In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast, to the place where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we can all pull together, if we can all create together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And yes, I have whatever is the current head cold virus Covid nimbus thing going around. So I apologise in advance for the quality of my voice and for the occasional cough sneeze snuffle that may have slipped past Caro to get into the podcast you’re about to hear. That apart, as you will know, if you’ve listened to any of the previous episodes, I believe we exist in a world where the ultra rich are getting richer, powered by a system that we call the economy, which is serving very well to funnel power and value up to an ever shrinking core of wounded individuals who then project their trauma out on the rest of the world in a doomed attempt to feel better about being caught in a system that does not promote human well-being. So far, so very obvious. Wherever you stand on the many toxic divides in our world, the current system is clearly dysfunctional. And as far as I’m concerned, the cost of failing to change that is the sixth mass extinction, and humanity will not survive this. There are no small bands of plucky humans roaming a devastated earth when the whole ecosystem has gone down; that’s not a thing. So the stakes are pretty darned high, and the question then is how do we, who care about this, create the unity and the clarity we need to coalesce around a common cause? Explicitly, how do we create a system that aims for the long term wellbeing of all, where all is not just all of humanity now and for the generations to come in perpetuity, but all of the web of life, the human and the more than human worlds.

Manda: How, in fact, do we persuade at least a critical mass of our existing system that we as humans exist to transform ourselves and our world for the flourishing of all. That we can be self conscious nodes in the web of life, Co-creating something that the web could not do without us. That we are here for a reason and that reason is good. This week’s guest has wrestled with these questions for all of her adult life. Victoria Hurth is an independent academic who works at the cutting edge of theory and practice, to help the world clarify its consensus on these foundational issues. As you’ll hear, she firmly believes that we need to agree that our goal is the long term well-being of all, and then we need to co-create the strategies that will take us there. We don’t need everyone to sign up, but we do need a critical mass of people at all levels of our organisations, from government to NGOs to industry, to local communities, to faith groups, to families, to wherever people meet in any numbers greater than one. To this end, Victoria co-led the five year development of the global ISO standard in governance of organisations. She was technical author for the first national standard in purpose driven organisations, and is currently project leader of the development of an equivalent ISO, which is ISO 37011, that we talk about in the podcast.

Manda: Victoria is a fellow of the University of Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership, director at the Soil Association Certification Limited, and advises Planet Mark, Unitary Venture Capital, Creatives for Climate Collective and SACE, which is Italy’s national export credit agency. She advised the UN on the SDG methodology for the business reporting target 12.6.1 and has over 25 years global experience in business transformation and as a full time Associate Professor of Marketing and Sustainable Business. Which is, you have to agree, pretty darned impressive. And alongside this, she is a practising stoic. How inspiring is that? She is also, and this is the reason we’re talking to her now, co-author of a new book called Beyond Profit. This comes out in early November, so you definitely can pre-order one now. I have read it, and it is one of those potentially world changing books that lays out in absolutely explicit detail, why the old system must be regarded as dead. How slight tweaks to make it more sustainable are never, were never, going to work. And how, instead, we might craft a new system of governance that allows us to step forward into a world that does prioritise the long term well-being of all life on this planet. So here we go, with somebody who genuinely spends all of her life working in this field of total systemic change. People of the podcast, please do welcome Victoria Hurth.

Manda: Victoria Hurth. Welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this bright and sunny autumn day? You’re not in the UK, I gather.

Victoria: No, but I am in a bright and sunny autumn day in the southwest of France.

Manda: That sounds extremely nice. Brilliant. But you’re heading off somewhere else after this.

Victoria: Oh, yes. Tomorrow I go to Geneva. I’m presenting at the Global Ethics Forum.

Manda: Oh, interesting.

Victoria: Three day conference. Yeah. Which should be really good. And they’ve recently refocused around governance, which I know we’re going to be talking about, obviously. And so I’m looking forward to that. I get on a train very early tomorrow and arrive in the evening.

Manda: Well. Good woman. All right, thank you. So your book, Beyond Profits, coming out early November, will be out shortly after this podcast goes out, so people have got time to get in their pre-orders. Tell us a little bit about you and your two other co-authors, and how you personally came to be writing this book. The genesis of the book, before we go anywhere else.

Victoria: My gosh, that could take literally the whole time.

Manda: It could. So edit the highlights.

Victoria: Okay. I’m going to really shortcut that. I hope that some of it will will come out later. So on on the book, very specifically, in a more technical sense, about a year and a half ago, probably two years ago, actually, I was having two separate conversations with two different people about writing a book. And then I realised, hang on a minute, this is one book. Because, you know, for a while I’d been talking about the sort of nestedness of governance and decision making, from the individual to all the systems that we sit within, and that they’re not something different. And that what we’re seeing happening is not 500, 5000 different movements. At the heart of it, I do truly believe that there is one massive movement trying to be born, and that we have a coordination problem. That’s not to deny any of the multitude of context richness specificness or how it might morph, but there are some just foundations about the nature of the system that we find ourselves in; what’s driving the current realities we face. And in that is the genesis of what therefore we need to address in order to move forwards. And if there’s one thing that distresses me more than anything in the world, I’d say, that sort of deep frustration, is good people with good intentions whose energy is going in a direction that is not what they would have wanted or is being blocked.

Victoria: And if I feel like there’s a way that I can help unblock that energy to go where it would have the effect that they’re looking for, then I feel compelled to. So my two co-authors: Ben Renshaw is a leadership purpose coach, and he really comes from you know, mainstream commercial CEO consulting, but around being purpose driven, very much at that personal level. Then my other co-author is very much focussed in that macro level. Lorenzo Fioramonti, who used was an academic who wrote a lot on beyond GDP and the Wellbeing economy and then ended up becoming an Italian minister in the Five Star Movement and trying to put some of that into practice. And then I’m really, I’d say I’m a boundary spanner and try and bridge as much of the system as I can. And I’ve been doing that really since I’d say I was Conscious. I mean that genuinely. It’s a path I’ve just followed now for probably 35 years. I was 49 last week.

Manda: Happy birthday.

Victoria: Had we done this when we were planning to Manda, I would have been a whole year younger.

Manda: But now you have more experience because you’re a year older.

Victoria: Absolutely.

Manda: I learned fairly recently, from someone who seemed quite sane in cognitive neuroscience, that our pattern matching techniques reach their peak when we’re in our 60s. So, you know, that whole year better at pattern matching. Although having read your book and your paper on AI governance, which I hope we’ll get to, you’re pattern matching seems pretty good to me. So right at the end of the book, if I’d been your editor, I would have had this right at the start. But right at the end you have a quote from Chief Arvol Looking Horse, and I just want to read it just now, because we might get to the end and not have got there.

Manda: “Each of us was put on this earth at this time to personally determine the fate of humankind. Do you think you were put here for something less?” And just for that alone, I would read this book. And the fact that the entirety of the book is aiming to help people understand the truth of that statement felt huge to me. So we’re going to go into technicalities, but I just want to know how you came upon that quote and how you see it fitting into your philosophy. Again, this is something that could take up the entire hour, but it’s a useful angle, a good way in, I think, because it does feel to me if every human being on the planet read that and embodied it, we’d be in a different place.

