Balancing and integrating new macro-economic multiple value cases at regional, national, and global scale, to achieve the necessary breakthroughs in the complex transitions and social challenges more efficiently, smarter, cheaper and with more value.
Our ambition
Our ambition is architecting the process, infrastructure, and preconditions to accelerate the transition to a regenerative economy and thriving society:
Our way of working
YESandMORE has a unique approach:
The greatest danger in times of turbulence
is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.
Peter Drucker (1909 – 2005)
founding father of modern management studies
Why
Unforeseen financial and economic crises. Excessive concentrations of wealth and power and extreme wealth inequality. Relentless resource depletion and pressure on the environment. Our economy and society are in a deep system crisis. People are increasingly radically insecure about their futures. The global crisis of society, economy, and supply chains (recently caused by COVID-19), shows us the fragility of the systems we have built. We need to develop our consciousness in businesses and institutional roles, or we might end up in conflicts, wars, and regression on our Sustainable Development Goals. At a world-scale, we never had so much money, resources, and technologies at our disposal that could serve the future of all. But the problem is that we are locked-in into current systems rules that lead to an inability to change for good.
Transform our economy into a strong, open, trust-based, and vital system
We want to radically re-envision the system and unlock the present potential. We need to replace the dominant short-term sectional and self-regarding conception of our current economy. Our current economic and organizational principles help create fragmented and uni-lateral solutions, redundancy, and a critical loss in human and natural resources. Our current system is vulnerable, distrust based, fragile, and unsustainable.
We need to transform our economy into a strong, open, trust-based, and vital system that contributes to a future that serves both the earth and our society. A balance shift is inevitable. Divisive and degenerative by default must be distributive and regenerative by design.
Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution.
It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.
Niels Bohr (1885 – 1962)
physicist and awarded Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922
Case for change
The fundamental uncertainties and crises are exponential and interconnected. We are looking for a new optimized balance that serves social, ecological, and economical goals. We need to build on solidarity and a more trusted and connected society, putting much greater attention and rehabilitation for the public good. The biggest question is
“how do we make this transition towards an optimised and vital balanced system?”.
It seems that our key challenge is how to shift from an economic system based on the notion of unlimited growth to one that is both ecologically sustainable and socially just.
‘No growth’ is not the answer.
Growth is a central characteristic of all life;
a society, or economy, that does not grow will die sooner or later.
Growth in nature, however, is not linear and unlimited. While certain parts of organisms, or ecosystems, grow, others decline, releasing and recycling their components which become resources for new growth.
Fritjof Capra and Hazel Henderson
Qualitative Growth (2013)
Transition to an integral regenerative logic
Transitioning to an integral regenerative logic implies that economies and societies are embedded parts of the biosphere. We need to restore, renew or revitalize our own and shared sources of energy and materials to create resilient and equitable systems that integrate the needs of society with the integrity of nature. The balance shift we urgently need to make is an extremely difficult one. The way we are conditioned, our organisations, management and processes are insufficiently geared to solve this. Current (political) decision-making, financial structures and governance do not contribute to effective and sustainable results. The major, multiple, and complex issues in the field of agriculture and the food system, energy, health and wellbeing, water, circular economy, area development we are faced with, compel us to work together in a different and new way. Issues that no one, no government, no market party can solve. The matter is too complex; the connections are too numerous; and the solutions are too cross-border to do it alone.
Next Commoning
The integral approach to regenerative design of our economy and society implies to take a bolder step in commoning – we would like to call Next Commoning. Commoning is a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates. Next Commoning is the same practice of governing resources but in a more integrated ecosystem approach with all the preconditions already set in place. Our goal is to deliver exponential multiple shared value creation, with blended finance arrangements and sustainable governance. Next Commoning is inclusive system hacking on the original intent of commons and commoning, in order to create and emerge an interconnected network of commons that shapes an integral long-lasting regenerative economy and thriving society at speed and scale.
Balancing act of growth and circularity
Creating an integral regenerative economy is a balancing act of qualitative growth and circularity. A new approach to clearing (clearing house), balancing (current and new business and goals) and shared value creation (multi-level and multi-purpose value cases). Nurturing qualitative growth through the integration of diversity into interconnected collaborative networks at and across local, regional, and global scales facilitates the emergence of regenerative cultures and a healthy, rich, mature, resilient, robust and vital ecosystem. We focus on resilience, robustness, and antifragility of assets and processes to prevent social, economic, ecological collateral damage. Proactively safeguarding assets and goals to be able to anticipate in the short term. Simultaneously developing assets that have future value (under the right conditions) and deleveraging stranded assets with no future value. This requires an integrated, systemic, vertical approach with all parties involved, creating time and space to do this effectively and elegantly.
The ‘tragedy of the commons’ does not need to occur.
Humans can cooperate to produce shared, long-term benefits.
