Supercommunities

1 PREFACE

• By 2050, almost half the world’s population, in both developed and developing economies, will be living on some form of knife edge. To address this, we must create more cohesive and caring communities.

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2 INTRODUCTION

• To become antifragile, communities need to develop local modifications of the market economy based on social enterprise, in which participants aim not only to make profit but also to benefit people and the planet.

• In order to prevent inequality that led to social breakdown, early societies protected individuals from unmanageable debt. Human rights go further in some ways now but no longer include debt protection.

• The economic shock of the 1970s led to commercial interests determining government policies. The rules of society are now shaped by businesses, whose access to a global workforce means they can disregard social concerns.

• Increasing freedom from taxation and regulation combined with privatisation of national resources mean that the largest economies in the world are now corporations, leaving states deeply in debt with no way out.

• Throughout history the rise of oligarchic wealth destroyed societies. Now, corporate power dominates political decisions, so privatisation continues although the resulting public services are expensive and poor quality.

• The rise of corporate power is creating human misery, exacerbated ever further as inequality grows unchecked. Debts are escalating out of control at both household and state level.

• We can create a better society without extremism by building supercommunities, which adopt emergent behaviours to become antifragile whether or not new sources of value provide economic growth.

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3 WELLNESS

• Wellness is not the same as absence of illness, and is not a purely medical concept but more holistic. Definitions vary, and attempting to standardize wellness may lead to undesirable intervention into private life.

• Positive psychology explores how becoming self-activated can help you flourish. PsyCap captures the importance of Hope, (Self-)Efficacy, Resilience, and Optimism in overcoming challenges and achieving goals.

• Some people cannot increase their wellness without access to, and help in using, practical as well as psychological resources - the poor in particular, since early disadvantage lowers your ability to thrive unaided.

• People who consume many government services generate massive cost to society. They are stigmatized as criminal or lazy but typically have long-standing health conditions that generate further wellness issues.

• Using a wellness wheel to show how practical life issues are interconnected enables people to work through their personal challenges and set achievable goals for each one. This is the first step towards PsyCap.

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4 COMMUNITY

• Social cohesion and engagement are at a historically low ebb. Restoring the trusting, reciprocal relationships that characterise community will release forms of value that help remedy major social challenges.

• Communities take varied forms and can be fluid. It is belonging that matters. The human brain evolved through social behaviour, since reciprocal altruism delivers powerful benefits that are otherwise unavailable.

• The strength of your community connections outweighs everything else when it comes to wellness. This is because community connection enables, or the lack of it disables, everything on your wellness wheel.

• A community can help marginalized people increase their wellness at low total cost by providing social rather than medical resources to help them thrive. However, some people need more than a social prescription.

• The holistic support needed for wellness can be provided at low cost via a personal support network – a group of people who help you make your wellness plan, then provide help and encouragement as you implement it.

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5 COLLABORATION

• Taking on a role is not about tasks but about accepting responsibilities for achieving goals. You need to know about other roles in the team, and ensure that it includes a mixture of thinkers, doers, socializers, and leaders.

• Communication coordinates behaviour as well as transferring information. To work well with others, have conversations for Context, Possibility, Disclosure, then Action and communicate about one thing at a time.

• In order to engage with their work, people need recognition and appreciation. Praise should be personalized, heartfelt, and timely. Volunteering has huge benefits, most of which accrue to the volunteers themselves.

• To achieve great impact for low effort, make interventions local and personal, focus on outcomes not outputs, and ensure that organisations work together. Depending on the scale, use Agile techniques or value maps.

• To notice events and respond, use Research-Evaluate-Analyze-Constrain-Task (REACT). To conduct Research, use Access-Identify-Memorize (AIM). Separate leadership into Strategic, Executive, and Management Control.

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6 OWNERSHIP

• Building a strong community requires years of civic engagement at grass roots, which must be multi-faceted and inclusive. It can be sustained or destroyed by municipal efforts towards regeneration.

• Ownership takes many forms. Useful ways to think about it are stewardship and stakeholding. Opening up control over activity typically increases its success, both economically and by more holistic measures.

• Community capitals are enablers of activity and can be separated into natural, human, and industrial assets. Community members can map them in an online database, and plan their maintenance using visual models.

• Local economies can build social cohesion and access specialist finance via social trading, which has ethical as well as commercial aims. Social traders must act cooperatively. They think differently about opportunity cost.

• Some social traders cannot access traditional community finance or impact investment. They can access global capital markets at low cost via stakeitbacks – a new way to fund good things, see the impact, and get a return.

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7 MEASUREMENT

• To ensure that outputs lead to desirable outcomes, benefits must be managed. This can be hindered by cognitive biases of various types, and helped by application of REACT and AIM to create virtuous loops.

• A community that aims to become antifragile needs its members to assess their own progress towards wellness. This can be enabled by providing diverse but standardized self-assessment tools in a digital hub.

• Assessing wellness of the community as a whole means identifying gaps and overlaps in provision of resources that support individual wellness. Data from wellness plans can be aggregated with data from other sources.

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8 TRANSFORMATION

• Communities that use autopoiesis to become antifragile must tell their stories to inspire others. Community wealth building, grass roots regeneration, and social prescribing are a starting point but not yet fully holistic.

• To ensure that all community stakeholders play a positive part in change, it is vital to be inclusive, ask open-ended questions that generate action, and use facilitation techniques to manage meetings effectively.

• Engaging with community can be emotionally and spiritually draining. It can also be massively restorative, bring new and rewarding relationships, help you develop personally, and make you feel better about your life.

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9 AFTERWORD

• Business will not save us from inequality, climate change, and new global crises. Government policies may help eventually, but when is unclear. Communities need to act now. The first step is to develop local social trading.