In 2013 a colleague and I at the German chemical company BASF formulated the following question: Why do people in business contexts tend to act against their own value judgements? Moreover, what is it about business contexts that cause kind, intelligent people to avoid even talking about the common good? The Creator Space® program for strategic innovation and new business development was my attempt to stack the odds in favor of the common good.

Creator Space was designed to help diverse teams understand and co-create solutions for complex environmental and social challenges. These usually require collaboration among a number of players. Take technologies for the circular economy: A technology that makes e-waste, plastic, or baby diapers easier to recycle or turns orange peels into textile fibers only has a chance if value chain and public sector participants create new, mutually reinforcing ecosystems. A recyclable baby diaper is of no use if it ends up in a landfill. It has to be disposed of, collected, and composted separately. And everyone needs to win: raw material manufacturer, diaper producer, consumer, disposal company, composting company and compost user. This is no easy feat since most companies demand “drop-in” solutions that they can effortlessly integrate into existing processes at no extra cost or effort.

Creator Space was built around a structured yet flexible process that moves from co-creative problem analysis, the design of potential solution spaces, business model and ecosystem design as well as experimental implementation. (1) During the seven years I built and ran the program, we put together dozens of project teams in countries around the world. Our initial assumption was that a clear mandate to work on environmental and social challenges as well as training in the Creator Space approach and methods would be sufficient to generate enthusiasm for common good-oriented projects and help move them from early-stage ideation to business build-up.

As we accompanied and observed the initial teams, we noticed interesting differences. Compared to internal or business-only teams, diverse teams with participants from impacted communities were more engaged, more empathic, prone to listen deeply, and more focused on understanding challenges holistically. These teams developed a cohesion and motivation not seen in internal or business-only project teams. For example, a team in Chile working on organic waste included a manufacturer, a municipality, a local NGO, local households, and a composting firm. Participants in such projects tended to see profitability as a necessary condition, but not an end in itself.

In contrast, teams composed of business partners were often highly enthusiastic about working on sustainability problems, but like internal teams they tended to be technically focused and easily discouraged by both hurdles to implementation in the real world and those stemming from internal bureaucracy and decision-making gates. Many team members, we discovered, didn’t trust their management to support these out-of-the box projects. All too often, they were right.
Since Creator Space funded the projects until the business build-up phase, we decided to transfer decision-making during that period to the teams. We included operational management in defining success criteria, which teams considered when making their own go/no-go decisions. And we helped the teams develop what we called a “learning agenda” to guide product and business model development as well as go/no-go decisions. At the same time, we trained teams in the principles of non-hierarchical self-organization.

While these measures increased performance and motivation during early-stage ideation, business modelling and ecosystem design, promotion to business build-up was still decided by a handful of senior managers who controlled access to critical resources and were rewarded for their ability to generate quarterly results not a pipeline of products and services geared toward the common good. They tended to promote low-risk projects that could deliver results fast.
At the end of the Creator Space experiment, I was convinced that the best way to generate economic activity geared toward the common good was to democratize companies; embed economic activity in communities and their institutions, thus taking a whole-life approach to innovation, strategy and investment; build mutually reinforcing delivery ecosystems and educate economic and civil society actors in the principles of co-creation, learning agendas and non-hierarchical self-organization.

All of this runs contrary to the principles of corporate capitalism. We can see the results in staggering social inequality, the destruction of the environment and the climate crisis. Mainstream economists and policymakers continue to argue that (neo)liberal financial-market capitalism may need to be tweaked, but that it’s the best system we have. They propose measures ranging from voluntary business commitments over regulation to subsidy programs to improve social equity, and fight climate change and biodiversity loss. Yet to date either the tweaks haven’t had teeth or they have been defanged by corporate and financial market interests. (2)

Neoliberal, financial-market capitalism is only without alternative if we buy into its key assumptions: that people are hard wired to enrich themselves,

that individual achievement – not cooperation – brings progress, that competition incentivizes creativity, that the market is the best mechanism to generate income equity, and that economic activity relies on the triple commoditization of land, assets, and people, as well as the carrot and stick of profit maximization.