Institutional arrangements can increase cooperation.
Cooperation can be learned over time.
Elinor Ostrom (1933 – 2012)
political economist and awarded Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009
Trusted Space for organizing, governing, and financing resilience
In order to realize and concretely implement the transition to an integrated regenerative logic, we must focus on resilience in order to give substance to these complex tasks. A new ‘Trusted Space’ must be created around complex tasks with new management principles and roles.
A Trusted Space is a “free meeting space between organizations, free from the pressure of internal protocols and interests, where parties can work on solutions in equivalence.”
YESandMORE is the architect of this new collaboration space for the penta helix of all stakeholders (as shown beneath). A Trusted Space in which we can reflect, do, learn, develop new roles and multiple value cases, develop multi-level governance, collaborate, and finance differently (more networked). Different levels of government must be able to find each other quickly. Today’s complex issues place different demands on decision-making. This is not an easy task for all stakeholders. It goes beyond efficiency and legality and requires resilience. And, in a way that different rules apply to different playing fields.
TRUSTED SPACE
PHASE 1
SENSE MAKING
- Create the consciousness and leadership to envision the reality from a systemic and holistic perspective
- Observe underlying patterns and emerging future, and explore, map and define the opportunities that really matter.
PHASE 2
MATCH MAKING
- Collecting the crucial actors, skills, and organizations around the opportunities into a coalition of the willing
- Connecting the funds, ideas, resources, and users needed to translate the opportunities in strong regenerative engines.
PHASE 3
DEAL MAKING
- Defining the value-generating process and the contracting that translates the opportunities into regenerative funds for the whole system
- Implementing the necessary governance structures to manage the new funds sustainably.
PHASE 4
MARKET MAKING
- Learning, harvesting, and sharing the value generation process behind the product, service, and ecosystem
- Scaling up of the product and delivering to new markets.
COLLABORATIVE CAPACITY
- Empowering and strengthening leadership communities that act as a nimble ecosystem of relationships, building through transformative leadership journeys
- Structuring interdependent coalitions of the willing, connected around a collective, vivid purpose
- Bringing together the collective of organizations and leaders in a continued process of multi-value creation and co-creation.
INNOVATION AND TRANSFORMATION PROCESS
- Solid and accepted innovation and transformation process and its corresponding playbooks. A structured process and playbooks we developed to simultaneously work on multiple innovation streams in different time horizons (H1 – Horizon one: Current Business in Performance Play and End-of-Life, H2 – Horizon two: Break-Out Categories in Scale-up Play, and H3 – Horizon three: Future Category Options in Incubation Play).
- Transforming and implementing a portfolio of disruptive and breakthrough innovations, validated scalable and repeatable business models to create regenerative economies, and solve global challenges.
- Taking a systemic and integrated approach to embedding the required mindset, skillset and toolset for effective leadership and management of innovation efforts throughout organizations and ecosystems.
FINANCING STRUCTURE
- Financing arrangements (blended finance) and deal-making process (transition operation, asset management, financial clearing, treasury).
- Infrastructure and financial platform to facilitate blended finance and deal-making (ie. tax, legal, banking, collaboration with Economic Affairs).
- Socially and ecologically inclusive financial markets (funds, impact, and regional bonds).
SUSTAINABLE GOVERNANCE
- Applying new management principles and roles, where parties can work on solutions in equivalence, and to facilitate transitions, blended finance, and deal-making processes.
- Governance process, structure, and rules with new decision-making, cooperation, and governance principles (trust-based governance, principle-based KPIs, and locally adapted conflict resolution strategies).
- Fluid laws and regulation, policymaking, policy space, and self-chosen regulations.
ECOSYSTEM DEVELOPMENT
- Body of knowledge, a body of action, and learning infrastructure to facilitate the transitions of regional, national and global challenges and opportunities (value creation)
- Facilities, programs, community building (communities of interest and practice) and collaboration (physical and online) with global and local leading partners
- Activation, development, and connection of a rich, healthy, consistent, and mature innovation and transformation ecosystem.
Supporting structure and process for transitions
We offer a trusted, collaborative space for organizing, governing, and financing resilience, a powerful supporting structure, and process for transitions. We apply an integrated approach and a 4-step phased process of sense making, match making, deal making, and market making for development of consciousness, leadership, and the right culture to shape this emerging future. Together we create the ideal environment, ecosystem, infrastructure, financing arrangements, governance processes, and innovation and transformation frameworks with practical tools and cases to guide all regions, industries, and nations in their journeys towards a regenerative economy and thriving society. We increase performance balancing top down guidance and facilitation; bottom-up activation, and participation; and setting the right preconditions to succeed at speed and scale.
We do not live in an era of change,
but in a change of eras.
Jan Rotmans
Professor Erasmus University Rotterdam