Why Weaving System Change Without Changing the Law
is like ‘spinning a top in mud’*
This article is the first part of a series entitled ‘Radicalising System Change’. Part 1 on ‘Weaving’ is my attempt to articulate a crucial gap in the most recent iteration of the movement for weaving system change building on the new mindfulness movement. I have been preoccupied with the question of how to re-engineer our legal systems to support system change for several years. I employ what I call a ‘meta-legal’ approach viewing the law as an emergent property of a Complex Adaptive System (CAS), itself then being a variety of components within an interconnected web of complex adaptive systems, the emergent properties of which are the socio-economic and environmental outcomes in society. In Part 1 I explore the problem space/context and political economy of system change identifying the failure of the weavers movement to engage coherently and adequately with the complex nature and role of law in society. In Part 2 I explore in more depth the concepts of power, safety, justice and sustainability as emergent properties within complex adaptive systems and in Part 3 I proffer an experimental participatory action research methodology aimed at catalysing a new genre of policy actors working for what I term ‘radical system change’. I share this multi-perspectival analysis to open up an ongoing conversation I am having with weavers to a broader audience in the hopes of exchanging ideas that can accelerate system change.
Introduction: On Weaving
Weaving in change-maker communities is being hyped as a new type of decentralised, relational leadership model emphasising “curating circles, hosting conversations and building trusted relationships. It involves taking the lead but, equally, empowering others to lead.” (Hall, 2020). A spin-off endorsed by the acclaimed Ashoka change-maker community, and the Aspen Institute, among others, weaving practitioners and communities are proliferating worldwide with foundations, NGOs, community organisers, businesses, purpose-driven startups, authors and others, self-identifying as Weavers. Tools and resources for Network Weavers are being rapidly developed and deployed online and the movement continues to grow.
According to Karim Maarek, Founder of Weave the Future
“Our challenges have grown so vast and complex, the systems in disarray so widespread, that any solitary world changing endeavor however intricate and clever it may be, is a delusion. Nobody has the one thing that will break through and even all those one things added together will never make a dent. And actually, it’s all this disconnected action that is at the source of what we see today.
The only way I see out of those multitudes of systemic failures is the cultivation of a new together at all levels and everywhere, that allows for the emergence of intensely human, intensely collaborative positive change. When we are tightly connected with ourselves, our community and the planet and learn to lead lives of love and courage, of compassion and abundance, and act in collaboration, we start to thrive. That’s weaving: revealing the social fabric, mending and repairing it where needed and bringing about an interconnectedness most of us have never experienced before. And it’s a teachable skill too. Our role then becomes to bring people together at all levels to cultivate a common future that is beneficial to all. In other words, help us be more perfectly human.”
David Brooks, Founder, Weave: The Social Fabric describes the weavers theory of change as the engineering of a cultural shift away from hyper-individualism toward relationalism:
“Society changes when a small group of people find a better way to live and the rest of us copy them. And these weavers have found a better way to live and you don’t have to theorise about it. They are out there as community builders all around the country. We just have to shift our lives a little so that we can say — ‘I’m a weaver, You’re a weaver’. And if we do that the hole inside ourselves gets filled but more importantly the social unity gets repaired” (TED, 2019).”
Weaving could perhaps be defined as a paradigm shift “a constellation of concepts, values, perceptions, and practices shared by a community, which forms a particular vision of reality that is the basis of the way the community organizes itself.” (see Capra and Luisi, 2014).
Core concepts, values, perceptions and practices of weaving have been outlined in the Relationalist Manifesto published by the Aspen Institute and I extract some below:
- The revolution will be moral, or it will not be at all. Modern society needs a moral ecology that rejects the reigning hyper-individualism of the moment. We need to articulate a creed that puts relation, not the individual, at the center, and which articulates, in clear form, the truths we all know: that we are formed by relationship, we are nourished by relationship, and we long for relationship.
- Relationalism asserts that human beings are both fundamentally broken but also splendidly endowed. We have egoistic self-interested desires, and we need those desires in order to accomplish some of the necessary tasks of life: to build an identity, to make a mark on the world, to break away from parents, to compete, create and to shine. Our savage impulses to dominate, rape, murder and destroy are written across the annals of history. But relationalism asserts that there are other, deeper parts of ourselves. There are motivations that are even stronger than self-interest, even if they are more elusive. There are capacities that can tame the savage lusts and subdue the beasts that remain inside. At the deepest center of each person there is what we call, metaphorically, the heart and soul.
