When Ideas Find Their People

When good work and positive intentions align, surprises can arrive as a rewarding outcome.

Two years ago, while working on writing and editing the book Saatnya Ekonomi Restoratif  (the abridged English version can be read here), I revisited Kate Raworth’s 2017 work, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, with deep attentiveness. This time, as I scrutinized every sentence and paragraph and turned the pages one by one, it felt like embarking on a cognitive pilgrimage.

Thanks to that, I became fully convinced that what the book advocates is one of the most sensible ways to run an economy, one capable of replacing the current system. It is the much needed pathway to get humanity away from the system in which they can only reap crisis after crisis, despite the material advancement achieved, at least in high-income countries.

What Ms. Raworth offers is a concept that encompasses every aspect needed to realize justice, equality, economic democracy, and respect for planetary boundaries.

When a couple months ago I had to help select the right keynote speaker for a regional conversation event in Bangkok our organization,  CommsLab, involved in organizing it–which took place on 6 October 2026–I put Ms. Raworth’s name forward as an option. She was the one we contacted after our first choice turned out to have an overly packed schedule.

However, her schedule–along with other obstacles–prevented her from attending. Even so, there was a silver lining: we received an offer for a replacement, Xiaoting Hou-Jones. As we all know, she is a member of the team at the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), the organization Ms. Raworth co-founded to put the concepts from her book into practice in the real world. Ms. Hou-Jones specializes in government and policy. Since other alternatives were unavailable due to the “tight timeframe,” we decided to accept her.

And that “discovery” during “injury time”–right when time was running out–truly met our expectations.

Ms. Hou-Jones, who enjoys coffee and prefers using public transportation, has clearly gained a deep understanding of Ms. Raworth’s ideas. When delivering the keynote address, she articulated her colleague’s concepts with remarkable clarity and ease, while also connecting them to the current situation in Southeast Asia, a topic we had specifically proposed.

“In Southeast Asia…we know this all along. It’s about rediscovering our roots, re-asserting our own vision, because it’s deeply embedded in our culture, in our religion, in the way we used to organize ourselves,” she said regarding the need to look for an alternative economic vision.

Her words resonated with us because the challenge in Southeast Asia is not simply to find a new economic model, but to recognize what has been pushed aside by the dominant one. Across the region, economic success is still too often measured by how much we produce and consume, even as ecological damage and social inequalities undermine the very foundations of prosperity.

Perhaps the task is not to import another ready-made solution, but to reconnect what we already know with a different way of organizing our economies: one that allows people to thrive without costing the Earth.

Just a day after the forum concluded, half of our team–those who had traveled to Bangkok–had the chance to have a relaxed conversation with her. We arrived that afternoon bearing a tote bag containing a piece of traditional fabric, a bag of coffee beans from Sigi province in Central Sulawesi, and a box of chocolates. In the terrace behind a building in Lumphini Park–overlooking the lake–we learned more about her while discussing opportunities for networking and future collaboration.

Looking back, I realized that the value of such gatherings lies not only in the ideas shared on stage, but also in the connections that continue after the formal programme ends. A keynote can introduce us to a different way of thinking; a casual conversation can help turn that intellectual connection into something more tangible.

Neither guarantee change, of course. But both can create the conditions for people working in different places, and different ways, to recognize common ground and explore what they might accomplish together.

Ms. Hou-Jones is actually just one of several people we came to know through that event. To us, all of them are focal points of ideas similar to what we believe in, which we were still looking for until the moment we met them.

Perhaps that is how a good idea works: it does not stop at being something we read and believe in, but gradually connects us with people who can help bring it to life.