Bottom-Up and Top-Down Transformation — with Bill Baue and Ralph Thurm

Podcast Notes

Today we’re joined by Bill Baue, Senior Director at r3.0, and Ralph Thurm, Co-Founder & Managing Director at r3.0 — a not-for-profit platform which promotes Redesign for Resilience and Regeneration. Founded in 2012, r3.0 connects a global community of “Positive Mavericks” around its “work ecosystem” that focuses on transcending incrementalism to trigger necessary transformations that enact living systems principles. The work of r3.0 explores responses to the ecological and social collapses humanity is experiencing, in order to achieve a thriving, regenerative and distributive economy and society.

Bill Baue is a true expert when it comes to sustainability thresholds, thriveability, and online stakeholder engagement. He has co-founded several enterprises, including Sustainability Context Group, Sea Change Radio, and Currnt.

Ralph Thurm is a leading professional in sustainable innovation and strategy, operational sustainability, sustainability change management, sustainability reporting, transformation and thriveability. He is also the Founder of A|HEAD|ahead and Managing Director at OnCommons, the not-for-profit home of r3.0.

We are super excited to share this interview with you as we dig into how r3.0 applies a fractal, multi-scalar and bioregional lens to understanding transitions towards a regenerative and distributive global economy and society. Tune in as we explore organizational entanglement, creating value at a systems level, and how Bill and Ralph look at global governance.

To find out more about Bill’s and Ralph’s work:

• Bill Baue’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/bbaue
• Ralph Thurm’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/aheadahead1
• Website: https://www.r3-0.org/
• r3.0 Blueprints: https://www.r3-0.org/projects/
• 8th International r3.0 Conference 2021: https://conference2021.r3-0.org/
• The UNRISD-r3.0 project “Thresholds of Transformation”: https://www.r3-0.org/project/unrisd/

Other references and mentions:

• Boundaryless Whitepaper, New Foundations of Platform-Ecosystem Thinking — Designing Products and Organizations for a changing world, 2020: https://platformdesigntoolkit.com/DOWNLOAD-NF
• The Sustainability Context Group: http://www.sustycontext.org/
• Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows, Jørgen Randers, William W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth, 1972: https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/
• Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, 2017: https://www.amazon.com/Doughnut-Economics-Seven-21st-Century-Economist/dp/1603586741
• Stockholm Resilience Centre: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/
• The Ecological Footprint: https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/ecological-footprint/
• Global​ ​Thresholds​ ​& Allocations​ ​Council​ (GTAC): https://www.r3-0.org/gtac/
• Global Commons Alliance: https://globalcommonsalliance.org/
• Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, 1990: https://www.amazon.com/Governing-Commons-Evolution-Institutions-Collective/dp/0521405998
• Brundtland Commission, ‘Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future’, 1987: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/5987our-common-future.pdf
• Organizations as Architectures for Complexity — with Joe Norman: https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/organizations-as-architectures-for-complexity-with-joe-norman-5eebf5d1362e
• Nora Bateson, Trans-contextual Organizing: Shifting Perceptions: https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/trans-contextual-organizing-shifting-perceptions-with-nora-bateson-5a2f233b9d23
• William R. Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, 1982:
  https://www.amazon.com/Overshoot-Ecological-Basis-Revolutionary-Change/dp/0252009886
• P2P Foundation: https://p2pfoundation.net/

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on 17 March 2021.

Key Insights

1. Thresholds and allocations play out at multiple scales, where top-down approaches do not necessarily trump bottom-up approaches, according to Bill and Ralph. Globally, r3.0 has set up a Global Thresholds and Allocations Council bringing together scientists from around the globe, while at the bioregional level they are experimenting with building bioregional collaboratives (e.g. one located in Connecticut River Valley in the United States) using Elinor Ostrom’s core design principles for governing commons. In their Systems Value blueprint from 2020, r3.0 further refers to different levels part of shaping a regenerative economy and society, from the nano (personal), micro (organizations), meso (conglomerate level, like industries), and macro-level (economy and society), adding “supra” level to denote the systems level.

•  Listen to Bill explaining the thresholds approach taken by r3.0 around min 14:38 and the different levels of the systems value approach around min 40:25.

2. In a disentangled, super-specialized, globally connected world, the sustainability concept itself has become disentangled. By putting a price on everything, resources become fungible and tradable — like for instance carbon trading as illuded by Simone in one of his questions (min. 26:36). The problem we now need to reckon with is that carrying capacities or thresholds of resource stocks cannot be traded; only flows can. As Bill points out in the episode: “there’s a non-fungible zone that we just need to respect”. This is something r3.0 is working relentlessly to raise awareness around.

•  Listen to the question by Simone on disentanglement and the responses by Ralph and Bill from min 26:36.

3. In 2019, r3.0 took the stance that they needed to increasingly focus on increased resilience on a bioregional or localized level, and not only through top-down power structures. Since then, they are thus incorporating ideas around bioregionalism (including from Joe Brewer’s point of view), trans-contextuality (from Nora Bateson), multi-level selection and peer-to-peer dynamics (e.g. the P2P Foundation) increasingly in their work. Both Bill and Ralph look cautiously at the role of technology in potentially increasing the carrying capacity or health of our systems, seeing it as a potential risk of creating so-called “phantom carrying capacity”, which lacks the real resilience of a regenerative system.

•  Listen to the final reflections around the question of progress, modernism, and technology from min 48:18.

? Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of organizing at scale by leveraging on technology, network effects, and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.