Cohesion and the Social Economy

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Conference notes on a gathering organised by The Wheel – Dublin Nov 3rd 2023

Prepared by Paul Mooney, Founder, Cohesion 087?338 9383 [email protected]

?This conference will focus on skills, visibility and funding. I am struck by the immediate use of the phrase ‘social economy’ a phrase I have not heard before, to replace the phrase social enterprise. Social economy includes enterprises, co-operatives and mutual societies.

The EU is focusing on three big ideas: People before profit, the reuse of profits for social good and democratic principles of governance.

Revitalese

I hear about an EU funded project which for €360,000 delivered a 4-day blended training course for 96 social enterprises. The results researched by Dublin City University reported a positive increase in sentiment.

I honour the work done and that it was measured, however, I can see no mention of value. I am not told how much social capital was generated and I am not told how much economic capital was generated other than the cost of the programme.

The university did develop a digital badge course where people could undertake for extra training, but all I can see is a pre and post survey for the course work.

Harvesting Collective Potential

I ask myself how can we harvest collective potential. I notice that these 96 companies were trained in separateness. I wonder what can be done to convene them as a collective.

?I am confident that the ideas that we as Cohesion have about a Collective Balance Sheet for a group of social enterprises is valid, even if the ideas are so old as to be unremembered in modern times and seem to be a step forward in how people are currently thinking and acting at this time.

Daily Language

It seems to me that what we have built at Cohesion is the ability to harvest the language and thoughts of the people IN THE COURSE OF THEIR DAILY OPERATIONS and not just in their training courses.

We have built something to transform and to track what leaders say, what employees say, what clients say; and we have built a scaleable technology to compare this language to the financial instruments which currently store value in organisations such as company values, ESG data or KPI’s right up to the income and expenditure account or the balance sheet.

Cohesion sets itself the task of building an economic instrument that can store intangibles such as kindness, courage, and curiosity. And we plan to do this, not with a group of separate legal entities; rather as a process of co-creating a collective.

We are is building a process and a technology that can transform these intangibles into reward for people who work in the social economy. We are determined to see that employees obtain credits for intangibles that give them discounts for childcare or food or travel or petrol, just as cash does.

Brehon Meitheal and Stór Treasury

I am reminded of Brehon Laws which were ancient Irish ways of maintaining a sustainable collective. These ways of being and doing were suppressed by church and crown over many hundreds of years.

I think of Meitheal – the ancient Irish system of helping each other. I think of the concept of Treasury rather than bank with the Irish word for treasury being Stór, which is also a term of endearment for a loved one.

Inequality

I hear that people who work in the social economy sector are paid less than those in the private economy. In some ways, they are looked down upon, as having less of a contribution to make. This may be the fundamental flaw in perception because money is used as the measurement system.

If non-money were the measurement system, using the Community Finance Ireland data that social return on investment (SROI) delivers 3.9 times the value for every euro, then surely Social Economy ought to be valued more the private sector?

I hear there are Corporate Social Responsibility budgets that want to get involved, yet they do not know how to measure the impact of their donations. I think of a term in my mind called Collective Economy and more deeply, I think of how we are planning to create an Ergodic Collective.

Ergodic Systems

I think of how an ergodic fair shares common would very quickly bring separate enterprises into a system of wholeness.

Until a group of people, and their group of legal entities form an ergodic collective, they will always be non-ergodic – which means that the chances of their sustainability are separately and collectively likely to be less than average.

An ergodic system on the other hand realises more of the potential of the collective, by pooling profits and sharing losses as a group, bolstered by adopting ‘Cohesion’ as a collective leadership development process and technology platform.

Cohesion methods and techniques transform collective thinking and then uses a natural language large language model AI to measure intangibles. We link these measures to the economic measures of activity, the profit and loss account, the balance sheet and eventually leading to a collective balance sheet for a group of enterprises.

