What’s Trust Got to Do with Business Performance?

June 5, 2009 – 2:39 pm

Everything!  Trust is our willingness to collaborate with someone else in order to get something done.   I’m willing to do something for you based on an understanding that you agree to do something for me, and we both feel it’s a fair deal.   The feeling we call “trust” is based on our experience of being able to come to an agreement we feel good about, to feel that each party has done what they said they promised to do, and that the results have been positive.  If we break it down, there are four steps in this process:

  1. Figuring out what’s going on and what’s possible to do. Do we agree on what the situation is?  Do we see a common problem or opportunity? Do we both care to do something about it?
  2. Coming to an agreement. Healthy agreements and promises are based on each party clearly understanding what the other person is offering or asking for, and what that will look like when it’s done.  In business planning language, this is expressed as SMART goals – Specific, Measurable, Accountable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
  3. Following through, and dealing with breakdowns. This is where things get challenging. If our agreement is clear, whether because it’s very thorough, or because we “understand” each other through past experience,  follow through may be easy and straightforward. If not, we need to get comfortable with addressing the situation early on – a skill I call constructive complaining. The clearer the agreement in the first place, the easier it is to deal with breakdowns.
  4. Declaring completion, letting go, and learning. This could be as simple as saying Thank You for a job well done, or a lot tougher if things haven’t turned out the way we wanted or expected. Letting go does not mean forgetting about it, it’s understanding how to get better results next time, and becoming more skillful with our requests and offers to others.

Too often though, we fall into the trap of seeing businesses, or any purposeful organization, as a “machine” – a financial machine, an information machine, etc, as if we simply plan it, program it, and “get” the parts to co-operate.  A more powerful approach is to see the plan as an agreement among all the people that need to make it happen. To be successful in today’s transparent environment, any organization, whether a business, a government agency, or a social enterprise, needs to maintain the confidence of all its stakeholders.  This requires an ongoing conversation about what each stakeholder values and how well we are fulfilling that.  And that’s the foundation for measuring business performance.

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Measuring Sustainable Business Performance

May 28, 2009 – 11:49 am

We are in a “perfect storm” of trends that are driving a new view of what consitutes “good” business performance. Our internet connected, “Hot Flat and Crowded” world puts all of us in each others’ backyards.  A global company can pollute an indigenous tribal area today, and it’s all over the web tomorrow. The traditional view of business performance is simple = return to shareholders.  The new view acknowledges the importance of a much wider variety of players in the system, what we’ve come to label as “stakeholders”. These can include employees, suppliers, customers, communities impacted by business operations, other species, and natural systems, in addition to the investors. A number of the entrepreneurs and others I’ve interviewed on my radio show have described a remarkably similar pattern that gives legs to the term “triple bottom line”.

  • First, we have to see the entire supply, manufacturing, distribution, consumption, and disposal chain as a whole system comprising multiple stakeholders with diverse interests
  • Second, we need to understand what constitutes “value” for each of those stakeholders, and how we measure that.
  • Third, we design products and business processes to maximize positive outcomes for all the stakeholders along the way, both in real time and in consideration of the future.
  • Fourth, we rethink what we mean by “branding” – today’s astute consumers want to consume information as part of the product – the product”story” becomes a key component of the packaging.

In a recent conversation I had with Bill Shutkin, Sustainable Development Chair at University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business, he characterized both approaches as “Friedmanesque”.  For you economists out there, the first is based on the view of Milton Friedman, the second on the very different views of Thomas Friedman. Many major corporations have begun annual reporting on wider stakeholder outcomes, using frameworks such as the Global Reporting Initiative. This has grown out of  the “Corporate Social Responsibility” movement as well as environmental reporting.  Increasingly, we are seeing initiatives like the Climate Prosperity Project, funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, that takes the ideas being popularized by T. Friedman and puts them into action in major cities – the idea that there can be no genuine economic development or prosperity without addressing both the challenges AND the business opportunities of energy efficiency, new technologies and more “natural” products. How would you translate all this into practice, to keep your organization focused on the measures that matter?

