenge.”

Schumacher College’s wise elder Julie Richardson offered a deeply insightful reflection on her own life as a committed agent of positive change in economics and design.  In her personal explorations of the inner and outer dimensions of economics, she came to realize that we can “live in the future today” and affect transformative change by starting with the inner or personal transformation of reconnecting to ourselves, to our communities and to nature as a source of insight and strength.

The effervescence of writer and artist Lucy Neal´s infectious optimism as a (r)evolutionary design activist reminded us that “joy is a radical force” and that art, theater and collective non-violent direct action offer ways to stimulate the imagination of what we can do together in community. “Between what is possible and what is not, there is a field rich in possibilities.” Through theater and play we can enact the future we want in the presence and plant seeds of transformational change.

Tom Crompton of the Common Cause Foundation stressed the critical importance of both extrinsic and intrinsic values in driving the transition ahead and invited designers to make the values that inform their practice more explicit. Robin Murray of the Young Foundation cautioned the audience not to blindly follow the economists call for “scaling up” and rather replicate effective transition design by diffusion – spreading rather than scaling.

The final panel of the symposium, hosted by Terry Irwin, had a number of leading design academics reflect upon the limitations that the current economic system imposes on design schools.  The dialogue highlighted the importance of reaching out beyond established and respected institutions like CMU, the Royal College of Art, the Open University, or the RSA to create effective transdisciplinary and multi-stakeholder partnerships that transform these institutions, design education and society at large.

For design to unfold its transformative potential, design academics are called to aid their own institutions to transition to a new way of doing things. This will have to be achieved by driving change from within, as well as, through building bridges to N.G.O.s and civil society. Design academics are invited to step out of their institutions to bring the power of transition design thinking into business schools and to visionary leaders in industry, politics and civil society.

All of the well-chosen panelist brought important contributions to the nourishing dialogue of the Transition Design Symposium, and maybe – as is so often the case at such events – the most transformative conversation with lasting impacts happened in the coffee breaks and during the Open Space Technology sessions of the second day when 100 transition designers were given the opportunity to network and learn from each other, co-creating a whole that was more than the sum of its parts.

As the global community of transition designers continues to grow, the design brief for all of us is clear. It was succinctly stated by the holistic design science pioneer Buckminster Fuller when he challenged us:

“to make the World work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”

Book: Designing Regenerative Cultures (link is external) is published by Triarchy Press, 2016.

Article originally published in the Schumacher College Website.

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The Renewable Energy sector is growing strongly as fossil fuel becomes less appealing in light of cost parity of renewables, limiting carbon emissions and driving evolution to sustainable societies. In Energy Efficiency, widespread ripple effects positively impact jobs creation, manufacturing and other metrics tracked by traditional GDP and integral to transition management.

The following text was sent to us by noted author and futurist Hazel Henderson to highlight the release of Ethical Market’s new Green Transition Scoreboard report, which you will also find embedded at the end of this blog post.

After decades of pursuing my life’s work helping guide Mother Earth from the Fossil Fuel Age to the Solar Age, efforts of colleagues and RSA Fellows like myself such as Chris Oestereich, Chandran Nair, Michel Bauwens and other pioneers, are driving the necessary change. On Earth Day, the United Nations held a signing ceremony for the UN Paris Agreement, with signatories pledging to finance and implement programs to limit climate change, aligning with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

On the same day, Ethical Markets Media released its Green Transition Scoreboard® (GTS). As of Q4 2015, the GTS totals $7.13 TRILLION cumulative in non-government investments and commitments tracked since 2007 in the global green transition now underway. As president and founder of Ethical Markets, I wrote the detailed overview of the 2016 report, “Ending Externalities: Full-Spectrum Accounting Clarifies Transition Management”, focusing on the top priority: eliminating “externalities” which the IMF estimates at $5.3 trillion annually worldwide and drawing from the work of Chandran and many others. Companies tracked since 2007 by the GTS are those avoiding negative externalities and focusing on transition management to low-carbon economies agreed on at COP21 in Paris, 2015.

The GTS covers substantial capital investment in areas which my years of research as a science advisor and which the Ethical Markets Advisory Board expertise, including Michel’s, indicate are strongly contributing to the growing green economy. The GTS tracks Renewable Energy, Energy Efficiency, Life Systems, Green Construction and Corporate Green R&D. Fintech for sustainability, a new subsector, includes peer-to-peer lending and crowdfunding, in addition to subsectors tracking the system-wide interconnections among information and digitization, water, food, education and health.

Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil), Certified B Corporation, is a micro-multinational social enterprise with the mission of reforming markets and metrics while helping accelerate and track the transition to the green economy worldwide. We strictly define ‘green’ by omitting technologies such as nuclear, clean coal and most biofuels while carefully assessing rapidly advancing technologies such as nanotech and IoT (Internet of Things). Sources of financial data are screened by rigorous social, environment and ethical auditing standards.