- The relationalist doesn’t walk away from the capitalist meritocracy, the systems of mainstream life. But she balances that worldview with a countervailing ethos that supplements, corrects, and ennobles. She walks in that world, with all its pleasures and achievements, but with a different spirit, a different approach, and different goals. She is communal where the world is too individual. She is more emotional when the world is too cognitive. She is moral when the world is too utilitarian.
- Relationalists prioritize those actions that deepen commitment, build relationships and enhance human dignity: giving, storytelling, dance, singing, common projects, gathering, dining, ritual, deep conversation, common prayer, forgiveness, creating beauty, mutual comfort in times of sadness and threat, mutual labor for the common good.
- The call of relationalism is to usher in a social transformation by reweaving the fabric of reciprocity and trust, to build a society, in which it is easier to be good.
- The social fabric is not woven by leaders from above. It is woven at every level, through a million caring actions, from one person to another. It is woven by people fulfilling their roles as good friends, neighbors, and citizens.
In the Manifesto there is no mention of the law, very little mention of justice and weaving of the social fabric is described as primarily a bottom-up exercise. Interestingly despite its oppositional stance to hyperindividualism, weaving centers its unit of change at the level of the individual.
Another leading Weaver, Ross Hall, (previously Director, Ashoka’s Education Strategy and now Co-Founder of the Weaving Lab) has created a more granular theory of change and weaving framework for action based on the following central beliefs of weaving:
- Universal wellbeing is humanity’s deepest purpose and highest aspiration
- Everyone should be empowered (equipped and inclined) to live for universal wellbeing (to practice change-making)
- Living for universal wellbeing means choosing and acting from moment to moment to achieve the optimal balance between the wholly interdependent and ever-fluctuating variables that constitute personal, socio-economic and planetary wellbeing
- Every human system should have Universal Wellbeing as its central purpose — and be thought of as an empowering learning ecosystem (a system which, through the choices and actions of those in the system, senses and improves itself continuously)
- To create and improve any empowering learning ecosystem that is directed towards Universal Wellbeing, a critical mass of people in the system need to be consciously and continuously weaving change.”
In this framework, policies, regulations and rules are mentioned once and are viewed as systemic mechanisms alongside, metrics, feedback loops, processes, routines, power dynamics, authority structures, connections, alliances, contracts, relationships, social ties, information sources & flows, conversations, communication dynamics, knowledge, skills, roles, professional specialisations, organisations, buildings, infrastructures, technologies, products & services, market dynamics, financial & resource stocks & flows. Loosely applying primary rules of interpretation, ejusdem generis translated “of the same kind”, and noscitur a sociis translated “a word is known by the company it keeps”, ‘policies, regulations and rules’ are here seemly perceived as in the same company/class of systemic mechanisms it is listed alongside. Placing law and policy here betrays a lack of appreciation of the singular role of law in power dynamics and emergent outcomes in society.
As a lawyer working for the last several years to identify legal leverage points for system change and participating in elite creative leadership and changemaker communities across UK, Europe and US, I have interacted with several self-identified Weavers with some curiosity. The language of weaving i.e. aligning, collaborating, acting systemically, being the new system and building learning ecosystems for universal well being is exciting and attractive. I was initially attracted to the concept of weaving since I perceived it as a pragmatic and accessible attempt to engage with a complexity worldview. I had been introduced to complexity and had become profoundly changed by the writings of Fritjof Capra in Hidden Connections (2010), A Systems View of Life (2014) and The Ecology of Law (2015). This worldview, generated from the findings of natural sciences, evidences the interconnectedness and interdependence of all living systems and therefore the interconnectedness of all our social, political, economic and ecological challenges. A complexity worldview helps one to focus more on the relations between things, patterns of interaction and non-linear causality. Accepting a complexity worldview is itself a paradigm shift and acts as a transformative agent in your reasoning, approach to conflict and to system change.
That said, in the last three years, my relationship with weaving has shifted from curiosity to disappointment. The failure to articulate a coherent strategy for legal system change I perceived as a crucial gap. It was my drive to come to terms with this disappointment that influenced my decision to undertake this three part series. Interestingly as I committed time to investigating beyond surface level with the concept and methods of weaving, my perspective has shifted yet again; this time, from disappointment to respect. Respect notwithstanding, my view which forms the main thesis in this series, that weaving does not coherently nor adequately engage with the complexity, constraint and resilience of law and legal systems in processing systemic change, remains. It is hoped that this series could serve as a conversation starter to foster more formal weaving between and within the weaving and legal communities, for without that integration, it is my view, that we will simply be spinning a top in mud.
