Month: June 2025

Flawless Consulting: A Compass in Chaotic Times

Posted on by Maya Mehta

We live — and work — in a world that feels increasingly complex. Organizations are stretched thin, trust is extremely fragile, and it seems like every day, leaders are being asked to do more with less.

In the midst of uncertainty, it’s easy to slip into survival mode. Solve the problem. Meet the deadline. Move on.

But what if consulting — whether internal or external — could offer something more? What if it could be a stabilizing force in chaotic times?

In over 40 years of doing this work, we have witnessed how Flawless Consulting® is more than just a workshop for consultants—it’s a compass for anyone trying to lead with clarity, integrity, and courage, even when things feel uneasy.

When Everything Feels Urgent, Relationships Should Still Come First

Especially in fast-moving environments, it’s tempting to skip over relationship-building in favor of jumping straight to the solution. However, as Peter Block teaches, the most effective consultants and leaders understand that building relationships and trust is foundational to genuine progress. 

Relationships require clarity. They require certainty about our wants and the courage to express them fearlessly. Building relationships isn’t a process that can necessarily be expedited. It can be slower, but that steadiness can lead to sustainable outcomes that make all the difference. 

Flawless Consulting provides us both a methodology and a mindset to: 

    •    Slow down enough to contract clearly and openly

    •    Name what we want and invite others to do the same

    •    Manage resistance without overpowering or avoiding it

These skills enable us to build relationships that can withstand complexity, tension, and change, especially in times of crisis.

Control Is a Myth. Partnership Is the Alternative.

Chaotic times often prompt our instinct to control outcomes, people, or processes. Flawless Consulting offers an alternative stance: partnership.

Rather than trying to fix others or carry the burden alone, the Flawless methodology is about shared responsibility. Flawless Consulting invites us to co-create clarity, even when outcomes are uncertain. That shift — from being a pair of hands or an expert to being a partner — is what makes work meaningful. In other words, the way through the storm isn’t control — it’s connection.

What You Want Matters Too

In the midst of these chaotic times, it can be easy to put the needs of your organization, your coworkers, and your clients first. Sure, it’s important to understand how you can be useful to others as the world around them is changing. It’s equally important to consider yourself too.

Whether you are partnering with someone else to get work done or rescoping work that’s already been in progress, these chaotic times should prompt you to consider: What do I want? Flawless Consulting teaches you to ask for what you want – not merely to satisfy your own personal whims and wishes but enable you and the people you are supporting to succeed. By putting your wants into words as simply and directly as possible, you are treating your relationship as a true partnership.

Why Flawless Still Matters (Maybe Now More Than Ever)

We get it, consulting skills aren’t the first necessities that come to mind when times are tough. But the truth is, this is when they matter most.

At Designed Learning, we operate at the intersection of meaning and methodology. Flawless Consulting doesn’t just give you steps to follow — it gives you a way to show up with integrity, even when everything feels uncertain.

The Creative Economy Part One: Another Way Forward

Posted on by Maya Mehta

By Peter Block

We live in a culture where our attention is fixated on what is not working and who is winning and losing. The narrative is filled with polarization, conflict, wrongdoing. This is the major substance of headline news and a good portion of social media, which carries within it a negative bias. We begin to think this is who we are.

Some particular themes hold consistent and endless arguments over whether we should:

  • Further liberate capitalism or consider it being in a late stage.
  • Embrace or watch out for “social” as an ism or an adjective.
  • Have more or less government regulation and oversight.
  • Have progressive or conservative legislation.
  • Have more or less government funding.
  • Inhabit, celebrate, or occupy Wall Street.

In addition, the stock market is headline news and a popular measure of well-being. Inflation, the consumer price index, unemployment and inflation rates are central measures used to evaluate our condition. These conversations occur at every level: city, state, nation, world. The focus on these dimensions of life is sold as essential to preserve our freedom, democracy, well-being, and historical legacy.

