“Their economic life was organized around the presumption of abundance rather than a preoccupation with scarcity”
Work: A deep history, from the stone age to the age of robots. James Suzman, 2020.
A sentence that in one moment brought different elements of what I have been studying and observing over the last years together. For me it was a major moment to “ReThink” – the term nicely coined by Adam Grant.
What do I mean?
First of all let’s start where we are today. It is obvious that our existing economic and societal models are not working as they should. If we look at the wellbeing of our societies and planet that becomes crystal clear – growing wealth inequalities, crazy levels of illness and burnout, loneliness becoming a leading cause of death, a climate crisis looming and the financial system we operate by being close to it’s end just pumping money into the system. I believe our systems have most recently been scarcity-driven to manage and control behavior, foster consumerism and hence drive the required economic growth.
Second, let’s talk about the work by Brené Brown, which I have now been studying for many years. Her evidence-based findings is targeted at individuals and relationships between individuals – it all started looking at the importance of connection and belonging. The research has identified that our current armored leadership style is linked with scarcity and a fear of not being good enough, not belonging and deep-rooted shame. She also identifies the skill sets for daring leadership – so a methodology for how we can move to a place of courage, vulnerability and curiosity.
Finally, the book by James Suzman allows us to take a different perspective on the system we operate in today. He leads us through history and shares how we have in the past lived by a concept of abundance. His hypothesis links this to a much better state of wellbeing.
So what?
Let’s reimagine our world to build new values, societal systems and business models around the following concepts:
1) daring leadership – so a truly human way of operating with each other, caring for and connecting with ourselves, each other and the planet stands above short-term financial returns.
2) abundance mindset – we have to move from trying to drive human behavior by instilling scarcity-driven fears to a notion of building trust that together we have enough.
3) collaborative narrative – as a last piece of this puzzle I believe we need to generate new stories around power and how we will measure success.
I will diving more into all these elements and additional research plus resources that supports how we can do this in following posts.
amdeans-consulting.com 