Victoria: Hmm. Yes. Well, there are so many different ways I could answer that, but I think hopefully by the end of this conversation, we’ll have got to the major elements. So many people have said it so much better than me, this idea that hope is in action. Somebody said to me the other day that that the universe is hard wired for love. And it’s such an antithesis to what we’ve been told and what we’ve institutionalised, and that’s really also at the heart of the book, you know. As humans, we can be all kinds of things. We know that. We have this wonderful inner diversity that we can be for good and for self above good, let’s put it that way. And all of the manifestations of that. But I really prescribe to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. I used to quote Yoda because he said the same thing, but Elisabeth Kubler-Ross has said it in a much more serious and academic way, that we have two base emotions, fear and love, and that they are fundamentally in opposition. And so where we are doing things that we might say are ‘bad’, the source of that is fear. And the opposite of that is love. And that for me, getting very spiritual very quickly, but I was brought up a Catholic and I’m actually a practising stoic, but in Catholic terms, I always looked at, the idea of love and what did it mean? But then I realised that if we think about both Jesus and other spiritual leaders, this idea that if fear is the base opposition to love and if you can take away fear. And what is our deepest fear? It’s the fear to not be loved. And the fear of not being loved is, ironically, a fear that we are worthless and meaningless, that our life is not of use to others, because that is what it is to feel loved, to feel that you have worth in this world. And so you get right to the heart. And this is a theme you’ll see in the work that I do, is like, but can we go one level deeper? And once we get there, then we realise that, of course, Jesus is there to say you’re already loved. No matter what you do, no matter who you are, you’re already loved and you can’t take that away. And so by reducing that, you allow yourself to love. And so in that quote, that beautiful quote which I got from Chief Arvol looking horse’s daughter, a remarkable lady who I interviewed for the book and the most incredible testimonial. For me the testimonials are half the book, they reveal…

Manda: They are.

Victoria: Yeah, they reveal this norm, this bubbling up that’s waiting to be born. It’s so powerful. So really, I think that if we could fully embrace this idea that the universe is hardwired for love. It was an amazing lady called Monica Deuce, who I’ve just met, who put that in that way and that we are part of that. And that we have told, as Rutger Bregman and many others tell us, that we’ve told ourselves this story, that is the opposite. Because the potency, the potency of fear in motivating our actions in the short term is so powerful. And that we’ve told ourselves that and harnessed that and then institutionalised that. And in doing that, blocked out that other part of ourselves that’s just trying to get into every situation. And if we stood back and actually observe an interaction in the world, we’ll see that that hardwiring is everywhere. And so this idea that if we’re born for love and if love is an active thing to be in service of the good of another, and that at that point self-interest and other interests become one.

Victoria: So it’s qualitatively different to saying, well, really you’re just doing it in self-interest, because what it means is that our happiness and the happiness of everyone else is ultimately intertwined. And so that, for me, gets to the heart of that. And I’m going to pause there because I could go on to say something. I’m desperate that I hope to, because I feel like after these 30 years of inquiry, it feels like a vortex I’ve started to describe. Because as you start to kind of go through certain doors, as you go over certain hills and certain things become stabilised, but you have to be very careful to never think that they’re stable. To always treat them as though they could change at any minute. But that that provides the foundation for this other question. And then suddenly you realise that you’re reaching what feels like some foundational truths that would be very hard to then break down, and then you start to see them everywhere. Anyway, I’m probably going off…

Manda: No, this is so interesting, Victoria. It’s not where I thought we were going to go at all, but we have to come back to this. I want to know about being a practising stoic, and I think we’re going to get to the truth. But if we carry on down this rabbit hole, we may never get to the book, so let’s just take a step back and take a breath. But this is so exciting and so interesting and so much where I do want to go. So let’s go back to the book, because otherwise you and I could go off down a rabbit hole of something that matters a lot to both of us, but I think this is really useful still, to look at business. It’s an area I don’t look at a lot on the podcast because I’ve never been in business, so I don’t really understand how it works. I just look at it from the outside and two things strike me. One is it’s quite flexible in the way that governance politics is not. So we might vote once every 4 or 5 years, but then the government is basically an oil tanker and we are the butterflies that achieve nothing, whereas business can spin very fast if it chooses to one way or another.

Manda: And so it’s both potentially taking us off the edge of the climate catastrophe cliff super fast, because nobody cares about the externalities. But, if everybody in business started caring about everything tomorrow, the world would be a different place in. The politics would have to follow. So that’s where I start off and you’re very welcome to correct me. So in the book, one of the authors’ 13 year old son says, as a result of what he’s been taught at school, obviously the point of a company is to make as much money as possible. And it does seem to me that most companies see that as their foundational role in life. And actually their fiduciary duty is to pay their shareholders as much money as possible, and that it’s this logic that is destroying humanity and the biosphere, when we could in fact be a flourishing part of the whole of the web of life. And your book, as far as I can tell, is aimed at persuading the people who believe this that there are other ways to do stuff. So I’m opening a door for you to go in wherever you want with that.

Victoria: Uh, so yes, and what I hope people get first and foremost is that this is not actually about business. Well, it’s about business and all other organisations. But one of the key points is that this thing of profit, which we can also interchange with financial income, is just as applicable to charities, to universities, to government, that this is a theory of the economy. And I would go beyond that, really. If we think about what an economy is, it’s about taking resources of any kind and allocating and transforming them in a way that will, we think, optimise our collective well-being. That is ultimately what an economy is there for. And if you open up any economic textbook, paragraph 101, it could be a paragraph, could be a page, could be even a line, will ultimately say that in one way or another: the economy is there to serve society by transforming and allocating resources. And we buy into it.

Manda: Yes. Okay. Can I ask a question very quickly? Because transforming and allocating resources is not always for collective well-being. And I watch the economy around the planet, and I see no absolute no consideration of collective well-being. Unless you assume that consumption and GDP rise automatically leads to collective well-being, which is not anybody’s observed reality. Although I had a very interesting flame War on Blue Sky a couple of nights ago, when I was seriously unwell, with someone who was trying to explain to me why GDP had to continue rising because otherwise well-being was never going to rise.

Victoria: And that Manda is exactly the point. One of the key points of the book is to empower people with an understanding that that is what we’ve bought into. And that the reason why we have what we call logic one, which is essentially short term financial self-interest, is because since the 1850s, but certainly in the last hundred years, you know, post-Second World War. Basically since the rise of the Anglo-Saxon, you know, USA, UK shortly behind, manifested in the conditions in the post Second World War, but with roots going back to the mid 1800s, that were then further embedded through the Friedman doctrine. And so we end up with a view of the economy, which is based on a set of specific assumptions that say that if we all play certain roles in this system, then our collective well-being will be optimised. And it is that, it is the moralising of those toxic assumptions, because those assumptions serve to justify and moralise. Which is why, if we think about it, the average business leader will turn around whenever they’re challenged, this is my experience over many, many years, and say, yeah, but you know, we’re making money.

Manda: Yes, we are the wealth creators.

Victoria: And we’re creating jobs. Now, the reason why they feel that that’s enough is because we’ve told them that’s enough. And we’ve said to them, so a very short cut version, but it’s in the book in length, is that we assume that we are rational, self-interested people. And that it’s not for the government or anyone else, and this is where Friedman came in on the pro-democracy side, to say it’s not the job of anyone to tell people what they should want, what their well-being is. They know their wellbeing more than anyone else. As long as they’ve got maximum choice, then they will be able to optimise their own wellbeing. But businesses and organisations and we can talk afterwards about the vortex; because although the thin end of the wedge is business, we all serve this vortex. Because we believe it. Because we believe that if we have more financial income and therefore more money to spend, that we will have a better life, because we can buy our wellbeing on the market. And most importantly, if all the conditions are met, then the only thing that can increase our wellbeing is more money, especially more money vis a vis other countries. So you’re essentially in this battle for money. And hyper financialization is the fact that we have shortcutted to say, rather than well-being equals well-being, and we need to keep philosophising what that means, how we deliver it, how we achieve it, who gets what, where. Complex, difficult questions that are value based, deeply philosophical, as well as what do we mean by long term?

