• 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

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.

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:

Our first online interview  October 1 with climate scientist Jeffrey Kiehl, covered a wide swath of territory in an hour.  Jeff talked about how nature becomes invisible to us.  Our limited awareness of ourselves in nature, time and space impacts our ability to see, and act on, the environmental challenges we are creating for ourselves. Jeff describes  how the images, metaphors and stories we tell ourselves impact our possibilities for acting in new ways.  And how do we change? We need to rewrite the story.  We have been living in an industrial-age culture in which the machine is the metaphor for life and business.  And now we are moving into a new metaphor, in which living systems are the metaphor. The earth goes from being an inert lump of resources waiting to be exploited, to something alive.  If we are addicted to fossil fuels, we talked about treatment models from psychology and the recovery movement. Jeff tells a powerful ancient greek story in which a greedy man becomes so addicted to the fruits of the earth that eventually consumes everything, including his own limbs!  In this story, the spirit of the earth is alive, showing up as a goddess.  At the end, we talk about the need to move from an argumentative, media-dominated discussion of sustainability into a real collective conversation focused on new stories and new actions.

Check out Jeff’s website at www.jtkiehl.com The interview is available at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/SustainableLeadership/blog/2008/10/01/Nature-Visible-and-Invisible

Or listen to it right here:

In the second conversation, recorded today, Michael Brownlee and Dan explored the rapidly growing “Transition” movement as an evolution towards resilient local communities, spurred on by the challenges of energy descent.  We talked about the idea of “peak oil” and the impact it may have on our economy and our lifestyles. Michael defined “resilience” as the ability of communities to withstand economic and environmental shocks.  Rather than viewing energy descent as a scenario of collapse and breakdown, however, Michael sees these times as a spur for cultural evolution of the human species.  We are moving from adolescence into adulthood, with new capacities for collective intelligence and community.  The Transition movement, which originated in the UK, has become a rapidly growing movement in Colorado.

See the Transition Boulder County site at transitioncolorado.ning.com and hear the interview at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/SustainableLeadership/blog/2008/10/09/Transition-The-Most-Inspiring-Movement-in-the-World

Here’s the interview with Michael:

And, that could be completely wrong.

I’ve been through several apocalyptic mood swings ever since I read The Limits to Growth in the run-up to the first Earth Day, back when I was in high school. Then, there were the two oil shocks of the seventies. Then the Harmonic Convergence. Then Global Warming. Now Peak Oil, taking us right up to 2012. The world hasn’t ended yet, and on the other hand, it’s a big assumption to believe that the past is a good predictor of the future.

So how am I holding the future now? The Buddha used the analogy of tuning a stringed instrument. He was talking about how to hold one’s mind. Not too tight, not too loose.

Too tight might be taking the worst-case scenario at face value. This attitude leads to paralyzing fear.

Too loose might be thinking everything will somehow work itself out and life will go on. After all, it has every time before, hasn’t it?

What does this analogy say about leadership, about the kind of leadership we all need to embody these days? One of the most important things leaders do is to create a mood.

Is it possible to act from a confident mood, without falling prey to either lame optimism or fearful pessimism? Can we be confident even while acknowledging great difficulty?

One of the biggest limitations of logical thinking is that it tends to be black and white. That’s why some of the smartest people I know are the most depressed. But are they right?

The quality I’ve observed in some of the best business and political leaders is the ability to embody paradox. Seen differently, paradox is a form of creative tension, the gap between the real challenges of our time, and a vision of what sustainable life might look like. And to act in that gap.

When the internet came along, I saw that as evidence that, at least on a crude level of text, pictures, music, etc, an infosphere was emerging. It opened communication, created a forum for dissenting voices, and made all kinds of products and ideas available. The internet is a miracle of innovation, and has made possible a whole new class of entrepreneurial, home based professionals, including myself. It’s not global consciousness, but it’s a step in the right direction.

