Degrowth Needs Teambuilding

But there is no time for that.

That dude in the orange shirt does not look confident.

Trust fall (mansfieldct.gov)

Raise you hand if you have ever participated in a “team building” exercise as part of a business or team.

I don’t think these team building exercises are terrible. But they aren’t good either. The best teams I’ve been on, and the best interactions I’ve had with people grew out of organic interactions - sometimes over a very long time. In some cases, someone that I didn’t really like or didn’t really trust at first became a great ally in the long-term. I hope that others can say the same about me. But I don’t know - I don’t ask them. I don’t have to.

I know the people who I trust, who I work well with, who I would gladly spend years on a project with, knowing that we would eventually create something great together. The camaraderie that has built in those relationships is a beautiful thing that I treasure. But it can’t be forced.

Forced camaraderie doesn’t work. Those team building exercises don’t work. Instead, build a culture where those teams and that trust can build organically. If you force it - it won’t happen.

Degrowth has a teambuilding problem.

Though I believe that degrowth is indeed the answer to getting to a well being economy where we live within planetary boundaries, I don’t pretend to know how to get there, and I understand that when and if we do get there, it will be too late. The baseline of “today” is the best we are going to see for quite a while. It is downhill from here for humanity, though we can take the reins in order to make that downhill less painful than it needs to be.

The taking of those reigns is going to take a while. We know what the reins are, but the people in charge of pulling them don’t think that they are allowed to do so if they even want to, and many of our leaders prefer to throw the reins away. Believing the “markets will solve things” is often just a way to never take the reins, so that you never have to take responsibility.

Will someone take the damn reins already?! I am sick of this reins metaphor. Let’s move on.

I attended a Research & Degrowth meeting in May in Barcelona that was the culmination of a year's worth of online meetings so that a small group of degrowthers in the financial world could get together. The week after that I watched Gaya Herrington give a keynote speech to hundreds of people at a finance conference in Montreal telling them that degrowth was coming whether they were prepared for it or not. Two weeks ago, I attended The Degrowth Institute’s DeSchool conference in Chicago, with about 100 people from just the US gathered, to spread the word and learn. All of that is fantastic. But it is still very small.

Degrowth is not going to come from the top. It will have to come from the grassroots, and that means people sharing these ideas, talking to other people, and slowly, over time building to a critical mass that those in power can’t ignore.

But you can’t force that.

It has to happen organically.

But there isn’t time !!!

But there isn’t time for that!!!

We have already passed seven of nine planetary boundaries!!!

We are on track for 3 degrees C or warming by 2050!!!

Stop yelling at me.

No amount of urgency is going to change how these things build. I’m sorry but that is true. The degrowth movement is small. I see it growing at a fast rate, but from a small base. To accept that we need to move to a post-growth world, a hell of a lot of people have to move from denial or bargaining in the “we are fucked” stages of grief, to acceptance of our predicament. A society does not speed run that without an exogenous event.

So let’s get to that exogenous event!!!

On Monday I talked about the images of the future to build, so that when a society is ready to change, those images are ready. No one is going to hold a meeting, a conference, or a convention where the whole world decides to adopt a post-growth economic system.

That gets back to the forced camaraderie example of the corporate team building exercises. However well intentioned, at best these things slightly move the needle toward getting people to know and trust each other more. At worst they turn people off, as people generally don’t like it when they are told to build camaraderie, ordered to build trust, or coerced into being part of a team they don’t believe in.

A culture has to want to save itself. If it doesn’t want to, it won't. I know that sucks and doesn’t sound fair, but that is the way it works.

We should have gotten our shit together as a civilization, as a culture a long time ago. But we didn’t. And we still don’t have it together, and we aren’t going to next week either.

There is not going to be any meeting, conference or team building exercise that will make this happen tomorrow. I hope that we can build a movement that gets the word out to enough people, to build enough images of the future that our society, our civilization will start to build the scaffolding for a post-growth future.

That exogenous event, or a series of them will begin to happen, most likely within our lifetimes. Maybe a category 5 hurricane hits Washington DC. Maybe the AMOC shuts down. Maybe something like the first chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future takes place.

I wish it wouldn’t take events like those to catalyze a post-growth world, but it probably will. The ideas of a post-growth world have to be out there in the zeitgeist before these events happen.

So, continue putting those images of the future out there. Continue talking about these things. Continue organizing. The actions to be taken, will only be taken if the people we are being asked to change their lives trust the message and the messengers. That is a long term project.

Get to it.