  1. Clarify your vision by identifying all the stakeholders you impact, the players from whom you need resources, money, services, etc
  2. You are in a state of “exchange” will all of these stakeholders – what do you provide them and what do they provide you?
  3. Design metrics that define what success looks like in relation to each of these stakeholders
  4. Combine these into a scorecard and build a system for regular reporting and feedback
  5. Learn, adapt, and refocus continuously
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Permaculture and Facilitation

May 2, 2009 – 12:50 pm

I recently had occasion to facilitate a group of leaders in the Transition movement.  Local transition initiatives are part of a vibrant, international grassroots movement that builds community resilience in response to the challenges of peak oil, climate change and the economic crisis.  Transition goes way beyond conventional environmentalism in its focus on building resilient communities, emphasis on adaptable local solutions, and a fundamentally positive take on what life can be after peak oil.  (see my earlier blog post from last fall)  Much of the Transition movement’s approach to doing things is based on the principles of Permaculture, developed by David Holmgren.

I had thought that permaculture had mostly to do with organic gardening and local food supplies – but what fascinated me as a facilitator was how permaculture is based on natural ecological principles that – lo and behold – actually have quite a bit to do with how people operate.  It’s the application of a “living systems approach” to collaboration, decision making and change.  For example, the approach to “change management” I learned working for a large consulting firm emphasized doing a detailed design, then essentially “managing” the change by designing communications to convince people that the change was “good for them”  The permaculture approach is a more stepwise process, one that values diversity, small steps, and constant creative adaptation.

The first step is what Holmgren calls “Observe and Interact”, which speaks to observing how our actions interact with our place, rather than developing all the details from a grand, abstract theory.  By observing first, we slow ourselves down and see how our thoughts and actions fit into a grander pattern.  This is the essence of systems thinking.

From a facilitation perspective, this means that one of the best ways to sort issues out efficiently is, paradoxically, to SLOW EVERYBODY DOWN first.  Too often we don’t really listen to each other, biding our time until they stop talking so we can jump in and say what WE want to say. Practices like using a talking stone (or stick) are not just some sentimental “kum-ba-ya” throwback, but in fact work because they shift what I like to call the “physics of a conversation”.  Conversations are highly complex interactions that can be understood through many of the ideas of chaos theory, particularly the idea that initial conditions of a system have a huge impact on the subsequent flow of the conversation.  That’s why a mindful facilitator pays attention to factors like the meeting space, the way people are arranged, the agenda, and how the conversation is initiated. Using a talking stone forces each of us into the role of either speaker or listener, without “cross talk”. When one speaks, one speaks completely.  Otherwise, one just listens.  It’s amazing how quickly the real issues in a group surface when we do this, and how it reinforces mutual respect and trust.

For an article on how Transition leaders are using these principles in practice, check out Shaktari Belew’s article in the Sentient Times.  Shaktari is a Transition Trainer and leader of Transition Ashland in Oregon.

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Is LOHAS the Business Culture of the Future?

March 28, 2009 – 12:21 pm

(This article by Dan originally appeared at www.lohas.com.  LOHAS is an acronym for a market segment characterized as Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability)

For the last 250 years, we have been living in what Peter Senge calls the “industrial age bubble”, based on a “take, make, waste” worldview. Behind this way of life has been a set of attitudes and beliefs about economics, wealth, and business. We tend to think of these beliefs as “common sense”, or even as objective natural law. But in fact, they are received knowledge, the inheritance of centuries of cultural, political, and philosophical tradition. Our way of business is based on learned behavior, not natural law.

With this worldview, we’ve created unprecedented wealth, knowledge and communication. And, we’ve created environmental toxicity, cheap throw away products, denatured industrially-produced food, and a culture of low self-esteem and spiritual poverty.

Since the 1960’s, there has been an increasing counter-cultural rejection of this worldview, and a declaration of the value of healthy food and lifestyles, social justice and environmental sustainability. New generations of LOHAS entrepreneurs have emerged – people who express those values with distinctly capitalist solutions for improving quality of life.

Is there a distinctively “LOHAS” business model?

Does having a healthy, sustainable product imply having a healthy, sustainable business culture to produce it? Are LOHAS businesses really run differently from “conventional” businesses? I believe the answer is YES.