The upward trend in investments since 2007 aligns with our recommendation to invest at least 10% of institutional portfolios directly in companies driving the global Green Transition. Updating strategic asset allocation models serves both as opportunities and as risk mitigation.

The Renewable Energy sector is growing strongly as fossil fuel becomes less appealing in light of cost parity of renewables, limiting carbon emissions and driving evolution to sustainable societies. In Energy Efficiency, widespread ripple effects positively impact jobs creation, manufacturing and other metrics tracked by traditional GDP and integral to transition management. Life Systems encompasses broad areas systemically linked, including water, remediation, waste and recycling, green infrastructure and info-structure, community investing and education, investments often overlooked as too small. Green Construction ranges from “low-tech” passive solar buildings to “high-tech” flow 3D printing. For consistency, we omit labor, thus undercounting a form of capital which intrinsically increases the value of green construction. Corporate Green R&D is powered by the automotive industry and also heavily weighted in favor of energy generation, conservation and distribution with a precipitous decline in fossil fuels P&E.

We track nearly a $1 trillion invested in the green transition every year! With great hope and pride, I’m pleased to spread the good news that the Solar Age is here.

Ending Externalities: Full-Spectrum Accounting Clarifies Transition Management by P2P Foundation

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The RSA (Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce), a 260-year-old charity in the UK, launched a programme of research on the sharing economy in November 2015 as part of our wider work on the economy, enterprise and manufacturing. Last month, we released Fair Share, a primer to help make sense of how the sharing economy has changed since 2009 as newer platform-based business models have gained ground.

We set out to first clarify what the sharing economy is given that the term “sharing” is now disputed by the media and commentators who argue that any exchange involving a fee does not constitute sharing. This is a too literal and limiting interpretation of what it means to share. Instead we would agree with many others, such as Benita Matofska of Compare and Share, that the sharing economy describes more than exchange; it is a socio-economic system involving a spectrum of activity based on maximising the potential of our underused human and physical resources, from our skills to our things.

The sharing economy is diverse, encompassing local, grassroots-funded initiatives such as tool libraries and timebanks, but also global, venture-backed corporations (the twin titans being Airbnb and Uber). Some may contest that the real sharing economy does not include the likes of these corporations, but the RSA would note that the shunning of these companies was a gradual development that corresponded with their growing size. It is true that as these companies have scaled, they have found it difficult to sustain their initial social value, but this is a risk that many start-ups in the sharing economy face as good ideas take off and platforms seek to serve more people. Platform-based models naturally tend to scale upwards because of the network effect, so unless we are conscious of managing or actively countering this predisposition we will continue to lose promising endeavours to the ‘dark side’ of the sharing economy.

It is not that the RSA thinks that success in the sharing economy relates to scale, but rather that reclaiming power in the sharing economy will entail acknowledging and confronting the scale of some of these platforms through taking a different approach to governance and regulation.

Our primer thus breaks down different types of business models in the sharing economy, but zeroes in on platforms because they are the most likely to scale upwards, and quickly, to a point where they are exercising monopoly power. The platform business model in and of itself is not necessarily problematic; as we explain, there can be variations of this model that are co-operative and/or decentralised. In fact, blockchain-based versions have the potential to be genuinely peer-to-peer. However, some businesses are exploiting the network effect to crowdsource monopoly power — this is where it can get especially problematic as some of these platforms (which we refer to as ‘networked monopolies’) set the terms and conditions for gig workers who are offering their services.

While we are hopeful that experiments with blockchain-based sharing platforms will empower workers (or at the very least serve their interests in the absence of a rent-seeking intermediary), we also need to consider the welfare of consumers, workers at large (those in traditional industries as well as those who are locked into other sharing platforms), communities, the state, the economy, and the environment. Blockchain-based platforms will not resolve all issues simply by virtue of being; some form of collaborative governance will be needed to balance interests.

The RSA proposes “shared regulation” as a starting point for defeating monopoly power in the sharing economy. Neither top-down, centralised solutions from the state nor solely self-regulation on the part of businesses will result in a fairer sharing economy. As monopoly power is rife in the wider economy, we should not assume that tweaking anti-trust legislation will make much of a difference either. What we need is to disperse political power and engage a range of stakeholders in a participatory process of governance and regulation.

The RSA doesn’t have the answers yet, nor would we expect to arrive at them entirely on our own. This primer marks a year-long exploration of how we address trade-offs in the sharing economy and, in the spirit of the commons, collectively determine how “shared regulation” evolves.

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If you’d like to get involved with the RSA’s work on the sharing economy, please feel free to get in touch with me directly at [email protected]

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