FIVE

Pursuing Prosperity

The Spectrum of Outcomes

Imagine a world

in which offices generate both financial return and social value. Corporations will provide vital bridges between working and living, increasing prosperity (social assets and shared value) for more people—both shareholders and stakeholders. New models of ownership and membership will emerge to empower people to feel a great stake in the outcomes that their organizations produce. It will be possible to achieve harmony between personal and social profit—even in a corporate setting.

Cascading Outcomes
Illustration by Yeti Iglesias from Mexico and Anaelle Press from Israel. After reading this chapter, consider how you might illustrate your story about the Spectrum of Outcomes.

Where the Spectrum of Purpose (chapter 4) focused on intentions, chapter 5 on the Spectrum of Outcomes focuses on results.

The results of officing should bring more prosperity to individuals, organizations, workers, and communities. In September 2020, the World Economic Forum published a report calling for a rebalancing of shareholder value with stakeholder value.¹ The WEF proposed metrics for measuring what they called stakeholder capitalism, a system in which corporations are oriented to serve the interests of all their stakeholders, including local communities. The report proposed four principles—governance, planet, people, and prosperity—to improve the ways in which companies measure and demonstrate their performance against the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

FIGURE 9:
Spectrum of Outcomes

The Spectrum of Outcomes, illustrated in figure 9, is about the value of office work and the results it produces. Spanning this spectrum between profit and prosperity reveals an opportunity to reflect on how we define value, how we organize ourselves, who makes decisions, the nature of working relationships, and ultimately our economic models.

Futureback thinking can yield clarity on these complex choices so conscientious leaders can walk the path toward a more inclusive and prosperous future reality. Choosing where to participate and how to succeed in office shock raises profound questions for all offices. The choices on the Spectrum of Outcomes are wide and nonbinary.

Value for Whom?

Many business leaders and economists² argue for a rethinking of Milton Friedman’s conclusion that the only social responsibility of business is to create value for shareholders.³ In The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy, Mariana Mazzucato sees that some players in market economies get rich by extracting value from those who create it and not adding value themselves.⁴ She argues that reevaluating the activities that create wealth will trigger a new valuation for the work, and the workers as well. In this manner, rebalancing value-extraction with value-creation, organizational outcomes can become catalysts for cultivating a healthy economy and society.

What kind of value do you want to create? Yanis Varoufakis identifies a critical difference in economic activities that create experiential value versus exchange value. Experiential value is meaningful—a wonderful dinner conversation, a beautiful sunset, fulfilling a favor for a friend. The value of these experiences is essentially intrinsic, they cannot be tangibly shared with others. Exchange value, on the other hand, is when we can receive something in exchange for something we have to offer (i.e., money for services or products). Varoufakis argues that these conceptions of value belie the confusion between goods and commodities in the modern era.⁵ He argues that goods need to go back to having goodness—filling our life with good feelings—whereas commodities need to refocus on being things (products and services) that we can exchange with others.

Defining value is at the heart of choosing where you want to play across the Spectrum of Outcomes. It enables us to choose if we are providing experiences for others or supporting the production of products or services. These are the catalysts needed to reinvigorate an ongoing commitment of organizations to improve the lives of individuals, communities, and the planet. Despite a growing enthusiasm for outcomes with greater social value, determining how to best pursue—or even measure—value can be difficult. Futureback thinking encourages leaders to consider better outcomes for society, beyond just financial performance.

Distributed Value

For many years, organizations were designed for efficiency and control, stemming from Frederick Taylor’s seminal work. But this view failed to capture the complexity of social and economic life within organizations.⁶ The realities of production and management combined with the prevailing theory resulted in workers (metaphorically and sometimes literally) who became parts of an efficient machine, designed to generate profit for owners and their shareholders—but often not social value for the larger society.

This traditional model of organizations is challenged in a world with pervasive outsourcing of production with armies of gig workers. Professor Jerry Davis, in his book The Vanishing American Corporation,⁷ points out that the number of corporations today is about half of what it was twenty-five years ago. He sees the digital transformation of economic activity as drastically reducing transaction costs and reshaping the markets for both goods and workers. He argues new models will replace the traditional company, and in response to COVID-19 the trend will only accelerate.⁸

While there are many concerns arising from the digitalization of markets—particularly the unequal distribution of wealth and the transactional relationship with those creating value—these new technologies are sparking a shift away from Taylorism toward new definitions of efficiency and new outcomes.

The decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) will become supercharged when Web3 brings more potential for decentralized governance and regulation.⁹ Cabin, for instance, is a DAO started outside Austin, Texas, to manage a set of homes. The group’s cofounder, Jonathan Hillis, had previously left a job at Instacart and built a house in the countryside. He brought friends to stay there, and they had the idea to start a residency program for other tech creators.

“We didn’t intend to be a DAO. The DAO tools were the best tools to accomplish what we were trying to accomplish”. . . . Hillis described the organization as a “decentralized city,” aiming to build spaces around the world and connect them through digital tools. . . . With any technology, Hillis said, “eventually the infrastructure becomes invisible.” Ultimately, the DAO framework matters less than what an organization actually accomplishes.¹⁰

Web3-based platforms have the potential to span this spectrum toward prosperity. These platforms enable members to own the means of production, access shared resources within the remit of their expertise, and be eligible for a fair percentage of profits.¹¹ As Aaron Dignan, author of Brave New Work and cohost of the Brave New Work podcast, writes: “the full potential of blockchain smart contracts is the basis for new kinds of on-chain organizations that resemble the open, participatory, and adaptive organizations.”¹² These technologies will not only digitalize governance but also create new models of ownership. However, Web3 and blockchain are in their infancy and many have already tried to subvert their use, so watchful waiting will be critical in the use of such new technologies.

Coupled with robotics and machine learning, decision-making in these new organizations will be quite different from traditional organizational models. With blockchain-based smart contracts, or the tokens of Web3, human managerial tasks like verifying and monitoring could fundamentally change. In a future where the need for oversight and control will be significantly reduced, leaders of organizations will be freer to choose how to organize themselves.

New Models for Ownership

A growing variety of more equitable enterprise models indicates a shift away from business models based on pure profit for shareholders toward prosperity for everyone who contributes to creating value, that is, stakeholders. The Spectrum of Outcomes provides options for sliding the scale for harmonizing between profit and prosperity.

Most companies are owner-managed, by founders, partners, or shareholders. There are other models, however, such as worker-owned cooperatives. There are many variations, with the key choice being the distribution of economic stake and decision-making power. In traditional organizational models, economic stake usually comes in the form of shares and decision-making in the form of representation. Research indicates that providing both is a powerful way to engage employees for both profit and prosperity.¹³ Marina Gorbis sees the emergence of a worldwide digital coordination economy as an opportunity for Prosperity By Design.¹⁴

A traditional corporation is a hierarchical structure owned and managed by people within a legal framework. Given the potential conflict of interest between profit and prosperity, Nick Romeo, in the New Yorker in early 2022, asked a critical question: “Can Companies Force Themselves to Do Good?”¹⁵ The answer lies with ownership, and like the nuances of value and organizational models, ownership can come in a variety of forms.

Romeo’s article highlighted the work of the Purpose Foundation. Originally launched in Germany in 2015 and in California in 2017, the Purpose Foundation advises companies to transition to a new kind of corporate structure, the perpetual-purpose trust, that can make the values of prosocial companies permanent. The foundation works with companies to either design or transition their legal structure to protect the social values of the founders. In addition, they help find investors who support this concept and are willing to back these new trust structures despite lower expected returns on their investment.¹⁶ Companies like OrganicallyGrown,¹⁷ Wildplastic,¹⁸ and Einhorn¹⁹ are signals of a new potential for steward-ownership. Steward-ownership is an example of futureback thinking in models of ownership: the owners’ vision of their company provides a permanent prosocial outcome that involves looking well into the future and then applying the tools to make this future a reality.

In the current version of DAOs, blockchain-based tokens offer members the opportunity to earn and vote, “different than any previous attempts at creating liquid democracies.”²⁰ In 2019, OpenLaw became the first limited liability for-profit DAO, named the LAO. In April 2021, Wyoming governor Mark Gordon signed Bill 38 recognizing DAOs as LLCs. These and other DAO LLCs are moving worker democracy into new models of shared capitalism for the digital age. The DAO mechanism is a signal of what may become a new model; particularly if Web3 fulfills the promise of decentralizing the web. We recommend watching this space closely as these are strong signals of changing how more equitable enterprises might be organized.