I’ve been interviewing business leaders in the LOHAS sector for the last two years, and have more recently begun sharing these conversations on internet radio. There are common threads in these stories, threads very different from what I was taught in business school 25 years ago.

A New Metaphor – Business as a Living System

The models we use to visualize business, far from being abstract business school stuff, are actually critical. The metaphors we use to describe the world inform our sense of what is real, our ability to imagine possibilities, and the choices we make. If we think the world is a machine, a fundamentally meaningless bunch of stuff, we see and act accordingly.

“Common sense” in the modern world emphasizes the separation of the self from nature, and a linear notion of cause and effect. This shows up in business planning models that view markets and organizations as machines, to be “managed” via command and control.

The business metaphor is changing from that of a linear, mechanical system to a complex, biological one. Your business environment is more like a forest than a set of gears. As a result, today’s emerging business planning models imagine enterprises as interdependent networks of resilient, individual players. Processes of planning and change are not straight lines from A to B, but cycles involving action, learning and adaptation.

Valuing Multiple Stakeholders

If you see your business environment as a machine, you want to improve your ability to manipulate it. If you view your business environment as a forest, you see a variety of plants and animals that behave according to their own rules, rules that you need to understand and respect.

In the industrial age model, business exists solely to make a profit for shareholders. LOHAS strategies begin with the intention to respect the values and needs of all the stakeholders they touch. The forest is only healthy if all the plants and animals in it are healthy. The value of a business model is maximized when all the players – investors, suppliers, employees, consumers, communities – benefit from being a part of it. And in a surprising number of cases, returns to investors are just as good or better.

Collaboration and Trust

Industrial age systems get people to work together by command and control, carrots and sticks. Networked organizations require greater skill to enable people to collaborate. Why is this essential? In a complex world, no one person can see the whole picture. Wise leaders tap into the collective intelligence and motivation around them. This means building trust.

Effective collaboration requires trust in order to creatively innovate and solve problems, negotiate healthy win-win agreements, and manage performance based on agreement rather than on power.

Head, Heart and Hands

It’s striking how many LOHAS leaders benefit from practices like yoga and meditation. These practices develop personal resilience and creativity, integrate mind and body, and enable one to act confidently within that more complex view of reality. We often use the term “authenticity” to describe this way of being.

To be authentic is to know and act from the heart, as well as the head. In the language of the heart, having the right questions is more valuable than having all the answers. Authenticity is a confident, wholehearted state of being that puts all these ideas into practice – purpose, complexity, interconnectedness, respect, and collaboration.

Is LOHAS the business culture of the future? If evolution is about adapting to greater and greater levels of complexity and intelligence, I believe it will be.

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Ordinary Business

December 22, 2008 – 8:49 pm

Commerce and trade are some of the most basic and ancient human activities.  This is a theme that has run through a number of my BlogTalkRadio conversations, particularly with Marsha Shenk and Jahn Ballard.  I spoke with Jahn last week on the show, in a segment entitled Lean and Green Transformation.  Jahn is a truly out-of-the-box thinker who has integrated a stunning number of perspectives into his approach to creating transparency and sustainable performance in organizations.

One of the big points for me was the way Jahn looks at operating cash flow.  Anyone who has been to business school has learned a variety of accounting conventions and financial ratios – which have become the goalposts and field markers in the game of business.  But how much sense do they actually make? Do they really tell us what’s going or are they several levels of abstraction away from the reality of the business?  Jahn would argue the latter.

What’s amazing is that most of us, at the level of ordinary domestic reality, know that so much cash is coming in, and so much is going out.  Pretty simple. Businesses, on the other hand, especially the big ones run by MBA-types, have a bewildering array of metrics, used in financial statements, that often obscure the truth more than illuminating it.  Think about Enron, widely celebrated as a runaway innovator and success until the sheer “creativity” of its financial metrics was revealed in all its shoddy glory.

