This week we sat at various points with systems workers of many kinds. Environmentalists, storytellers, Buddhists, economists, movement builders, politicians, system-relations coaches, community organisers… mostly in the Zoom room we are beginning to call home. (Note: Zoom is the amazingly flexible web-conferencing service that’s amplifying activism and organisation everywhere).

Each one of these discussants are compelling, effective, ambitious in a certain sphere of activity. Each of them was only dimly aware of the others’ work till now.

As we move into the 2020s, the task of identifying a clear way forward to meet the multiple crises we face is only becoming more daunting, in the face of past failures. It’s not that there are no solutions available, but that we don’t seem to be able to work together effectively in order to make those solutions viable.

We stand facing a Tower of Babel: so much strong, rich expression of intent, so little ability to understand each other and move into action together.

While Babel is a common metaphor for dissonance, it’s interesting to go back to its origins. In the original Bible Story, we read about the descendants of Noah who had survived the end-of-the-world floods by living on an Ark together.

To honour their achievement, once returned to dry land, they began to build a tower that would reach to the heavens, showing God they didn’t need help anymore. God responded by scrambling their language, so they lost the ability to communicate.

It’s a mythical explanation of why each country uses a different language – a problem now easily overcome with dictionaries and translation devices. But today the dissonance is not so much language as behaviours, needs and wants. Political observers might say wryly, that the ‘gods’ of today – those with the most material power – act constantly to prevent us from being able to come together to build something strong.

Media barons constantly framing events as conflicts, reasons to be fearful of each other; disasters waiting to happen out there, that keep us at home. Political parties construing each other as competitors rather than collaborators. Advertisers using the best of psychology to keep us in thrall to their products, creating in- and out-groups to motivate us. An economic system that develops our individuality, over our sociability. And more recently, increasingly manipulative forms of behavioural control (ref).

Fear of the other is a triumph of the Gods of the growth economy. They need us to be ‘nose to the grindstone’ or as ‘hamsters on the wheel’. Which means not listening intently to each other, finding our joys in play and experiment, or partying in the streets. Except at the weekend, maybe.

The Tower of Babel by Александр Михальчук — The Tower of Babel by **Александр Михальчук**

But even when we do share a common purpose, we often can’t seem to rise above our behavioural differences. For example, when three organisations – using no names – are offering local green energy plans, why don’t they pool their resources to offer something simple, comprehensive and cheaper than anything they can do alone? Or why, when two groups of activists want to “serve the people’s needs”, do they set up rival camps?

No doubt as you are reading you’re also thinking: it’s obvious why. Each of us have historic reasons for choosing our own path of action. We need autonomy, status and achievement – we can’t get that by giving up ownership of our ideas. Also, we are all competing for funds.

Yet who’s to say that working together would rob us of those rewards? After decades or going it alone, recent trends in scientific collaboration across the world show a tripling of transnational projects in the past 15 years.

Yet socio-political projects, start-ups and tech initiatives seem slow to the party. In recent months, the evidence that even those who share values find it hard to collaborate has become more obvious. Let alone taking on the task of working with those who don’t share our values – which is essential to the bigger challenges of our multiple crises.

Fundamental to this dysfunctionality are the different kinds of agency we experience at different stages of our projects: moving from the energy of launching a new idea to that of harnessing support and funding as we grow. Further down the line we have the weight of responsibility to our co-workers and the capitalisation of our assets. Even if we want to be generous with our different forms of capital, we are not always free to be.

In Frederik Laloux’s book Re-inventing Organisations, he shares examples how managers and leaders can move from trying to control outcomes for everyone, towards allowing self-organisation at different levels of any enterprise, in order to release the energy of the people working there. Equally, Laloux shows how working in a more open-source way in your own field can refresh and bring new vigour to your company or initiative.

