In Search of Systems for the Common Good

This is an exercise in joining up the dots, backwards, to lend some coherence to more than 40 years of writing about everything from education and health to cities and technology. It is not a record of a career that went in a straight line. It involved quite a lot of meandering, pivoting, reaching dead ends, retracing my steps and getting a bit lost from time to time.

This account of what I’ve written over the years is not complete, by any means, and it’s from the perspective of someone who is now a grandfather, a recipient of the state pension and, at this advanced age, an entrepreneur creating a new fledgling business - System Shift - with my colleague Celia Hannon.

My interest in systems goes back at least to writing in Marxism Today and the Financial Times, which I did in parallel in the 1980s. I was interested in how national Fordist systems of production, work and organisation were being superseded by “post-Fordist” systems, which were networked, adaptive and international. At the Financial Times by day I wrote about the industrial restructuring of the UK under Mrs Thatcher, the conflicts that created and the arrival of Japanese inward investment. In the evenings and at the weekends I wrote for Marxism Today, exploring the implications of all of that for the future of the working class and progressive politics. That interest took me to Japan in the early 1990s to study just-in-time production systems (and karaoke culture) and from there to California, where a post-industrial, digital economy was just emerging in Silicon Valley. (Britain: California of Europe.) 

After I left journalism in 1996 to become self employed and live on my wits, I wrote three books in quick succession. Living on Thin Air, in 1998 was an early attempt to understand what the rise of a knowledge driven economy would mean and how it could be shaped and guided for the public good. Up the Down Escalator, was an effort to assemble an optimistic progressive narrative, which argued for an adaptive, creative form of social democracy. We Think, published in 2008, was a paean to the collaborative, mutual self-help ethic of the early world wide web. All were in their way efforts to understand how innovation and technology could feed a more inclusive and creative society through mutual and collaborative forms of ownership and organisation.

That interest in technology and systemsas the most important unit of innovation resurfaced in earnest with a Nesta report in 2014 on systems innovation (written with Geoff Mulgan). The short version is that products and services do not create big impacts on the world; it’s the systems that enable them that do. The container is a product; containerisation, the system, changed the world.

That work paved the way for the System Innovation Initiative - hosted by the ROCKWOOL Foundation in Denmark, and the 2022 paper Building Better Systems, (written with Jennie Winhall.) 

I’ve always been interested in the role of insiders and outsiders in creating change, and how they can come together.

One criticism of those reports was that they gave too much weight to individual entrepreneurs working outside public systems, and underestimated the scope and capacity for innovation within systems from skilled, committed public service professionals. That set off a stream of work on innovation to renew public service systems that, by the early 2000s, had become too top-down, target-driven, siloed and self-interested. I called it the McKinseyite state: hitting the target but missing the point.

The Man in Caravan is a series of case studies of civic innovators working in local councils to support systems for the common good. Innovate from Within was a critique of the over centralised, target driven approach to public service reform. The Art of Exit explored how to decommission existing public services to create space for new ones to emerge (what some people now call hospicing or composting.)

Two key characteristics of common good systems emerged from that work.

The first is that the state cannot deliver common goods the way that Dominoes delivers a pizza. Common goods have to be created in society, through the state working in alliance with communities and citizens. That point lay at the heart of Dying Matters (with Jake Garber), which advocated new community-based approaches to the end of life; the earlier Self-Policing Society, which argued that community safety came from the way citizens look after one another more than from the police; and Civic Spirit, an argument that a civic culture among citizens is as important as the institutions of the state. An early articulation of this thinking was a Manifesto for Public Services published in Marxism Today in the mid 1980s.

Those themes run through the work I have done on the future of education systems. In order to prepare young people for an uncertain, unfolding world, education should enable young people to learn how to collaborate, adapt and create, solving problems, opening up new possibilities, forming a shared sense of purpose and identifying opportunities to put knowledge to work to make a difference to the world. That argument for education to build a sense of young people’s power and agency lay behind Make It Personal, in 2004; Learning from the Extremes and its related TED talk; The Problem Solvers; and Ten Lessons for Student Agency. Education has become an accreditation delivery system which breeds disappointment, wastes talent and underpins inequality. It should be a journey for all  young people to find a shared sense of purpose, a sense of the common good they want to create together.

The promise of place as a setting in which systems for the common good can grow has been a consistent theme of my writing for the past twenty years and more. That was evident in The London Recipe, which argued that good cities were a combination of systems and empathy: highly relational and yet efficient at scale. That combination was taken up in More Together, an exploration of the social infrastructures and technologies of  five US cities; and in The Socially Entrepreneurial City, a profile of Curitiba in Brazil, which exemplifies how a creative municipal council can work with civil society to generate common goods. All of that is reflected in System Shift’s work on place based systems change, including how to create conditions to spread the principles of community wealth building. Place is still the most promising site for social innovation to create common good systems that can work between the top-down state and the profit-driven market.

The promise of place as a setting in which systems for the common good can grow has been a consistent theme of my writing for the past twenty years and more. That was evident in The London Recipe, which argued that good cities were a combination of systems and empathy: highly relational and yet efficient at scale. That combination was taken up in More Together, an exploration of the social infrastructures and technologies of  five US cities; and in The Socially Entrepreneurial City, a profile of Curitiba in Brazil, which exemplifies how a creative municipal council can work with civil society to generate common goods. All of that is reflected in System Shift’s work on place based systems change, including how to create conditions to spread the principles of community wealth building. Place is still the most promising site for social innovation to create common good systems that can work between the top-down state and the profit-driven market.

None of this happens without the people who make systems that serve the common good, bring them to life by mobilising coalitions of actors to support them. The people we work with are generative leaders: they generate the sense of shared purpose, trust, and commitment that mobilises power and resources behind a common goal. These people - like Karyn McCluskey, who led the violence reduction unit in Glasgow; or Alvaro Salas, the architect of Costa Rica’s community health system - bring together creative communities joined in a cause: the kind of community that creates common good. The leadership involved requires public leaders and politicians to be part of the process, sowing narratives of collective care and achievement that offer a counter to the fear, division, anger, and anxiety spread by the populist right wing. Fostering this kind of social leadership is one of the big themes of System Shift’s work.

To do that, we’re working with philanthropic foundations around the world that are in the paradoxical but potentially pivotal position of turning private wealth into common good. Some of the thinking about how philanthropy could play that role as society’s social R & D funders can be found in The Future of Foundations, which lies behind the ambitious funder collaboratives that System Shift is developing. We also have a lot to learn from how conservative foundations have supported the culture and ideas behind the right-wing revolutions in US politics, from the free market 1980s through to the MAGA movement of today.