Likewise, one of the supposedly radical innovations in Lean Manufacturing is the idea that workers become involved in working out their own solutions to problems, based on agreement about the metrics that matter. How radical is that? For most of our history as hunter/gatherers, or farmers, that’s been pretty ordinary stuff. Let’s put our heads together and figure out how to cut one of those mammoths away from the herd so we can eat.

But somehow, we’ve been lost in that Industrial Age Bubble, where ordinary logic is banished in the name of specialist management-think.  Somehow I think this is related to the clever MBA mindset (disclosure:  I have an MBA) that slices bits of mortgages into new instruments, puts it all into a blender, and creates derivatives whose risk characteristics and accountabilities  resemble some indistinct smoothie more than a piece of meat one can value and sink one’s teeth into.

Somehow the ordinary business of risk, interest, and trade gets lost in all this.  And we’ll likely deflate until we find the  ground again.

Listen to my interview with Jahn Ballard:

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What is a Car For, Anyway?

December 9, 2008 – 11:52 am

This morning I interviewed Steve Meyer, Founder and CEO of Mainstreet Pedicabs, on my BlogTalkRadio Show. Steve started off studying both Ecology and Economics, worked in real estate development for a few years, and then started Mainstreet Pedicabs. Mainstreet is the largest manufacturer of pedicabs in North America, and ships pedicabs to major cities all over the world. The Pedicab story inevitably weaves into a bigger conversation about land use, urban economics, and the role of government in transportation.

We talked about the role of the car in the ecology of the urban landscape.  At a time when there is so much discussion about saving the American auto industry, it’s useful to take a deeper look at what the car actually is. Bailout notwithstanding, what are all the other costs of auto transportation that we have subsidized, externalized, or ignored in the conversation?  The auto industry is already deeply subsidized in a number of ways.  Public monies are spent to build and maintain roads and bridges.  Enormous amounts of real estate are devoted to parking, and the runoff from those parking lots is a toxic stew of old oil and tire dust. Much of our foreign policy, subsidized through our taxes, goes to maintain advantageous relations with oil producing regions.  The effects of carbon emissions include global warming and health impacts. Our entire built landscape has been created in response to the existence of the automobile.

Steve likened the bailout conversation to the debate over suppression of forest fires. We now know that letting fires burn is good for the forest system.  If we let a forest become overgrown, the effects of fire, when it does inevitably happen, are far more devastating.

So too the auto industry.  The human consequences of a Detroit failure are enormous, and just become worse the more that the industry is protected from the true costs of auto addiction.

Is insisting on higher fuel efficiency standards enough?  Steve suggested that this is just becoming more efficient at doing the wrong thing.  Sure, it’s better to use less gasoline, but is that really the big question? We are talking about an interdependent system of transportation, land use, economics and sociology, in which the automobile, and the auto industry is one player.

The real challenge of our times is not to get things back to the way they were.  It’s to see through the current crisis and write a new story about how we live, work and do business.

Listen to my interview with Steve:

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InterBeing, Buddhism and Business

December 2, 2008 – 7:02 pm

Last night I read a fascinating article in What is Enlightenment? Magazine (www.wie.org) by Howard Bloom subtitled “Descartes’ Delusion”.  The delusion was that René Descartes settled himself into a house in Amsterdam, back in 1636, and decided he’d sit there, more or less by himself, until he penetrated the bedrock of reality, ie “What is that I can know for sure?”.  And he came up with the famous statement “I think, therefore I am”.  Bloom deftly critiques Descartes’ methodology – and makes the statement that Descartes could only think because he inherited a body, a mind, a language, and an entire social environment from millions of years of evolution.  Like Descartes, each of us is in fact a multitude.

Descartes has had such an impact on our culture that today we tend to think it “common sense” that each of us is an island – or at least we behave that way.  One of my teachers, Julio Olalla, was fond of pointing out that we tend to think of ourselves and our problems as our own isolated psychological case, when in fact we are playing out cultural scripts that date back centuries.  These scripts are passed on through family stories, cultural messages, official history, and the very words we use to describe our world.

Our culture has achieved incredible material success/excess because of our ability to view ourselves as separate – as if, like Archimedes, all we need is a place to stand and a lever big enough, and we can move the earth.  The only problem is, we are standing on the earth.  There’s nowhere else to stand, space fantasies notwithstanding. Despite our limited success at conquering nature, we are in danger of overbreeding, starving and poisoning ourselves with our own toxins.

