Sustainable Relationships

When organisations and groups are small, it is possible for the people in charge to understand the dynamics and treat everyone as individuals. The key person can have lunch with every new joiner. They may even have a role in picking all of them. Work with all of them at times. Know their names. Understand the complexity of their story. In small groups, each combination of members has its own character. Each combination of two. Each combination of three. Four. Five. When it is relatively small, you don’t need prejudice. You don’t need roles. You don’t need grades. You don’t need standardised controls and comparisons. As soon as an organisation gets beyond a certain fuzzy size, it needs to turn into an institution. Every decision becomes precedent setting. You need to be able to articulate reasons, cause, effect, and attribute value add to ensure fairness. A friend of mine regularly tells his kids, “If life was fair, you would be far worse off”. There are benefits to scale, but there is danger in turning people into numbers. Dunbar’s Number is a theoretical limit to the number of people with whom an individual can sustain meaningful social relationships. It is usually considered somewhere around 150. Who are the 150 people you understand reasonably well as individuals?

Meritocratic Rule

Meritocracy is an appealing euphemism for hereditary privilege. It is appealing because within our bubble, it makes us feel like we genuinely deserve the success we have achieved. If most of our self worth comes from our identity, crediting ourselves is the easiest way to feel good.

Incentives are the cornerstone of anything that happens. Understanding what drives us to make the choices we do. Meritocracy is appealing because it theoretically drives resources to where they are most effective. Merit rules.

Some challenges to true Meritocracy are (1) size and (2) diversity. When any organisation gets bigger than our capacity for relationships (about 150 people), we end up summarising and classifying. Instead of fuzzy decisions, precedent and fairness become important. Instead of each situation being unique, rules and standards need to be applied. This means that roles get created so not everyone is doing the same thing, and management structures get put in place so decisions can be made higher up the hierarchy.

It is no longer a Rugby Team where a Captain has to be good enough player to make the team, to maintain leadership. Where everyone understands the role of each player, and can have a view on their impact.

Most organisations are quite closeted about pay. Bonuses, Salaries, and Promotions are part of the Meritocracy Machine and yet people are doing very different jobs, under line-managers with different philosophies, adding value that is very difficult to quantify. As organisations become global, physical distance makes it more challenging to have knowledge of what is being done. As human input becomes more cerebral, there are fewer obvious quantifiable outputs, with short enough result time frames, to honestly form views on merit. Ironically, in the Public vs Private debate... the market only ends up deciding the size of the pie to split. The slices of pie end up getting split by neither a market nor a democracy. They get split by men in a room through centrally gathered information.

I believe in bottom-up empowerment. In keeping decisions as small as possible, and the decision makers as close to the action as possible. The "Spontaneous Order" that comes from releasing our Tacit Knowledge - the stuff we understand, but don't know how to communicate without deep relationships and time.

At some point in the story of Meritocracy, someone will point out that the Emperor is wearing no clothes. 

Graffiti in Tartu, Estonia

Just One Fifty

We have limited capacity. Limited time. Limited attention. Limited energy. The power of this is that we will make different mistakes. Mistakes are the foundation of resilience in an unpredictable world. With perfect knowledge of the future, doing what works again is sensible. With a complex, ambiguous, and uncertain world... small, regular, reversible mistakes are strength. 

Financial Empowerment (Ending Poverty) and Mental Health (Relationship Building) are my areas of focus. In 'Factfulness', Hans Rosling identifies five key threats we are wrestling with. Global Pandemic (the rampant spread of a disease in a connected world), World War (with weapons that could wipe us all out), Financial Meltdown (with the systems that keep us cooperating breaking down), Climate Change (where the resources and environment that sustain us breaks down), and Absolute Poverty (where Billions are excluded from the opportunities our ancestors built). These huge challenges facing 7.5 Billion people seem way to big to wrap our heads and hearts around.