Suppose that these versions of who we are and what matters had a purpose other than freedom and democracy. That these storylines were mostly driven by our religious devotion to a market economy. That we have simply internalized the idea that it is the market economy that best serves our progress and well-being. That the typical debates are really about whose point of view can make the market economy work the best. That the market economy, more than the well-being of our collective, benefits from endlessly focusing on the stance of government, the distribution of wealth, who is in charge of the rules. Not that these don’t matter, but are they really decisive?

These debates and objects of our attention do us a great disservice. They actually distract us, by design, from most of the human values which more authentically define us, our lives, our enduring culture, what really matters most. There are places the market economy, how it is funded and regulated, cannot take us: simply put, the collective well-being of us all.

The existing immersion in the market context, no matter whether progressives or liberals run things, has produced way too little reduction in our suffering. Our social and economic isolation grows. The climate crisis has been growing. Wealth disparity grows. Fear grows. Housing and family security are a struggle. Injustice thrives. The number of human beings who struggle each day is too many. The actions by urban or national military forces are growing. Perhaps the only decisive outcome of the current debates within the market context is which ruling class is in charge.

Walking upstream, it is time to more seriously question the impact of all these conversations confined within the context of a market economy. Perhaps they are a very narrow view of reality and are the wrong conversations. Perhaps there is an alternative to the market economy that would better serve us. Engage us in conversations and debates that truly have the capacity to create a more just, enriching quality of life and culture.

The Soul of the Market Economy

The market economy holds that we live in the midst of scarcity. This becomes the rationale that justifies too many of our actions. This recurrent debate is based on the myth that our well-being is best served by being more competitive. Which starts in the first grade with the grading system. It reflects the Adam Smith adoration of self-interest. It sustains the neoliberal belief that global scale and dollar volume are the real measures of success. Both sides of the debate are really concerned with how to make scarcity, competition, and scale work best.

This conversational drumbeat relegates the common good to the sideshows of collateral damage and externalized costs.

The power over our existing culture is described by Ellen Meiskins Wood who, in her classic book “The Origin of Capitalism,” defines the contemporary focus of the market economy quite simply:

“Material life and social production in capitalism are universally mediated by the market. This unique system of market dependence means that the dictates of the capitalist market –– its imperatives of competition, accumulation, profit maximization, and increasing labor productivity –– regulate not only all economic transit actions but social relations in general” (p. 7, emphasis mine).

Wood explores the idea that the market economy has spread beyond commerce to define and shape our way of living. This includes how we school our children, how we value the arts, who manages our health and aging, what stories we highlight, our love of screens, how we manage our judicial system, taxation, and who keeps us safe.

An Alternative in Plain Sight

There is an alternative economy. We have a choice where our attention goes and we might be better served if we shifted our primary attention to what can be called the creative economy. This is an economy based on the conviction that there is enough. It replaces scarcity with imagination and memory and relatedness. If we shift the context from market to creative, it changes our patterns of solutions. We will still argue, but why not over something that cultivates our humanity? This can become the center of our attention. We have the choice to relegate commerce to something that is incidentally interesting. The Dow Jones average becomes a human-interest story.

The creative economy better honors the original definition of “economy”: Economy is “the management of a household, stewardship of a household’s resources.” It also arises from the original definition of “creative”: “to beget, give birth to.” The creative economy rests on a belief in stewardship for all that a household both inherits and produces. A household can be you, your family, your neighbors, your community, a nation, a planet.

“Creative” is not just about what we call art. It encompasses our local ability to innovate, make, and produce. This includes social relations and local memory and culture and preservation rather than commercialization of the land and nature. It incorporates local production. The arts are included, but extend to sustaining a creative culture. The creative economy focuses on the capacity of a neighborhood to give people access to and control of most all they need to survive and prosper. This encourages a career not dependent on schooling or class rank. It means keeping dollars circulating locally. Art becomes a way of bringing people together for the larger purpose of well-being.