Of the many alternative economic models that have been proposed in recent decades, I have been drawn to commoning. As many recent theoretical works emphasize, commoning is a lived set of practices that we test and refine together. We can identify abstract principles that help us communicate and develop the practice further. Hence the saying, "We create commons by commoning." A few principles, however, are essential and help us understand the power of commoning as an economic model that creates space for human connection and authentic human voice. Commoning turns the temporal order of the capitalist mode of production on its head. Not production planning, production, and sale, but needs identification and mediation between individuals and between groups are the foundations for a commons-aligned production and distribution practice:

In the case of commons, …, production takes place on the basis of the clear needs and desires of people. Clarifying these needs and desires is not an easy task because they are seldom uniform and sometimes contradictory; ways in which they can be fulfilled first have to be discussed and decided on. Commons production is not a blind (inefficient, indirectly wasteful) or manipulative (intentionally wasteful, through market distortion and built-in obsolescence) form, but a conscious, directly needs-driven process. (3)

Furthermore, because commoning starts with needs and then mediates needs fulfillment between individuals and groups, sufficiency and post-growth are not mere on-top moral obligations but are built in by design, both locally, regionally, and globally.

That also means that there is no basis for coercion. Commoners contribute because they are inspired, feel a sense of belonging, have agency, or simply because there’s a job to be done. Jobs no one wants to do, don’t get done. If no one wants to work in the slaughterhouse or meat processing plant, there is less meat. If no one wants to work in a sweatshop producing polyester stuffed animals, there are none. Commoning is a radical, whole life approach. It does not divide the world into separate economic and private spheres, one autocratic, the other democratic.

In her Nobel Prize winning research on the commons, Elinor Ostrom rejects the findings of mainstream economists that common-pool resources (CPRs) will inevitably be overharvested and destroyed and must therefore be handed over to for-profit private or bureaucratic state actors for sustainable management. (4) She identifies several errors in the models of these economists. Interesting here is their use of the so-called prisoner’s dilemma game, which assumes that - like prisoners asked to testify against each other - commoners cannot talk to each other.

Her observation that people can, indeed, talk with each other, understand each other’s needs and experiences, as well as the needs of the natural environment they share, and agree on rules is not trivial and begs the question why economists compare ordinary people to prisoners in separate cells each trying to get the lightest sentence. One explanation is that their models are based on the liberal notion of the separate, autonomous self that must first enter into a social contract before it starts to build relationships and collaborate with other selves. This implicit assumption may cause them to create the theoretical underpinnings for a market-state system that creates conditions similar to those laid out in the prisoner’s dilemma game. This, in turn, may help us understand the experience of employees stuck in business-only contexts; why they tend to steer clear of conversations about the common good, and why the conversation changes when economic activity is embedded in community, civil society, and state institutions; when – as Ostrom says - they are able to make their own rules, and freely access the necessary resources.

On this reading of Ostrom, market-state capitalism feeds on and perpetuates liberalism’s false dichotomy between autonomy and community. Ostrom’s work indicates that people find their voices in community. But what does it mean to find one’s voice? Modern developmental psychology and neurobiology provide important answers that can help us move beyond this false dichotomy without giving up on the promise of human autonomy.

In The Birth of Pleasure, a new map of love, developmental psychologist Carol Gilligan writes:

My sense of the need for a new map of love came from my experience in working with girls – hearing a voice at once familiar and surprising. It was a voice that spoke truthfully about love, a voice I would subsequently hear in my work with young boys…. After writing In a Different Voice, a book showing how women’s voices change the conversation about self and morality, I remember thinking that the discussion of self and morality rests on a deeper conversation, about love. (5)

What can a concept of voice rooted in love teach us about building democratic economic practices that are geared toward the common good? Recent research in neurobiology and developmental psychology indicate that loving relationship – attuned connection – builds the foundation for a child’s ability explore the world, feel a sense of personal freedom, and – to speak with Gilligan – dare to speak what she thinks and knows to be true. There is, they conclude, a strong correlation between secure attachment in childhood, and strong relationships, collaboration as well as autonomy in adulthood. (6)

In contrast to the liberal narrative, there is then growing evidence that both individual autonomy and community have common roots, namely in emotional attunement – in loving relationship.

