Ziwani’s podcast series Big Change: How Ordinary Christians Change Their World explores how Christians can drive significant change in society. Andy Crouch is partner for theology and culture at Praxis, a venture-building ecosystem advancing redemptive entrepreneurship. Jonathan Wilson is co-founder and Managing Partner at ThirdWay Capital, a venture holding company investing in and scaling small-to-medium businesses in sub-Saharan Africa.
Introduction
In this episode of the Big Change podcast series, host Jonathan Wilson interviews Andy Crouch on the differences between ethical and ‘redemptive’ business, and why being ethical is not enough to achieve large-scale, sustainable change – which is precisely what the podcast series is all about.
The conversation starts off by introducing the concept that people, organisations, and communities interact with the world in three distinct ways: exploitative, ethical, or redemptive. These different approaches seamlessly integrate into our lives and have a profound effect on how we daily live and work in the world.
Why being ethical isn’t enough
After acknowledging that “exploitative business is a reality, and has been a reality, all over the world,” Andy points out that “most people do not set out to be exploitative. Besides a few notable exceptions, most people aspire to something better than brutally taking advantage of others and the planet simply for their own benefit.”
Especially for Christians in business, being ethical has become the minimum baseline for how we want to operate in the world. We aim “to be fair in our dealings, to ‘do the right thing,’ to respect other people, and to address injustices through our businesses whenever we can,” Andy says. We expect the ethical of ourselves and of those around us, and that is why the experience of an ‘I win, you lose’ situation leaves such a bad taste in the mouth.
In essence, being ethical refers to pursuing ‘I win, you win’ in our business deals, where we don’t benefit at someone else’s expense. It is about finding a way to unlock value through cooperation. And when we manage to achieve this, there is inevitably more abundance in the world than there was before. “But what if your industry, or your corner of the world, bears the scars of years of exploitation?” Andy asks. “Then being ethical is not enough, because pursuing win-win cannot actually repair or undo the damage that exploitation has done.”
“The ethical approach to business works very well in a world of fully functioning systems where the other actors are also ethical,” he continues. In that case we can trust that in general, projects and partnerships will work out well for everyone involved. There are a few places or sectors where this is true, but if as Christian business leaders we want to address the major issues of our time, we need a different approach. We need to go beyond the ethical.
Understanding ‘redemptive’ in the business context
The word ‘redemptive’ originally comes from an economic term rooted in the Latin word meaning ‘to buy back.’ Andy explains, “In the modern financial world, we still use this term when we talk about redeeming a bond – once it is paid off, the debt is cancelled. While the ancient world didn’t have the same financial systems, the concept was similar – if land was lost or a person was enslaved, someone could step in, pay the price, and restore the land to the family or return the person to their freedom.”
As Christians, we understand that Jesus redeemed our debt by becoming human and sacrificing his life so that we could be restored to a right relationship with God and his creation. In a similar way, wherever there is loss, brokenness, or injustice, and someone willingly enters into the situation by bearing a cost or taking a risk to help the person or system to be restored – that can be considered redemptive action in the world.
However, the redemptive approach is altogether different than the exploitative (I win, you lose) or even the ethical (I win, you win) approach to business. Andy asserts that it does not mean ‘I lose, you win,’ but rather ‘I sacrifice, we win.’ Firstly, “sacrifice is chosen loss,” he says. It is not being forced to be the loser in a transaction, or being constrained to give up something that you would never do otherwise. It means that you believe there’s something better than the current situation, and for the sake of unlocking that preferred future for everyone involved, you are willing to take the first step and risk the loss.
Secondly, what this kind of sacrifice does, is it creates a ‘we.’ “Normally,” Andy explains, “business involves independent actors who each decide what’s good for them. And they either act exploitatively or ethically. They either act in win-lose ways or win-win ways, but it’s always ‘I’ and ‘you.’ What sacrifice does is it binds us together. It creates a ‘we.’ And together we discover there are many new possibilities that were not available when we were independent actors.”
The biblical story of Ruth and Boaz beautifully illustrates this point. Ruth takes the risk of leaving her homeland to care for Naomi, while Boaz takes on the risk of marrying Ruth. Both Ruth’s willingness to tie her future to her destitute mother-in-law, and Boaz’s willingness to marry a migrant widow and assume their family’s debts, show voluntary sacrifice. If either of them had gone for the ‘I win, you win’ in this situation, they would never have met, or married. But because both of them went beyond what was expected (what was ethical), the outcome was a flourishing family that became the ancestral line of David and ultimately, Jesus.