It takes time to get on the same page

I hear a principal officer at the department of rural and community development. He is enthusiastic about helping the sector, yet he also says that because there are fragmented systems in government departments, it will take 5-10 years to have people singing off the same page, even though the Irish government is currently developing a national social enterprise strategy.

I hear the CEO of the Wheel. He mentions that there are 33,000 social enterprises in the EU. It creates €19bn in GDP per annum. There are 12,500 charities in Ireland. They employ 200,000 people.

That means one in eight people in Ireland are involved in the social economy. More importantly, one out of every three public service deliveries are done by these social enterprises. I then hear that 92% of all Irish companies employ less than ten people.

He tells me later over a cup of tea, that he is a philosopher, and he is interested in new ideas. He asks me to email him to set up a conversation.

Collaboration does not go far enough

I hear the word collaboration a lot. Yet, Cohesion proposes that collaboration does not go far enough. People will collaborate, but only to the point of their economic limit. The organsiations are separate. The profits are separate. People who consider themselves to be individual are separate.

IN-Dividual is Whole

People who speak English have misunderstood the word individual if they think it means separate. ‘IN’ is a prefix which negates what follows it, e.g., IN-ability, IN-capable. And yet, we use this word IN-Dividual. This word actually means we are NOT DIVIDED. It means all humans are part of a whole.

Keeping the lights on

I hear of having to watch for social impact washing, making sure that money is not being pumped into the social economy just to relieve the guilt of profit taking.

I hear that everyday social enterprises do not get the time to think about such issues. They are dealing with addiction, poverty, abuse, trafficking, disability, inequality and so much more.

Paid and unpaid staff deal with the daily problem of keeping the doors open and the lights on. They have to generate revenue, attract volunteers, suffer a digital divide, try to be sustainable in a donor-based world where there is no multi-year funding.

They are busy surviving. They have no time to thrive. They say that collaboration slows them down from their mission.

Competitions are non-collaborative

I hear that there is a lack of synergy and alignment between all the actors. There are dozens of funding agencies, all with their own quirky mechanisms. I see that that they set up ‘competitions’ for funding.

I see that the top ten or twenty social enterprises who apply for funding will ‘win’ yet hundreds of applicants have to ‘lose’. Not only is this demoralizing, but it is a massive waste of collective potential.

And even if a few enterprises so called ‘win’, some of the prizes are in services that the social enterprise does not have the time to undertake, let alone not wanting to be preached to by z donor with their own agenda.

There are many invisible ties to funding which are more insidious and shadowy than are measured in impact reports.

IN-Capacity

I see that the local development companies, funded though SICAP have only 40 full time officers to deal with hundreds of thousands of cases. I hear that private enterprises want to give operating contracts to social enterprises, but the social enterprises are not set up for professional delivery.

The procurement budget from the Irish government is in the region of €15bn every year. But social enterprises appear not to have the capacity to respond to these requests.

I see that funding applications take up management time, taking founders away from service delivery and day to day activities. How can private enterprises build capacity whole social enterprises cannot?

Profit motive versus the motive for good

When profit is the motive, capacity can be built, but when social good is the motive, why can’t capacity also be built? Why does good have to get the smallest slice of the pie?

I saw this very thing in an NGO I recently dealt with in the West of Ireland. A manager was taken on board to do the admin of fund-raising. But this became the focus of activity, and the communal wealth and social treasure began to slip out of the project. Money became the root of the effort, which was in contrast to the essence of community activity being the root of its founding.

Ceannaire is the Irish for Leader

Again, I think that Brehon principles applied to leadership development, dialogue and quantum computing, have a role to play in the modern Social Economy. I recall that the word for leader in Irish is Ceannaire – head of care.

Local Enterprise Offices and Chambers of Commerce seem to be the financial darlings of our enterprise economy. Perhaps the reason they are darlings is that only money is measured.

What if the SROI at 3.9 is greater than the ROI of the Local Enterprise Office? Would that change people’s minds in how they think about the social economy?

