Turning the Tide through TheoryU
by Violette Ruppanner, Francois Rossier and Audrey Selian

If someone told you that you had to use your body to sense into a problem or challenge that you feel is central to the entire professional paradigm in which you work, would you agree to participate? Would you think the folks involved were slightly ‘off their rockers’ or ‘coming from another planet’? Come on, admit it. You would.

Following an experimental program shaped by the Theory U developed by Prof. Otto Scharmer and colleagues at the Presencing Institute at MIT, a group of practitioners from the Swiss development finance world came together in the months just prior to and through the COVID-19 pandemic to explore exactly this. The program and its methodology are a bit of a leap of faith; those who gave their precious time to this heavily curated process were in equal parts generous and adventurous. As it happens, a few other groups in Switzerland have also apparently been experimenting with this method whilst focused on specific problems around waste management and the circular economy; this synchronicity and adventurousness has been heartening. In some sense, perhaps it has been the experience of COVID-19 and the forcible ‘quiet’ it has brought in terms of travel and convening that has opened us to thinking differently about our everyday experience at work.

“Time to Turn the Tide” (T5) is Born

With a wink to the 5 “P’s” in the ‘people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnership’ pledge underpinning the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) undertaken by the international community in 2015, we too coined a 5-word consonant moniker to name our informal group: “T5” as in “Time to turn the tide”.

What tide are we referring to, one might ask? We mean the one that characterizes the finance paradigm in which competitive, siloed and redundant behaviors for maximization of personal gain override the logic of collective action.

We’d all attended many conferences and workshops on the topic of development and impact in the past; notably, we saw and appreciated both the intrinsic and extrinsic value of the Building Bridges week organized in 2019 by Sustainable Finance Geneva and the UN SDG Lab together with other key partners in the Swiss development finance community.

It was a great week of activity and learning. We couldn’t help but wonder, though: Are the right people meeting at the right place(s)? Are the right conversations really happening to the point where those in the business of changemaking are able to test, apply and expand their interventions at scale? It’s no shock to say that the power dynamics of mostly all such events were — and remain –the same as they have ever been. A select few are setting the frame for everyone else. Feedback loops upon which to build on the wisdom of the (intelligent) crowd are rarely if ever visible or exercised. And, most are experiencing what may be termed generally as a mirage of ‘access’ to those with influence and capital. But are these gatherings moving the needle? Is more capital flowing to the projects led by “the meek who shall inherit the earth”?

Unpacking our Present Situation

And so, within a disparate group of finance and development experts from in and around the region of Lake Geneva, we formulated a few foundational points of agreement atop which we began exploring some of the causes, drivers, motivations and incentives related to our ‘status quo’. What characterizes the system we participate in, willfully or unconsciously? What are the unspoken banks of knowledge and context that we draw upon as we engage as professionals, especially as people who identify (often personally) as being ‘on a mission’ toward making the world a better place?

To do so, most people in our sector believe that the best way is to channel more and more money (“at scale”) to selected interventions that have the potential to reduce our world’s biggest problems, as reflected in the 17 SDGs. Today, every development institution, venture philanthropist and foundation from Geneva to Singapore and back around to London is singing from the same hymn sheet about directing capital towards those goals, represented by the famous multi-colored tiles.

Knowing well that the place we live (Switzerland) is a global hub for private wealth and banking and that it strives to become a leading global center for sustainable finance, our group’s point of departure was — and is, we think — relatively unique. We are here in close proximity to many of the world’s largest banks, institutions, and leaders in finance. Seen from this privileged perch, a ‘shortage of capital’ is rarely the problem; yet, pondering what must happen for a re-organization of the feedback loops that help unlock this capital is no less challenging for our proximity.

We stumbled inevitably into a truism that few can bear to utter aloud: “… any social system […] is the way it is because the people in that system (at least those individuals and factions within that have the most leverage) want it that way” (Heifetz et al). Perhaps, this is simply a case of ‘… better the devil we know’. Alternatives to the social dynamics and decision-making structures of the loci of power in public and private development financing naturally bring great uncertainty. It does not help today that a fertile ground of misinformation risks triggering unfounded suspicions of lurking ‘socialism’ in any project that is deemed remotely ‘social’ in nature. Lest we forget that our wellbeing as a society is a function of how people and their health, work, and education are socialized.

