This article was originally submitted to the ASinGB Summer Newsletter 2013
The formation of an Economic Association in the Lancaster area - Michael Hallam 06 July 2013
For the last seven years I have been attempting to sow the seeds for Economic Associative working in the Lancaster and Morecambe area. This short article outlines the steps of that process, points to some modest success and hints at potential future developments.
Lancaster is a settlement of some 65,000 people in the North of England that together with Morecambe, with which it is interlinked, comprises a combined urban population of 135,000 people. The fortunes of Lancaster hark back to its days as an important node in the slave trade triangle, with much of the wealth of that time being invested in Lancaster’s fine and distinctive architecture.
Its relative decline since then has been reversed with the arrival of the university in the early 60s. Lancaster University now plays a significant economic and cultural role in the life of this small city.
Morecambe, on the other hand, has not recovered from its decline as a thriving Victorian seaside resort, Although there are periodic attempts to revive is fortunes, The current attempt is to portray is as a ‘green’ tourist destination, sitting as it does on the rim of the magnificent Morecambe Bay Estuary, with the foothills of the Lake district clearly visible over the waters.
Despite its size, Lancaster & Morecambe is relatively isolated, albeit isolated by stunning countryside, with the Lake District National Park to the north, the Forrest of Bowland to the east and the 30 miles of the flat Fylde Coast stretching southwards to Preston. And lets not forget the North Sea on our west side.
I arrived in Lancaster in 2004 from Totnes, home of the Transition Towns Movement, to take up an offer to become administrator and bursar in the small local Steiner School. Apart from the Lancaster Steiner School there are no significant anthroposophically inspired initiatives for nearly 100 miles in any direction *(1) so it is culturally isolated from an anthroposophical point of view.
Being deprived of the usual ‘cultural trappings’ of the Anthroposophical Movement for the first time in eighteen years *(2) I felt the need to re-invent myself. In spite of a background in Steiner Education and Biodynamic Agriculture my core interest had always been with economic and organisational development. An arguably neglected area of spiritual scientific study and application.
One of my chief research questions was why we, as good-willed human beings, found it so difficult to form healthy functioning collegiates, along the lines indicated by Rudolf Steiner? Based on over thirty years experience and observation of dysfunctional community dynamics, in a range of settings (not just anthroposophical ones) I concluded that the chief problem is an inability to separate applied training and expertise (or to address the lack of it) from personal inner soul reactions to the actions thoughts, mannerisms and gestures of others. In other words we project our own inner soul traumas, imprints habits and inclinations onto others and, with no clear language or set of protocols to identify and separate these interactions, they get in the way and mangle themselves into our attempts at getting things done.
Whilst doing a two year person-centred counselling course at Cumbria University (Lancaster’s second university) I identified and formulated a simple rule namely, that the amount of work cleared or generated within an organisation (of whatever complexion) is directly related to the amount of good will or ill will generated amongst its co-workers. Furthermore, the switch from harbouring good or ill will can be instant.
I called this the Good Will-Ill Will Invertible Dynamic (or good will ill will flip for short) and, combined with an analysis of various organisational structures and types, sought to find an organisational form and a task in which to test my observations.
The task I chose was the development of a healthy local economic form and the group of people I chose to do this with were people who were self employed and effectively working alone. I wanted to see if it would be possible to create an organisation that could give such ‘lone workers’ the benefits of collegiate working with little or none of the downside.
I was also aware of the fact that those who are self employed are less likely to waste their time and mess around working at what I characterise as ‘label production’ *(3) for the simple reason that, if they do, they are likely to go out of business.