* “Spinning a top in mud” or “Spinning top in mud” is a saying from my home country in the Caribbean — Trinidad and Tobago and means that that one can be doing a lot of stuff to achieve an end but the sad truth is that you are proceeding nowhere
Part 1 The Political Economy of System Change
This month the UK Home Secretary Priti Patel pioneered The Police, Crime and Sentencing bill which has now passed its second reading in Parliament. The bill has been widely criticised by academics and legal practitioners across the political divide for what is perceived to be the expansion of the powers of the Office of the Home Secretary and the police to curb public protest thereby threatening the rights of citizens to peacefully demonstrate their disagreement with government decision making. The action has been viewed, inter alia, as a form of legislative backlash for the ill-considered spate of protests carried out by members of the environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion (XR) gluing themselves to trains which turned violent when angry commuters set upon the protesters. This type of conflict between executive and citizen power is a symptom of the rising authoritarianism now increasingly evident in the wake of the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 and the demand on governments to do more to protect citizens in extreme circumstances. Across Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean a spate of legislation using the force of the state to compel lockdowns, curfews and other mobility restrictions has been passed. As I write this, there is a video circulating over social media with what appears to be a police officer in China beating passersby with a baton for not wearing their masks. Since the protests at Capitol Hill in January 2021, fourteen US states have passed anti-protest legislation. Governments using state-sanctioned violence and the threat of fines and imprisonment over the bodies of citizens protesting, failing to wear masks or breaking curfews is the most visible manifestation of a society in the midst of a substantial re-negotiation of its social contract.
And it is not just government excesses during the pandemic that is urging this reconsideration. It is that most of us are waking up to the fact that our governments have not organised and managed our collective resources in our best interests for quite some time. The world in 2021 is in the midst of a hyperconnected, complex socio-economic and ecological meta-crisis. A few of our most pressing challenges include an unprecedented wave of biological and environmental threats; a warming planet with scientists warning we have lost crucial time and that it is most unlikely that we will meet the targets in the Paris Climate Agreement and the UN Agenda 2030; more humans in slavery today than at any other time is history; exacerbating wealth inequality between global north and global south countries and within countries, disproportionately negatively impacting Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (BIPOC); the mining, commoditization of our data, algorithmic emotional manipulation of masses of people by fake news, disinformation campaigns, echo chambers nudging the consumption of stuff we do not need and threatening the integrity of democratically held elections; a deepening refugee crisis with concentration-type camps being set up outside borders in Europe, US, and Australia to house those traveling to escape violent and inhabitable spaces; and rising public anger and dangerous ‘othering’ among people within society as result of racism, misogeny, homophobia, religious and gender discrimination.
Bottom up calls for system change have been burgeoning post the financial crisis in 2008 and groups that were hitherto focused on activism within niche areas are embracing systems perspectives on the interconnectedness of all our current challenges. The demand for new more diverse forms of collaboration in order to gain deeper understanding of the relationships within the system and take greater responsibility for the unintended consequences of actions is steadily increasing. For example, since 2015 “system change not climate change” is now the rallying call at the forefront of climate justice movements being promoted around the world urging new types of grassroots organising, consensus building, rewilding and consciousness raising more aligned with our interconnectedness and interdependence within a living planetary system. A just transition to a cleaner economy is central to the movement for system change. In Naomi Klein’s latest book ‘On Fire: The Burning Case for A Green New Deal’ there is a recognition within the climate movement that for the transition to a more ecologically resilient future to be just (i) at a global level, responsibility for the costs of transitioning must lie with the countries which contributed the most to the current environmental outcomes; (ii) it must include some form of climate reparations to compensate countries most impacted; (iii) it must support later-industrializing countries to forgo short-term profits from extractive industries; and (iv) at national levels a just transition must ensure that costs are not passed to the individual consumer.
With so many interdependent relationships, competing tensions, interests and considerations, the political economy of system change is a complex endeavour and governments are continuing to lag in their response to the call for change. Governments though agreeing to 17 goals with 167 targets in the UN SDG Agenda 2030 in 2015 are still far behind in implementation and reportedly at the current rates of implementation, we will not achieve these targets in the next nine years. Even when Governments do make policy commitments in response to electoral demand, action to implement these policies tends to be postponed to future election cycles or simply left in abeyance (see Battaglini and Harstad 2016). Citizens acting alone or in communities do not have the power to achieve these targets when legislative barriers to decentralised action exist e.g. energy, finance sectors. Similarly, global economic governance frameworks in the form of international trade, competition, procurement, investment, taxation and intellectual property laws work to constrain the actions of countries seeking to act more aggressively.