It also means there are 7.5 Billion other heads and hearts facing the same challenges. The resilience, endurance, and creativity can come from everywhere. How do we narrow down and choose our own particular area of focus?

I am attempting to do that by joining others to build a Community of 150 People. 'Dunbar's Number' gives a (relatively arbitrary) number to the limit of our ability to develop stable social relationships. A group of people where you can know everyone, and know how everyone knows everyone. Where you can develop an understanding of the group's values, skills, and knowledge. An understanding of the group's story.

This should allow the ability to put names, faces, and stories to massive problems. Instead of 'X million people' don't have access to electricity, clean water, safety etc., it becomes a person. Mike doesn't have a bank account. Kerishnie doesn't know how to put a C.V. together. Thandiwe is old, and lonely. It also allows relationship building with people to be done in a sensitive, peer-to-peer, way.

We have a horrible history of 'Civilising Missions'. Where people with Saviour Complexes have attempted to spread their truth roughshod over established beliefs and strengths. Helping sensitively is hard. It is a minefield. Not to treating people as problems or projects. Regularly reflecting on the real intentions behind our actions. Unwinding our unknown prejudices.

I believe a group of 150 is sufficiently small for us to stretch ourselves. The 'Six Degrees of Separation' theory, is that all 7.5 Billion of us are connected by just 6 relationships. One knows Two, who knows Three, who knows Four, who knows Five, who knows Six, who knows Seven. That viral spread of knowledge lets what we learn benefit everybody. In a group of 150, we can try get the balance right between Local and Global. Stretching ourselves enough that we don't snap the 'Peer-to-Peer' connection. Enough common ground to see each other, enough different perspective to create a discomfort from which we can learn.

Those big risks we face are daunting. We need to break them down into bites. We need to look after ourselves, and each other. I believe that starts with Community Building. 7.5 Billion people is a lot of people to care for. How would the problem change if you focus on just One Fifty? How would you build that One Fifty?

Six Relationships

Giving Tax Payers Mugs

Framing is everything. It is the context. 'The Endowment Bias' shows that people are willing to pay less for something that isn't already theirs, than they are willing to sell the exact same thing. The experiments to show this used Mugs. Some people were offered bugs, then offered money for the mugs. Others were offered money, then asked if they wanted to buy the mugs. Our money decisions are emotional.

Modern Income Tax was introduced in the United Kingdom 1799 to pay for equipment for the French Revolutionary War. It was supposed to be temporary, and was turned on an off till it was turned off in 1816 after Waterloo. Peel brought it back again in 1842 and it became a permanent feature of the British Taxation system.

Pitt's Income Tax

The problem with Income Tax is it gives the impression that you have been given the Mug. It creates a class of 'Tax Payers' who feel entitled to make decisions about how the money is spent. It gives the impression of Givers and Takers.

With huge countries, being a Tax Payer becomes an identity and creates barriers between between people. It becomes abstract. Instead of a pool of money amongst your community, it becomes someone taking what is yours.

I prefer Consumption Taxes. To me that feels more like you are paying a fee to society for creating the opportunities that you have benefited from. You pay for something you want. Don't want it, don't pay. Income Tax feels like someone is taking something from you.

If you imagine the world/your country was just 150 people, the dynamics change. Instead of an abstract Giver and Recipient, people have names, faces, and stories. It isn't 'you vs. the Man', 'you vs. the State' or 'you vs. them'.

A group of 150 could have 75 people paying in more money than they are receiving, because they are part of a community. Instead of transactional, it becomes relational. We know that some people bring in money, and other people do other things. Suddenly people know each other, and that changes the framing.

A Community Wealth Fund (CWF) could be built up by those 150 people as an Engine for the Community. Eventually, that CWF could pay everyone a Universal Basic Income. If that went viral, a sufficient number of CWFs would ensure no one was left out of society. Not in an abstract way. In a way where we saw each other. Where we knew each other. That is a world I want to live in.

