Sustainable Wealth

Tree intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 09:05:09 +0000

https://youtube.com/watch?v=RA_GodrfHP4&si=PQ9OH0JIzw2eeobl

A new dialogue with our human nature

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 22:20:00 +0000

This passage Fritjof Capra’s 1997 feels book relevant to our time.

“ A NEW DIALOGUE WITH NATURE

The conceptual shift implied in Prigogine's theory involves several closely interrelated idcas. The description of dissipative structures that exist far from equilibrium requires a nonlinear mathematical formal-ism, capable of modelling multiple interlinked feedback loops. In living organisms, these are catalytic loops (i.c. nonlinear, irreversible chemical processes) which lead to instabilities through repeated self-amplifying feedback. When a dissipative structure reaches such a point of insta bility, called bifurcation point, an element of indeterminacy enters into the theory. At the bifurcation point the system's behaviour is inherently unpredictable. In particular, new structures of higher order and complexity may emerge spontaneously. Thus self-organization, the spontaneous emergence of order, results from the combined effects of non-equilibrium, irreversibility, feedback loops, and instability.

The radical nature of Prigogine's vision is apparent from the fact that these fundamental ideas were rarely addressed in traditional science and were often given negative connotations. This is evident in the very language used to express them. Nonequilibrium, nonlinearity, instability, indeterminacy, etc., are all negative formulations. Prigogine believes that the conceptual shift implied by his theory of dissipative structures is not only crucial for scientists to understand the nature of life but will also help us to integrate ourselves more fully into nature.

Many of the key characteristics of dissipative structures - the sensitivity to small changes in the environment, the relevance of previous history at critical points of choice, the uncertainty and unpredictability of the future - are revolutionary new concepts from the point of view of classical science, but are an integral part of human experience. Since dissipative structures are the basic structures of all living systems, including human beings, this should perhaps not come as a great surprise.

Instead of being a machine, nature at large turns out to be more like human nature - unpredictable, sensitive to the surrounding world, influenced by small fluctuations. Accordingly, the appropriate way of approaching nature to learn about her complexity and beauty is not through domination and control but through respect, cooperation, and dialogue. Indeed, Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers gave their popular book, Order out of Chaos, the subtitle 'Man's New Dialogue with Nature'

In the deterministic world of Newton, there is no history and no creativity. In the living world of dissipative structures, history plays an important role, the future is uncertain, and this uncertainty is at the heart of creativity. "Today, Prigogine reflects, "the world we see outside and the world we see within are converging. This convergence of two worlds is perhaps one of the important cultural events of our age.”

And the last page of the book:

“ In ecosystems, the role of diversity is closely connected with the system's network structure. A diverse ecosystem will also be resilient, because it contains many species with overlapping ecological functions that can partially replace one another. When a particular species is destroyed by a severe disturbance so that a link in the network is broken, a diverse community will be able to survive and reorganize itself, because other links in the network can at least partially fulfil the function of the destroyed species. In other words, the more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be.

In ecosystems, the complexity of the network is a consequence of its biodiversity, and thus a diverse cological community is a resilient community. In human communities, ethnic and cultural diversity may play the same role. Diversity means many different relationships, many different approaches to the same problem. A diverse community is a resilient community, capable of adapting to changing situations.

However, diversity is a strategic advantage only if there is a truly vibrant community, sustained by a web of relationships. If the community is fragmented into isolated groups and individuals, diversity can easily become a source of prejudice and friction. But if the community is aware of the interdependence of all its members, diversity will enrich all the relationships and thus enrich the community as a whole, as well as each individual member. In such a community information and ideas flow freely through the entire network, and the diversity of interpretations and learning styles - even the diversity of mistakes - will enrich the entire community.

These, then, are some of the basic principles of ecology - interdepen-dence, recycling, partnership, flexibility, diversity, and, as a consequence of all those, sustainability. As our century comes to a close and we go towards the beginning of a new millennium, the survival of humanity will depend on our ecological literacy, on our ability to understand these principles of ecology and live accordingly.”

A path forward for living laboratories

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 03:29:00 +0000

The following ideas are drawn from my rough draft notes for a research white paper I’m writing at the moment based on my articles since 2007. The paper is intended to be a survey and my reflections of some of the emerging ideas and ages old wisdom born from our community of practice over the last 35-50 or so years, and how we can improve the creations and contributions many of us are making to serving and evolution of capital markets, economic development, business systems, ecological management, regenerative agriculture, circular economy, impact investing, restoration and reconciliation, etc. and all the various approaches you can imagine to find better ways forward:

There is an imperative for a new paradigm that goes beyond sustainable development, one that involves a collective vision for redesigning our civilization, drawing inspiration from nature through biomimicry. At the heart of this transformation is working within planetary boundaries and embracing a city-to-city, citizen-to-citizen cooperative community of practice within a larger bioregional framework. This framework accounts for local community efforts and nature's context within each bioregion from which cities operate.