Victoria: And we can get into that afterwards. Because what Elon Musk means by long term is not what we do, or not what I do, and I want to know what everyone else thinks, because I don’t think we’ve had that debate. And what we mean by everyone. So when we talk about long term well-being for all, these are the three fundamentals that come up everywhere, as that goal of the economy that we assume. So I’d say the economy as we have it, for all its destruction of our well-being, is supposed to be purpose driven, which is why we buy into it. It just is the most inefficient, ineffective economy we could ever have created because it does the exact opposite. And it does the exact opposite because we’re not governing for whether the goal that we think that it should be doing is being created. And if we stop to ask that, we would realise that the assumptions that it’s been built on are so flawed that this is why the opposite is happening. But we don’t. And so really, to shortcut everything in the book is to say that instead of thinking that financial income is a proxy for well-being outcomes, and to assume that we are rational and we don’t live in a constructed world is another assumption that has to go. And as well, the assumption that harnessing self-interest leads to optimised other serving outcomes and is the basis of innovation. So I could go on with these list of assumptions, but the point is that these assumptions, especially the assumption of all assumptions, that is financial income equals wellbeing outcomes.

Victoria: What we need to do is to deeply switch that, to say no, wellbeing outcomes equal wellbeing outcomes. Money is a symbolic good, it can never be an end in itself, even a proxy assumed end in itself. It is always a means to an end. It should be liberated to be such and we should be talking about profit for all organisations. We should be using the word profit in government, in charities, in universities, because it is an excess of financial capital, and everyone needs that to pay the bills, invest in their purpose and meet the expectations of their stakeholders. And it is only ever a means to an end. And so that really is the shift. The boy, by the way, it was my son that said that. It was probably school as well as TikTok and everything else, and maybe also winding me up, because he knew the work that I did, although I’m not sure he listened at that age so much to it. But the point being that we have absorbed this. Not just that that’s the job of business, but I’d say more that we as a society have absorbed all these other assumptions at one level or another. And if we think about it, there is not one world leader, including Donald Trump, that has not grown up in those assumptions.

Manda: Sure, they’ve been around at least since the Romans. The Romans believed pretty much the same thing. You know, Nero was busy watering down the denarius with nickel so that his treasury had more money so he could do what he wanted with extra money. So this is not a recent thing. I have theories that it goes back to the dawn of current agriculture, but let’s leave those aside for the moment, partly because people who listen to the podcast have heard them a lot. One of the things we want to go on to is how do we assess wellbeing? What does long term mean? And who are ‘for all’?. But there is an ancillary to this that I think is worth highlighting, which is that it’s not simply that money is a proxy for well-being, it’s those who have the money have somehow an ethical, moral, spiritual, divinely ordained right to have more well-being than the people who don’t have the money. And that they have the right then to define how the money flows happen. It’s a question of agency. Money provides agency, and money provides power. And power and agency are not totally interchangeable, but they are considered interchangeable in the world that we have created. And partly we came to focus on GDP because Kuznets created GDP during the Second World War. But also absent the fossil fuel bubble, I don’t think we would be in the crisis we’re in at the moment. We had a concatenation of power accruing to the top during the Second World War, continuing to accrue because once those who have got it, they take it and they hold it and they’re not going to give it away.

Manda: And what’s happened in the last century, I would say, is that people who have the power, have the money, that they still believe is going to give them well-being. And up to a point, it does insulate them from the horrors of extreme poverty. They have constructed the system of flows, that is our economy, such that money is accelerating from the bottom to the top. And it seems to me money is no longer a neutral thing. Money is an agreement we make between ourselves, but money seems to me at the moment to be the commodification of suffering. And I don’t see how you can have profit that isn’t the commodification of suffering. And so I loved the title of your book is Beyond Profit. That we need somehow either to redefine money; I would be really happy if the dollar and the pound and the euro ceased to be fiat currencies tomorrow, because then the people with the current power would cease to have any extra power. We could redefine money in a totally new way. And then we would have a lot more egalitarian living. But in the meantime, how is it that money is not the commodification of suffering and that profit is okay? Does that make sense as a question?

Victoria: Um, yes. There are so many things in what you said there. Because there are different ways in which we can problem analyse this. So for example, we know that our economic system is such that if you put money in one end, it will always concentrate. There’s a great study, it’s quoted in the book, Bouchaud and Mezard, that just replicates this. And the only difference is how fast that happens. So that’s an old paper and we’ve known about the concentration of power. For me, if we were to sort of problem diagnose, and this is what the book is trying to say; for me, the problem is a problem of governance. Because ultimately, we have our worst selves, we have fears, but we have a system of governance that has been focussed on our self-interest, that has exacerbated fears, that has made it feel like you could never have enough money to be insulated from the horrors around you. Which is why wealthy people feel utterly insecure most of the time also. And the problem is that when we agreed these set of toxic assumptions, I’d say that the worst assumption is this idea that financial income equals wellbeing outcomes, I think that that is true. But the assumption that went alongside that, that is perhaps equally toxic, is the idea that you need small government, right. This is very much a neoliberal view. And this is where the potency of self-interest and fear met the inadequate governance system. And we failed as citizens, because a democracy is something that enables citizens to be the governing body. That’s what it does.

Manda: Well, a functioning democracy allows that. I’m not certain we’ve ever had a functioning democracy.

Victoria: I don’t think we have either. But again, why would we have? When governance, which is a topic that’s gone back to Plato as a real function that we’ve understood, was co-opted by the very economic system that is the problem. And it’s only when, and maybe we’ll talk about that, because I had the privilege of leading the process to create the first international standard in governance of organisations; did we have a view of governance that is applicable to all organisations that was built through a global consensus process and that is liberated from the very problem itself. So why would we be good at governing when our literacy on governance is so poor? And so I think this is the real story happening, is that governance just is. You don’t get to choose whether you govern or not. Any system is governed. Our bodies are governed. You can go from the smallest organism upwards. And by governance I mean direction. In other words, what are you seeking to achieve as a goal within what boundaries, parameters. And that sets the scene for strategy, which we could call an approach. It doesn’t matter what you call it, but it’s ‘given the choices that I have, in the context that I’m faced with; what is the best way to achieve that goal within those parameters?’

Victoria: And then we have oversight and accountability. As in, are we doing what we think we want to achieve within those parameters? And are we answerable to those stakeholders that we should be answerable for that? Now, in a system where we unleashed this potent self-interest and fear as motivators, and I mean, at the time they were like, did we really think this was ever going to go well? You know, let’s unleash the devil for good, right? This was the narrative. Did we really think that therefore, that that governance frame that was designed from the very beginning to be as light touch as possible, was somehow going to hold that system? And we’re talking, like you say, in many cases, very newly emerging democracies without a very clear sense of what governance was and about the role of different actors, etcetera, etcetera. And so I believe that in a era, and you mentioned fossil fuels, absolutely. In an era of cheap fossil fuels, what they’ve done is like opening up the doors to the sweetie shop. Everything only looks like it can get better and everything tastes nice. And now, obviously, discounting the fact for the vast majority of the world that has felt nothing like that, but for the people who are commanding the resources, the 10% of which we and anyone listening to this I’m sure are sure firmly in.

Victoria: And I say this whenever I present on this, is that we have failed in our governance duties, but understandably so. And so what we have happening now at the moment is a co-option of governance. Governance which structures decision making and it therefore makes normal, it therefore is the basis of culture. It is co-opted because no one really understands that it’s there and that if we want decisions that are aligned with our collective long term interests, we’re going to have to govern for it. And this is where we start to intersect with some of that stuff at the beginning, which is, well, wouldn’t it be better if we just made governance, you know, just let the reins go? Wouldn’t we all just find our path? And I genuinely believe that we can think about the the deeper story of humanity also through through a governance lens. I’m sure many of your listeners studied ecology. I did a master’s in environment and development, and my basis was, sort of halfway through my journey, I suppose, was deep in sustainability in a very foundational way. And we know that living systems are hardwired with what I would describe, and I’m probably describing this in a very bad way, but this is my current conclusion, that we as animals and when we were “less conscious” animals, that we were governed intuitively to act in a way that was aligned with the good of the whole. That the good of ourselves would be aligned with the good of the whole, but that we would not we would not articulate that. Just like bees that, you know, they are governed and they govern themselves, but they don’t sit there as it were, for the policy on the wall.

