The Hard Conversations

Abstract

Most regenerative programmes are not decided by evidence. They are decided in conversations: a board meeting at the end of a long agenda, a negotiation with a union representative, a call with a supplier who has heard promises before, a kitchen-table argument about whether to pay more for the thing that lasts. The evidence matters in each of them. So does the state of the people in the room. Santa Anna's Ecstatic Economics puts the point in a sentence that is uncomfortable for anyone who prefers to think of economics as a matter of numbers: The economy is not something that happens out there, in boardrooms and trading floors and legislative chambers. The book's claim is that it happens first in the body: in the quickening of a pulse when a bill arrives, in the tightening of a jaw in a negotiation. Chapter 3 described the book's diagnosis that the bottleneck in regenerative change is somatic rather than informational, and graded the evidence for it as thin. But the pattern it describes is one every manager has seen.