How to build a world beyond money

In this episode, we explore how to start freeing our world and our lives from the myths of money

Beyond money.

It’s how most of us already run the economics of our own households.

It’s how most of us already run most of our day-to-day interactions at work.

It’s how perhaps most of us would already aim to interact with others in the wider world as well.

Indeed, it’s often only when we introduce into the picture a purported need for monetary payment that everything suddenly comes to a grinding halt. (No shortage of examples there: supermarket checkouts and train-station ticket-barriers are just two of all too many that come immediately to mind…)

“Money makes the world go round”? Hmm… – maybe more like “money makes the world go stop”?

In previous episodes here, we’ve seen that to make sense of our economics, we need to to rethink it in terms of value, rather than money; we’ve seen that we can imagine a world beyond money; and we’ve seen some perhaps worrying reasons why we need to imagine a world beyond money.

So if the money-system is colossally expensive, absurdly inefficient and ineffective, is often more of a hindrance than a help, and we don’t even need it to exist in any case, why not get rid of it?

Yet having seen that there’s a real need there, how could we make it work, in real-world practice? Is it actually possible to build a world beyond money? Even from an everyday perspective, where could we start?

One clue comes from a key theme that we’ve seen in previous episodes – that we could replace every monetary transaction with just one question: “What do you need?”. That then gives us an anchor for the ‘Start Anywhere principle’ – hence, for example, we could start from anywhere within the shared-enterprise of the chocolate-biscuit (US: chocolate-cookie) that was mentioned in that thought-experiment of ‘Imagine a world without money’:

CGI graphic by Joseph Chittenden

So start anywhere, from any element anywhere within that entire enterprise of the chocolate-biscuit: from cacao-trees to chocolate to biscuit-dough to chocolate-coating machines to metal-foil makers to delivery trucks to fuel for trucks to waste-collection, recycling, cafes, refrigeration, milk-cows, makers of grain-silos… Anywhere at all in that whole ecosystem: it really doesn’t matter where we start, because it’s an ecosystem in which everything ultimately depends on everything else.

And note that, because it’s an ecosystem within which everything ultimately depends on everything else, there is no element within that ecosystem that is ‘more important’ than anything else. It’s all one system: if we remove or ignore anything, without fully understanding what we’re doing and why, the system as a whole will fail – maybe not immediately, perhaps, but certainly over the longer-term. An important warning there…

Start anywhere: don’t worry too much about where it is. We can move from there to any other element in the ecosystem, as soon as we’re ready to do so. The most important point is that we get started at all.

And for each element – person, machine, ingredient, process, whatever – we keep applying that one question: “What do you need?” What does that element need, in order to play its part in the overall ecosystem? – usually not just once, but over and over again? How would each of those needs be satisfied, within the overall ecosystem? How might those needs be satisfied better, across the ecosystem as a whole? And how would we identify ‘better’, in what forms of value?

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One tool that’s proven useful in tackling those questions is the ‘This‘ game – a set of checklists to help find the detail we need about the elements in a context, and the relationships between them. To avoid the trap of ‘too much information’, we can simplify the game down to just three questions:

• What is This? – tell us about what element is called, what it is, what it does, and suchlike

• What are the relationships of This? – tell us about how and why this element connects to or associates with other elements, and what is exchanged between them

• What are the changes of This? – tell us about how, over time, this element changes, or is changed by other elements, and so on

So let’s put that into practice.

Everything in that whole ecosystem of ‘the chocolate biscuit’ will ultimately depend on everything else in that system. So start anywhere - any element will do. That element then becomes your initial ‘This’.

Apply the checklists to that element, to gather the information you need about that element. Whilst you’re using those checklists, keep the focus on those questions further above: about where the money-system intrudes into each interaction, and how you might replace it with a simpler ‘What do you need?’.

Keep on going with this ‘This’ until you have just enough detail to play with, for future explorations on the role and interactions of this element.