Eastern philosophies, particularly buddhism, offer a radically different worldview, based on mutual causality. Western philosophy has generally focused on linear causality until very recently.  A causes B, which causes C.  Which is exactly why so many of our great inventions have brought about unintended consequences. Pharmaceuticals have conquered many diseases, which is a good thing, but are now polluting our water, subjecting fish, and ourselves, to unmetabolized birth control pills, anti-depressants, etc.  Only recently, with the development of Systems Theory, have we begun to see how phenomena emerge, sometimes unexpectedly and chaotically, from a variety of causes.

In a chaotic, interconnected world, we see that we cannot control everything, but instead influence a complex chain of events through intentions and small actions – even if we are not sure which ones matter.  This is why random acts of kindness are a good thing!  Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese buddhist monk and peace activist, has coined the term “InterBeing” to describe this mutual connectedness.  Rather than believe our own story about how things happen to us, he suggests we continually ask why things occur the way they do.  And, when we keep asking that question, we ultimately see there is no one to blame, including ourselves.

The way of leading business that I see emerging among “natural” entrepreneurs draws from this well.  Any complex product arises from a number of ingredients, that come from different places.  Each has an impact on the local economy that produces it, the local ecology, the health and well being of the people who live and work there.  Likewise for the way it’s manufactured, packaged, used and ultimately disposed of.

Today on my BlogTalkRadio Show, I interviewed Joshua Onysko, the founder of Pangea Organics. Pangea is the fastest growing organic skin care line in the world.  Josh has built Pangea from the ground up to be a business that acknowledges the connectedness of all players in the manufacture and use of the product.  Josh has even thought deeply about packaging.  Since cardboard packaging consumes millions of trees a year, Pangea’s products are packaged in downcycled paper fiber which is impregnated with seeds.  Plant your holiday gift pack wrapper and a Colorado Blue Spruce tree will grow.

Josh is using profits from Pangea to fund micro-financing efforts that go back to the people – mostly women – who grow the crops that supply Pangea with ingredients.  This creates stable livelihood for the growers, and a steady supply of quality product for Pangea.

The market for organic personal care products is growing at 22% per year. Why does this matter? Our skin is our largest organ, and absorbs 87% of what we put on it.  Cold processed organic soaps maintain the liveliness and efficacy of the ingredients so they can be available to the skin.

Josh pointed out that we are led to believe that healthy products are a luxury. In many cases, because of their effectiveness, organic products are actually cheaper per use, and infinitely better for long term health. Is a “cheap” bar of soap actually cheaper, when we consider the real cost of petroleum by-products, wasteful packaging, and unknown efffects of chemical ingredients?

All of this may sound like fringe thinking, but Josh summed it up when he said “the Fringe predicts the Future”. Business people and economists are beginning to see how many costs we have traditionally “externalized” – but on a small, crowded planet, all those “externalized” costs, like the pharmaceuticals in the water supply, ultimately find us.

Listen to my interview with Josh:

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Metrics and Sustainability at General Mills

November 24, 2008 – 6:54 pm

My BlogTalkRadio guest today was Kim Callis from General Mills.  Kim’s job is integrating sustainability into the fabric of General Mills’ operations.  Give it a listen – we had a great conversation – but I want to share one big point I was left with.

General Mills mission is to “Nourish Lives, Nourish Communities, and Nourish the Future”.  But what does this really mean, and how will we know if General Mills is actually getting somewhere with this great idea?

Agreement about Metrics.

Having an intention about becoming sustainable requires a way to measure the fulfillment of that intention.  Which comes down to Data.

It’s striking how many conversations are going on about creating metrics, indices, datasets of sustainability.  Without these, we don’t have an agreement on what we even mean by the term sustainability. For example, in Kim’s work with the Global Reporting Initiative, there are 10 food companies meeting with various NGO’s to define social and environmental measures that these companies can use in their reporting, and even more importantly, in aligning their own internal efforts.  They are talking about issues like child labor, animal rights, fair trade practices, and impacts on indigenous communities.

