Fair for one, fair for all: calls for equity governance to design a sustainable future

Updated Feb 20th.

Fair for one, fair for all is the rally call for equity muses, mentors and leaders. This virtuous motto calls for equity governance in designing a sustainable future.

Paradoxically, equity has contradictory meanings that relate to both fairness and the ownership of financial value. This double meaning creates a challenge in educating people about what does equity (the impartiality of fairness) means.

To address what this motto means means in terms of designing a sustainable future, equity muses, mentors and leaders ask #BHAQ (big hairy audacious questions) about why fairness and sustainability are important and interdependent.

• Why are political, economic, financial, social, racial educational and gender inequities unfair to people and the planet?
• Why are systems and cultures designed to be unfair and ineffective in addressing sustainability?
• How can we redress unfairness and promote fairness to design a sustainable future?

Equity muses and mentors facilitate thought leadership mindset development through a process of self-reflection, slow thinking, dialogues and story-telling. Their collaborative and emergent learning processes enable people to cultivate distributive leadership networks, organizations and communities needed to design and build equitable and sustainable systems and cultures. This calls for developing group and peer mentoring learning platforms to scale up a distributive leadership movement for equity and sustainability.

What is the simplest definition of equity?

Equity is about giving everyone fair opportunities to achieve their highest potential. Here is a more elaborate definition.

Equity is about designing sustainable systems and cultures that give everyone fair opportunities to achieve their highest potential of healthy well-being, virtues and human flourishing.

The "game" of life is about developing rules of fair play that create a more level playing field for all.

• How do we create fair play to prevent foul plays?

This virtuous aspiration is sabotaged by the flawed human impulse of people taking advantage over others and creating policies and laws that perpetuate and perpetuate systems of isms, inequities and injustices. The game is rigged by the elites of the system. Just contrast the differential responses by the government to the Black Lives Matter protests and the Trump insurrection of the Congress.

What's missing in our public discourses? We avoid addressing what we mean by equity and fairness within politics and in the media. Fairness is a socially co-created construct made by the dominant ruling elites and not all of the people, and to their advantage.

The poem below aims to evoke slow thinking, deep learning and engaging dialogues with kindred spirits about what is equity and fairness in relationship to systems and culture.

Fair for one, fair for all

Cultivate equity governance and thought leadership development

Open closed-mindsets to transcendence and interdependence

Interconnect truth, trust and transparent accountability

Unite superheroes of equity across the world

Soar like visionary eagles on the thermals of virtues

Generate network superpower for transformation

Design learning systems and cultures for an equitable and sustainable future

Co-elevate all in common cause for the greater good

Unleash the vast ocean of untapped human potential

Practice creativity, innovate for abundance

Scale up equity entrepreneurship and economies

Exponentiate social and civic impacts

Uplift humanity through story telling about (un)fairness

Are brand mindsets inadequate?

Personal, professional, corporate and political brands are first and foremost about getting attention in our noisy world and building up reputations and wealth for a blend of self-serving and altruistic purposes.

• How can we move beyond the constraints of brand mindsets?

Purpose-driven causes and credos are based on cultivating virtues that unite people together in common cause for the greater good. Brands become secondary to the unifying cause and credo. These virtuous causes are lifelong learning journeys, and not a final destination. They enable leaders and people address a wide range of fundamental questions about fairness and unfairness.

Questions about (un)fairness address about for whom, for why, for how and for what. How well do we address the unfairness of isms? Is voting fair? Is education fair? Is housing fair? Is food supply fair? Is water fair? Is justice fair? How fair are wealth inequalities?

• What are your questions about equity, fairness and unfairness?

To address the complexities of these questions, we need to develop a story movement about (un)fairness.

• What are your stories about (un)fairness?
• How can we co-create what equity and fairness mean to all stakeholders and for all people?

Our responses to these questions are essential for building a story movement about how to design an equitable and sustainable future for greater good of all and for the health of our planet.

This calls for co-creating equity leadership, governance, economies and entrepreneurship as the heroic counter-force against sociopathic co-dependent systems of kleptocracies, neoliberalism and corrupt crony democracies.

To muse further about #WhyEquityLeadershipMatters