The creative economy is dramatically distinct from the market economy. The market economy is where what matters most is surplus and profit. Convenience, cost, self-interest are driving forces. The market economy is used to justify what is sometimes called a command economy. They both call us to give structure and priority to the market-driven way of being. Corporations, central agencies, or government, under the lobby of corporations, control all major aspects of how we function as a society. This includes what goods and services are produced, how they are produced, and how they are distributed. The market economy is used to justify foreign relations strategies and agreements. Essentially, central entities, often monopolies, dictate most economic decisions.

The creative economy reports and puts attention and control of material and social well-being into aggregated local entities: households, streets, or a neighborhood. It exists in co-ops, urban farms, local production. Local enterprise. In rural communities, it means that farmers are connected. Cooperation thrives as a core function of rural communities.

A creative economy does have a place for competition, but competition is not a driver. It has more interest in sustainability than scale. In the quality of work more than its efficiency. It is more interested in restoration than accumulation, local circulation of dollars rather than profit maximization, spreading labor opportunities rather than increasing labor productivity, distributed rather than centralized control of production. Care for the soil.

An Economy Serving the Common Good

Among economists, the term “creative economy” increasingly refers to all economic activity that depends on a person’s individual creativity for its economic value. In this usage, the creative economy occurs wherever local individual and collective effort is the main source of value and the main source of a transaction. John Howkins developed the concept in 2001 to describe economic systems where value is based on novel imaginative qualities rather than central organizational control of the traditional resources of land, labor, and capital. It gives first priority to the question of how we can produce with each other what we were in the habit of seeking from government, institutions, and large global or national enterprises.

The most radical shift towards the creative economy begins with where we place our attention. With what we consider important news. Headline news reports on where we, together, are producing the care required for all that matters most to us. It lets self-interest be present but not as our organizing principle. The neighborhood or community sector –– not the government or private sector –– becomes central and defines our social relations.

Government becomes a convening agent and protects the rules and limits needed for communities to function. We always need institutions like we now have, but their attention shifts away from growing the private sector and growing their services; it shifts towards building community agency. Private enterprise with its market economy remains nearby, but it does not define who we are.

Luckily the creative economy already exists. It is all around us, waiting to be valued and made central to our way of seeing and speaking to and about ourselves. Tune into the next column for proof of concept, evidence, and things practical.

Part Two: The Creative Economy in Plain Sight

Posted on by Maya Mehta

by Peter Block

“The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.”

––William Gibson 

We are surrounded by an economy that we rarely hear about, called the creative economy. It is not an economy for creatives, it is about the ways people create a life for themselves and others around them which cannot be measured by its commercial appeal. It arises from the original meaning of the word “economy,” which was household management. The creative economy is an alternative to the market economy, and it is all around us, though essentially unrecognized as news. Some examples of this invisible economy: 

  • After an operation a surgeon invites the patient’s family and caregivers plus nurses, lab people, and other technical support to stand in a circle with the patient once a day. Each states what they think the best course of action might be to care for the patient. Agreements are written on a whiteboard on the wall. The process is called Collaborate Rounds and takes twenty minutes. Results: Dramatically shortens the hospital stay. Quickens recovery time after release.
     
  • A teacher in grade four begins most days by having students in small groups have a fifteen-minute discussion of what is on their mind, what they are feeling at the moment. In the same school, there is a Restorative Practices room where teachers, family, and friends sit with each disruptive student to discuss what is going on and what might make a difference. Results: Suspensions reduced seventy percent. Classroom performance improves.
     
  • A police force in Colorado declares that their purpose is to keep offenders out of the judicial system. Citizen groups join in restorative justice practices which give to offenders who choose to participate the support to shift the direction of their life. The chief and citizens walk difficult neighborhoods once a week to invite people into this process. Results: Thousands of offenders have not returned to unlawful actions. Overall safety compared to similar communities is one of best in the state.
  • A hip hop cultural arts center invites urban youth aged fourteen to twenty-four to learn how to compose, record, engineer, do graffiti art, and perform hip hop related music and dance. They are never asked about their background or their needs. They are just offered studio space and daily instruction on how to do, in a disciplined way, what they care most about. After four months the vast majority decide, on their own, to leave the street culture. Results: Over seven thousand youth have chosen to use this unique experience to create productive lives. 

