A note from the author giving permission to download this material.
You are
free to download this draft of my book, which is due for publication by Profile in the summer
of 2007. Please read it, comment
on it or pass it on to your friends, but I would be grateful if you referenced it, if you use ideas
from it in anything
you write. If you want to comment
on it please
do so through the website:
wethinkthebook.com
Thanks
Charlie
Leadbeater
Note* This is written to British audiences with knowledge of India. The spelling and names are a bit strange to Yanks but the main point of the author is interesting.
Chapter 1 – Going Barefoot
They used to have to close when the sun went down,
the shops in the little village
of Bahurva in the Indian state of Bihar.When darkness fell virtually everything had to come to a halt – work, reading,
cooking – because the village
had no electricity. Ritma Bharti
has changed all that. Largely thanks
to Ritma more than 750 solar powered
lanterns have been installed in shops, schools, irrigation facilities and medical
centres. Now thanks
to the lanterns that Ritma built and maintains children learn to read at night,
nurses can see patients and shops, like the one run by Ritma’s husband, can stay open
late into the evening.
Ritma does not
have a degree
in solar power engineering. She has no paper qualifications. Indeed, she can barely read, write and count. Ritma is an alumni of a remarkable educational institution in a village
called Tilonia, in Rajasthan, called the Barefoot
College, which was set up in 1971
by Sanjit Bunker Roy after a famine
in Bihar that killed thousands
of people. Roy turned
his back on his life
as the son of a wealthy Delhi family to set up an institution that would give
India’s illiterate villagers greater control over their
lives by helping them to learn how to provide heat,
light, clean water and food for themselves.
Roy could not afford to employ
professionals to teach the villagers.
Anyway the city-based experts
were not equipped for the task.
They could only teach in classrooms and they did not want to work in villages with the poor. So Roy trained a small group of from the village - -barefoot
teachers and engineers
– who in turn went on
to teach others,
who in turn became barefoot engineers, teachers
and doctors in their villages. Two generations of families have now become
barefoot professionals of one kind or another
thanks to the college.
Thousands of poor villagers have acquired
the skills to use simple
technologies to improve
their lives.
Each night more than 4,000 children who tend cattle by day attend night classes with barefoot teachers
in education centres
lit by solar powered lanterns built and installed
by barefoot engineers. They drink clean water from one of the more than 1,737 hand operated water pumps
which have been installed
since 1979, providing water for more than 325,000 people.Those pumps
are maintained by 1,200 barefoot
mechanics. More than 1,000 education
centres and schools
have been electrified by barefoot engineers. The 30,000 sq ft Barefoot College campus
was designed by Bhanwar Jat,
an illiterate farmer,
working with 12 other barefoot architects. Using Buckminster Fuller’s designs,
Rafiq, a local blacksmith fabricated more than 150 geodesic domes to be used as schools, dispensaries, telephone booths
and community centres.
Out of a mixture
of instinct and necessity Roy had hit upon an ingenious
self-help solution to rural poverty.
But he did much more than that: he devised
a new, low cost,
way of organising ourselves which could have revolutionary consequences far beyond rural India. His barefoot philosophy scrambles up the cast-iron categories of top heavy, industrial era organisations. In the barefoot world demand generates
its own supply,
because the consumers
can become producers, the learners
can become teachers, when they are equipped
with skills and tools and motivated to help themselves. The professionals and experts do not have all the answers;
committed amateurs – like – Tilonia’s
barefoot engineers - can devise their own effective solutions so long as they can get access
to the knowledge and resources
they need. Roy’s lack of formal
resources – no money, buildings, nor professionals to work with – meant he had to become
an organizational revolutionary.
When Roy started the Barefoot
College in 1971 he was a maverick.
But the same philosophy is at the heart
of mass, participatory approaches to collaborative working that are being fed by the rise of the Internet and low cost technology, the spread of knowledge and education, the ethic of participation and self-help. High tech versions of barefoot
thinking are at work in eBay, the trading system, and Wikipedia, the online
encyclopedia, Linux, the open source software community and computer
games, such as the Sims,
blogging, podcasting, Youtube and many forms of citizen
activism. Running through them are some common threads: the spectators want to take part,
not just sit on the sidelines; the consumers
are becoming contributors; the audience
wants to take to the stage. Many new organizations, utilizing new technology, will thrive on this spirit
of mass participation. If the 20th century was the age of industrial work, mass production for mass consumption, then mass participation will be one of the defining features
of the century to come.