One area that needed tackling was the nature of the organisational structure itself. I have noticed on numerous occasions, that as soon as a group has responsibility for resources and legal responsibilities much of the energy that initially was available for the primary task of the people that inhabit the organisation is absorbed by the body of the organisation itself. *(4)
I also wanted to learn from my experience serving on the Totnes Community Strategy Group, in many ways a pre-cursor to the Transition Town Movement, where we experimented with an executive model of facilitation and checking rather than initiating in which the initiatives (for community development projects) arose directly in the various specialist groups (youths, arts, business, environment, transport etc) rather than at the ‘centre’ with the executive. In this organisation model it became the executive/steering groups task to facilitate grass roots initiative and only intervene directly if the tasks and projects initiated deviated from the agreed remit of the organisation. *(5)
With these three elements to hand: a highly motivated group of people with their own projects (businesses), a very resource-lite organisational framework and a non-hierarchical organisational structure I founded the Ethical Small Traders Association (ESTA) in the summer of 2010. *(6)
ESTA currently has 70 business members, including a handful of ‘third sector’ organisations, *(7) social enterprises and not-for profits. These include the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce, Lancaster and Morecambe College and the Cumbria Universities Institute for Leadership and sustainability (IFLAS)
It works for the benefit of its members businesses and organisations and asks of them the following:
That, wherever possible they seek to collaborate and cooperate with each other, rather than instinctively resorting to competing with each other. And that they acknowledge the need to and strive to work not just for the single “bottom line” but for a four fold-set of bottom lines. These are:
1) Material (and economic success) : BL1
2) Establishing environmental responsibility : BL2
3) Having a positive and cohesive impact upon the social fabric : BL3
4) Acknowledging the need for and making a commitment to life-long personal development : BL4
That fourth bottom line is crucial, for it is the one that give licence for inner change, development and growth. It also means that a conversation can be initiated on the relationship between the outer world (things : BL1 and living bodies :BL2) and the personal inner world of the human being (BL4); with the social realm being a crossover between the two (Bl3). *(8)
Being on a life-long journey of growth and self-discovery implies that we are not yet perfect and opens the possibility that it is culturally acceptable to talk about what one cannot do as well as what one can. So, for example, a member can say that they have no clue how to market their business and receive practical collaborative help from their member-colleagues without this being seen as a weakness or a failing.
For this to really work confidentiality must be maintained as much as possible within the group and three core attitudes must be nurtured and adopted: refraining from being judgemental, actively listening (developing empathy for the position and perspective of the other) and attempting to be authentic and congruent in ones relationships. *(9)
Establishing ESTA was the first step in creating a forum for active economic associative working. The other thing that needed to happen was to establish the foundations for a healthy market in which healthy trading can take place freed from the distorting and destructive influences of the current disintegrating debt-based money system.
In order to attempt to wean local communities off the current bank-driven money system many communities have elected to introduce local currencies. I sought a different approach and, inspired by my analysis of Rudolf Steiner’s Economy Lectures, along with work done by the New Economics Foundation on what they termed the local multiplier effect (LM3) *(10), I modelled a system in which true wealth (as opposed to “ilth” (*11)) could be traded into existence locally at the point of exchange between free traders/customers.
Because it is the trading of goods and services that creates wealth *(12) rather than the currency itself (which is just a trading marker) I wanted to devise a system that would give positive feedback and incentives to customers and traders to trade locally by making the trading patterns transparent and building in positive feedback information that would show everyone how clearly their purchasing choices were helping the group.. In addition I wanted to link the spending of customers and traders with the aspirations of local citizens to create a more sustainable community, with reference to the four bottom lines mentioned above. *(13)
In late 2011 I approached the Catalyst team at Lancaster University (*14) for help in developing a practical system that would allow traders to record where they spent customer money and provide analytics and feedback to both customers and traders on how they were doing. This initial work led to a further £250,000 of funding for our university team and, as of August 2013, we are just about to begin field trials of our trading ‘app’ with the cooperation of businesses and organisations in the Lancaster and Morecambe area. *(15)
The project is set to run until late 2014 by which time the intention is that we will have a fully self-funded system capable of generating additional resources for local community organisations directly from the increased business turnover we expect to generate. The businesses will, in their turn be guided in their gifting by the general public who, in their role as active consumers, will set the priorities for where they want to see improvements and developments.
My research colleagues and I expect the information generated, by making the trading patterns visible, to allow us and the local community of customers, businesses and third sector organisations, to identify gaps, where money is ‘leaking’ out of our communities and therefore to identify opportunities for further sustainable local business development.
If we are successful this will fulfil one of the key aspects of free economic associative working as identified by Rudolf Steiner, as it will put development decisions firmly back in the hands of the community so they can make conscious strategic decisions on market development. Thus replacing the ‘invisibility’ of the free-market hand with the consciousness of the communities own heart-filled thinking.
For further details and information please contact Michael Hallam
07971 673 436
[email protected]
You can also contact me direct on the Spiritual Science Online network. http://spiritualscienceonline.ning.com/
FOOTNOTES
*(1) Loch Arthur Camphill Community east of Dumfries c90 miles: Botton Village c80 miles: Tintagel House and RMET in Sheffield c60 miles: Stourbridge c115 miles
*(2) We had been one of those typical Steiner school families moving between Steiner hot spots for the sake of our daughters education and also due to our desire to be immersed in the fruits of Steiner-inspired culture.
*(3) Label Production is a term I coined for people whose job consists of re-branding and re-defining tasks rather than actually doing them. In once celebrated case, faced with multiple and immanent crisis I witnessed the team responsible spend an entire emergency meeting simply re-naming the various task groups.