Value is rarely whole

Too few people seem to think about VALUE in its whole form. People and groups think about a job, or about a grant or about a transaction. Yet beneath each transaction is a thought. This thought creates language. Because we do not measure language, we miss out on the wholeness of the potential.

Terence McKenna once said that a culture can only advance at the rate at which they advance their language. So, if we measure thought as it manifests in language, and we compare it to tangible economic indicators, then we will have an opportunity to take part in a WHOLE system.

This whole system for one organisation, could then be part of a multi-organisational collective which takes all the measures and aggregates them into a single economic instrument – a collective balance sheet.

More importantly, by having all the members of the collective use Cohesion as their collective leadership approach, and by using a Natural Language Processing Large Language Model AI to harness potential, we could go way beyond the apartheid of a single legal entity into the collective potential of the field of endeavour as a whole.

Wellbeing Accounting and Fair Shares Commons

I am reminded of the work of Mark Anielski in Canada who is doing wellbeing econiomics work for First Nations using their sacred teachings as the foundation for the accounting systems. He is working on the development of a wellbeing bank which will use the tribe’s wealth to lend to each other, not taking usury as the reward.

I am reminded of the work of Graham Boyd in Ergodic investment and Fair Shares Commons. Applied in the context of a Cohesion process, I can see that a wellbeing accounting system / a wellbeing bank and an ergodic fair share commons structure could be a very powerful pilot in Ireland.

ReThink

I hear that Rethink have given €99m in 48 funds, creating 2,700 jobs and reaching 829,000 people. I hear about CoRá a hub for social change, and I think of it as a play on the Irish word for conversation – Cohmrá.

Yet, the panel say that funds are tied, inflexible and time-wasting. I see that Pobal gives away money. I see that activists try to use a Social Business Model Canvas to translate the good that they are trying to do into modern economic jargon.

Perhaps social enterprises would be better off doing good in an unrestrained manner and then translating the value after the impact, rather than limiting the potential in advance by trying to be MBA’s when they are not.

I set Cohesion the imaginative task of manifesting an Ergodic Treasury.

I suddenly have the insight that the wheel did not change humankind. It was the axle that changed humankind. In my mind, money is a wheel and Cohesion is the axle.

Transformation first, not last

I see that the presenter shows us a theoretical model called a scaffold that ends in transformation. In Cohesion, we begin with the transformation and witness its quantum potential unfold?

The eco-system IS the problem

I hear that full employment is a barrier to the development of the social economy. It is said that people will not join the sector for smaller wages. Surely, this makes the entire eco-system the problem.

I hear that Leargas (Irish for insight) give away money to the tune of €26bn in one project alone. I am told they cannot spend the budget as they do not have enough projects!! I am told that the EU loves to give money to Irish projects. They are very enthusiastic about the Irish as a people. There is so much more available that we are not accessing.

JEWEL Bottom Line

I hear there is another network called The Irish Social Enterprise Network. At their panel, I hear about hybrid social enterprises – those that have traded income as well as grant-based projects. I hear about a dual bottom line, but what I sense deep within is a JEWEL BOTTOM LINE.

I hear about the business of social economy and the social obligations of business. I recall a teacher of mine telling me that governance without measurement is tyranny while measurement without governance is piracy. I wonder how big can we build the container so that tyranny and piracy are transformed into sovereignty and generosity?

Passion Myopia

I hear from a panelist that members of the social economy can be so passionate about their own projects that they actually become myopic, not being able to collaborate and not being able to see the big picture.

I hear about the transversal skills that will be necessary for future world of work. I hear about skills gaps, green transition, digitisation, inclusivity and the creation of occupational profiles for the social economy.

But nobody here is talking about love, or compassion or empathy. Nobody here mentions courage, or that having heart to heart conversations is the currency of social economy. What I see is a conference format trying to deal intellectually with an issue that is more meta-physical than people here seem to realise.

I am asked to sit in on a table discussion on the future skills needed by 2030. I ask the question would it be ok not to know? I offer that ChatGPT will answer this question better technically than any of us can. But ChatGPT will not be able to listen to a victim of rape or someone who has not eaten for three days. What good is social economy in Gaza right now?