The way we organise ourselves in future will not just be an extension
of the industrial era, corporate
organisations we have become
used to – Ford and Toyota, WalMart and Microsoft - with their hierarchy, targets, divisions, civil
wars and myriad humiliations for workers and consumers
alike. A growing band of organisations in future will resurrect ancient
ideas and meld them with new technology. One such resurrection is the idea of the “commons”
a feature
of village life for centuries: a common resource,
like a wood or grazing land, held in loose,
self-regulated shared ownership
for villagers to graze their flocks on. The
likes of Wikipedia
and Linux organise
their activities around a digital version of the commons.
At least one part of our complicated future could be a peculiar mixture of the peasant
and the geek,
the pre-industrial and the post-industrial combined. That recipe,
blending the interactive technologies of the Internet
with the habits of the village,
may be particularly potent in Asia, where over the next few decades
hundreds of millions of people will leave villages to live in cities
and connect with one another
using mobile phones
and computers. They will carry with them village habits and social networks
that will combine
with the latest
wireless and mobile technologies. Out of that new kinds of organisation will be born quite
unlike those that grew up around
railways, cars and steel,
from Detroit to the English Midlands and the Rhineland.
One of the best ways to navigate
your way through this world of
mass participation and creativity is to adopt the vantage point that Bunker
Roy took in India more than thirty
years ago. That means flipping the world on
its head. Thanks
to low cost technology many more consumers
can become producers at least some of the time. Good ideas will come from amateurs as well as
professionals. Innovation will not just flow down a pipeline,
from experts working
in their labs and studios,
to passive consumers
waiting in the line. Innovation is a social,
cumulative and collaborative activity; ideas will flow back up the pipeline
from consumers and they will share them amongst
themselves.T hat is why the next big thing will be us: our
power to share and develop
ideas, without having
to rely on formal organisations to do it all for us.
But to go barefoot as Roy did you first have to
think barefoot. Industrial era organisations have enslaved
our imaginations. We cannot image being organised without having an organisation. We cannot imagine
work getting done without
someone being in charge
of a division of labour. We have grown up in an era of standardisation: mass production for mass consumption. But we are moving
into a time when with the help of cheap, distributed technology there will be more production by the masses,
for their own ends. As a consequence, innovation which has long been seen as an elite activity,
undertaken only by
special people, in special places will become more like a mass activity,
often involving large collaborations of professionals and amateurs,
designers and consumers, sharing their ideas. Increasingly we will think together.
We-think will change the was we work and consume;
it will change the way leadership is exercised
and where new ideas will come from. More leaders
will have to be like Bunker Roy, inspirational and visionary,
but humble and self- effacing. More work will be self-organised and self-motivated to tap into people’s ideas and imagination. Industrial era organisations like to broadcast
at people, issuing instructions to their workers and regarding their consumers as targets
for their marketing
and wallets to be emptied. Barefoot organisations are more convivial. They work through dialogue and interaction, co-creating value with and among their users.
Industrial era organisations see themselves mechanistically: they are value chains or pipelines. Barefoot organisations are more like rolling creative
conversations. They are
organised without that requiring top-heavy organisation. The claim that we can
successfully self-organise ourselves will strike many people as utopian
and fanciful, especially in light of the myriad failures of cooperatives and communes. Yet in many areas of our lives we
rely on old forms of volunteer self-organisation such as clubs. Scientific inquiry
has long relied
on the sharing of ideas among peers. In many rural communities mutuals and cooperatives still organise the marketing
of agricultural products.
Those old forms of mutual endeavour take on a new life when they
are combined with the power of
the Internet, which
allows mass participation to be taken to scale. One of the best models for how this kind of collective self-organisation is another barefoot activity: a day on the beach.
Can Christians do this?
SURE Can!
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