In addition, the convergence of innovative ownership models and technologies is happening with platform cooperatives. Although the usefulness of cooperatives has been challenged in the past,²¹ Nathan Schneider, in his book Everything for Everyone, illustrates that with new technology the model can help realize the important intentions of democratic decision-making and employee ownership.²² Zebras Unite is taking the platform co-op model into entrepreneurship. This community of entrepreneurs, investors, and allies is dedicated to building companies that balance both profit and purpose. It pools resources and teaches how to build more inclusive and ethical entrepreneurship.²³

New Models for Membership

Changing offices into communities with active members will require a different kind of organizational structure and technological support. A model of membership that includes how the organization can contribute to a social and secure identity gives meaning and agency to the community members. Membership restores the agency of workers and rejuvenates worker dignity in opportunities for ownership and influence. Membership allows individual workers to actively harmonize their choices on the Spectrum of Outcomes in sync with the organization itself. It combines what may be two steps in other organizations where employees do not have the influence of membership to work in concert with the organization. Membership enables harmony to be found more easily, leading to better futures of working and living.

Considering the ways to be an active member in an organization is an important catalyst of organizing for greater prosperity. It opens choices for individual workers ranging from the transactional contracts of freelancers to workplace democracy practices²⁴ and financial stakes, proportional to the value of the contributions.²⁵

In a hyperconnected world, workers still need to make a living, regardless of what the organization’s intended outcomes are. As organizations embrace the transactional model of hiring freelance experts, there is concern that officing can become an endless series of unconnected gigs, where individual workers move on to the next task for hire. But for many office workers the freelance model means they do not have to be stuck in a specific job. They can freelance to do a variety of work that appeals to them. This allows everyone to both be an expert in certain areas and a student in others. It allows lifelong learning and growth. It helps bring creativity and variety to the individual’s workplace.

Regardless of the contractual relationship, meaningful employment is based on practices that include fair compensation, good benefits, reasonable work hours and expectations, flexible schedules, and possibly remote working options. Membership benefits like health care, retirement, stocks, and other incentives should be designed to encourage collective behavior in the offices and officing.²⁶ However, in a world of freelance working, some of these traditional benefits may be provided, not by the hiring organization, but by third parties such as professional organizations. The primary form of payment from an organization to a worker for a specific task may be the only thing that resembles what happens today.

Although these practices are necessary, they are not sufficient for making work more meaningful. Nor can they instill a sense of membership in a community by themselves. These outcomes and the effort to create them will become more meaningful when they are aligned to individual aspirations and collective needs. For the individual, meaningful employment engages neurological stimulation and social cognition in more explicit ways. Although exercising our cognitive functions—like setting goals, completing, or failing at those tasks—is fundamental, both individual and collective learning will become an explicit experience when officing.

When employment choices become meaningful experiences, the way to achieve outcomes will not be about hiring. Outcomes will increase by matching opportunities to interests. Technology will match people with tasks more effectively than anything we have seen previously. This will allow both the hiring entity and the individual to connect in more meaningful ways. The review of qualifications could become more holistic, considering experience more than formal degrees, and in the process, open more resources for professional and personal development.

More clarity on what is needed will enable better aligning with what we aspire to, individually and collectively. Offering more meaningful opportunities will trigger a shift in how work is distributed. This shift can potentially open new opportunities to traditionally marginalized groups who have better knowledge of how to best contribute to the prosperity of their community.

More Equitable Economies

As markets emerged as places for economic activity, some raised a fundamental question: is social good best achieved individually or through coordinated action?²⁷ One economist, Kate Raworth, proposes a reconceptualization of economics she calls Doughnut Economics.

Doughnut Economics seeks to change our goal from surviving amid supply and demand, to thriving inside interdependent social and ecological spheres. Raworth’s image of a doughnut provides an alternative language to help us shift away from the insatiable linear models of growth. Doughnut Economics aims for the far bigger goal of the twenty-first century: “meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.”²⁸ Her model recognizes that human behavior can be “cooperative and caring, just as it can be competitive and individualistic.” Using system thinking, Doughnut Economics acknowledges the complexity and interdependency between economic activity and the social living world. It calls for turning today’s degenerative economies into regenerative ones and divisive economies into economies that distribute wealth more broadly and fairly.

These and other signals of more equitable models are all based on the assumption that economies of scale (where bigger is almost always better) will yield to economies of organization (where your ability to thrive is dependent on what you can organize). This new narrative is a catalyst intended to mobilize organizations to leverage office shock to accelerate the transition to more sustainable practices for regenerating the communities that organizations are intended to serve.