For the most part, we have matured past the constraints of monarchical absolutism (recognising the divine right of kings as the ultimate source of power in society), and in the majority of states we have instrumentalized sovereign power in varied forms of the ‘triad system’ of representative democracy i.e. ‘government of, for and by the people’ (see Tormey, 2017). Nonetheless, despite changes in political form, the underlying structures in modern western society, based on a hierarchical power-over model prioritizing the ‘government for the people’ variety of democracy, has hardly changed. From feudal systems, the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, industrialization and globalization, there has been the progressive iteration of systems of governance which are extractive, exploitative and designed to reward the accumulation of wealth with status and power in society. This wealth is enjoyed by a relative few at the expense of the majority with widening inequality as the system incentivizes capital accretion. In fact, I might go so far as to state that this type of domination model of society goes beyond resilience to antifragility (see Taleb 2012) becoming more generative and increasing in its capability to extract and exploit as each form loses popularity.
In a piece written on power dynamics and systemic inquiry, Dr. Anne Birney put it this way:
“At the heart of these issues is dominance — of one society, nation, peoples — where their policies and practices acquire control over another — through literal means — from slavery, use of resources, exploitation, occupying land. It starts from a place of difference, but is acted on from a sense of superiority, exemplified through racism and other oppressive behaviour across all forms of intersection.”
According to Dr. Riane Eisler, a lawyer, social systems scientist, historian and author who has investigated underlying patterns in human relations for the last millenia,
Just as with rising authoritarianism, the inaction or slow action of governments to respond to calls for change on some of the most pressing challenges facing people and the planet today, at core, is a question of power and the means of its brokerage in modern society. In modern western society, the law is the principal legitimate means through which power, including but not limited to the use of force, is negotiated by governments, individuals and organisations. Thus the law, through constitutions, legislative enactments, rules, regulations and policies legitimizes a form of positional power in the institutions of government (French and Raven, 1959). A central thesis of this series is that only law (through constitutionally defined mechanisms located in the executive, legislative or judiciary) has the power to change the law. Therefore, the only strategy which can change the underlying power structures embedded in the law lies through coercive power, either by the legitimate force of another law or violence.
I do not adhere to oversimplifications of the nature of power in society that rely primarily on a unitary notion of power which one either has or does not have i.e. the ruler and the ruled/ the dominator and the dominated. According to Foucault (1966), “power is a relation — it is not a thing” and these relations are not monopolised by the powerful. Foucault rejects the ‘zero-sum’ unitary, homogenous view of power and despite writing decades before the more recent application of complexity science to social relations, his perspectives are rooted in non-absolutism and a clear intention to grapple with the tensions inherent in relationships acknowledging co-existing and conflicting modes of power. I will explore Foucault perspectives further and share my own developing complex systems perspective of power in Part 2.
So what does this all have to do with weaving system change? The answer, put simply and perhaps without much finesse, is that if we are serious about system change at national and international levels we must contend with what I call the “elephant in the room” and i.e. the power structures which underlie and sustain current political and economic systems. By this I mean we must seek to understand the political economy of the processes of system change and methodically deconstruct the systems of power which produce the current socio-economic and environmental realities with which we are currently grappling.
And this is where I believe the weaving and formal legal systems diverge in their capabilities and outcomes. Weaving, from my understanding of it, operates in what we may call the “soft power” space. Soft power “is a term coined by Joseph Nye, former US Presidential advisor. He recognised a distinction between hard power (force) and soft power (attraction)” (Adnan, 2017). Building soft power and contributing to more life-sustaining relationships for universal wellbeing, cannot by themselves shift underlying power structures which are hardwired into our legislative frameworks. The legal system presents a constraint that soft power alone cannot shift. For weaving to work it assumes that the following would organically emerge: (i) the hearts and minds of those who hold “hard power”, politicians, legislators, judges, policy makers, executives of transnational corporations and business leaders would be transformed or there will be some collective compulsion to act against their own interest which does not carry the force of law and (ii) there would be clarity and collective agreement on the suite of policies, rules and regulations which would need to be enacted worldwide. The idea, that by transforming one relationship at a time (whether at self, interpersonal, social and systemic levels), we can transform our current systems, assumes a privilege of time we no longer have, if we accept the scientific findings. Despite my personal optimism that hearts and minds can be transformed and the movement will grow, I seriously question whether the level of intentionality, strategy and precision required for legal system change can be achieved by weaving alone.