Victoria: When we developed a consciousness, an imperfect consciousness that led us to believe that somehow we were better, But actually what we did was we consciously implemented systems of governance that preferenced our short term interest over the interest of the whole of which we were intricately interconnected with. And that journey, you mentioned 10,000 years ago agriculture, and I think we can go back even further than that to the inklings of that consciousness. Now, indigenous groups give us a sense of what that conscious governance that is aligned with the whole might look like. But we have followed a journey of saying, you know, as probably anyone who’s read Ishmael and Story of B, you know, that we broke that contract.

Manda: Or Graeber and Wengrow, which you referenced in the book also.

Victoria: Yeah, exactly. And that we followed that journey and so by the time we get to the mid 1800s, by the time we get to the harnessing of fossil fuels and then the absolute embedding in this globalised system of organisations, and you know how big our organisations have become; we have a Conscious governance system that preferences human short term desires over long term well-being for everybody. And we are now at the end of that journey. Our toes are over the cliff edge, and if we cannot consciously alter our governance systems to being such that we have at the very outermost frame; so this is nothing about rules and laws – we get to decide that, that’s strategy. But at the outermost frame, that our organisations exist to do something with the shared resources they have access to that drives long term well-being for all in one way or another. And that can can assure us that the basis of long term well-being for all is being protected in the process. Now, I don’t think we have the luxury to not consciously do that. Ideally, if we get that in place, like with any kind of sort of Conscious framework system, maybe it’ll become so intuitive again that one day we won’t even have to call it governance. We won’t have to have any boundaries, we won’t have net zero strategies, because we’ll have gone back to becoming our wise, pure selves (and this is what stoicism also says) as part of nature, truly. But we are not there yet. And the idea that we can go there without consciously changing that governance away from what it is and to something else, I just don’t believe that that’s true.

Manda: I live in a world, partly because I have read Graeber and Wengrow, and also because I do the shamanic work, and so every morning with my morning ceremony, I dedicate myself in service to life. And I live in a frame that says, if I can be open enough and get rid of my projections and my fears and my thoughts of what should be and listen to the web, then I become a co-creator, a self-conscious node in the web of life. And my job is to then ask, what do you want of me? And respond to the answers in real time. Which is, I think, where you are aiming for also. But in the meantime, and this is a thrutopian narrative, we need to go from where we are, which is taking the whole of us off the edge of a cliff into the sixth mass extinction, to that, in a way that takes everybody on board. Whereas at the moment those with power are seeing quite a lot of benefit in creating massive toxic division, because it stops us from shifting the governance system away from the one that they prefer. Let’s leave the politics to one side. How do you see the step from basically profit driven to what you’ve called in the book Purpose Driven? Where what we are doing is in the long term aim of well-being for all. And how are we defining long term well-being and all?

Victoria: Well, starting with that last part, it took me sort of 20 years of inquiry and just saying, but what’s being said over here and what does this really mean? And where do we bottom out? And then there was just this point. So if you look at the goal of the economy, ultimately what it’s saying is long term wellbeing for everyone in that collective, that’s within whatever you define that economy. If you look at the definition of sustainability, the Brundtland definition, it is long term wellbeing for all. And I think we really went down two wrong roads. A) sticking with the word sustainability without really being clear what it was and calling it something that we value. What is it that we are saying we value? And B) by talking about the pillars and not what the pillars are there to support, which is long term well-being for all. And once we turn it to that, then we realise, oh, well, we might be able to govern for that, because we might know if we’re going towards or away from long term well-being for all. But also, like I said, it’s like if you ask enough, why is something valuable? Why is it important? Why is it good? You ultimately in my assessment, get there. And please tell me if I’ve missed something here, but this is what I’m saying. And then when you look at the definition of the mandate of government, and it’s everywhere when you look for it. And I was looking at the International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board, and it literally has this clause in it that says, and obviously the purpose of all governments is the well-being of everyone who’s its citizens and other entities.

Manda: Obviously! And yet there is not a single government I’ve seen on the planet, with the possible exception of Bhutan, who are actually doing that.

Victoria: Exactly. And then you look at the Local Government Act, because in the UK, the local government are organisations, they’re incorporated and all their powers, and they have powers to take all others out of the way that get in the way of them delivering wellbeing.

Manda: Okay. And yet we don’t know what wellbeing is.

Victoria: Well I believe that those are the three pinnacle things and you need each of them, because wellbeing you know: for whom over what, times for everyone, over the longer term. And to me these are the questions, subjective to the current population who are the current citizens of planet Earth, who have to answer that question to the extent that we are consciously acting in this world. We have to answer that question on behalf of those yet to come. Something that many indigenous people already understand. And we have to ask, what do we say is well-being? And let’s face it, it’s the most perennial question that’s ever been asked by humanity probably. We’ve got quite a lot to go on. And in our book, we also talk about all the countries and all the ways that they’re measuring and talking about this. We need to talk about long term. Like what do we mean by ‘over time’? Do we mean just for now? Do we mean 5 to 10 years? Do we mean seven generations? Do we mean more than that? Or do we mean Elon Musk and MacAskill’s longtermism where planet Earth is merely a stepping stone to our future selves, which will be our final destination now?

Manda: Do you want to unpick that a little bit? Because it’s not hard to unpick.

Victoria: Well, I’d like to say that, you know what? I’m not here to tell anyone what they should think. I am here to say we need to have a proper discussion about that, guys, in a democratic way. Because if I live in a world where the majority of people say, yeah, I’m with them, then I’d say, okay, I don’t agree. Shame I was born on this planet Earth at this time. What I really think is bad is that people with power are enacting a version of long term that we haven’t all had a debate about. And so then the third point is then for whom? For everyone. Now, when we were developing the British standard in purpose driven organisations, people were very clear that this is all life on Earth, people and planet. That’s just a way that people can connect with that term, but really all life on Earth. So really a deep ecology perspective. But again, the most important thing is that we ask and answer that, because you probably know, over the decades it frustrated me so much to see this sort of gap between development and the environment movement, because we hadn’t got in order an ends and means to an end.

Victoria: And when you put it together, you realise we are both ends and means to an end. You know? We are part of the ultimate beneficiaries of this collective well-being, but we’re also in service to this, we’re a means to that end. And it’s really important to have those things. So the summary point is there will never be an answer. It is subjective. It is the question that we need to have at the centre of the room. We need to bring it back into the centre of the room, because part of logic one is outsourcing that; that pesky annoying thing that could cause wars by talking about philosophical things. No, unfortunately we cannot outsource that and pretend that it’s just the result of what we consume. We have to bring it back into the room and answer it collectively. And that’s, I think, all we can ever do.

Manda: Oh. And yet… Okay. And this is huge. And I want to unpack this. But before we do, let’s just very, very briefly, as concisely as you can, can you express logic one, logic two, logic three. Because we haven’t. And you’ve referred to logic one a couple of times, and that does take us through the progression of the book. But then I really want to come back to what does long term mean? What is well-being? And who are we, what’s ‘for all’?