When NAFTA came in, I was living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. After having lived in the US all my life, I found that products in Halifax were overpriced, of low quality, and limited selection. That was the late 1980’s. As NAFTA took effect, I had as much choice as I’d had in the States, at lower prices. I thought that was a good thing. And, it created opportunities for people in that somewhat out-of-the-way, but very creative, place to find new export markets for software, music, film, and other knowledge products.

There are lots of problems with globalization – but I’ve tended to think many of these could ultimately be fixed with sufficient attention to labor and environmental standards as part of international agreements.

Two years ago I met Michael Brownlee. Michael was the head of Boulder Going Local, now known as Transition Boulder County. The premise of Transition is that, with peak oil, the cost of transportating goods and people will become so high that we will have to create more economic and social value at the community level – the way humans have lived for most of our history.

I have to admit I was skeptical at first. Boulder County, Colorado is not a place that has supported a subsistence economy since the days of the Arapahoe. When my industrial age European-descended forebears arrived here after the Civil War, Colorado was already a commodity economy. The railroad transported immigrants and capital west, and gold, wheat and sugar beets east. Civil engineers like my great-grandfather Alpheus McNitt built irrigation ditches to bring water from the mountains into what had been called the Great American Desert.

So, isn’t re-localization just wishful thinking? Seems not. Last week Michael and partner Lynette-Marie Hanthorne held a workshop outlining the ideas of David Holmgren, one of the Australian founders of the Permaculture movement. Holmgren makes the argument that we are still living in the post-Enlightenment culture, based on a fundamental belief in human brilliance. The whole modern worldview, with its belief in progress and innovation, is based on this assumption.

But what if all the marvels of 21^st century life as we know it, are in fact more the product of cheap oil than of human brilliance? I resist this idea. It sounds Marxist, the idea that our consciousness is determined by our material circumstances. I believe that thought generates our world. I’m not new agey about this. I recognize there are limits – the inevitable cycle of birth, old age, and death we all live through. The influence of parents, schools and other cultural institutions on the stories we tell ourselves, stories about who we are and what we are capable of.  Nonetheless, we create the world we live in.

But the evidence for peak oil, as a constraint that we’re colliding with at 90 miles an hour, is compelling. Holmgren makes the connection between cheap oil and social breakdown. Our ability to drive many miles to our private home with our automatic garage door opener, where we don’t talk to our neighbors. Each in his/her own unit, with its own toaster. Our isolation, our addictive behaviors, which are epidemic. The fear we have of each other. Maybe life’s not so good with cheap oil after all?

Holmgren lays out four possible future scenarios of post-peak oil “Energy Descent”:

Techno-Explosion: In which we discover a new source of limitless energy and blast off into a science fiction future of no material limits. Given the dystopian view of social breakdown he lays out, it also sounds like a recipe for Timothy Leary – inspired psychosis. Perhaps we could colonize space, and humans will multiply infinitely through the galaxy and beyond. Hopefully the pharmaceutical industry will keep up and they’ll get that Holodeck invented after all.

Green-Tech Stability: After a little bumpy period, we learn to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources. We don’t continue our Evel Knievel – like jump into space, but settle down into a stable, slow/no growth pattern, in which we relax into an abundant, but less frenetic lifestyle. This is the point of view advocated by many of us who believe in innovative, capitalist solutions, eg Al Gore.

Creative Descent / Earth Stewardship: Using permaculture principles, we descend gently but steadily into a localized, subsistence economy that features greater value in community and ecological harmony. Population subsides from the current level to something that respects the earth’s carrying capacity – maybe 1 billion or so?

Collapse: Think end of the Empire, Dark Ages, warlords, barbarian hordes, moats, only with automatic weapons. Not a pretty prospect.

Michael challenged us, not to believe one idea or the other necessarily, but to take a hard look at what idea we were holding of the future. And to examine the basis for that view.

I come down in the Green-Tech Stability camp. But, I wonder, can we recognize the challenge and change the system and our own worldview fast enough? And what kind of hard-facts slap in the face will we need to get moving?

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