Applying the r3.0 Educational Transformation Blueprint Recommendations
How r3.0 ‘practices what we preach’
After having released the r3.0 Educational Transformation Blueprint in September 2021 and having offered a series of nine articles since then and a workshop in January 2022 (see recording and slides), we asked ourselves in how far we at r3.0 have been applying the Blueprint recommendations ourselves. The anwer is: intuitively quite well, and that has mainly to do with the way we approached systemic transformation through our work ecosystem approach, offering a whole set of Blueprints that give recommendations for a systemic leapfrog. This approach benefits from having started r3.0 in 2012 with the idea to offer a pre-competitive and market-making non-profit alternative to the many insufficient approaches in standard setting, policy setting, management system approaches and reporting and benchmarking attempts. The release of the r3.0 Educational Transformation Blueprint in 2021 offered a chance for an introspective, looking back at our past and see how aligned we are ourselves with the 13 recommendations and our way of approaching them.
- Listen to the feedback of life and our planet
At r3.0 we listen carefully to the feedback of life and our planet. r3.0 wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t done that. Our ideas around an ‘ideal’ of a regenerative and distributive economy is a response to these feedbacks and tries to salvage our human shortcomings through awareness, structure and application of the collective wisdom we create through the whole set of Blueprints. In earlier articles on Medium we explained that #flattenthecurve on everything is necessary to regain balance with life and our planet.
2. Address systemic thriveability barriers
From early on we have backcasted from our idea of the ideal of a regenerative & distributive economy, and have put thriveability as endgoal of the spectrum of achievements from nano up to supra level. It became clear how desastrous our economic sytem approach is for the ecology and education, and in consequence causing social stress on so many levels. Our two slides on the “Triple-E-Failure” are, as we often hear, one of the best overviews of our collective failure in creating economic system conditions conducive to life and planet, which — if unchanged — are a deadly procrastination!
3. Provide transformative learning contexts
Since 2015 we have started to work towards a set of 9 areas that need a systemic and simultaneous leapfrog, our r3.0 Work Ecosystem. We are close to completion and have also started to develop White Papers, Opinion Papers and Case Studies to support a major revision of the r3.0 Work Ecosystem in the years from 2023 onwards.
4. Facilitate learning as a process of life
The r3.0 Work Ecosystem and its Blueprints have been developed from 2015 until 2022, with a last Blueprint on ‘Funding Governance for Systemic Transformation’ as the last piece of that puzzle to be released in September. We already learn along the go and see them as best possible knowledge at a specific moment in time. That also means they aren’t cast in stone forever and will be updated in cycles.
But what’s crucial from our perspective is that these Blueprints are global public goods, available to all and always. All Blueprints can be downloaded from the r3.0 website free of charge. This is one of our ways to facilitate learning as a process of life.
5. Imaginally explore our future potentials
As mentioned r3.0 has put a lot of emphasis in backcasting from the idea of an ideal regenerative & distributive economy. We base this ideal on Plato’s “The one can only be well unless the whole is well” definition of wellbeing, ensuring the thriveability of all. The r3.0 Educational Transformation Blueprint takes this further in exploring the 7 Learning Perspectives and is instrumental in widening our collective awareness of these future potentials.
6. Develop future creative learning systems
in 2019 r3.0 started the Transformation Journey Program, which was based on the earlier released r3.0 Transformation Journey Blueprint and organised the journey of the participants around an imaginary mountain climb, reaching the top of ‘Mount Thriveability’ and returning from there. The curriculum was developed with the collective wisdom of following Blueprint releases and will now be updated again with content from the Educational Transformation Blueprint and the forthcoming Funding Governance for Systemic Transformation Blueprints.
7. Design for regeneration and thrivability
One of the ingredients of achieving progress towards a regenerative & distributive economy is the mindset shift from shareholder and stakeholder primacy to what we call ‘rightsholder primacy’. This perspective is getting more and more recognition as it becomes clear that the stakeholder primacy idea is too weak and just becomes a prolongation of shareholder primacy with a little twist around ESG (being less degenerative) and a minimum requirement around justice (do no [significant] harm).