Mug Shot

Survival Models

Always have some time between thinking and sleeping, for your mind to calm down. I learnt this lesson most vividly when I was doing a course called ‘Survival Models’ at University. If you think that name is bad, it used to be called ‘Mortality’. In it, you learnt to model different states and the probabilities of moving between them. After spending a day studying this, I can remember not being able to sleep. In my head, I believed I was allowed to go to sleep once I had calculated the probability of such a transition. A nonsense problem that couldn’t be solved. I would flip between realising that, and scolding myself, and then going back to trying to solve the nonsense problem. Neither resulted in sleep.

A Self-Portrait from my Survival Models days

I had to do that course twice. I failed the final exam horribly along with most of my class. I had to transition to doing the course again. The second time around, suddenly things started to sink in better. I was able to help those doing it the first time, and in doing that I was teaching myself. Sometimes we move on from what we have learnt too quickly. Failing that exam was a blessing. I got to spend more time genuinely wrapping my head around which were real problems, and which were nonsense ones.

I am now very interested in the way Hans Rosling (Gapminder) argued that we should reframe the ‘Developing World’ and the ‘Developed World’. In 'Factfulness', he argues that the gap between the two has disappeared. That instead, we should be talking about Income Levels. He defines Level 1 as people living on less than $2 a day (about 1 Billion people). Level 2 live on $2-8 a day (about 3 Billion People). Level 3 live on $8-32 (2 Billion), and Level 4 live on more than $32 a day (about 1 Billion).

Level 4 people know very little about actually living on Level 1, but are often in a position to start trying to help. Help often comes with strings. I prefer empowerment. One of those methods of empowerment is recognising the strength that is already there. I would love to learn about more real Case Studies of the transitions between levels. How do real people get from Level 1 to Level 2. From Level 2 to Level 3. From Level 3 to Level 4. How often are these transitions happening every year? What is working? What isn't?

If we built Community Wealth Funds with 150 people on a variety of those Levels, that could be a powerful tool to create a bottom-up Universal Basic Income. People living on $32 a day, could probably kick-start transitions by ensuring no one lives on less than $2 a day. There are about as many people living on more than $32 a day as living on less than $2 a day. They could buddy up. I always prefer names and faces (real) to abstract (nonsense) problems.

I know I would sleep better as part of a Community that was looking after each other.

Early Colonies

For obvious reasons, Colonialism is associated with its most recent incarnation. A distant land with a superiority complex, on a mixture of a commercial and civilizing mission. Money and God. But we have always been wanderers. We know that every person alive descended from a single female who lived in Africa. People arrived in South America in the Paleolithic period when people grouped into small bands and went searching for food.

The early colonists wouldn't have been connected to earlier settlements other than by new wanderers, old lingering words, and a stretched supply line of physical features that adjusted to local conditions. They would mostly have been starting again.

I know how useless I am at a lot of pretty basic tasks. Mostly because I never had to learn them. Either because someone else did them because they loved me, or I could pay. I certainly don't personally know all the people who do things for me, or what doing those things for me entails. I don't even know where my food comes from.

I like the idea of a society where you don't ask anyone to do anything for you that you would not be prepared to do for yourself. That doesn't mean you have to do everything, or could do everything, but it removes the 'those tasks are below me' element.

The life of Genghis Khan, who founded one of the largest Empires the world has ever seen, was not that different from the lowest members of his original band of wanderers. Maybe just a slightly bigger Ger. As we have stopped wandering, the lives of those who stand still seem to have stretched apart.

I wonder how we would think differently if we were part of small groups of 150 people that connected us to everyone else. Names. Faces. Stories. The stuff that makes us human.