As economic models evolve and new ones emerge, signals abound that indicate measurement will look different in a more equitable economy. Many countries²⁹ are exploring new metrics to rectify the limitations of Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. GDP is the monetary value of all finished goods and services made within a country during a specific time period and includes costs and waste as economic development. It does not include informal or unrecorded economic activity, such as volunteer work, nor the value of education, leisure time, or household production. It emphasizes material output without considering overall well-being.³⁰

Equitable Enterprises

The Institute for the Future’s research on “Equitable Enterprises” is an ongoing exploration into the accelerated evolution of new models of ownership.³¹ A multitude of institutions are organizing themselves differently to distribute assets and wealth equitably among those who contribute value. The increase in stewardship and employee-owned companies signals significant change. Equitable enterprises aim to reverse decades-long policies and practices based on the idea that the only social responsibility of business is to increase shareholder profits. These enterprises bring alternative models of ownership, such as partnership, stewardship, cooperative, and commons. Their goal is to distribute value more equally, replacing the economic inefficiencies of hierarchy with more flat and transparent models.

For many mature companies, shifting to a more equitable entity will be nearly impossible. The inertia of business and organizational models built primarily for profit will render even the bravest of decision makers docile in the face of executive commitments, shareholders, and board members who are accustomed to the profit paradigms. But their future success may depend on this change.

Thinking full spectrum about facilitating the shift toward more prosperity and community benefit requires imagination to define the new norms emerging in the post-pandemic, inequitable world grappling with climate crises. Using futureback thinking will inspire the creation of new stories with narratives of a shared journey to a more equitable economy, delivering social as well as financial value to the members of the communities we serve. As more young people enter the workforce they will challenge current office practices about racial justice, gender equity, and climate impacts. They will bring their own values into the workplace and create more office shock. Only futureback thinking now will prepare organizational leaders for the impact of these workers.

A key element in considering how to transition to more social value is the focus on what we do when we work. In an increasingly virtual world, what will be meaningful catalysts for bringing people together for collective action? Choices that contribute to creating communities will be critical. Finding harmony among the choices of the spectrum will be key. The higher ground is choice, and the choices on the Spectrum of Outcomes are challenging.

An Economics of Hope

A new narrative is required to accelerate the transition to more equitable economics and enterprises. Mazzucato calls for serious reforms, including focusing the financial sector on long-run investments,³² changing the governance structures to focus less on the share price, and legally curbing the excesses of executive pay.³³ She argues that such changes can stimulate what is needed in economic models today: An economics of hope.³⁴

Just before the outbreak of COVID-19, Thomas L. Friedman wrote a column called “The Answers to Our Problems Aren’t as Simple as Left or Right: The Old Binary Choices No Longer Work.” Friedman quotes IFTF executive director Marina Gorbis when she says:

The answer is not socialism or abandoning free markets, but a vibrant state that can use taxes and regulations to reshape markets in ways that divide the pie, grow the pie, and create more public wealth—mass transit, schools, parks, scholarships, libraries, and basic scientific research—so that more individuals, start-ups, and communities have more tools to adapt and thrive.³⁵

Friedman ends his analysis by observing that “real solutions require a left-wing wrench, a right-wing hammer, and all sorts of new tools and combinations we never imagined. . . . Leave your rigid right-left grid on the hook outside the door. That’s happening locally. But tackling that nationally (or globally) is very difficult.”³⁶

Thriving does not necessarily mean growing. Alternatives for more abundance are on the rise.³⁷ The paradigm shifts of Doughnut Economics and other economic evolutions offer a spectrum of choices for brave organizations and the citizens they serve. They demonstrate that economies of organization will be more important than economies of scale. It is time to choose economic models with more hope.

Your Choices on the Spectrum of Outcomes

As you think about your own personal story across this spectrum, consider these questions:

1. How might you illustrate your story about a future with more positive outcomes?

2. What are the desired results or outcomes—both individual and social—that you are seeking from your office?

3. Who is obtaining value from the outcomes of your work and the work of your organization?

4. How might you organize yourself to increase a sense of membership among your workers? Will this call for a new model of ownership?

5. What path do you want to take in the pursuit of increasing prosperity for all your stakeholders?