These stories are vivid examples of what is widely occurring in every community. They are about health, education, crime, and youth. Popular topics. The outcomes are dramatically different from those we hear most about. And they happen all around us: in parks, libraries, coffee shops, churches, kitchens, arts venues, and front yards. 

What is puzzling is why outcomes like these remain invisible. In the current culture they are not considered news. They do not align with the commercial essence of another economy: the market economy. The market economy wants to know what is not working, where are the deficiencies, where are the commercial opportunities for scale, efficiency, cost, speed, revenue volume, profit to take advantage of conflict, wrongdoing, crisis, crime, litigation, competition, self-doubt, and fear. These are themes in the dominant narrative which are all drivers of the market economy and capture most of our attention and energy.      

The invitation here is to consider centering our attention on people creating a culture where the primary conversation is not driven by the modern market economy. It begins by seeking a name for the alternative that does not use the existing narrative in its title. Postmodern, late-stage capitalism, neoclassical. The term “creative economy” is in use and captures the primacy of citizen agency, connection, localness, and affection that frames the essence of what best serves us and the common good.

We can more fully choose to shift our primary attention away from the market economy and its effects. We can acknowledge that the creative economy better serves us and is waiting for us to make it central. The stories in this economy are mostly alive in their own disciplines like health, education, public safety, and art. Something shifts when we consider these stories of interest to all of us, all the time.  All that is required is to amplify our attention to them. We live in an attention world. Suppose we decided to shrink the discussion of the market economy to a side show, a human-interest story?

Economic Mindfulness

Shifting attention as the methodology of transformation is an extremely well-developed practice in many domains. It is the essence of eastern practices like Buddhism and its variants including mindfulness and meditation. The interconnection of body, mind, and spirit in yoga practice is all about attention. In the religious domain, devotion takes the form of contemplation, liturgy, prayer, communion, immersion, kneeling. All are practices to shift and reinforce where to focus our attention. Same for therapy, counseling, communities of practice. All are built on the idea that how and where we put our attention is instrumental in creating a life that best serves what matters most to us. 

In most of these movements, the focus is on the individual and how they navigate themselves and the world. While each advocates compassion for all, the individual is the center of attention. The creative economy is about communal efforts. It manifests the idea that cooperatively, through powerful, small-scale encounters and programs in a particular place, we create a world that best serves us.   

Participating in the creative economy, we shift our relationship with time. We believe there is enough time for what matters. We set convenience aside as the major selling point for goods and services. We consider the number of neighbors we learn to trust to be more important than likes, followers, or finding the right occupant of the corner office. We decide to keep our dollars very local.

On a bigger scale, there have been historical efforts to shift the economy to what we value most. Mennonites. Quakers. Co-housing neighborhoods. Utopian communities. Each designed to reshape our way of participating in the material world. These groups are sometimes called intentional communities. Our current effort might be to create attentional communities, whose purpose is to normalize paying primary attention to the economy that primarily values slow, small, local, inconvenient, relational, kind to the earth and the other.
  

Citizens as Agents

The creative economy is a shift in who is accountable for what we consider essential to our well-being. We become citizens, not consumers. It encourages us to reclaim the ability to shape our culture and how we build what is called social capital. 

Social capital is a term that captures the cultural force that produces our individual and collective common good. Social capital has two components: How much we trust each other and how much we work together to make a place better. Robert Putnam, in “Bowling Alone,” showed that communities with high social capital were more successful in domains such as livelihood, education, and health than communities with low social capital.   

One way social capital is produced is when we plan an event together. Street fairs, sharing food, arts, library, workshops, park events, anything neighborhood or street. It is not just the event that creates trust and makes a place better; what really creates social capital is how we connect to each other in the planning and production and hosting of the event. The event itself is a reason for a relational activism that creates a future we want.