A Mongolian Ger

At Scale

'Big Solutions' take a lot of people agreeing and a strong vision of where the destination is. Bringing empowered people along with you is difficult at scale. Like herding cats, getting a bunch of strong-willed individuals to 'get on board' requires top-down control, and (strength to unsustainably overcome un-)willing followers. Complete individuality doesn't scale either. We have to cooperate given we don't live on desert islands by ourselves. There is a middle ground. Voluntary Association can scale. Pushing ourselves outside our comfort zone in who we mix with, but not so much that we break. Accepting our foibles and dark-sides as people, but not at the expense of rejecting the better angels of our nature. Micro-ambitious 'solutions' may just be questions, but the spreading of questions may be more powerful than the spreading of answers.

Accepting the dark side?

Small Changes Need Time

If forever is your time frame, you could solve a lot of problems with little changes. Most of our actions are discounted by time value. The further things are away, the less they matter. That is why we have to rush. Get rich quick. Get fit quick. Get slim quick. Small changes need time. Small changes also love time. I would love everyone on the planet to receive a Universal Basic Income, paid by Community Wealth Funds. One way to do this would be to (1) pay myself one from my engine, (2) build a engine for one other person, and  (3) build an engine building engine. If you invest a monthly amount for 15 years at 5%, then you will have built an engine that can continue paying that amount forever. I call this 'Multiplying Marshmallows'. After 15 years, I would have two engines, and could build a third. Small changes create movement. Add time, and you have a dance.

Basic Income Platform

We could crowdsource a Community Wealth Fund (CWF) to pay a Universal Basic Income (UBI). Given that it is Universal and doesn't distinguish between deserving and undeserving recipients, finding those to receive is not difficult. The harder challenge is getting buy-in for those willing to contribute. Each contributor could (1) fund their own UBI, and (2) nominate one recipient they know personally. A fully funded UBI of $3000 a year could then be allocated to recipients via a lottery system once the capital has been raised. Limiting the size of the CWF to 150 payments would mean 75 recipients. This would be small enough for everybody to get to know everybody. Those who contribute know the others who contribute. This would prevent the sense of disconnection that comes with scale. The peer-to-peer relationships provide the human glue to hold it together.

Self-Financing Community

There are two sources of income - Labour and Capital. What you get paid for your work. What you own gets paid. Half the world's population get an income of less than $3,000 a year. If a community of 150 people had 75 people with an income of less than $3,000, they could lift everyone above that level in two ways:

1) With contributions from those earning more than $3,000

2) With dividends from a Community Wealth Fund (CWF)

If living below that level was how you defined poverty, a self-financing community could end poverty in that group if contributions from that group's income, and from the group's CWF were sufficient. The bigger the group's common capital, the lower the need for this to come from contributions from others. 

With time, all the finance needed to ensure the death of poverty for this group is a CWF that get's paid enough to pay everyone a Universal Basic Income. If people don't get poorer, and the fund can earn 3% a year, that would require a fund up to $7.5 million (75 times $100,000 which earns $3,000).

If you assume the CWF starts from zero, the full amount would need to come from the 75 people earning more than $3,000. To have zero poverty, you need people willing to contribute somewhere between $0 and $3,000 each on average. The person earning $3,001 may not be willing/able to contribute. The person earning $300,000 may be willing and able to contribute a full $3,000 (1% of their income), or more.

To kill poverty, we need to be willing and able. There are 7.5 Billion of us. One way to kill poverty would be to build 50 million self-financing communities of 150.

Clock

From What is There

One way to build is to have a vision, and then fight your way through the obstacles in the way. Another way to build is to see. To give something that is already there a name. The nameless exist beyond our stories, but our stories help them exist in our minds. Naming connects us. The 150 group I am a part of is one of several that are there already. The group is (1) replicable, the idea is (2) scalable, and the purpose is (3) sustainable. Engineers bend the world to their will. I want to find fellow sculptors. To chip away and reveal the beauty beneath the stone. Like Michelangelo's, our sculptures are unfinished.