But do volunteer organisations, or community projects, allow the same possibilities? When people are not being paid to fulfil their responsibilities, they might well bring their fuller selves to the work, but also expect more freedom of expression and need. Here are three behaviour patterns we see a lot of. And as we humans are social mammals, it might be interesting to compare these patterns to those of otters, rabbits and squirrels.

Otters create emotional fields. Despite being ferocious animals in many ways, otters have become internet memes for the way they float on the waters holding hands [ref]. They work co-operatively to build dams and habitats. It’s beautiful to watch. We find many human tribes are built on these warm feelings. Even so, they find it hard to connect with those who don’t share these capacities and values. For that reason, they appear like in-groups, closed to those with less time and resources.

Rabbits pop up everywhere, but particularly in difficult terrain. When the challenging work of the complexity of an organisation becoming coherent is causing hurt and upset, the rabbit will distract everyone. It will ask for simplicity where none is possible and take us all down a hole – where we want quick, tangible solutions on old, recognisable terms.

Squirrels pick up all the acorns in the room and put them into their pouch. Those acorns will never become trees.

And then there are the elephants: enormous, heavy animals whose intelligence is manifest, but unfathomable. They can judge the balancing point of an enormous log, in order to lift it with the minimum effort and stress – more efficiently and accurately than any man-made machine. Despite its size, it can tolerate being saddled and ridden by tourists. When roused it can kill anyone in its way. However, it can also be trained from an early age to believe that a simple chain can restrain its power.

We know the metaphor by now: elephants appear as the missing bit of conversation in the room, that no-one dares to acknowledge. Or they symbolise the answer to a problem that is too big for any one single person to describe on their own – it can only be described collectively. Mostly, it sits in the room, unarticulated. When people can’t really listen to each other well enough, instead projecting their own view of the elephant onto the other, it’s the elephant – invisible and inscrutable – that reigns.

Of course, these are human caricatures of animal behaviours - but useful for that reason. Choosing these symbols might help us to understand each other in new ways. They might offer us, via emojis and memes, ways to communicate despite the diversity of languages described in the Tower of Babel. But does the animal kingdom also offer us metaphors for a workable system within which each of these behaviours can work happily alongside each other?

Yes if you believe that humans are essentially animals. You will accept the ‘law of the jungle’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ – aka meritocracy. But If you believe humans simply cannot be compared to animals, however diverse, it’s more difficult. Particularly in a meritocratic society that offers mostly uniform actions and criteria of success – where most of us can’t compete. It’s the equivalent of asking a horse and a leopard to climb a tree to see which is better.

So, what kind of system can allow all kinds of diversity of input while ensuring fair outcomes for everyone? And at the same time, evolve rapidly in order to meet our current crises? Do we need a new belief system to overcome the trust barriers we face? Or will we instead learn to trust artificial intelligence to do much of the work we can’t do?

Our own ongoing experiments are still highly aspirational, linking I, We and World projects within cosmo-local Citizen Action Networks. The intention is to link everyone within a relational community—place-based and virtual—to the solutions already available. So that we can begin to hit our climate targets with actions from the grassroots upwards. Using more soft power (modelling, narrative, attraction) than hard power (force, money, sanctions) to get results.

Sounds like magic; and it’s early days yet. Around the country – indeed, around the world – many groups of people are experimenting in similar ways. Unlike most scientific projects, this socio-economic-political prototyping is happening in real time, out there in public spaces, so we can all learn from each other, copying and iterating as we go. Making friends intentionally.

As our great friend and long-term collaborator Sabra Williams – founder of Creative Acts - suggested at this New Year, these are “the good old days of the future”. We are surrounded by people of every age, colour, gender and privilege, making enormous efforts to respond adequately to the task before us. At times, it feels miraculous.

So, in these early days of the decade, let’s set only higher goals and expectations. Let’s not look back in 10 years and regret that we didn’t fix the roof while - where we are at least - the sun is still shining.

Alternative Editorial: Can We Hold Hands?