In fact, Weaving without intentionally, strategically and precisely engaging with the law and policy making process, could arguably work to strengthen and reinforce systems of oppression which are structurally designed and embedded within society through law. A potentially controversial and divisive statement but I submit this for the following four reasons:
(i) The pursuit of Universal Wellbeing within a structurally violent system cannot be undertaken without legislative change. ‘Structural violence’ a term coined by Prof. Johann Galtung refers to a form of violence wherein a social structure or social institution may harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs. Dr. Paul Farmer, puts it this way:
“Structural violence is one way of describing social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harm’s way… The arrangements are structural because they are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world; they are violent because they cause injury to people … neither culture nor pure individual will is at fault; rather, historically given (and often economically driven) processes and forces conspire to constrain individual agency. Structural violence is visited upon all those whose social status denies them access to the fruits of scientific and social progress. [emphasis mine]”
Some examples of this type of violence are institutionalized ableism, adultism, ageism, classism, elitism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, speciesism, racism, and sexism. I like to think of it as the forms of violence which are systemic and the mechanisms of which are largely invisible save for its impact on people’s lives.
My point is not to suggest that the pursuit of Universal Wellbeing starting with each individual and then through circles and networks of relationships does not have merit. My point is that to proffer this as a mechanism for system change which will catalyse universal human flourishing is contestable. Without engaging the law, how can the pursuit of Universal Wellbeing curtail human rights infringement, trafficking and child labour in global supply chains? What about treatment of refugees and asylum seekers? What of the use of excessive force by the police and military, or the threat of nuclear war? What of climate justice? What of the use of our data to threaten democratically held elections and manipulate us into consumption patterns which accelerate the degradation of the planet? What about preventing the use of algorithmic data from being used in criminal justice systems perpetuating historical prejudice and biases? How can the pursuit of Universal Wellbeing correct historical and economically driven inequalities, inequities and discriminatory practices embedded within our laws and institutions? If the answer to these questions is that these changes will emerge as people evolve then it seems that the weaving solution for people living under oppressive systems is that they will just have to wait until weavers arrive at their doors.
(ii) Local preoccupation avoids the wicked challenge of global governance — An emphasis seems to be placed on building local circles and networks in the community and allowing those circles to continuously interact and expand from family to neighbourhood, to community, nation, region and so on (perhaps not in such a linear fashion but starting locally nonetheless). The challenge is that some of the most pressing challenges facing people and the planet today relate to the manner in which we share resources on a finite planet. Moreover, as laws primarily operate within state-centric governance systems, there is a gap between the jurisdiction of governments and harms perpetuated by transnational corporations around the world in for example, the financial, extractive and big data industries. Weaving it seems again will take quite a while to tackle these problems, and will be overpromising on the rallying call of “system change” unless an intentional, strategic and precise focus is placed on weaving within the spheres of influence in law making spaces at national, multinational and international governance levels. (More on this in Part 2).
(iii) Business as a force for good — Weaving seems to me to be either the latest iteration of business as a force for good or certainly a close relation. From my research I have been able to find several companies self-identifying as weaving organisations that are for-profit organisations. Whilst I am of the view that markets are an essential part of human interaction and as a mechanism for creating, capturing and delivering value serves us as a species — there is an urgent need for transformational regulation of markets to stop the harmful, oppressive practices of corporations. The voluntary, self-regulating, business as a force for good approach does not address the structurally flawed underpinnings of our neoliberal economic system, which will require a methodical re-engineering in order to catalyse system change. Moreover as I have learned from my own experience as a serial social entrepreneur, the focus on making profits while making an impact is challenging. The need for sustainability almost always constrains the entrepreneurs capacity to create impact, thereby we become unwilling participants in upholding a system we expressly want to disrupt. (More on this in Part 2).