Unfinished

Community Wealth Fund

A Community Wealth Fund could finance an Unconditional Basic Income. A UBI is defined by the Basic Income Earth Network as "a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement". Over time, labour is transformed into capital. Who notionally 'owns' this capital is defined by property rights. In practice, ownership is just a number and an agreement. Our labour is transformed into capital if it is productive, and reinvested. As time passes, this capital grows and we build on it. It is cumulative. Hawking gets the benefit of Einstein and Newton. Einstein gets the benefit of Newton. Newton gets the benefit of giants. A Community Wealth Fund could formally recognise our privilege, as a clumsy best effort to give it a number. It could be built up by voluntary contributions. It could pay an equal share of the fruits out as an 'average' of a group of people's privilege. It would be tough to figure out how to do this for 7.5 Billion people. I think we can each be part of doing it for 150 people. The beautiful question is how to construct that 150? How to construct it in a way that can spread to 7.5 Billion.

Human Glue

When groups become too big, they become abstract. The story stretched. Dunbar's number is a theory that, as people, there is a limit to our ability to develop stable social relationships. This allows 'lawless' policing functions like gossip to work. It allows a culture to develop. Insurance started as a way for groups of people to help look after each other - 'Mutual Societies'. Scottish Widows, was founded in 1812 in the coffee shops of Edinburgh by a group of men worried for the sake of widows, sisters and female relatives who could be left in poverty by the Napoleonic Wars. By spreading the risk amongst each other, 'the law of large numbers' smoothed the financial uncertainty. In order to grow, many Mutual Societies demutualized, and became companies. Over the last century, the Welfare State has also taken on the role of protecting communities. Large scale provides efficiency, but it also loses something. When care becomes a number rather than a relationship, the human glue weakens.

Scottish Widows Advert - 1878

Three Challenges

I am working on an idea of building a community of 150 people. I want to simplify what seems like a bottomless pit of issues to something that feels manageable. Here are three challenges I am chewing on.

1) Scalability

The traditional tool to solve big problems has been Government. I have grown a little cynical at our ability to gain consensus for big groups. We don't come at the problem with a recognition that we are searching for common ground. Instead, voting tends to be about picking the candidate who represents our view, and mandating them to fight for our interests. As soon as groups become very big, this becomes incredibly difficult. That is why I like the idea of focusing on a small, holey group. However the idea takes shape, it still needs to be easy to copy, and likely to be copied, for it to be of 'big' value. The benefit of Big Government is its scale. It might be slow to move, but when it does, it can have a big impact. For better or worse. A bottom up idea can better control for unintended consequences, but needs to be catchy and easy to spread.

Holey

2) Common Ground

Most communities grow around a feeling of having deep common ground with people. There are lots of examples of functional communities that are incredibly powerful. My concern is the lack of understanding, conflict between, and inequality of opportunities between communities. If what I want to build is, by definition, a community that is built on the idea of challenging a lack of common ground, then that becomes incredibly difficult to build around. Poking our bubbles is uncomfortable, and something that requires deep wells of discipline. There may be some people who push deep into stressful territory to build strength, but most people take the path of least resistance. For ideas to spread, they can't just be the right thing to do. They also have to be a nice thing to do. The preferred thing to do. Easy common ground feels good.

Deep Well

3) Selection

Who gets help when so many need help? I find the Universal part of the idea of Universal Basic Income very appealing. It is a bit of a misnomer in the sense that the target is not people with money already. It is universal because 'means testing' (1) costs/wastes money, and (2) adds a stigma with recipients having to prove they need help in order to get help. If I manage to figure out how to fund 150 UBIs, the vast majority would not getting anything. It could be funded in part through Capital and in part through voluntary contributions. For the idea to be scalable, how that money is raised has to represent willingness of people to be a part of the idea. Otherwise it is just a vanity project. For something to truly be universal, it needs to be very simple and be something we recognise, and buy into. Selecting those in need may be easy, but selecting those who will help can't give false hope.