*(4) This seems to me to be one of the central malaises in our current global organisational life. Organisational structures in which the process of self-auditing and self-justifying have reached such high proportions that the human element has all but ‘left the building’. And because of this underlying structural fault the more resources are put into them the more dysfunctional (at delivering their stated task) they become.
*(5) It also involved the existence what I called ‘lateral connectors’ whose job it was to move sideways between different groups and make new and unexpected connections that would not otherwise have been made in a purely radial ‘centre-to-speicalism’ organisational model. These mercurial lateral connecting people are the ones that don’t like to go into a particular break out group at conferences and workshops but prefer to bob and flit between groups as they see fit. Harnessing the capacity of the sanguine you might say.
*(6) The Ethical Small Traders Association (ESTA) Main public website and members website.
*(7) Third Sector is a broad term that effectively corresponds to what Steiner referred to as the cultural realm in his talks and writings on social three-folding. Unlike the body economic and the body politic, the majority of new organisational initiatives in the last 100 years have been culturally inspired (inspirational intelligence brought to bear upon a specific task or problem) and started by individuals.
*(8) for more information on the quadruple bottom lines go to: http://lancasteresta.org/member-standards/
*(9) I am indebted to Carl rogers, the initiator of Person Centred counselling for these three Core conditions.
*(10) The Local Multiplier Effect (LM3) is a term used to describe the way that money passing from hand to hand stays in or leaves a specific geographical area. The destination of each ‘generation’ of money transfer depends principally on who you give it to and on where their wider interests and commitments lie. If they are a local person like oneself they are more likely to re-spend your money locally and keep it circulating in the area.
*(11) “Ilth” is a term coined by John Ruskin to describe the kind of ‘wealth’ creation that brings benefit to a few at the expense of the many, and which today might better be described as ‘externalised costs’ , collateral damage, or disaster capitalism.
*(12) Enhanced by the applied skill, inspiration, ingenuity and technical expertise of the producer/seller in order to meet the needs of the buyer.
*(13) the entire Quadruple Bottom Line Framework consists of 62 separate indicators, themselves derived from an analysis of over a dozen diverse sets of sustainable indicators. Full details of these are viewable here under the toolbar tab “how sustainable is it?” available at http://localtradelocalwealth.weebly.com/
*(14) http://www.catalystproject.org.uk/
*(15) http://www.nublue.co.uk/blog/nublue-lends-support-for-the-barter-research-project/
For the last seven years I have been attempting to sow the seeds for Economic Associative working in the Lancaster and Morecambe area. This short article outlines the steps of that process, points to some modest success and hints at potential future developments.
Lancaster is a settlement of some 65,000 people in the North of England that together with Morecambe, with which it is interlinked, comprises a combined urban population of 135,000 people. The fortunes of Lancaster hark back to its days as an important node in the slave trade triangle, with much of the wealth of that time being invested in Lancaster’s fine and distinctive architecture.
Its relative decline since then has been reversed with the arrival of the university in the early 60s. Lancaster University now plays a significant economic and cultural role in the life of this small city.
Morecambe, on the other hand, has not recovered from its decline as a thriving Victorian seaside resort, Although there are periodic attempts to revive is fortunes, The current attempt is to portray is as a ‘green’ tourist destination, sitting as it does on the rim of the magnificent Morecambe Bay Estuary, with the foothills of the Lake district clearly visible over the waters.
Despite its size, Lancaster & Morecambe is relatively isolated, albeit isolated by stunning countryside, with the Lake District National Park to the north, the Forrest of Bowland to the east and the 30 miles of the flat Fylde Coast stretching southwards to Preston. And lets not forget the North Sea on our west side.
I arrived in Lancaster in 2004 from Totnes, home of the Transition Towns Movement, to take up an offer to become administrator and bursar in the small local Steiner School. Apart from the Lancaster Steiner School there are no significant anthroposophically inspired initiatives for nearly 100 miles in any direction *(1) so it is culturally isolated from an anthroposophical point of view.
Being deprived of the usual ‘cultural trappings’ of the Anthroposophical Movement for the first time in eighteen years *(2) I felt the need to re-invent myself. In spite of a background in Steiner Education and Biodynamic Agriculture my core interest had always been with economic and organisational development. An arguably neglected area of spiritual scientific study and application.
One of my chief research questions was why we, as good-willed human beings, found it so difficult to form healthy functioning collegiates, along the lines indicated by Rudolf Steiner? Based on over thirty years experience and observation of dysfunctional community dynamics, in a range of settings (not just anthroposophical ones) I concluded that the chief problem is an inability to separate applied training and expertise (or to address the lack of it) from personal inner soul reactions to the actions thoughts, mannerisms and gestures of others. In other words we project our own inner soul traumas, imprints habits and inclinations onto others and, with no clear language or set of protocols to identify and separate these interactions, they get in the way and mangle themselves into our attempts at getting things done.