And so, with a dozen or so individuals at the core of our group accompanied by sympathetic observers and allies, we started with formulating some questions. What is the present structure of our operating System (with a capital ‘s’) for those in the business of working towards global goals like clean water and sanitation for all? Where are the focal points for power and leverage, in practical terms? What perspectives do we apply to help us derive truths in the reality of our planetary situation? Together, our aim was not only to question our assumptions and identify blind spots, but to collectively gain a clearer sense of our operating environment — and of one another.

Walking the Talk, Literally

We met five times in varying constellations through the months of March, April, May, June and September 2020. And we worked with social technologies (3D and 4D mapping) that propelled us to actually ‘act out’ our knowledge. Thus, we tested, perhaps, the construct that “the body can’t lie”, maybe only because it’s too much to monitor, re-frame, clean up and find acceptable words for how we truly feel when we are effectively in a theatrical (embodying) mode. Working in this way offered us an unvarnished access to identifying where the ‘true’ issues lie for us as actors (and more broadly) in the ecosystem.

Some of the conclusions we came to felt transformational in the sense that we all know, and our bodies know, where the barriers are and who holds them up. Even if we are not able to act directly on these as individuals, we collectively understood that deconstructing the elements of the status quo in order to achieve better and more equal distribution of agency and influence is paramount.

T5 as an Ode to Naked Emperors

In practice, the process of re-thinking ‘access to finance for SDGs’ may well and simply mean eventually calling bullshit on a number of major institutions at the center of our universe. Provided, of course, that we know for sure that they really do act less than they talk. Preaching about financing the SDGs as though it is a matter of will in a small group of choir singers without addressing the mathematical realities of trillion-dollar capital shortfalls becomes quickly moot. And we all do get that, whether it’s conscious or subconscious. The very nature of our natures must be addressed and incentivized … to shift. It really does seem to come down to the simplicity of ‘mainstreaming impact’, once those natures have well and truly shifted. It’s worth noting that the importance of integrating nature and indigenous wisdom emerged for many of us, whether we sought it out or not. It’s interesting how primal knowledge is moved to the periphery of our consciousness when we are so very busy being professionals.

That Rising Tide

In order for us to understand how the SDGs are financed, we need to understand how progress is measured, what legal framework is applied, and which technologies facilitate practical action. In applied terms, the inter-connection between four critical components (finance, metrics, legal and technology) manifested itself strongly in the various models that the T5 subgroups built and acted out. Viewed from a complexity and interdependence perspective, those who understand which levers need to be pulled and in what direction know that these four areas present opportunities for designing the tide that will lift all boats. At some point, the idea is also to hear what those boats think about a rising tide. To push the analogy a little further, folks at the base of the revenue pyramid need not only be brought to the center from the periphery, but should be the owners and indeed stewards of their narratives when a big crowded ecosystem of development finance (bolstered by public subsidy in all its shapes and colors) is purported to be in their service.

With these exercises guiding our thought process as a group, we edged toward reinventing and redesigning configurations of work that become possible when the fog of individualism (and individual gain at the expense of others) lifts. Slowly, we began to find the ‘language’ of a number of prototypes — or solutions for testing that may translate to practical action. Some of these are emergent in game simulation formats — to help us explore ‘how things might be’ in the event we do ever succeed in deriving the win-win-wins our world needs so desperately right now.

Preliminary Conclusions

To be frank, the challenge of ‘not knowing what we don’t know’ overtook us at times in this process. Nor did we feel necessarily that our charted course ‘wants to be easily found’. As navigators for our group though, we were pointing to the unknown and hoping for the best — and we found that quite a few were willing to experiment with us and re-think at least what should be coming out of our biggest and most successful industry convenings. All that said, the experience with MIT’s Theory U method has unequivocally opened up a dimension of awareness for all who partook. It really was the equivalent of a test of collective ‘muscle memory’, or a foray into kinesiology for a whole team of people working on the same challenges every day! We have access to the blueprints of a better future right here in our own minds and psyches, and in the unlikely event one can gather a group of decision makers willing to open themselves to a crazy idea in a quiet room one afternoon — the pathways and incentives to better collaboration for a better world may just be closer than we think.