According to Daniel Siegel, emotional attunement becomes a mental model that the securely attached child carries with her throughout her life, forming the basis for what he calls “attuned communication.”

The capacity to achieve this attuned form of communication, sometimes called ‘affect attunement,’ is dependent on an individual’s sensitivity to signals. Parental sensitivity to signals is the essence of secure attachment and can inform us about how two people’s ‘being’ with each other permits emotional communication and a sense of connection to be established at any age. In these transactions, the brain of one person and that of another are influencing each other in a form of ‘co-regulation.’ … This is the fundamental way in which the brain activity of one person directly influences the activity of the other. Collaborative communication allows minds to ‘connect’ with each other…. Intimate relationships involve this circular dance of attuned communication, in which there are alternating moments of engaged alignment and distanced autonomy. (7)

While research on developmental trauma focuses on individual childhood experiences and the passing on of secure attachment or trauma to the next generation, Gilligan looks at how initiation into the gender norms of patriarchy (8) causes a kind of self-induced trauma. The result of initiation is a loss of connection to one’s own intuition and voice, which implies, for Gilligan, a loss of the ability to connect to others. She calls this giving up “relationship” for “relationships.”

Building on this understanding of voice, I would like to reframe the original Creator Space question:

How can we regain our intuition and voice in economic life to create economies that serve life?

In her work with constitutional law professor David Richards, Gilligan explores how – throughout history – loving relationship between equals has been a source of resistance to patriarchy, to authoritarian regimes and injustice. Loving relationship keeps us connected to our voice and intuition, and helps us use this wisdom creatively. This, they say, is why patriarchal, authoritarian regimes put such emphasis on “love laws.” The work of Gilligan and Richards then suggests that love – or as Siegel says “collaborative connection” – has the power to create spaces in which we tap our individual and collective wisdom to work toward a joint vision of the common good.

Gilligan and Richards do not conceptualize such “public spaces of collaborative connection,” but we can use their analysis to help imagine spaces of economic activity where the “unforced force of” of connection - rather than the “better argument” alone - is allowed to unfold. (9)

This brings me to the role of praxis. (10)

Practice, I argue, is the missing link that allows intuition and voice to enter the conversation, reduce fear, as well as increase agency and connection.

Various practice forms can help us create economic spaces that tap into our embodied intuition and voice, even in decision-making processes in ecosystems involving multiple groups, many of whom do not know each other directly.

At the most basic level, there are the various meditation practices brought to the West since the 1960s that increase our self-awareness, awareness of others’ states, our ability to be present with what is and build compassion for ourselves and others. Interestingly, such practices attract people from a wide range of faiths, united in the goal of building compassion, loving kindness, and connection. The Catholic monk and priest Willigis Jaeger and his disciples, including protestant minister Doris Zölls, have dedicated their lives to honing and teaching practices rooted in Zen Buddhism and integrate them with Christian contemplative practices.

Trauma therapy can support people lacking foundational experience in secure attachment, who are often overwhelmed by what they experience in meditation or prayer. The therapeutic method known as titration, the trauma therapist’s term for slowly helping their clients be with both difficult emotions and their own love for themselves and others, reveals a close link between meditative-contemplative practices and modern psychotherapy. (11)

Then there are the many non-verbal and verbal communication practices such as non-violent communication, transparent communications, contact improvisation, mediation, and affinity groups that seek to bring the embodiment, presence, and emotional attunement of meditative-contemplative practices into interpersonal relationships and group collaboration.

Finally, there are trends in organizational design such as sociocracy and agile management, which have identified mechanisms by which collaboration in and between groups can function without hierarchy and allow all voices to be heard and considered in decision making in and between groups. The organizational design principles of sociocracy mirror Ostrom’s eighth design principle, which include that when CPRs are part of larger systems, there should be multiple layers of “nested institutions.”