Applying the redemptive approach to business today
How does this story of roughly 3,000 years ago relate to the way we do business today? Andy suggests that much like in Ruth’s time, we operate in environments marked by chaos and exploitation. If we take the ethical approach and only pursue ‘I win, you win’ transactions, we will often have to walk away from business opportunities. We won’t have the courage to bind ourselves to people in difficult situations and to enter into painful realities, in essence “to bet on there being more abundance than we can see,” he says.
For this reason, he considers the win-win ethical approach as “a limitation of imagination. It says, ‘if we can find a contract that we can both agree on that will serve both of us well, only then we can do business.’ But what if you’re in an industry where a lot of exploitative actors are actually winning? If you’re just ethical, you’ll say, ‘well, I can’t do anything about that.’”
From his experience, Andy observes that this dynamic is particularly evident in many African countries. “Ethical investors may want to invest, but because of great complexity (where there is a legacy of exploitation that has to be reckoned with) they have no choice but to walk away from those opportunities, because the stakes don’t allow them to work in a mutually ethical way. This implies that there are countless environments where we can’t make a difference.”
The ‘I sacrifice, we win’ approach is the only way to enter into these broken realities that are doing so much damage to people, societies and the planet, and to “reimagine what’s possible in those spaces,” he says. Jonathan agrees, “given the context that we live in a world that is broken, that does have damaging and exploitative systems, if we’re only prepared to take the ethical approach, we will only ever be able to settle for managing things as opposed to transforming things.”
Becoming redemptive leaders
They both note that living and working in a redemptive way requires more than self-improvement, however. It calls us to ‘die to self’ and allow deep inner transformation before we can transform the world around us. As Jonathan remarks, “who’s going to give of themselves when everything about their identity is wrapped up in protecting themselves?”
“We can live and work in such a way that we reorder and restore things back to the way God intended this world to be,” he encourages us. “As redemptive leaders we can ask ourselves, ‘What am I willing to sacrifice for others so that we can actually transform our world? How can my business not just avoid harm, but actively participate in the healing of society?”
By way of illustration, Andy mentions a (now global) financial risk management firm where he knows the founder, Mike. During his many years in the complex world of financial derivatives, Mike saw how major firms exploited clients by keeping critical information hidden. He began to ask, ‘What if our job is not to maximise profit, but to maximise trust?’ Inspired by this radical idea, he chose to take a fully transparent approach and to share all relevant information with clients. By sacrificing potential profits for the sake of honesty, the firm not only grew in size and profitability, but redefined industry standards. As Andy puts it, a redemptive leader who wanted to do things differently “reset the possibilities of exploitation in an entire market.”
He shares another example of a company in the oil and gas sector, where instead of following the standard path of recruiting through high-profile HR consulting firms, the CEO chose to intentionally hire ex-convicts. Normally marginalised by society and disqualified from finding good work, these people were treated with respect and dignity – and as a result of their tremendous motivation the company flourished. Furthermore, the CEO’s philosophy of prioritising long-term financial returns over quarterly profits energised and empowered his team to consistently outperform larger companies in the same sector.
Andy acknowledges that taking a counter-cultural approach to business does not come easy, and that both these companies have to deal with complications. “Yet they’ve been able to affect the way things are done far beyond their own sphere of direct control. Of course, they know they cannot fix everything in their industries, but they can make some things better – and this gives glory to God.”
Conclusion
Even as redemptive leaders we cannot fix whole industries or regions, “and that was also true for Ruth and Boaz, by the way,” Andy reminds us. “Yet four generations later, there was someone named David who was able to restore a measure of civil order, of good governance, of proper worship to the whole nation. David was not a perfect king, but he was much better than what came before. We have to think multi-generationally about our redemptive choices today, because it may not be for three or four generations that the full impact will be seen.”
So, in between the daily pursuit of the ethical, of ‘I win, you win’ transactions in business, every now and again let’s be willing to take the long bet of ‘I sacrifice, we win’ for the sake of restoring a small part of our world to the way it should be. We’ll create a better future for everyone involved, and get to tell some quite remarkable stories.