At r3.0 the combination of rightsholdership and all duties and obligations that are owed towards all life then translate into respecting thresholds and allocations as the necessary measurement and data points to showcase how any organisation respects rightsholdership by being in balance with fair share allocations, based on scientific or ethics-based norms. The shortcoming of ESG is the lack of accepting thresholds and allocations due to the missing mindset shift to rightsholdership. The below diagram explains causal effects and feedback loops of rightsholderhip in the way the organisation would position itself in serving thriveability and wellbeing for all.
8. Initiate and nurture third way approaches
At r3.0 we have waved goodbye to the idea of competition as the sole driver for innovation. We believe collaboration based on clear goals towards System Value Creation is crucial for human survival and the idea that nobody should be left behind. Monetary gain based on ‘destroying’ others and lifting on the back of weaker humans are impossible ingedients of a regenerative & distributive economy.
All r3.0 offers is pre-competitive, we will not be competing with others. Aligning with r3.0’s ideas is a conscious choice and binary — yes or no. What our ideas offer is that we give guidance for new markets to prosper. The fact that r3.0 is doing well after being called a ‘strange animal’, or ‘naive’, is a prompter that one can prosper in developing the ‘new.’
9. Empower collaborative agency
In 2015 we also started to offer alignment with r3.0’s thinking through the Advocation Partner Program and the Academic Alliance Program. At this moment, more than 120 organisations are using these schemes to embed r3.0 thinking into their very own value propositions. More programs are possible, think about an Investor’s Program or a Government Program.
10. Communicate patterns that connect
The development of the Blueprints have offered great insights into ways how to create, communicate and dissiminate r3.0 collective knowledge. Over time new components deriving from the principles of a regenerative and distributive economy and the work around appreciating the Commons have also lead to new ways of collaboration. We focus strongly on the Bioregion as the unit of measurement and have adopted Prosocial and Sociocracy as ways of collective work techniques.
11. Act as a thrivable learning community
Since the beginning of r3.0 we offer the r3.0 International Conferences as yearly gathering of the r3.0 community. 6 in-person conferences and two online conferences (due to Corona) have been described as ‘life changing’ and ‘unseen’ and always create a great opportunity to connect. This year’s 2022 conference will be a hybrid approach, offering both in-person attendance at the Pakhuis De Zwijger in Amsterdam and online, presenting studio quality to r3.0’s appreciated conference format.
For the first time we now also have the opportunity to offer the r3.0 conference on September 6/7 free of charge, registration is possible on the r3.0 conference website.
12. Celebrate the rites of passage moments
We use the r3.0 yearly conference as milestones of our achievements and celebrate our successes. Corona hasn’t allowed to do so for the last two years, but we are coming back from this in-person hibernation strongly, as we also celebrate the 10-years anniversary in 2022. We will look back and look forward, with a sense of urgency of what’s needed in the remaining years of this decade, the decisive decade for humanity.
13. Invest in the future of life and a thriving world
r3.0 will continue to build its Work Ecosystem alongside the necessary components for systemic transformation. Two additional activities are particularaly worth mentioning here:
- A regenerative & distributive economy needs a serious and global thresholds & allocations regime, so r3.0 is embedding a Global Threshold & Allocation Network in 2022, as a pre-step to long-term plans to establish an Global Thresholds & Allocation Council (or Commons, t.b.d.).
- r3.0 also embarked recently on a multi-legged campaign called “Transcending Incrementalism — From ESG to System Value Creation”, in which the GTAN is one of 5 essential leverage corridors. See more about the different leverage corridors on the project website.
The r3.0 Learning Journey continues
The delivery of the Educational Transformation Blueprint is just one of nine r3.0 Work Ecosystem releases, but it will help us to move forward in the ways we organise and structure our future work, communicate and scale up our visibility and influence.
