Introduction:

The False Economy and the inalienable truth

Note: This is the part of a book. At any point you can visit the book page for the full table of contents.

Hi, hello, welcome, thanks for coming. We love that (pretty overwhelmed to be fair), you’ve chosen to spend a little bit of your time to hear what we have to say. And we want to give you something valuable in return. This is the beginning of a book, a ‘how to’ on rapid business design and why it has the ability to reshape the economy for a sustainable future. Like any book it needs to tell a story, but not just that, it needs to become a clear manual for how to get shit done. There’s already way too much ‘thought leadership’, opinion and method out there that doesn’t track back to tangible tasks, actions and impact. You need to be able to get on and do, or what’s the point.

We believe that by redesigning the economy from the ground up, working with the people that fundamentally dictate our socio-economic structures — big business, government, non profits, we can solve the many systemic issues that face us. The many global crises we face as a people are symptoms of the way we currently strive for and measure economic output. We believe that by working with people and organisations to re-design business is the fastest most impactful way to create progressive, sustainable change. This is our hypothesis and like all problems, this is where we start. We know where we want to go, but who knows how and if it will end.

The book will cover a bunch of things. From the big questions around economic thinking and the seismic activity that is starting to shake the foundations of theory (see Kate Raworth and Doughnut Economics). Through to the cause and cyclical effect of systemic socio-economic problems. We’ll share our design system for mindset shift and behaviour change, learned from implementing in the world’s largest organisations. We’ll give you the frameworks, tools and tasks we use at Po3 to design and deliver new propositions, products and services.

We know we’re not the first to think about some of these things. In order to evolve we need to build on the great work already done. So we’ll share other best practices from communities like the Teal movement, highlight key texts and people like Laloux’s reinventing organisations and point to the many other great things happening all the time. We’ll reference and direct you to existing libraries of tools, workshops, methodologies — all the elements you need.

We’ll bring these to life with real world examples and stories. Examples of people we’ve worked with and other organisations making a massive difference like B-corp and Burtzoorg. We need to share all this because we need to tell the whole story. To solve any problem you have to look at it holistically, you need a plurality of perspectives. And business and the economy is a big problem to solve, no doubt.

We’re going to give you all the tools you need for rapid business design. Stick with us and it’ll be great (or just get the book at the end when it’s finished and published — that’s an option too). But in the beginning we need to tell you why we’re doing this, what’s the purpose, what’s the point — because it’s personal for us and important we’re on the same page.

In this first article, we just want to leave you with a thought. And so it begins. Enjoy!

This is #TheFalseEconomy