What does it mean to make the existing business model obsolete
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. R. Buckminster Fuller
When we talk about Syntropic World and mention that Fuller’s quote is central to our doing and thinking, I am aware that almost everyone interprets our commitment to making the existing business models obsolete very differently from what we are doing.
They might think of a fancy business model canvas that has us finagle bits and pieces here and there and arrive at some typical destinations. A co-op or a social enterprise. Some strange new version of a Not For Profit.
These are incremental changes. Syntropic World is committed to transformative change, where the end business model looks nothing like anything anyone has seen or experienced before in human-constructed systems.
Just as when I talk about capitalism as being past its use-by date, I am not seeking to replace it with capitalism dressed in a different costume. Not conscious. Not regenerative. No revival of any existing isms. Not socialism, communism, or Marxism.
Something we have never seen before applied to humans. The source code may be found in Nature’s coordinate system. Indigenous communities likely used earlier iterations of this never seen model in different contexts.
This is the type of new model I speak of.
Investopedia says that business models are the company’s plan for making a profit.
We might see the threads of humanity’s destruction in this narrow band definition.
Pursuing profit as the solitary goal of anything removes everything else and gives these a lesser degree of importance, including the things that matter most to almost everyone.
Health, access, community, relevance, fun, love, belonging, significance, and family.
The term business model itself is entwined with a Pattern Integrity that keeps any enterprise that gathers for purposes other than profit sidelined.
Syntropic World is not seeking to contrive a new business model for the sole purpose of profit-making.
In a Syntropic Enterprise, profit is the precessional — side effect — of the purpose.
Even more, it is just ONE of the precessional effects of the purpose.
If we are to contemplate making the existing models and systems obsolete, which particular models and systems are we referring to?
Syntropic World answer: All of them are likely. But especially the substrate systems that have become so normalised, we fail to consider their consequences.
Those deep systems and models are so embedded into our psyche, culture, behaviors, and habits that we do not even see them.
Beginning with the purpose of business.
Do you not find it as curious as I do that we are caught in the story that the purpose of business is to make a profit? Yet, if we returned to the origins of business and enterprise, the Source Idea, we would not find profit as the solitary purpose.
But business for profit is not all. It is wrapped in fancy legal protection codes, limiting liability for side effects, externalities, or bad decisions. These tools of corporate law amplify power and wealth and increase inequality. (See The Code of Capital by Katharina Pistor).
Added to this, we have the ways we measure profit, value, exchange and worth. Our current measure, GDP, celebrates when there is a war or fire as the GDP goes up. It never measures the caring economy, domestic work, or private child care, ensuring the underpaid irrelevance of anyone who participates in these economies.
We have accepted a position of hourly work for a wage, more often than not untethered to the success or struggle of a company. People are no longer people; they become numbers on a spreadsheet. Commodities. Resources. They are objectified to extract any semblance of humanity from their participation, making it easier for companies to underpay and exploit.
Our profit imperative has us make stuff that is optional, and construct whole systems that keep the wheels going without any overall increase in well-being. Bucky called this obnoxico. Our marketing game wants us to consume en mass endlessly. A false sense of never enough is healthy for GDP and profit maximization.
Our governance systems open the doors to corruption, jobs for mates, obfuscation, and asymmetries of power.
How we are taught to mind our business — short-termism, win-lose, externalities someone else’s problem, colonisation in one form or another, extraction to extinction, failure to consider whole systems — have embedded within them, the generator functions for humanity’s extinction.
We incentivize for win—lose—profit at all costs. We play the Molochian game.
We never consider the all-in-accounting cost. Nature and her work are never on the balance sheet. Who cooked Adam Smith’s dinner is never on the balance sheet. The externalities are never on the balance sheet.
The buck is passed down the line. However, it is coming due. To be paid by those not responsible for its extreme cost.
Responsibility and accountability have flown the coup. If I can blame someone else, I win; they lose.
Leadership is scared to death. Many know the truth. But the sunk costs are too high. Speaking up is the beginning of the end as we know it. There is still money to be made before the House of Cards crashes. And besides, almost no one has a clue what to do.
Capitalism needs exploitation and poverty to co-exist for it to thrive. Venture capital has zero care for anything but how much money it can make.
When Syntropic World speaks of making the existing models obsolete, we talk about ALL of the above. Not one, not some. ALL.
You may ask, what gives us the right or the hubris to think we can change any of this?
And I will say someone has to start. Are we certain we will lead change? Not certain, but confident. Rather than impose our egoic human constructs on the human constructs that we currently that we have that are failing us now, we reach into the library of Nature’s Coordinate system. Nature’s laws, crafted over billions of years, are Syntropic World’s tools and maps.
What we are doing at Syntropic World.
Profit is a precessional effect of our purpose. If we keep to our purpose and serve the highest number of people without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone, and if we do this well, we might see a profit. If the profit is not there, we re-access and recalibrate without violating the Pattern Integrity of the Source Idea we are stewarding to life.
An enterprise is alive, life expressing itself. To respond to it as anything else is to ignore the dynamic emergence of everything.
The purpose of enterprise and business is to increase the well-being of Earth and all her creatures by producing needed and wanted products and services. While we achieve our purpose, we provide ecologies for synergy and significance. People get to bring their brilliant unique skills and experience to the whole.
We design new legal codes and structures that embed our enterprise and leadership responsibility to the increased well-being of Earth and all her creatures. We are Steward leaders, holding the integrity and shape for collective brilliance.
We are the model we are bringing to life.
We consider and exchange value in multiple domains, never allowing one domain to dominate another.
Currency, monetary flows and incentives are designed to starve our Molochian potential.
Self and collective development is built in by design in all we do.
All-in-accounting, long-term consideration and strategising, and inquiring into the precessional effects are hardwired into our actions.
Our governance structures are separated from the currency returns. Decisions are made for the whole and the purpose and not for the money.
We acknowledge the need for diversity, polarity, and natural hierarchy. Healthy, stable systems require them all.
What does it mean to make the existing business models obsolete? It means starting with a clean sheet of paper and reimagining and redesigning everything to increase the well-being of Earth and all her creatures.
And while we are doing this, having so much fun.
This is Syntropic World.
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Syntropic World is a global education and community of practice applying the organising principles of nature to enterprise design and human coordination. Creating ecologies of trust, ensuring integrity in everything, enabling collective sense making, and organising around a central purpose — how to create a world that works for 100% of humanity without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone.
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