Whilst doing a two year person-centred counselling course at Cumbria University (Lancaster’s second university) I identified and formulated a simple rule namely, that the amount of work cleared or generated within an organisation (of whatever complexion) is directly related to the amount of good will or ill will generated amongst its co-workers. Furthermore, the switch from harbouring good or ill will can be instant.
I called this the Good Will-Ill Will Invertible Dynamic (or good will ill will flip for short) and, combined with an analysis of various organisational structures and types, sought to find an organisational form and a task in which to test my observations.
The task I chose was the development of a healthy local economic form and the group of people I chose to do this with were people who were self employed and effectively working alone. I wanted to see if it would be possible to create an organisation that could give such ‘lone workers’ the benefits of collegiate working with little or none of the downside.
I was also aware of the fact that those who are self employed are less likely to waste their time and mess around working at what I characterise as ‘label production’ *(3) for the simple reason that, if they do, they are likely to go out of business.
One area that needed tackling was the nature of the organisational structure itself. I have noticed on numerous occasions, that as soon as a group has responsibility for resources and legal responsibilities much of the energy that initially was available for the primary task of the people that inhabit the organisation is absorbed by the body of the organisation itself. *(4)
I also wanted to learn from my experience serving on the Totnes Community Strategy Group, in many ways a pre-cursor to the Transition Town Movement, where we experimented with an executive model of facilitation and checking rather than initiating in which the initiatives (for community development projects) arose directly in the various specialist groups (youths, arts, business, environment, transport etc) rather than at the ‘centre’ with the executive. In this organisation model it became the executive/steering groups task to facilitate grass roots initiative and only intervene directly if the tasks and projects initiated deviated from the agreed remit of the organisation. *(5)
With these three elements to hand: a highly motivated group of people with their own projects (businesses), a very resource-lite organisational framework and a non-hierarchical organisational structure I founded the Ethical Small Traders Association (ESTA) in the summer of 2010. *(6)
ESTA currently has 70 business members, including a handful of ‘third sector’ organisations, *(7) social enterprises and not-for profits. These include the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce, Lancaster and Morecambe College and the Cumbria Universities Institute for Leadership and sustainability (IFLAS)
It works for the benefit of its members businesses and organisations and asks of them the following:
That, wherever possible they seek to collaborate and cooperate with each other, rather than instinctively resorting to competing with each other. And that they acknowledge the need to and strive to work not just for the single “bottom line” but for a four fold-set of bottom lines. These are:
1) Material (and economic success) : BL1
2) Establishing environmental responsibility : BL2
3) Having a positive and cohesive impact upon the social fabric : BL3
4) Acknowledging the need for and making a commitment to life-long personal development : BL4
That fourth bottom line is crucial, for it is the one that give licence for inner change, development and growth. It also means that a conversation can be initiated on the relationship between the outer world (things : BL1 and living bodies :BL2) and the personal inner world of the human being (BL4); with the social realm being a crossover between the two (Bl3). *(8)
Being on a life-long journey of growth and self-discovery implies that we are not yet perfect and opens the possibility that it is culturally acceptable to talk about what one cannot do as well as what one can. So, for example, a member can say that they have no clue how to market their business and receive practical collaborative help from their member-colleagues without this being seen as a weakness or a failing.
For this to really work confidentiality must be maintained as much as possible within the group and three core attitudes must be nurtured and adopted: refraining from being judgemental, actively listening (developing empathy for the position and perspective of the other) and attempting to be authentic and congruent in ones relationships. *(9)
Establishing ESTA was the first step in creating a forum for active economic associative working. The other thing that needed to happen was to establish the foundations for a healthy market in which healthy trading can take place freed from the distorting and destructive influences of the current disintegrating debt-based money system.
In order to attempt to wean local communities off the current bank-driven money system many communities have elected to introduce local currencies. I sought a different approach and, inspired by my analysis of Rudolf Steiner’s Economy Lectures, along with work done by the New Economics Foundation on what they termed the local multiplier effect (LM3) *(10), I modelled a system in which true wealth (as opposed to “ilth” (*11)) could be traded into existence locally at the point of exchange between free traders/customers.