Community

A Community is a group of people sharing a particular characteristic, or certain attitudes/interests. Community is a trust tool that immediately establishes rules of engagement with someone you don't know, or allows you to build a life with people you know deeply. In the clash between global and local, this is a difficult challenge. How do you create trust, in a global world with lots of different local conventions? The 'global community' has to, by definition, be quite superficial. It has to accommodate very different communities. 

Defining a community by particular characteristic is an arbitrary rule, but it is useful as a signal that is harder to fake. The underlying attitudes/interests are the more important thing.

I am deeply uncomfortable with my community being based on people I share attitudes/interests with. I grew up in Apartheid South Africa, where the lives of people on different sides of a road can be vastly different. The idea of self-determination where a community takes on the role of self used those 'arbitrary rules' in order to embed trust. This allows communities to extend their 'circle of care' beyond themselves, but selectively, and destructively.

The world has 7.5 Billion people. We can't know those people. We can't build the kinds of relationships you need to trust people when there isn't thousands of years of deeply wired understanding to help. If the world were 100 people, we could put names and faces to those people, and start. Still, would there be enough common ground to develop deep relationships? Only 5 would be English speaking. Three English guys would mean they were over-represented. Add age as a filter and no one can be 'like me' on just three criteria.

Somewhere between the wide of Global and the deep of Local lie some beautiful questions.

100 People

Small and Tangible

The smallest country in the world by population is the Vatican City, with 451 people. China has a population of 1,386,923,384+. The World population is 7,497,007,539+. Dunbar's Number is a theory that we can maintain stable relationships with about 150 people. Despite effort, I have to admit that my '150' are probably mostly very similar to me... and they definitely don't live in one country. It is comfortable to spend time with people I share common ground with. That isn't good enough. Most of the people in my bubble are fine. They may grumble, but we like grumbling. 7.5 billion becomes too abstract to think about. I want to intentionally figure out how to put names, faces and relationships to 150 that make the issues more tangible. I am over the grumbling. I want to crack on with micro-ambitious goals. Small, achievable goals that add up.

150 UBIs

How much is enough? More. Or Less. Two and a half years ago I 'declared independence'. Later, I thought 'interdependence' was a better aspiration. Towards the end of last year, I decided to go back to work in order to help build engines to empower others to have independence too. I don't want to be a hero. I want to be a half-hearted fanatic, so I am not going back to a normal job. I would crack. I am interested in how to partner with people to help each other with whatever purpose we choose. The goal I have, is to set up a community of 150 people who each receive a Universal Basic Income. Eventually I would like this to be powered by a Community Wealth Fund. But, I subscribe to being micro-ambitious, so my first goal is to figure out how to finance one. Then two. I will think aloud, so please feel free to copy, contribute, critique and collaborate. We have to start somewhere.

Building a Community

At some stage I would like to start a company. I have been plotting for years with some friends. The name of this company has shifted from 'Happiness Inc' to 'Savour Centre' to 'Muse'. The name doesn't really matter, nor does the company. What I am interested in is how we go about community building.

150 People

There is a magic number below which a group of people can know each other, and know how the others know each other. This reduced size also means Tacit Knowledge can be shared. Tacit Knowledge is the stuff we know, but don't necessarily even know we know. Tacit Knowledge is the stuff that can't be explained other than through interaction. We can learn from each other by spending time with each other. Tacit Knowledge is the reason honesty isn't about telling the truth in words, it is about spending time with people. 

Sustainable Community Wealth Fund 

I would like this company to be able to pay everyone a Universal Basic Income. This income would be independent of whether they showed up at work. It would have no strings. It would be for life. I would like the company to be able to build up a fund to be able to support this independently of any other activity. Like a Sovereign Wealth Fund. This fund would act as a muse for the ideas that get generated. The company would be free from thinking only about ideas that can be monetised. Someone's job may then be to visit people in Retirement Homes. Someone else may work as a sport's coach in poorer communities. A UBI would free members of the community to lift their eyes from living hand to mouth.