Some things are easier and more objective to measure,  like energy and materials.  This has been the subject of “lean manufacturing” for a while now. Measuring positive or negative impacts on an eco-system – whether an eco-logical system or an eco-nomic system – is more challenging. It’s less subject to pure scientific or engineering analysis.  More subjective, more values-driven. Which is why it makes sense that there are collaborative groups across industries having these conversations.

We are going through a major cultural shift about what we value.  For companies in a particular industry, like food, it’s important to have that collective conversation.  The players in a given industry share suppliers, production technologies, and even the same industry analysts on Wall Street. Collaboration is essential, especially when it comes to shifting the value proposition for a whole industry, and dealing with issues that balance economic, social and environmental concerns.

Kim summarized the impact of metrics by paraphrasing what he had learned from the work of Dr. Steven I. Simon, who specializes in creating safety culture for large manufacturers.  But, the lessons are just as applicable to creating a sustainability culture.  Kim said that, when expectations are made clear and communicated, the response of people is to want to live up to those expectations.  The result is predictable behaviors – and predictable behaviors are the essence of culture.

We are going through a cultural shift – from one in which business “predictably” focuses on the financial bottom line – to one in which business “predictably” balances the concerns of multiple stakeholders, including financial interests.

Listen to my interview with Kim:

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Glass Half Full – The Sustainable Opportunity for Business

November 20, 2008 – 12:06 am

In the last two weeks, I’ve had conversations on my radio show with two gentlemen who work with very different ends of the business spectrum.

Last week, I spoke with Graham Russell, Executive Director of CORE Colorado. CORE is a non-profit business association dedicated to promoting more environmentally and socially responsible business practices in Colorado and the Rocky Mountain West. CORE’s constituency tends to be small to medium businesses, and Graham is much more interested in reaching traditional businesses rather than preaching to the choir.

Much of the attention to sustainability in the business world is on the big companies. CORE, in conjunction with the University of Colorado at Denver Business School, recently undertook a survey of small-medium businesses to fill in the picture.  The study found a surprising amount of initiative and progress among businesses that don’t necessarily think of themselves as “green”.  The reasons for change vary – in some cases, business owners just feel it’s the right thing to do.  Others are driven by competitive and customer pressures.  A few cited compliance with regulation – but having said that, most small businesses hate regulation.

The picture is very different for big business. In my interview today, with Will Sarni, CEO of DOMANI Sustainability Consulting, he pointed out that many of the biggest industrial companies in the US have joined in the United States Climate Action Partnership to lobby the federal government for more greenhouse gas regulation.  For big companies, acting unilaterally to reduce emissions – if it raises costs – serves as a “prime mover disadvantage”.  So, they want a level playing field, at a new level.

Between big and small businesses, there are also big differences in the amount of “greenwashing” going on, being the act of making oneself sound more sustainable than one really is because it’s good PR.  According to Graham, greenwashing is big company branding issue.  Smaller businesses can’t afford the PR machinery to create the story in the first place. In the big companies, according to Will, greenwashing backfires pretty quickly given the ever increasing level of transparency in the marketplace.  Given the current economic climate, many companies that aren’t really sincere about sustainability are abandoning the story and just focusing on hanging on to their “base”.

Notable, and to me shameless, exception being Detroit’s Big Three, offering to come up with greener cars, if we will only save them. Like a drunk, showing up at church on Sunday and offering repentance, with a bottle hidden in his pocket.  The last so called “American” car I bought was a piece of junk, and I’ve been driving mostly Japanese, but “made in North America” cars ever since.  I have no sympathy.

But I digress….

I’ve been impressed with the thinking of Bob Willard on how companies evolve into sustainability.  He sees sustainability in business as a continuum.  Yes, a lot of companies start out ignoring sustainability, actively resisting it, then grudgingly complying with whatever it is they are pressured to do.  To me, greenwashing is a stage in which a company recognizes that someone out there – customers, employees, regulators, investors – cares about sustainability.  So, they are at least acknowledging those values by making sustainability claims, even if they aren’t sound.  Eventually, they realize it’s in their own self interest to be real about it, and move forward. I’m still impressed from my conversation with Don Beck two weeks ago, with his willingness to meet people where they are and open the way for them to evolve.