Because it is the trading of goods and services that creates wealth *(12) rather than the currency itself (which is just a trading marker) I wanted to devise a system that would give positive feedback and incentives to customers and traders to trade locally by making the trading patterns transparent and building in positive feedback information that would show everyone how clearly their purchasing choices were helping the group.. In addition I wanted to link the spending of customers and traders with the aspirations of local citizens to create a more sustainable community, with reference to the four bottom lines mentioned above. *(13)
In late 2011 I approached the Catalyst team at Lancaster University (*14) for help in developing a practical system that would allow traders to record where they spent customer money and provide analytics and feedback to both customers and traders on how they were doing. This initial work led to a further £250,000 of funding for our university team and, as of August 2013, we are just about to begin field trials of our trading ‘app’ with the cooperation of businesses and organisations in the Lancaster and Morecambe area. *(15)
The project is set to run until late 2014 by which time the intention is that we will have a fully self-funded system capable of generating additional resources for local community organisations directly from the increased business turnover we expect to generate. The businesses will, in their turn be guided in their gifting by the general public who, in their role as active consumers, will set the priorities for where they want to see improvements and developments.
My research colleagues and I expect the information generated, by making the trading patterns visible, to allow us and the local community of customers, businesses and third sector organisations, to identify gaps, where money is ‘leaking’ out of our communities and therefore to identify opportunities for further sustainable local business development.
If we are successful this will fulfil one of the key aspects of free economic associative working as identified by Rudolf Steiner, as it will put development decisions firmly back in the hands of the community so they can make conscious strategic decisions on market development. Thus replacing the ‘invisibility’ of the free-market hand with the consciousness of the communities own heart-filled thinking.
For further details and information please contact Michael Hallam
07971 673 436
[email protected]
You can also contact me direct on the Spiritual Science Online network. http://spiritualscienceonline.ning.com/
FOOTNOTES
*(1) Loch Arthur Camphill Community east of Dumfries c90 miles: Botton Village c80 miles: Tintagel House and RMET in Sheffield c60 miles: Stourbridge c115 miles
*(2) We had been one of those typical Steiner school families moving between Steiner hot spots for the sake of our daughters education and also due to our desire to be immersed in the fruits of Steiner-inspired culture.
*(3) Label Production is a term I coined for people whose job consists of re-branding and re-defining tasks rather than actually doing them. In once celebrated case, faced with multiple and immanent crisis I witnessed the team responsible spend an entire emergency meeting simply re-naming the various task groups.
*(4) This seems to me to be one of the central malaises in our current global organisational life. Organisational structures in which the process of self-auditing and self-justifying have reached such high proportions that the human element has all but ‘left the building’. And because of this underlying structural fault the more resources are put into them the more dysfunctional (at delivering their stated task) they become.
*(5) It also involved the existence what I called ‘lateral connectors’ whose job it was to move sideways between different groups and make new and unexpected connections that would not otherwise have been made in a purely radial ‘centre-to-speicalism’ organisational model. These mercurial lateral connecting people are the ones that don’t like to go into a particular break out group at conferences and workshops but prefer to bob and flit between groups as they see fit. Harnessing the capacity of the sanguine you might say.
*(6) The Ethical Small Traders Association (ESTA) Main public website and members website.
*(7) Third Sector is a broad term that effectively corresponds to what Steiner referred to as the cultural realm in his talks and writings on social three-folding. Unlike the body economic and the body politic, the majority of new organisational initiatives in the last 100 years have been culturally inspired (inspirational intelligence brought to bear upon a specific task or problem) and started by individuals.
*(8) for more information on the quadruple bottom lines go to: http://lancasteresta.org/member-standards/
*(9) I am indebted to Carl rogers, the initiator of Person Centred counselling for these three Core conditions.
*(10) The Local Multiplier Effect (LM3) is a term used to describe the way that money passing from hand to hand stays in or leaves a specific geographical area. The destination of each ‘generation’ of money transfer depends principally on who you give it to and on where their wider interests and commitments lie. If they are a local person like oneself they are more likely to re-spend your money locally and keep it circulating in the area.
*(11) “Ilth” is a term coined by John Ruskin to describe the kind of ‘wealth’ creation that brings benefit to a few at the expense of the many, and which today might better be described as ‘externalised costs’ , collateral damage, or disaster capitalism.
*(12) Enhanced by the applied skill, inspiration, ingenuity and technical expertise of the producer/seller in order to meet the needs of the buyer.
*(13) the entire Quadruple Bottom Line Framework consists of 62 separate indicators, themselves derived from an analysis of over a dozen diverse sets of sustainable indicators. Full details of these are viewable here under the toolbar tab “how sustainable is it?” available at http://localtradelocalwealth.weebly.com/
*(14) http://www.catalystproject.org.uk/
*(15) http://www.nublue.co.uk/blog/nublue-lends-support-for-the-barter-research-project/