Victoria: Okay, great. Yeah. And we’ll revisit that. But obviously we’ve got good starting points. But I suppose the point is that it’s an inclusive conversation and subject. On logic one, two and three. And I use an adapted Dalys triangle, which Donella meadows then adapted. And it’s in the book, but it’s also on my website and so many resources where I’ve been leaning on this for a long time. And I actually had the pleasure of exchanging emails with Herman Daly just before he died saying, hey, I’ve been adapting your triangle quite a lot. Because he was really focussed at the macro level, and I wanted to kind of check that. And he was like, yeah. And I’m like, this explains the nestedness of this system. And he was very glad that it was being used to to go inside decision making rather than be just at the macro political level.

Manda: Just before we go any further, it’s worth telling people who don’t know that Herman Daly was the father of ecological economics.

Victoria: Yeah, exactly. And that triangle, which served to explain what a sustainable economy is. And the unsustainable economy is that we’re trapped in the middle of this triangle. And and then I overlaid the capitals framework and the essence of what was in his triangle, and then overlaid that again with governance, which is what structures our decision making. And then it becomes really clear, not just that we are stuck there, but why we’re stuck there, and why that stuckness is manifest from the individual governance all the way to the biggest system level. In other words, logic one is that we are focussed on short term financial Self-interest. So we say that financial income is the goal, but we say because it’s going to lead to long term well-being for all. But we say that we mustn’t think about long term well-being for all. That is just an emergent property. It’s an automatic consequence of the market dynamics. The job is to just focus on the financial self-interest, and everything else will take care of itself. And that on the parameters, in other words, what do you need to protect as a means to that end? The key thing we focussed on is the stocks and flows of financial capital, and they’re not the same thing. Finance is a goal, is not the same as finance as a means to a goal. They’re different ways of managing, accounting, valuing. One is which market do we go in and what do we innovate and what do we create. The stocks and flows of financial capital is do we have the right cash flow? Have we got enough money in the bank to pay for this thing? So that’s the hyper financialized world.

Victoria: And why would you not want that as quickly as possible? So it becomes short term. It isn’t actually an assumption of the economic logic that it has to be short term, it’s just a natural consequence. Then because logic one results in catastrophic undermining of long term well-being, because you’re making products and services and all other ‘solutions’  that actually are not focussed on driving long term well-being for all and are often very toxic to it. But the resource use to produce those things that are often not very good in the first place, we count the financial capital, but we don’t count the non-financial capitals. We don’t count the social and environmental systems, we don’t count the health of the stakeholders. And so that’s logic one. But logic two is instead of just saying, oh gosh, look, there’s a problem of climate change. People are telling us that we’ve got to become net zero. We’re going to lose money if customers go somewhere else because they think we’re bad. So we’d better look good, you know, and you get all of this CSR action. Logic Two is where people genuinely become enlightened and they start to say, hang on a minute, there are these things that we rely on. They are degraded, and if we don’t do something about them, then we’re not going to be able to make money in anything but the short term. But it’s nice and safe, because you don’t have to question any of those fundamental assumptions about the market. Right?

Manda: Yeah. You’re not changing the system. You’re just smoothing the system out a little bit, which actually doesn’t work.

Victoria: And also it’s perfect because the system never said it should be short term. So after the 2007/8 financial crash, that was the key response. Lots of reports were done and the final analysis was we’ve got to think long term. And if we think about ESG and all that agenda, it is basically long term.

Manda: Longish term, I mean, not Muskian long term.

Victoria: Well, this is the thing. So I often talk about immature and mature logic too. There’s a massive difference between being a little bit enlightened some of the time, about maybe climate change, maybe slavery, but not soil erosion, ocean acidification, you know, mental health epidemic. You know, all of the other foundational things. So you have to be very enlightened to get this. And you also have to be constantly battling against the fact that all your decisions are being filtered through financial self-interest, which means that all of the innovations that really could do something are off the table before they’re even set off. And in the book, we’ve got six key reasons why Logic Two is not enough. And I had to pause as to whether to spend that much time really unpicking that. But I think it’s so important because it’s the rabbit hole that’s so easy for us to go down. This is the point in the book, the argument we’re making, Logic One is dead and killing us. You can’t stay there.

Manda: You say that often: logic one is dead.

Victoria: And logic two is not enough. And if we don’t do something that’s enough, we’re going to end up in command and control.

Manda: Or we’re going to end up in the sixth mass extinction, which is coming faster.

Victoria: Well, that’s going to be that’s going to be under all scenarios. Like you say, we are pretty much in that as well as everything else. But the key thing is, I don’t see any scenario where we do not need skills in collectively governing for our long term collective well-being. I mean, in any scenario of collapse that’s going to be needed, right? And in any rise up that might happen, that’s going to be required. So this is a one for all people of all scenarios. So logic Three is your parameters, like what you protect while making decisions, that includes stakeholders, nonfinancial capitals, and social and environmental systems as a means to an end. And your goal leapfrogs over all those assumptions of the market economy to be focussed on the end goal of the economy. So it is efficient, effective. If we’re going to put this in very inclusive, because I don’t like left and right, but let’s just say in what might be classically right hand terms, we end up in a situation where we have a highly efficient and effective economy that’s achieving its goals. And by being really clear about that frame, we can get rid of all the bureaucracy that is drowning us while we plug holes in a sinking ship of something that’s not working. And I think we can all buy into that, because who wants to do that?

Manda: We’d like to think so. Okay, so this takes me to the very obvious question; I read your book and you’ve got so many endorsements from amazing people, and I wonder of the people who are currently driving the bus over the edge of the cliff, the bus that is humanity and clamping tighter and tighter and pressing on the gas harder and harder, and are still wedded to logic one because it’s where their emotional framing is at. Because what you’re saying seems to me to come down to this is about each of us individually doing the inner work. And that means you need to know that you need to. You need to know that you want to, and you need to have the bandwidth, the capacity and the facilitation to do the inner work. To get to a point where you can step from logic one to logic three, because as we’ve explored, logic two is basically tweaking the existing system, and that’s not going to cut it. We need to turn the bus into a unicorn before it crashes over the edge of the cliff and painting the wheels of the bus a different colour is not the answer. But to turn it into maybe a unicorn is not the best thing, but to turn it into something other than a bus. It needs everybody in the bus to grow up. This is a model that Bill Plotkin suggests, which is that most of us are locked in early adolescence and that we need actually a bunch of elders. And we can get to be very old, you can get to be 78 and be president of the US and still be a toddler. And we live in a system that promotes the psychopaths who are at best adolescent. How many of the people that you’re talking to who have the power to change the systems within which they exist, are capable, and want to make the shift from logic one to logic three?

Victoria: Okay, before I answer that last bit, on that first bit, because Paul Shepherd, who I read very early on, says something very similar about that.

Manda: Yes. And you quote him.

Victoria: Yeah. One of the things that’s really, I think, empowering about the governance framework is that, and we can take this down just to ourselves; it enables us to show up as our best selves as often as possible. And it allows us to hold ourselves and others to account for how we would like to show up if we were doing our best work. And so we don’t need everyone to be a grown up in a system that governs well for our best selves, you know? Because what it does is it helps us to make the the best decisions in that context, in that moment. So in other words, the system becomes the holder of the wisdom. So governing bodies, for example, every system has a governing body, and that’s like a perpetual body. That’s one of the things that makes it unique. When you enter a governing body, you are becoming part of a single decision making unit. And people can go and come, but it remains as this thing. Now it then creates, or is the holder of, because we’re all part of every governance system, but it embeds and encodes that system. Now, if that system is encoded wisely, no one governing body member even should be able to totally overturn that system. And that’s when you take it to the citizen level, where we’ve gone really badly wrong.