The four opening stories show how social capital is built with a shift in the role of expert –– namely surgeon, teacher, chief, executive director. These people are important and vital, but it is the ways they build agency and connection among citizens, students, and peers that are decisive in the learning and healing process. These experts spend as much thought and time building relational connection as they do on pedagogy, instruction, and policies. Plus the primary focus is on the gifts of offenders, urban and school youth, and patients. 

In addition to the role of professional experts, the function of leadership comes from neighborhood connectors –– people who thrive on invitation, caring for the common good, bringing strangers in touch with one another. If you are still reading this column, you are likely one of them. 

The creative economy places in the hands of citizens and the neighborhood the agency to produce our well-being. Not to purchase it. Not to expect elected officials or social service or educational institutions, commercial organizations, or public programs to raise a child, care for the earth, provide livelihood, keep us safe and happy. 

Measuring What Matters 

What we measure is a direct expression of what we deem important. In the market economy we evaluate an event by the number of people who showed up and how they rated the experience. We measure scale, likes, money spent or produced. In the broader look, we measure average annual income, GDP, sales, efficiency.  

One reason the creative economy has not been valued is that it is not monetized, nor should it be. If we hold to the belief that our measure of well-being is first and foremost our dollars, our wealth, our upward mobility, our global scale, and our convenience, then our humanity and the condition of the earth will remain an afterthought.  

This calls us to measure the creative economy in a unique way. In valuing the creative economy our attention goes to efforts and outcomes created by citizens producing something together. Our attention goes to a qualitative assessment of local efforts: How were neighbors engaged? What gifts were made visible? In what ways did people become less socially and economically isolated?   

We would measure people’s trust in each other and how much they belong to the place where they reside. We would be interested in their general well-being and happiness, how their children are doing, their involvement in the arts and local government. The tools for these measures are available. Canadian economist Mark Anielski has spent a career designing and applying a Well-Being Index. Used by countries, provinces, and First Nations, it focuses the conversation on how citizens are doing together.

Broadcasting the Creative Economy    

Our collective task is to imagine ways for the creative economy to become prime time, headline news –– the center of our attention –– in ways that are aligned with its nature. The traditional attention channels will remain committed to the market economy. Let them be. We need to find ways to publicize and report a version of news that draws attention away from our current habits. There are already islands of this.         

David Bornstein is a strong national voice for the community-serving possibility of journalism. He started Solutions Journalism as an alternative to the prevailing focus on what is wrong and who is at fault. 

Peter Pula has created Axiom News. He trains people in generative journalism designed to build and serve community.  

Next City in Detroit gives constructive attention to neighborhoods and works to support the strengths and struggles of Blacks to find full equity and participation in the life of the city.  

Perhaps we create The Connecting Times as a regular publication that is a container for the news we choose to value. It can focus on efforts where the future exists in the present. This is technically possible. We just have to decide together if we have the will to create some communal instrument that ties all our efforts together. Local newspapers are everywhere, so let’s have a regular column on the creative economy. 

Citizens are the source of the stories for creative journalism to support the creative economy. Suppose we treat as primary news those instances where local people are already telling their stories to each other. There are storytelling organizers everywhere. Suppose we treated these stories, currently collected for connecting people, as central to our economy. In the connector networks that exist now, we can document the stories of where the creative economy is operating.

An Invitation

Attention on the creative economy focuses on where social capital, rather than traditional financial capital, is at work. These are situations where three or more people trust each other and decide to make things better. Central to each effort is how it builds local relationships and affection. Wendell Berry has written about this elegantly. 

Again, the stories we are interested in start small and are slow, underfunded, and inconvenient. There are innovations all around us involving land use, youth, safety, urban farming, small community and cooperative enterprises, health, housing, the arts. There are already structures for innovative community capital investment and jubilee-minded debt treatment. These are all practices that allow every city and rural town to thrive.

This is an invitation to see if framing what so many are creating as an economy might be a thread that is useful. Let us know if you are interested. Or have a story.