Then, from the responses you found from that question about ‘What are the relationships of ‘This’?’, pick another element as your next ‘This’, and then another, and another, repeating the same process with the checklists and so on with each new ‘This’.

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Note that this exploration is not only about structure, about how things relate with each other: watch also for the underlying shared-story that holds the overall ecosystem together, and about how the money-system tries to dominate that story. We also need that story because to change the structure, we also need to change the story. In this case, we need to create a new story that doesn’t presume that the only thing that matters is money.

Another related trap here is that we can focus so much on the detail of structure that we not only miss the story, but also the value and values that underpin that story, and that are our real concern here. To sidestep that trap, remember that each interaction is a kind of ‘mini-enterprise’ in its own right. The content of the interaction, and thence what each element does as its part in that interaction, is what we’d describe as the flow of value across that mini-enterprise. In turn, shared-values are what hold the mini-enterprise together as a shared-enterprise. We can summarise that set of relationships as follows:

• an enterprise is bounded by a story

• the stakeholders in that story are connected by a shared commitment to the vision and values of that overall story

• a ‘market’ defines a set of roles in relation to the story, the vision and the values

• a ‘value-proposition’ is a description of how an organisation (one or more stakeholder(s) in the enterprise) will aim to provide value to the enterprise as a whole, aligned to the vision, within a market role, delivered via a mission, actioned via goals, validated via metrics

We can then follow any of those associations to take us to another related element in the overall story, and repeat the same process there – on and on, to build up ‘just enough detail’ about the respective shared-enterprise and ecosystem.

At this point, though, it’s easy to get lost in the technicalities of how everything links together, as interconnected services and flows of value and so on. Sure, all of that is important to someone, yes - very much so - but it can distract us from what we need to look at here, about how to break free from the money-trap.

So step back a bit, and make a small change here: look more carefully at whatever it is that you’ve chosen as your ‘start anywhere’ point in the overall story, and explore how that part works in terms of value, not money. For example, for the chocolate, the cacao tree needs specific conditions, it needs skills in managing the trees - people who grow, harvest, ferment, roast, process, separate, re-blend, add flavourings and other ingredients, plus all the human needs. Value is added at each of those places.

Yet value is removed (and, usually, monetary-cost added) at each point where there’s an ‘entrepreneur’ - literally, ‘between-taker’ - parasiting from the flow of value. Looking at the overall structure and story of the making and provision of the chocolate biscuit, explore what small changes might help to detach those parasites from the flow of value.

One last checklist for now, to include in that exploration:

• value is created in a flow of responsibilities, passed smoothly from one person to the next

• value is lost whenever the money-system intrudes into any point of exchange, a transfer of responsibility from one person to the next - especially where a ‘between-taker’ can parasite at that point

• value is lost whenever someone purports to possess an item, because it brings the flow of value-creation to a grinding halt

The more we allow the value to flow freely, the more value is created. The more we allow possessionism to intrude, the more value is lost. It really is as simple as that. So each small change we can make to reduce those intrusions, the better it becomes for everyone.

Yes, overall, it’ll be a lot of work - a huge change. No doubt about that. And overall, a change so huge that it might at first seem impossible to achieve. Yet that huge change would consist of many, many small changes - and each of those small changes would each be entirely achievable, in its own small way. The challenge then is to link each of those small changes together - whilst also remembering to keep the money-system from intruding again into any of those connections.

So how do we build a world beyond money? In practice, it comes down to just those three themes: look at the flow of how value is created; look for any place where value is lost, wherever the money-system or any other delusions of possession try to intrude into that flow; and look for any place where we can replace those intrusions with that one simple four-word phrase, “What do you need?” - and quiet, practical, respectful response to that need.

That’s what will help us to build towards a world in which we can all live. And a world worth living in, too.

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(Note: This episode has been adapted from my post ‘RBPEA: How to build a world beyond money’, first published on the Tetradian weblog in July 2019.)