Victoria: Because if we were acting as citizens, and everything John Alexander says and more, you know, and all of the brilliant stuff in his book; We would be clear that we have to create the government. We are essentially hiring, in the four year cycle, it’s like hiring a new CEO who has a nice strategy. And we’re saying, yeah, we like that strategy, go on, go off and do it. But we’re not allowing them to alter the governance frame that directs that strategy. We’re the directors of that strategy. So I’ll park that there. But being able to govern ourselves well is what being more mature is about, right? Again, we can use that governance language, that we learn lessons, and we embed them in our principles about how we would like to act and show up on a consistent level. And the strength of the governance system that we have within us allows us to be able to do that. Or to fail, recognise it, pull it up, maybe change that governance system because it’s not working well enough. So that’s to the first part. Now the second part of your question was?

Manda: Who is shifting from logic one to logic three fast enough in time and creating the individual and collective governance systems that would work?

Victoria: Absolutely. So the way that I describe it is that we’re in an inert system because we have embedded logic, one so deeply into our subconscious.

Manda: For such a long time. It’s ancestral.

Victoria: Yes, exactly. But Hypercharged because we really wedded it into those global systems at a time where we globalised the world. Where it doesn’t matter to say, oh, I’m from a country that doesn’t… Still, you’re wedded to the system. And so what changes an inert system and this is where purpose nests all the way down the system, because it is only the energy that comes from being purpose-driven, where where you are in service to the good of another. Where you are alive to the problems that present themselves in relation to the good of the other. Where you educate yourself about that, where you have the persistence to show up, to learn, to deepen and not get waylaid because there’s a problem, because what else is there to do?

Manda: Solving problems, this is what we’re for and what we’re really good at.

Victoria: Exactly. And the more purpose driven we are, the more we have the energy and that virtuous feedback loop that comes with that, That enables us to be able to do that well. Like just intuitively to do that well, because I do believe we’re hard wired for it. So then the question is who? And this is where when people say like, who’s the book for? And I’m like.

Manda: Everybody.

Victoria: Everyone everywhere. And the only caveat is, because yes, ultimately everyone, but who? Those who are, and I believe they exist everywhere at every part of the system, because before I’d even really learned very much at school, I was intuiting these problems. Because if you tune in, you can see, you can you can work them out because they’re so manifest. So I believe that the book can help clear up some of the fog. It’s not there to create energy that doesn’t exist. I believe that there is enough energy that is trying to do the right thing that is embedded in people all over the world. But I have seen time and time again over the decades that energy hit a brick wall, get lost, and that that that person feels so lost in a system that is literally pulling in the opposite direction. And this is my fundamental theory of change, Manda; to envisage a future that doesn’t yet exist, with such clarity and commitment that you can encourage others to go towards this something that doesn’t yet exist.

Victoria: To do that, we need two things. To have the courage to essentially be the difficult person in the room; because this is what it really means, it means saying the unusual thing. Bringing up the thing that’s not normal. By default, it’s not normal, right? It’s a future that doesn’t exist. To do that, you need two things. I believe we need unity; we could call this coherence, community, whatever it is. Because if we think we’re the only person that wants to go there. Unless you’re a real psychopath, you just wouldn’t. So we need to feel we’re part of something, right? But you can’t unify around nothing. And I think that’s partly the case. We get a sense that we’re all going in the same direction, but we’re not really quite sure and we’re not really quite sure where we’re going.

Manda: Right. Yes.

Victoria: The clarity to say there is this system, we have designed it. It is killing us. We need to change it. And the clarity to say our best version is not going to work. Let’s not put our energy there. And to say this is what could work. But that it is so broad because it is merely saying that we govern our decisions so that they drive and don’t harm our collective long term well-being. You can’t get anything, in my view, as big as that. Everything else is strategy, and we should clear it out so that we can debate and discuss and do whatever we need to do, but that we can move forward to changing that governance frame.

Manda: Okay. I think you just defined the peaceful revolution that we need.

Victoria: I hope so. I think, by the way, this is not me. That’s the other thing to say. I feel that all I’m doing, I’ve been in service just like you described Manda. Since I was Conscious, when I would pray, it would be, tell me what the problems are. I can feel them, but I don’t understand what the problem is. How can we move forward and what can I do? And I’ve just put myself in service to that for 30 years, genuinely. And I want everyone to believe that I have nothing to gain from this. I don’t need anyone to ever talk about me or remember me, ever. It’s not anything zero to do with me.

Manda: Okay. Yes, it’s not ego. This is not Victoria ego.

Victoria: I swear to you. And if anyone catches me out doing anything that is that. Because sometimes things can seem like that, but that’s only because someone told me, oh, you’ve got to show up here doing this. Honestly, I want everyone to believe when I say, this is what I hear you all saying in different ways, with different language. And if it isn’t this, great, but what is it? Because we’d better get on with it pretty fast.

Manda: Yeah. For sure.

Victoria: And I believe this is indigenous wisdom also. That’s the other thing to say. Why the testimonials are so deeply important to me is because they reveal to me this sense of fundamental foundation for this, that we can debate the discussions. We can have different ideas, ideologies within this frame, but to see the ex-CEO of shell alongside the daughter of Chief Arvol Looking Horse alongside Philip Kotler, saying, essentially read this book.

Manda: Because this is what we need. Yes. It’s glorious and gorgeous. So clarity and unity. I don’t particularly like left right dichotomies either, because apart from anything else, we’re a tiny, tiny fraction of the whole evolution of humanity and our political differences are irrelevant. However, Steve Bannon and the right are very good at defining what they want. They want a white supremacist, patriarchal theocracy run along the lines of the Inquisition. It’s really well defined and there is nothing they will not do to get it. They have said that really clearly. Bannon was asked, a long time ago, why does the right always win? And he said because we know what we want and there is nothing we will not do to get it. And we’re all going for headshots and you’re still in a pillow fight. And so they have it clearly defined. And we’re basically going, well we want something to emerge that is in the long term benefit of all, and we don’t know quite what that looks like because it’s emerging into a new system. And by definition, you can’t tell the parameters of a new system from the old system. So we don’t really know what it looks like. And anyway, we don’t want to define it too closely because everybody has to emerge on their own. And we end up with something very fuzzy. And basically we end up with magnolia walls, because that’s what happens when you can’t all agree on one thing. And the tanks are rolling into Poland, and we’re still stabbing each other in the eye because we spelled the pronouns wrong. And somewhere along the lines, clarity and unity.

Manda: And I absolutely get the clarity of long term well-being for all. I think there’s something about the narrative of that’s the long term goal, and the rest is strategy, but laying out a few strategies so that people have a sense that there is a pathway from here to there, so that they can have a sense of this is the first step that I, an individual who is not part of an organisation, particularly, other than the greater systemic whole. And I’m struggling to feed my kids, and the rent has just doubled and the price of petrol has just gone up, and I have very little bandwidth. And I’m assailed on all sides by narratives that are telling me what to think and how to feel. And I probably very deep down want the wellbeing of all. But most of the people that I speak to who are not necessarily in my bubble, would struggle to stretch outside their own community, to people of different colours, different races, different genders, different sexualities. They’re certainly not interested in the wellbeing of the web of life unless you get something specific like, well, yes, it would be nice if the river was not full of sewage. But they’re not necessarily interested in giving the river personhood or agency, and I think that’s essential. How do we step from where we are to create enough bandwidth space for the people who are struggling, to be able to take the agency at the scale and the scope that we need? How do we create that unity and that clarity? Please define the revolution for me.