These practices, all of which strengthen our capacity for emotional attunement, are highly complementary and taken together offer ideas for a practical framework for commoners seeking to build democratic economic decision-making spaces based on “compassionate community.”

Looking forward: Commoning may seem radical or visionary. However, as Ostrom showed, traditional commons continue to thrive around the world. Moreover, there are numerous books with case studies of modern-day commons, which have distilled the underlying mechanisms or patterns.&nbsp(12)

1. More information about Creator Space can be found in the Harvard Business School case study „co-creating innovation“ as well as the documentary film Experiment 150 by filmmaker Thomas Grube.

2. A well-researched example is the U.S. Glass-Steagall legislation from 1933, which separated commercial and investment banking to prevent risky speculation, which led to massive bank failures and poverty during the Great Depression.

3. S. Meretz (2022): Peer-commonist produced livelihoods, in Perspectives on Commoning: Autonomist Principles and Practices, ed. Ruivenkamp and Hilton, 420.

4. E. Ostrom (1990): Governing the Commons. The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.

5. C. Gilligan (2003): The Birth of Pleasure, a new map of love, 3.

6. Gilligan builds on John Bowlby’s empirical research on the traumatic effects of parent-child separation during WWII, which was subsequently developed further by Mary Ainsworth and Mary Main, who show that children of emotionally attuned parents demonstrate what is called “secure attachment.” In contrast, children of emotionally misattuned parents have difficulty relating to their caregivers and difficulty exploring their surroundings, integrating, and learning from difficult situations. For her analysis, see C. Gilligan, N. Snider (2018), Why Does Patriarchy Persist.

7. D. S. Siegel (1999): The Developing Mind: Toward a Theory of Interpersonal Neurobiology, 70-71. Research by neuroscientist und psychologist Stephan Porges supports the hypothesis that attuned relationships are foundational for autonomy. Securely attached children are able to access the part of our nervous system called the ventral vagus, which allows us to approach difficult situations calmly through the safety of loving connection. Where there is early trauma, children and adults are steered by the defensive strategies of the older dorsal vagus, leading to freeze, collapse and ultimately to dissociation; see L. Heller (2012): Healing Developmental Trauma, 101 ff.

8. Gilligan defines patriarchy as a system in which some men rule over other men and all men rule over all women. The opposite of patriarchy, she says, is democracy; see C. Gilligan and D. Richards (2009), The deepening darkness. Patriarchy, Resistance and Democracy’s Future, 12 f.

9. See Danielle Allen’s compelling critique of Habermas‘ „unforced force of better argument“ in D. Allen (2004): Talking to Strangers. Anxieties of citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education, 53-68. Interesting for a theory of commoning is her argument that liberal political thought suffers from the „ideology of oneness,“ which is rooted in a „philosophical tradition that idealizes unanimity.“ Habermas, she argues, postulates an environment in which interest and emotions are conciliated by trust. However, he does not explain how to generate this environment of trust.

10. My use of the term ‘practice’ builds on ordinary language. We use the term to refer to actions carried out repetitively with the intention of learning or improving a skill. Practice often involves breaking down a skill into its component parts. An expert often demonstrates how to carry out a component part to achieve a desired outcome (exactness, speed, timing, sense of rhythm, etc.). A master woodworker may demonstrate how to hold a plane, a Zen master how to feel a sense of loving kindness, a dance teacher how to fall using the head’s gravity. The student then attempts to repeat what she has seen and heard in an isolated, experimental setting. By removing herself from “real-life situations,” the student has time to slow down and experience her attempts in “real time,” to contemplate and somatically integrate them. The magic happens when the student feels like she “gets it,” that it “looks” and “feels” right. The realm of practice is thus clearly separate from the realms of theorizing and of doing. Practice allows us to access what we have learned in the complexity of real-world activities. Theory can support practice but cannot replace it.

11. It is notable that in recent years there is a high level of convergence between trauma research, trauma therapy, mindfulness-contemplative practices, and neuroscience.

12. For example: D. Bollier and S. Helferich (2019): Frei, fair und lebendig. Die Macht der commons (Free, fair and alive. The power of the commons).