One big constraint on sustainability is that businesses are tending to view it as a cost, therefore something to be avoided.  Maybe we decide to endure the cost, because it’s the “right thing to do” and customers value it.  But the real opportunity for business, according to Will, is seeing sustainability as a top line focus. That is, innovating new products in the business to business, or business to consumer, markets that help customers save energy and reduce waste.  This involves rethinking the product itself, and creating new value.

A prime example, and well worth rethinking, is the automobile. One of the most mind-blowing ideas I’ve heard in the last year is the idea that electric cars can become an interactive part of an intelligent electrical grid.  One of the issues with wind power in particular is that it blows more at night, when demand for electricity is lowest.  And there’s nowhere to store the juice.  Except in millions of cars, with their batteries plugged in, resting in their garages for the night.

Here’s my interview with Graham Russell:

And my interview with Will Sarni:

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Resilience, Emergence and Overcoming Polarization – a Conversation with Don Beck

November 6, 2008 – 2:16 am

On the morning after an historic election, what if President-Elect Obama were to call and ask: “OK, I got elected, now what?”

In today’s BlogTalkRadio Show with Dr. Don Beck – bio-psycho-social mapmaker and activist – we explored that question.

In Dr. Beck’s view, our greatest need is a remedy for the polarization in our society. We’ve tended to look at conflicting values like left vs right, free-market vs interventionist, as a kind of pendulum that goes back and forth.  There are trade-offs and compromises made between opposing poles. In fact, the better mental model is that of a spiral, in which each movement transcends and includes the previous movement.  The apparent opposites and value conflicts are really moves in a bigger dance, a pattern that reveals itself as it emerges.

Beck’s model, called Spiral Dynamics, imagines personal and cultural emergence as a response to increasing levels of complexity in our environment.  Today, we are at an unprecedented level of complexity, with 6.5 billion humans emerging from a variety of conditions and cultural stories.  Here there are Vikings with nuclear weapons, shamans on the internet, and hedge fund managers doing yoga.  It sounds like a giant halloween party in Times Square attended by all the people who have ever lived.  For a species in which, for most of our existence, most of us have known at most 200 people, this is quite an encounter.

How can we all live together and adapt to this situation? Beck practices what he calls “natural design”.  It’s not based on a “one size fits all” formula.  It’s based on curiosity, inquiry, mutual respect, and an understanding that we all respond intelligently to our particular life situation.

Don Beck has used this model to defuse conflict and create political and economic transformations in a number of troubled societies, including South Africa, Palestine, the Netherlands, and Mexico.

What are the implications for business leadership? Beck thinks that it’s critical to align the business’ cultural DNA with the “habitat”, the larger cultural and economic conditions. There’s no way to fake that – which to me fits in with the new sense that branding has to be authentic.  Authentic branding is not limited to product packaging and advertising, but to the totality of experience of everyone who touches the organization.  Collective karma, if you will.

We talked about race.  Working in South Africa, Dr. Beck developed a color scheme to describe the various sets of values, or vMemes, that he encountered there.  It was no longer an issue of black vs white, but a tapestry of purple, red, blue, orange, and green. As he said today, “It’s not the color of your skin that matters anymore, it’s the color of your mind.”

Can the US create a national political culture that honors everyone?  The blue states, the red states, the cities, the suburbs, the rural areas, even…….Alaska? If we recognize that different parts of the country have different life conditions, can we find a new framework that accommodates each and all of us?

And perhaps President-Elect Obama is just the right person to serve this transformational time.  His unusual background led him to be labelled “un-American” at one point in the campaign.  On the contrary, the fact that he didn’t fit any neat category – African father, raised by white mother and grandparents in multicultural Hawaii – required him to make choices about how to define himself, rather than to “know” who he was.  He had to “ask” who he was, and make a choice.

To my way of thinking, inventing and re-inventing oneself is as American as apple pie.

Here’s the interview:

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