Victoria: Well, yeah. So I think that question of what do we call for that is as clear and unified enough, but that doesn’t that doesn’t just do what we’re all fearful of, which is replace one shit thing with another. And that’s why I really hold true to this outermost space. But why also the international standards work as a place for consensus building. That’s all it is. Imperfect, needs changing. But it’s a way where up to 174 countries, plus liaisons can bring their voice and where it can be revised, revised, revised. So it’s a party that the most number of people are invited to as possible, that is not owned by governments because it’s shadowing. All those 174 are arms length from government to varying degrees. Because this cannot be owned by a particular country company. So in terms of strategy, to me, the development of this ISO in purpose driven organisations, which creates the specification for the behaviours of the governance that we would expect to see in any organisation. And really clear that that includes government, which is an organisation. So if we were to say one place to start, for the average person it would be, well firstly let’s be clear; that ISO is not going to be digestible for most people and that’s fine. Because with AI, but also because we can create any number of bridging documents. Once we have the diamond at the centre, we can create all number of sector focussed, case studies, you know, explaining it. As long as that is coherent, consistent, it can be boring and geeky and hard to pen. That’s okay. The rest can do that job. And then I’d say, number one thing: that the average citizen can call on their government and say, you’re supposed to be purpose driven. How do you match to this standard? And join with others to do that, to just ask that question, to ask for accountability against acting in their collective long term well-being, which is the mandate.

Manda: Well, it is, but they don’t behave as if it is.

Victoria: But we don’t have the tools to push back on that.

Manda: But we don’t have the tools. This is the peaceful revolution, is how do we change the actual political system? Because I could talk to my MP. I used to write 2 or 3 letters a week to my Tory MP, who has now retired and been replaced by someone who makes reform look normal. And I could spend all day writing him actual physical letters and he would take no notice whatsoever. Also, he’s not in government. So I could then write to a government minister and they will ignore me, because I’m not the person pulling their strings.

Victoria: And that’s why I believe we have a coordination problem. That coordination problem cannot be resolved without clarity about what we’re asking for. Because what are you coordinating around? And so that is ultimately where the ISO comes in. And it’s so funny because of course most people have never heard of an ISO. When they think about this peaceful revolution, the last thing that they’re thinking about is an ISO. But I can genuinely explain why, as a catalyst for being able to provide the resolution to this coordination problem. In my systems brain when I think it through from all different directions; and before I say this, I am just going to say what you were saying before; I don’t know if you saw Javier Milei, the Argentinian president who’s mates with Musk and Trump and everything. It’s really worth watching. He had a platform to do a plenary note in the last World Economic Forum, and he essentially revealed the guts of their narrative and how they were defining what’s going on out there, and it fits everything with what you said. What was really clear is, he said, the system is broken. Yeah, we all agree. Everyone who’s Woke, he used Woke about 50 times, everyone who’s woke is in this system, right? Anyone who’s calling for laws and regulations, they’re all in this bad system. But over here, in this beautiful green pasture land is Trump and him and Musk, who are selling something that isn’t the broken system. And I genuinely look around and I say, you know what? We deserve this. Because all we’ve done is tweak a system that is killing us. So why shouldn’t someone turn around and say we are part of that problem? Because while we persist in just supporting it or tweaking it, we are the problem. But where is our clear pasture over there?

Manda: That was my question. Yes.

Victoria: So what that clear pasture needs to be, what I believe we need to do to define that so clearly that we can make it happen, but that is not going to then bring in a whole load of things that are going to be as bad, is a system of governance that holds itself to long term well-being for all. And the standard being built, ISO 3711 and purpose driven organisations, is the world’s first consensus view on what does it mean to govern an organisation so it drives and protects long term well-being for all, through direction, oversight and accountability? Now, once we have that down, we can then tweak, refine, we can have our debates. I mean, how wonderful would it be to have fervent debates about how we do accountability? Those are the conversations we have to be having. I see two things that that does. It says, I don’t have to know everything; it’s in that standard. I don’t have to feel like I’m not representing a global thing; it’s as representative as we can get given our systems. It can be revised if it’s wrong, I can be part of it in one way or another, and there are certain parts that need to be fixed about that. But that I can use that to ask of my community group, of my school, of my university, of my the same question, which is to what extent are you aligned with these behaviours? That is incredibly powerful.

Victoria: And the second thing is that because the fundamentals of governance, direction, oversight and accountability are nested from the individual all the way up, it means we don’t need to learn, as we’ve been told, because we’re so good at exceptionalism. For anyone who’s been in a university, you’ll just know this, right? And it took me years being in all the departments and all the disciplines. God honestly, really, really hard. Is that if we can say, wow, there’s this thing called governance, it has these fundamental foundations. And if we get literate in these foundations, we can apply this across everywhere. And that’s why when I distil it down, I’d say the two things we need to do to act now as strategy is get literate in governance and purpose. Purpose as in what is well-being? What does it mean? What do we know so far? You know, the questions that we forgot to ask about that. And of being constructed in our post-modern world where we are so vulnerable. But that’s for another podcast, Manda. So we have that purpose and then governance. And purpose governance is the technical means by which I believe we can have this peaceful revolution, because I genuinely cannot see how we can possibly do it without those things. And if I’m wrong, please tell me because I want to be working on that other thing.

Manda: No, I think you’re completely right, And I think you’re dealing with people who, first of all, have the bandwidth to take this on board. And second, maybe be able to act on it. I struggle to imagine going out into the village and saying this to people. I think we also need a story of how the world looks when that’s in place. Looks and feels. Because again, it’s very easy for a guy who wields a chainsaw on the stage, Argentine prime Minister, to say the system is broken. Everyone agrees the system is broken. And then my way of addressing this is to blame a bunch of other people, because we are also hardwired, sadly, to feel good if somebody else is being beaten up and we’re not. And that’s an unfortunate phase of our existence. I haven’t seen anyone on the right offering an actual solution, but what they’re offering is I’m going to make other people feel worse than you, and then you can feel better about yourself. And it’s a narrative that people absorb. I had a very interesting conversation in the local wholefoods shop just before I came to talk to you, and I was talking about Gary economics idea that billionaires passive income is £1 million a week at 5%, and that if we don’t do something, all of the wealth is going to be siphoned up to the top 1%. And a very nice lady serving in an organic food shop looked at me in the eye and said, yes, but there’s nothing we can do about that, is there? Because they’ve got all the money and all the power.

Victoria: And you know what, Manda, everyone says that. I’ve not met anyone. You could be the CEO. You could be…

Manda: Right. So they have got a narrative that has deeply landed in our limbic systems. And we do the post-hoc rationalisation, which is we’re in a power structure, we’re at the bottom they’re at the top. There’s nothing we can do about it. We need a narrative that says not only can we, I want I have this idea of MADE: motivation, agency, direction, empowerment. You have to give people motivation. They have to yearn for this other world. Which is not just the existing system is shit. It’s there is a better world that I have the agency, the direction and the empowerment to reach. I know how to get out of this concrete box that I’ve been locked in. First of all, I know there’s a world out there that I want, where I could party and it would be good. I know how to get to the door, and I have the runes or the locks or the keys or whatever, and I’m not so weighed down. I’m not chained to the floor in my existing concrete box. I have to have a vision. And what I’m not hearing in an ISO 3711 is a vision, yet. I completely see that at a conceptual level, it’s a good idea. It’s not hitting the limbic level that the ‘everybody else is bad and we’re going to make their life hell, and therefore you can feel better about yourself’; that hits a limbic level.

Manda: So we need to hit the limbic level with a story of what the world feels like when you have agency and connectivity, and you wake up in the morning and you feel loved and connected and proud and part of something. And you can feel that you as a human being, are making the world a better place for everything. You can lose that sense of shame and guilt about being human that that almost everybody seems to carry and then project outwards. How do we create a story that says, guys, we are self-conscious nodes in the web of life, and we could create a world where everything alive is flourishing. All we have to do is shift our focus. And here, look, here’s the governance system that allows us to do this. I think the bit that for me is missing, is that story of what the world looks like, that the governance system gets us to. Because nobody’s going to take on the governance system unless they believe that it’s leading to a place they want to get to. Does that make sense?

