Weeknotes 24.11.2020: acting like an entrepreneur, dreaming of the system(s)

Mary Stevens
4 min readNov 24, 2020

Last week Chris and I in my team were focused on a short sprint: accelerating the next stage of OwnIt (our peer-action programme for women and personal finance) to take it from proof-of-concept to something that is financially sustainable in the long-term. For my three working days last week I cleared my diary of (most) other distractions and worked intensively on testing our hypotheses for possible revenue models.

Feedback loops in a business model for OwnIt — and some of the different actors in the system

I was reminded throughout of the RSA’s model (which I did some early stage work on back in 2017) of ‘Think Like a System, Act Like an Entrepreneur.’ Last week we were definitely in entrepreneur mode: we scripted pitches, turned round a market research survey in 36 hours, spent what felt like all day on the phone talking to financial journalists, a Financial Adviser, legacy fundraisers, all sorts of ‘real world’ people who could give a quick view on our project.

It was very productive — and I came away feeling energised and excited about the work (it’s also very timely). But also exhausted. By Friday my brain felt rinsed out (exacerbated probably by doing this all on screens). It really brought home to me the need for balance — particularly between the need for urgency, and for taking time and care. I recently spent some time supporting a friend who works in a ‘start-up culture’ who had burnt out during the first lockdown period; a week of my own internal start-up rhythm helped me understand how corrosive and exhausting that way of working could be.

Fortunately the networked, interconnected, systemic understanding was never far away. This interview with Brett Scott helped me join the pieces together:

In order to understand the monetary system, people need to grasp the idea of interconnectedness. Monetary systems are basically like giant meshes, so if you want people to reorientate how they think about money, they have to stop thinking about it as an object and start thinking about it as a network system.

In the context of COVID, interconnected networked concepts are suddenly a lot more viscerally understandable, because there is the realisation that you’re not actually an isolated individual.

‘Visceral’ invokes a set of metaphors that come up a lot when thinking about systems at the moment. I listened to this podcast with Tom Rippin, recorded back in March, where he uses an extended analogy of the human body as a system, with the existing misplaced economic incentives acting as a cancer (untrammeled growth, sucking in resources and energy from neighbouring cells). The joy of this analogy is that it also — surprisingly — turns out to be more complex and interconnected than we think. Growing (western, scientific) knowledge of the microbiome, and the uncertain boundaries between human and non — human life in our guts are providing a new lens for thinking about place in a complex ecology. This shift-shaping boundlessness was one of the key takeaways for me from Merlin Sheldrake’s BBC radio 4 series based on his new book about fungi, Entangled Life.

Finally — and most importantly overall — we have new CEOs at Friends of the Earth. Last Tuesday they presented to staff their initial thinking about vision and direction — and this networked approach is its DNA, or rather its circulatory system (I nearly wrote at its core, and then spotted how inappropriate that is). I am so thrilled to be embarking on this journey with them.

Fruiting fungi bodies at Hazel Hill, October 2020

Some thanks and other thoughts:

  • The podcast listening was part of a new mini-project I set up with my On Purpose cohort to find spaces for more meaningful conversations with friends. Thanks to Jo Alexander for our first suggestion, for great discussion prompts (name one memorable thing?) and to Alice and Fran for helping kick this off.
  • A bumper week for Women’s Hour — with both the power list (what does success look like for OwnIt? Imagine if a future project director featured on the power list) and a great interview with Özlem Cekic (TED talks here). Despite listening to this interview, the first thing I did when I heard someone say something I fundamentally disagreed with was to default to win-them-over-with-superior-evidence mode. Lots to keep learning.
  • I finally read the New Economics Zine issue on mental health. If you read one thing make it Ayeisha Thomas-Smith’s piece on neo-liberalism and the relationship between neo-liberalism, the self-help industry, structural racism and inequality, and how our leisure time is under attack, all written with her characteristic warm humour. It’s a good companion piece to Tom Rippin’s podcast, about why we need a values shift. They both leave open the question of where we go from here. Although given what I’ve learned this week about the brilliance of fungi at distributing resources through a network maybe part of the answer is to think more like a mushroom.

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Mary Stevens

Climate, sustainability, nurturing community and self. Cycling comes into it a lot. I often use this blog to take the long view, or a sideways look.