(iv) Binary approach to ego and emotion — The language of the movement is very much aligned, and seems a part of, the burgeoning zen neo-spiritual movement (the mindfulness movement) worldwide (which I confess is a pet peeve of mine). By this I mean a form of spirituality which focuses on the pursuit of so-called peace, happiness and joy within oneself and allowing that to radiate out into the universe and attract the same back to you. A form of disembodied spirituality that holds neutrality and non-attachment in the face of injustice as an indicator of higher levels of enlightenment. We are told that gratitude, love, joy, curiosity, playfulness are good feelings we should aspire to vibrate and anger, fear, sadness, hatred are bad feelings to be avoided. We are told that ego is a bad part of ourselves and self-lessness and heart and soul are good parts of our being. We are told to have empathy for all perspectives even those perspectives embedded in laws and institutions which are structurally violent. The binary approach to ego and emotion, allows us to “other” parts of ourselves we do not like and which in my view, if a more integrated view is taken, can be transforming forces for good within ourselves and our fellow human beings. Emotion and ego are far more complex than the hero/villain, zero-sum approach we tend to construct. Ego can and is quite positive in our lives as well as negative. Anger can be a powerful indicator of a failing system and provide immense energy for system change and at the same time be quite destructive. A complexity mindset urges the embrace of and engagement with all of who we are as human beings and points the way to a more radical form of system empathy which engages with right action, fairness and accountability for antifragile systems (More on this in Part 3).
Conclusion
I leave you with a few questions on the subject of weaving system change: How can the pursuit of personal peace, happiness and joy within oneself be given priority, in a world where millions of people around the world are dying because of corporate excesses; dying from poverty and preventable disease despite there being an abundance of food and medicines; when some of the richest countries from a resource perspective house some of the poorest people on the planet; when some of the hardest working people on the planet take home the least amount of income? Isn’t there something egregious about focusing on personal happiness in a system so oppressive to others?
Learning to be an effective, productive and flourishing component in a globally structurally violent and oppressive system cannot be our ambition or vision for a safer, more just and regenerative future.
That said, it seems to me that the cultural shift to Universal Wellbeing is crucial. It is simply that the means of getting there must engage with systems of hard power in society. Weaving and legal system change must go hand in hand and together. It is the perennial question of hard v soft power, which forces are so often pitched in opposing camps to each other; when a complexity mindset urges us to explore the relationship between the two. I question whether we can and/or should wait for the cultural shift to organically emerge from learning ecosystems around Universal Wellbeing. The argument proferred is that in complex adaptive systems the smallest action can generate exponential impact. I accept that, but, even though we humans are complex adaptive systems, interacting with and operating within other complex adaptive systems — human systems are different and operate very differently from complex adaptive systems in other forms of life — in a very crucial way.
Human systems are a type of “super-complex-adaptive-system” in that they have the attribute of volition. Human systems are intentional, purposeful and creative and it is through these distinctions and with this power we transform our world.
In my view, applying a Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) metaphorical perspective, provides us with a qualitatively new lens for understanding laws and legal systems and therefore can help us to generate new strategies for the intentional re-engineering of legal system change. In Parts 2 and 3 I explore in more depth how this might work. In Part 2 I turn to CAS theory and address the concepts of power, safety, justice and sustainability as emergent properties within complex adaptive systems. In Part 3 I proffer an experimental action research methodology aimed at catalysing a new genre of policy actors working for radical system change.
This series is written by Margaret Rose-Goddard (LLB (Hons) LLM (Corporate Commercial) L.E.C.), Co-Founder & CIO, Future Law Institute. Margaret is a lawyer, public policy innovation strategist, serial social entrepreneur and doctoral researcher driven to contribute to solving our grand societal challenges by transforming the underlying power structures embedded in our laws and legal systems. A specialist in public procurement law, anti-corruption and governance, Margaret has been involved in education, training, capacity-building and in advocating for and drafting new laws in the English-Speaking Caribbean. Also a consultant, Margaret supports organisations in both the public and private sector to leverage procurement policy innovation for greater social and environmental impact. Now based in the United Kingdom, and at the forefront of developing new and what she terms ‘radical’ discourses on empathy, values-based entrepreneurship and legal system change, Margaret is a courageous, sometimes confronting, public speaker and educator, articulating Global South perspectives and featured in Tedx conferences across two continents. View Margaret’s Tedx Port-of-Spain talk on Public Procurement (2015, Trinidad and Tobago). View Margaret’s Tedx Brighton talk on Anger & Empathy (2019, United Kingdom).
To learn more about Margaret’s work on empathy and values-based entrepreneurship visit: https://u-solve.org.
To learn more about Margaret’s work on public procurement policy innovation visit: https://procurementinnovation.org
To learn more about Margaret’s work on legal system change visit: https://futurelaw.io