Victoria: Completely. And it’s a question of what is its job in that transition. And its job is to provide the foundational mechanisms that can work and that people can look at and say, yeah, I can see how this can work, and that can be applied to all levels of the system. Because that’s the bit that I think, even when we evoke this idea in people, it then has nowhere to go. So we’ve been able to do that to some extent, but it’s more like, yeah, let’s envisage a place where we all work well together and we do visualisations.

Manda: But we don’t know how to make it happen.

Victoria: Exactly. We don’t know what underpins that. So the role of the standard is to provide this solid foundation that will operationalise what it is that we want, without dictating what we want. Because that’s the other dark side of this and dark side of standardisation is, that you then end up de facto dictating strategy. And this is where, to be honest, I very happily say it doesn’t do that, Manda, but it doesn’t need to do that. What it needs is that the people who’ve been knocking at the door, trying to reach something that can work, will see it for what it is. And in my experience, if they’re genuinely purpose driven and will therefore engage, because a lot of people are wedded to things and, you know. But anyway, that they will see this as co-owned, because it is a co-owned space, to be able to then do the job of everything that you’re saying. Because we have 100 million creatives to tell these stories. And the story in one place, even in one village versus another, will be different. And it’s not for any central place to do that or to say that, but to set the frame that we can start the work now, just by applying it to ourselves. How do we direct and oversee ourselves so that we are aligned with long term well-being for all? That is the purpose driven leadership question that we can start with, and then it becomes a virtuous circle. So I think we need a critical mass to engage with this and then use their superpowers to get the next level. It’s the vortex that can hold us because it is not owned by a company or an individual, it is co-created and it can be recreated as required, right?

Manda: It can evolve as we evolve. Okay. How are we going to get the critical mass, Victoria? Because I am so on board with this.

Victoria: Well, that’s what the book is there for, right? So the book is there to serve that because no one’s going to read that standard and know all that. But the book leads, I hope, the horse to water, to say, hey, if this makes sense. And by the way, honestly, for the last 15 years, but certainly with this very particular message for the 5 or 6 years I’ve been presenting this material and testing it and being in conversations; really detailed or in the pub and with people of all walks of life, all across the world. And I can tell you that for people it’s just obvious, because it’s just logic, to be honest. And this is why I think it unifies beyond political divides as well. Because ultimately it is the base, the foundation. The book is there to cast the net as wide as possible because it really is for leaders at all levels. Which means everyone’s going to hate it because it’s never going to be how academic versus not academic versus, you know, language used and all the rest. So I ask everybody to read it with an open heart and an open mind to say, even if it’s not served up on the plate, that you would like.

Manda: Yes. Come in good faith.

Victoria: Yes. And if not this, what? And that’s really the heart of it. So this is the culmination of my 35 years are these two strategies, Manda. I have no idea if they’re going to work, but I cannot see anything better out there that I think can help. I am literally just like holding the mirror and saying…

Manda: Offering out.

Victoria: This. Like I’m reaching saturation point, guys, because it’s everywhere. But is it? Am I going mad? And then everyone’s going, yes, yes, yes, that’s what I see. So I think it’s going to take all of us, but I reach out; anyone who’s listening to this podcast, I know you must be incredibly thoughtful and therefore powerful in your spheres of influence. And I just ask you to engage and put aside any assumptions you might have about the word strategy, about a standard, about ISO, and engage with the fundamentals, because if not this, what?

Manda: Yes. And you write that in the book too. And if not us, who? And if not now, when?

Victoria: It’s classic, but it really.

Speaker3: It really is.

Victoria: I think when faced with something that could. And I think that’s what you’re saying, Manda, because when you read that, you’re like, I can imagine that that could work. People say that about reading The Ministry of the future, it’s that sort of like, oh, so if our government was run in that way, wow, so much would change. And you can imagine it. You don’t even need much more than the framework for the imagination to just go.

Manda: Exactly. To kick off. And then you just need to work out how do we get there? And that’s then every community working individually and together and collectively to do that.

Victoria: And imagine with people like Jon Alexander and Citizens, with Soli Townsend and her stuff, but everyone being able to unite that energy more coherently, bringing all the pieces of the strategy and the puzzles. Because mostly what we’re working on is strategy. And that’s great. But unless we can explain how this strategy relates to that, or whether it’s an opposing or whether it’s a complementary, and we cannot talk about strategy until we have the frame. And that’s what’s been missing.

Manda: Brilliant. I still want to talk about what it is to be a practising stoic, but I think that might be the next podcast. Victoria, I think we definitely need to book another one, because that feels like a whole other rabbit hole. And we are already at an hour and a half.

Victoria: I would love to do that, Manda. Because honestly, it’s like this vortex and once certain things, you tune into them, they are everywhere. And I’m only relatively recent. I think I was always stoic, actually. I realise some of the things I was doing when I was really young were very weirdly so.

Manda: Are you following John Vervaeke now, or are you going other avenues to stoicism?

Victoria: Oh, all sorts, but I do, whenever I get time, Practical Stoicism with Tanner Campbell.

Manda: Send me a link, I’ll put it in the show notes, because this is not a field I know much about, but it sounds really interesting.

Victoria: Oh, fantastic. He really unpicks and unpacks a lot of the foundations. It’s not a religion, but it is about the universe and everything. Essentially it says exactly the same thing. It says we are rational when we are fully in tune with nature, that we lost that rationality when we became conscious.

Manda: Because it’s a heart rationality, not a head rationality.

Victoria: Well, I’d say everything rationality. It is a governance system that keeps us in a state where we are in virtuous service of the system. And that system then serves us in a virtuous reality that we don’t have to overthink. But we have been cursed with the ability to overthink in a very partial, quite young person type way. And only a few people are able to, that we are currently ignoring, help us to get closer to what we have been running away from. It’s like we’re not like the animals. No, unfortunately we’re not. But let’s try and get back there really quickly. So anyway, I would love to because I’d say that the wisdom, that foundational wisdom, I believe it’s in us and it’s everywhere.

Manda: Fantastic. Right. We’re going to stop there. Thank you, Victoria Hurth, for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. And as soon as I hit stop, we’re going to book the next one. Thank you, my lovely this has been amazing.

Victoria: Thank you so much. What a pleasure.

Manda: And that’s it for another week. Enormous thanks to Victoria for the depth and breadth of her thinking. For the sharpness of it, for the capacity to see all the angles, to see the systems flows, to think in systems and then to think beyond systems to the core of who we are. To what it is to be human. Why are we here, each of us? Are we here simply to consume? Or could we be here to be active nodes in the web of life, creating with the web a world that is better for everything that lives however you define living? This is the core of Victoria’s book. These are the ideas that she’s wrestling with. So if you have the means, do go and get this book. I put a link in the show notes. I’ve also put a link to the Beyond Profit book community on LinkedIn and the ISO 3701 purpose driven organisations community, and both of them are alive and vibrant and places where we can share ideas. And even if you’re not on LinkedIn, if you buy it, please go to Amazon and put a review. We are still often locked in logic one, but we can use the logics of logic one to shift to logic three, which is where we have a world that we would be proud to leave behind.

Manda: So go for it. And yes, we did book another conversation. It’s going to be next April, so we can really get to the depths of what it means to be a practising stoic. So thank you Victoria. And that’s it for this week. We’ll be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and Foot and for wrestling with this week’s production. Thank you also to Lou Mayor for wrestling with the video, which was equally problematic. Thank you to Anne Thomas for the transcripts. To Faith Tillery for endlessly wrestling with the tech behind the scenes and for the conversations that keep us moving forward. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants to understand how we can craft the systemic change that we need, then please do send them this link. And if you have time to subscribe and like us on the podcast platform of your choice, it does still help the algorithm to resonate. So there we go. That’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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