The predicament is the problem

I see a predicament at this conference. The people here are trying so hard to be economic that they have forgotten how to be social. If I was organising a gathering, I would take out all the tables and just have one circle of chairs.

I would ask each of the experts to sit in the circle with us and to have rounds of dialogue. No PowerPoint, no stage, no them and us. Just a group of humans having a Dialogue.

I would then transcribe the session in real time and compare the language to a large language model to human values such as empathy, courage, heartcentredness, listening, encouragement and wholeness.

?What is the value of this conference?

I see that qualifying our intellect with academic and professional certifications is part of the problem. Surely, our ambition is to collaborate rather than to teach or advocate? How do we know how much collaboration took place with 160 delegates taking six hours of their lives to be in the same room together?

What did we co-create together? How would we know? How do we know the collective insights and learnings when people could not even scan the barcode for the agenda, because their cameras were broken, or they had no credit, or they did not bring their phones?

Humans thrive on intrinsic motivations, yet we at this very conference where we are calling for change, do not value the intangible that we have been part of. We may be able to say how much it cost for lunch, or how much it cost for the hotel.

We may even be able to get people to say how much they earn each year and to take six hours of it as a cost. We may be able to count the cost of flying to Ireland and hotel stays.

But we do not know the value of the very collective that we were for a day...

WE ARE THE PREDICAMENT...

I hear that skill and knowledge are a limitation. We have forgotten intuition. I hear that the term soft skills were developed by the US Army in 1972. I hear that social science operates in a totally different academic world that the STEM world.? They differ due to their definitions and agreement on language.

I hear we are unable to value personal agency. Thriving is not valued. Pursuing social aims are not valued. All I see and hear around me is untapped potential and AI will not be our messiah.

Learning and development

I see a huge hunger for learning and development. I hear that humans have evolved from being settlers to being seekers. Yet I do not see how we value meaning. Valuation has become a comparative game of numbers. We do not compare the value of language. The word sanction can mean two things, each of them being opposite to each other. What do we mean by words anyway?

Micro credential meetings

What if we evolved from working groups to Dialogue groups? What if we can micro-credential every hour that we spend in a group process? What if our ancestors did this better under Brehon Law than we ever can, even though we have AI and our fancy weapons of mass destruction?

?What if collaboration, competency and community are the problems? I hear that leaders say they have no time. What if time is an illusion?

How do we value human relationships? How do we value that people have the intention, skills, support and value for enhancing such human relationships? How can we relate these human relationships into economic values that access the quantum potential of the quantitative and the qualitative?

Keynote Address

In the keynote address, I hear that the EU wish to value people over profit. But in the economic private sector, PEOPLE ARE SOLD FOR PROFIT. All companies sell the knowledge of their employees at a higher rate than they pay for them in salary, so we always have a conundrum.

I hear that the EU wants profit to be invested as surplus in the social economy. But if every externality were considered on the profit and loss account of each company, there would be no profit.

Companies do not consider what taxpayers pay for, in order to get employees to work. Private companies would not be able to afford to operate if they had to account for all the social benefits that get employees to work.

I hear that the EU wants democratic principles to apply to social economy. But democracy is a few people speaking for the whole. Why can’t the whole speak for themselves?

And then at the end of the keynote, I hear that these are only recommendations, not directives. I am disappointed yet not surprised.

Set up a church

A friend of mine in Columbia wanted to establish a social action group. He decided that it easiest to set up a church and to develop a congregation with no taxman looking over his shoulder than to get unconscious combatants to collaborate beneath their language and intentions.

Cohesion and Dialogue

In a world of politically correct language, I crave Dialogue and Cohesion.

?I vow to follow up with the people who gave me their email addresses or their linked in contacts.

I am interested to see how many will ghost me, how many will pay lip service to deep transformation and how many will genuinely follow up to access such huge collective potential.

ENDS

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