About us
Tackling the root cause of today’s natural and social inequities
Rethinking Capital’s mission is to flip the upside-down incentives that pervade today’s natural and social systems - what we describe as the true root cause of the inability to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises.
The root cause principle was created by W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran - architects of the Quality in the Workplace movement that took hold first in Japan after 1950.
Deming and Juran believed that for any system to create consistently high-quality outcomes, it needed to be mapped into its component parts. That way, if a quality control problem occurred the true root cause of the problem could be identified and a permanent fix designed and tested.
A fix applied anywhere else could only solve the effects of the problem and would inevitably fail.
Going back to Bill Gates’ insight:
‘The portion of the world's economy that doesn’t fit with the old model just keeps getting larger. That has major implications for everything from tax law to economic policy, to which cities thrive and which fall behind. But in general, the rules that govern the economy haven't kept up. This is one of the biggest trends in the global economy that isn't getting enough attention.’
We believe that the hidden implications include that net zero transition incentives are upside down. That inclusive beliefs are penalised. As such the climate and biodiversity crises must inevitably get worse.
We believe that this is the true underlying root cause and the only point in the system at which a permanent fix can be designed, tested and scaled.
Our mission is then informed further by Bill Gates:
'In his view, the world is a giant operating system that just needs to be debugged. Gates’ driving idea... is the hacker’s notion that the code for these problems can be rewritten, that errors can be fixed, that huge systems – whether it’s Windows 8, global poverty or climate change – can be improved if you have the right tools and the right skills.'