Representative

We tend to end up working largely with people with similar skill sets. There may be some variety, but only where those are seen as complementary to each other in pursuit of a very narrow shared goal. I would like this company to be able to break down the obstacles the people in it have to understanding other people in the world. It should be diverse enough to open paths of communication between different world views. The hiring process at most companies is a filter, trying to find 'the best of the best'. This type of hiring process reinforces the walls between us. I would want to build a community that helps us see each other.

Relationship Focused

Most of our grand plans have unintended consequences. The world is too complicated for us to understand in any other way than our own chosen story. If we can be micro-ambitious, and work on the relationships between any two random people, I believe we can tap into the tacit knowledge we have. If interactions encourage creativity, reward creativity and constrain activity that doesn't benefit both people - the knock on effect to the broader community can only be positive. I believe the big problems will solve themselves if we focus on creating more friendships.

Catalyst

'Utopia for Realists' talks about a 15 hour work week. Some people would still work 60-100 hours even if they didn't have to. They love their jobs. My concern is that sometimes work becomes a default and we lose perspective about the other things that matter. We become defined by our jobs. We become seduced by our success. I would want to see a company that enhances the other aspects of peoples lives. That supports and strengthens other relationships. I like to see work as a catalyst for life.

Building Communities = Building Meaning

Starts With Two

We like the idea of fairness. People shouldn't take advantage of others. Experiments have shown people are actually willing to pay to punish people, even if that leaves them worse off. One of the bits of the Sharing Economy and Gift Economy that I like is they remove the idea of accounting. They reduce concern about fairness. It ceases to be transactional. It isn't quite blind one-sided giving. There is faith that the community you belong to will be something you can participate in, but you aren't giving in order to receive. You are giving with as close to zero expectation as is humanly possible.

Hayek writes about creating a society that focuses on enhancing spontaneous order. When we try plan things, we have no idea what the unintended consequences will be. We can't predict the future. Things seldom work out as planned. Yet we can focus on how people coordinate in intricate and mutually considerate ways. In other words, we can focus on individual relationships. 

He uses the example of the price of Rice. The question of what the right price of Rice is, is impossible to answer. There is no correct answer. Things that may seem unrelated may affect the price of Rice. The cost of drilling. New substitutes. Political unrest. Weather. Distribution. Exchange Rates. The Labour costs are only one little part. All this information gets summarised in two people deciding to swap rice for money. If both people feel okay with the trade, if both people feel like they have gained, no more information is needed. Everyone is better off. There is no such thing as the right price, there is such a thing as a good trade.

I often feel overwhelmed with all the big problems facing the world. I have growing conviction that we don't need a plan to solve these issues. We don't need to be able to visualise the world we want to live and, and figure out a plan to get there. Those dreams are fun, but we don't have the understanding or the ability to bend the world to our individual wills. Our individual wills and dreams aren't even the same. What we can focus on is the individual relationships.

Take any two people in the world at random. What are the obstacles to those two people being able to understand each other's worlds? What are the obstacles to those two people communicating? What are the obstacles to those to people engaging in activities where both walking away better off for it? Fairness becomes a much easier thing to understand when it involves two people with names. Two people with stories. Two people with people, places and things that matter to them.

The solution starts with two.

The Power of Sport

Creating opportunities for community building is hard. It is very tempting for us to spend time with people who are the same as us. I am very guilty. If the world was just 150 representative people, only 7 would speak English as their first language. Including a couple of lighties and a couple of very wrinklies. 3.5 ladies. My world is very mirror like. Sport provides a magic catalyst to build relationships. Every Friday at 5pm, Langa Hockey Club hosts a 5km run through the streets. Townships were designed to keep people separate, it would be a wonderful thing if their lasting legacy is of teaching us about community.

Langa Cricket, Rugby, and Hockey grounds

The Home of Temba Bavuma (Cricket) and Thami Tsolekile (Hockey & Cricket International)