Most workplace cultures, however progressive their stated values, are built on an implicit assumption that runs directly counter to the producer model we have been developing throughout this series. That assumption is this: when something is not working, the solution will come from outside the team. It will come from a new strategy commissioned by senior leadership, a consultant hired to redesign the process, a training programme purchased from an external provider or a technology solution procured from a vendor. The team’s role is to implement what arrives from outside, not to generate what is needed from within.

This is organisational consumerism. Like community consumerism, it is both a habit of mind and a structural condition, reinforced by the systems, incentive structures and professional cultures that shape how most organisations operate. Breaking free from it requires not just a change in thinking but a deliberate shift in how teams relate to the challenges they face and the resources they already hold.

What organisational consumerism looks like in practice

The signs of organisational consumerism are visible in the characteristic language teams use when things go wrong. The budget is insufficient. The leadership has not provided clear direction. The system does not support what we are trying to do. HR needs to sort this out. These statements may be accurate descriptions of real constraints, but they share a common orientation: they locate the solution outside the team and position the team as the passive recipient of whatever the external source decides to provide.

This orientation is self-reinforcing. When a team consistently looks outward for solutions, it stops developing the habit of looking inward. The internal assets of the team, the skills, relationships, informal knowledge and creative intelligence of its members, become progressively less visible because nobody is looking for them. The team’s self-assessment of its own capacity shrinks, its dependency on external provision grows and the gap between the two becomes, over time, the defining feature of the team’s relationship to its own work.

The inside-out producer mindset

The shift to an inside-out producer mindset begins with a single, disciplined question: before we look outward for a solution, what do we already hold that might be relevant here? This question is deceptively simple. It requires the team to resist the very natural and often institutionally reinforced impulse to reach immediately for external help, and to invest instead in a genuine inquiry into its own internal assets.

This inquiry is not a substitute for acknowledging genuine gaps or for seeking external support when it is truly needed. It is a prior step: the honest audit of internal capacity that a producing community undertakes before it presents itself as a needing community. The team that has conducted this audit will arrive at any external support relationship from a fundamentally different position, knowing what it has, knowing what it genuinely lacks and able to specify precisely what kind of outside support would most effectively complement its existing strengths.

The organisation as a civic space

The concept of the organisation as a self-governing civic space extends the logic of community citizenship into the domain of professional life. It suggests that the principles developed throughout this series, gift mapping, associational thinking, the producer model, the learning conversation and the four-finger test, are not exclusively relevant to neighbourhoods and streets. They apply with equal force to any human group that shares a common space and a common purpose.

When a team begins to treat itself as a civic space rather than a functional unit, it changes its relationship to its own members. It becomes interested not just in what people can do within the confines of their job description but in what they are capable of as whole human beings. It creates the conditions for gifts of the head, heart, hands and conscience to be offered and received across the formal structures of role and hierarchy.

Questions for reflection

When a system or process breaks down in your team, what is the default consumer complaint that your peers immediately use to defer responsibility to an external authority?

How can you pivot your team’s orientation this week from asking who is going to fix this for us to asking what internal assets we already hold to address this ourselves?

Think of the last time your team sought external support for a challenge. Had you first conducted a genuine audit of your internal capacity, and if not, what might you have found?

What is one challenge currently facing your team or organisation that could be addressed, at least in part, by a more honest and systematic mapping of existing internal assets?

Inspired by: Puntenney, D.L. (cited in Russell, C. and McKnight, J. (2022) The connected community: discovering the health, wealth, and power of neighborhoods. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.)