Week 20 of the lock-down and the strange power vacuum continues. Strange, given the historic capability of this government to control the media narrative around our ongoing buoyancy. At the moment, we appear to be living in a sea of leaky vessels.

This narrative is not simply defined by a pandemic that has caused the worst economic recession in history (yet to manifest in our communities in real time). It is also reported as the incompetence and failure of ministers, with the tools at their disposal, to manage the consequences.

Failure to produce adequate track and trace technology to manage the spread of Covid.. Failure to design fair means for pupils to get deserved outcomes with their exams.. Failure to provide sensible guidelines for travel in advance of people rushing abroad as soon as they were permitted —now obliging them to abandon their ‘escape from lock-down’ holidays and scramble back to avoid unaffordable penalties. Failure too by the Opposition to provide any coherent alternative.

It’s a cliché to say that we we’ll only really know what’s happening at this moment in time from the perspective of hindsight. But that won’t stop those inclined to narrate each moment from making a claim about what is shifting, as we move from the past into the future. At A/UK, we count ourselves amongst them. After all, what more can we ever do than look back and look forward from the present? Projecting our world view in both directions?

To occupy the position of ‘There Is Always An Alternative’ (in contrast to Margaret Thatcher’s TINA, There is No Alternative) is to instantly credit human agency. It’s the same thing as the power of our dreaming brain to imagine a way out of any deadlock we might find ourselves in. It’s also always possible to build on that act of imagination – new ways of being, designing and organising. But for most of us that possibility remains just that and no more. For reasons we can barely grasp, our inner belief that we can change does not translate into action that changes things.

This week we spent a lot of our time on this frontier between real and imagined. We noted how easily these two words get decoupled – as if what can be imagined is by definition not ‘realistic’. Instead we should see the first as the forerunner of the second, as Rob Hopkins explores in his book on imagination “From What Is to What If”. That Rob is now working in tandem with Kate Raworth and her new economic framework “Doughnut Economics” is highly promising for our collective ability to take meaningful action.

But few people experience the level of networked agency that Rob and Kate might enjoy - where one person’s dense socio-economic (and increasingly political) capital meets another’s to cause ripples across the planet. However well such creative encounters eventually impacts the whole of human flourishing, at this moment it’s literally out of most people’s world.

In fact, those who conceive of their problems as directly caused by inequity—rather than climate—may even distrust this promise of change. A focus on climate for them is a deliberate avoidance of redistribution of income (or colonialism, or the gender gap).

Is that inevitable? Will most of us have to wait for the effects of others’ agency, their grip on power relenting, before we can feel some benefit for ourselves? Or is that misunderstanding agency as mechanical – the power to take action in a material world of cause and linear effect? A world in which only those with hard power – guns and money – can make change happen.

The desire for freedom

In a beautifully provocative webinar that we took part in this week called Agency Matters, scientists Karen O’Brien introduced a different idea of agency that could, when embodied, cause what she describes as “quantum social change.” Introducing her book You Matter More Than YouThink Karen describes how “understandings of our social world cannot be reduced to the laws and mechanisms associated with classical physics”.

Instead “The notion of a wave-particle duality, the concept of quantum entanglement, and the idea that the observer influences the outcome of an experiment have raised many metaphysical questions about our foundational understandings of reality.”

She quotes Alexander Wendt, author of Quantum Mind and Social Science who says “Quantum social theory makes it clear that agency, represented as conscious actions, intervenes in what is otherwise perceived and experienced as a classical, mechanical world. To deliberately transform political, economic, social, technological, and cultural systems and structures requires the perception and activation of free will”.

Karen then describes how “Climate change is a relationship problem that is inherently about how we relate to ourselves; to each other, and to nature. It’s also about how we relate to systems and change. When we address these relationships, we may find that the solutions to climate change and many other problems has been with us all the time. We are the solutions.”

Responding to Karen in the webinar, renowned UN Leadership coach Monica Sharma talked about the nature of freedom. Not as an individual’s pursuit of free will over the interests of others, but through deep connection with the desire for freedom (meaning dignity and equity) in our shared consciousness with others.

Standing for that freedom, while connecting with others at this deep level makes us radical, says Monica – we feel able to transform our reality, with the actions we take as our evidence. In the seminar, we developed Monica’s point with our description of citizen action networks (CANs) as containers for this kind of agency. A heady mixture! We’ll share the video next week.

The next day, as we attended the final module in the Trust the People training course, Mags Mulowska (interviewed here) was describing something very similar, with their innovative approach to community organising. “This is not a ‘how to’ lesson”, she said, “but a sharing of ‘attitude and aliveness’, and a more playful approach to change”.

She used the example of how to establish a new community hive for free by adopting an empty building. Not by squatting and putting yourself in danger of arrest, but by seeking win/win solutions for the owners through ‘meanwhile leases’ (see Climate Emergency Centre strategy here). Through making relationships with others, who face difficulties and yearn for release from constraints—particularly across diverse communities—magic happens.

This is not simply about the power of local relationship making. Working with the Bounce Beyond community this week on the ‘next economies’ system we experienced similar expressions of deeply felt agency amongst groups of what we call ‘next-economy’ practitioners.

Those working in the variously named practices of circular, regenerative, doughnut, well-being economies are having a-ha moments around climate solutions, the world over. The passion that people are investing in each of these different arenas of innovation, becomes an attractor for the idea of global transformation.

And in a rare moment of insight from the culture of mainstream, “old politics”, we picked up this observation from the writer of the French TV drama, Baron Noir (are you watching it?).

The series’ writer Eric Benzekri recognises a wider ‘waking up’ of ‘the people’ to a shared frustration and yearning for something they know can be better:

“Something is happening in the world. Something we need to talk about… the tension between representative democracy on one side, with all its problems that need to be solved, and what I call the democracy of the social networks on the other, that is, the public expression of billions of people all at once.”

It’s a space that we can barely keep up with, growing week by week, but we are committed to narrating, facilitating and organising in whatever way we can.

Alternative Editorial: Shifting Ground