For example, Mediterranean cities—or leaders within cities residing in Mediterranean climates in one of the four bioregions of that template—can cooperate with each other since they face very similar conditions of climate and the challenges of those unique environments.

To fulfill the grand aspirations of regenerative development and economic transformation, it is essential to establish guiding principles for future inquiry and create contexts that are resilient and adaptable. Adopting a localized approach to development and financing allows for improved coordination and tailors solutions to the needs of specific communities.

There needs to be a new era of cooperation emerging, benefited from the technosphere—the conscious cultivation of communities across the planet harnessing relational bonds that can now be formed through ubiquitous tools like communication networks, videoconferencing, peer learning platforms, cooperative tools, and AI.

Yet to underwrite evolutionary cooperation—a hallmark of the emerging Symbiocene—we need resources. Among these are the eight types of capital, of which money is only one.

We must transcend the logic of the global casino toward a culture of care—place by place, culture by culture, people to people. This new ethos provides a responsibility to steward the collective through this conceptual emergency. Like sailors navigating treacherous narrows, we require deft leaders—systems leaders—who operate with full responsibility to care equally for future and current generations.

This must be grounded in ecological principles, evolutionary systems thinking, and multidisciplinary approaches to resilience. Cooperation has brought humanity this far; we must partner together in new and innovative ways for a win-win society. Emerging scholarship on Darwin’s thinking reveals that cooperative systems increase survival as organisms learned over eons that working together gets us farther than working apart.

From intergenerational wisdom such as the Golden Rule, we must also listen to life's principles through biomimicry and symbiosis—patterns tested over nearly four billion years on Earth—to guide civilization design. For example, we can create curricula inspired by living systems for human settlements, land use planning, and urban-rural landscape regeneration.

By integrating scenarios for opportunities emerging from today’s chaos, we harness collective intelligence to co-creatively architect better futures. This involves creating bioregional regeneration communities of practice—peer-to-peer learning laboratories designed to improve life for families today while ensuring better outcomes for future generations in hometowns, cities, states, and countries worldwide.

We must design ways to steward our heritage and wealth as fiduciaries for our collective inheritance. This requires fully recognizing the incalculable value of Earth's life-support systems that have enabled humanity’s existence.

By reevaluating notions of value, risk, and growth, we can develop a new Modern Portfolio Theory encompassing all treasures—whether tied to places like cities or bioregions or families or neighborhoods. Our worldview must evolve beyond calcified 20th-century models into frameworks suited for 21st-century challenges.

If money makes the world go round, we must redesign how it is managed to unlock wealth embedded in living systems around us. Just as a caterpillar uses its gifts to become a butterfly, we must integrate impact investing with economic development through regeneration—not mere sustainability.

This perspective nurtures ecosystems and communities while fostering innovation through living laboratories that test frameworks for development. Fiduciary responsibility should extend beyond financial capital to encompass all eight types of capital—reflecting holistic views on wealth.

Rather than hoarding insights privately, these tools should serve as public utilities empowering sovereign communities toward stewardship over their collective inheritance.

The fusion between cooperative mindsets across disciplines is essential for integrating impact investing with bioregional development rooted in living systems principles. Observing how plants or animals harmonize with nature offers profound lessons for designing finance aligned with ecological resilience.

Such systems embrace complexity while fostering connectivity, diversity promotion, resilience cultivation—all grounded locally yet regenerative globally—and community-led approaches holistically integrated into finance models ensuring thriving futures.

Were finance allowed evolution serving humanity's needs alongside ecosystems under "Five R’s" (Relationship/Resilience/Regeneration/Reconciliation/Reverence), it would awaken humanity’s sense belonging within interconnected webs spanning life itself.

Bioregional financial systems being developed globally promise flourishing cooperative economies supporting humans alongside ecosystems alike—a transformation requiring expanded imaginal capacities distributing solutions innovatively across cities/bioregions alike accelerating adoption best practices enhancing quality-of-life everywhere.

Expanding Our Perceptual Range: A Systems View of Life, Economy, and Consciousness

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 05:22:00 +0000

Thank you AI:

“ Expanding Our Perceptual Range: A Systems View of Life, Economy, and Consciousness

In the face of mounting global challenges, from climate change to social inequality, it is becoming increasingly clear that our current economic and social paradigms are inadequate. To address these issues, we must fundamentally transform our understanding of life, economy, and consciousness itself. Drawing on decades of research and insight from systems thinking, ecology, physics, and economics, we propose a new framework for perceiving and interacting with our world.

The Limits of Our Current Perception

Our civilization has long operated under a mechanistic worldview, seeing the universe as a collection of separate parts rather than an interconnected whole. This perspective, rooted in Cartesian dualism and Newtonian physics, has led to reductionist approaches in science, economics, and governance. As Fritjof Capra notes, “The major problems of our time cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent.”

Hazel Henderson aptly observes that “the humanoid is a perceiving/differentiating device of limited range inevitably distorts the visioning of the totality.” This limitation in our perceptual apparatus has profound implications for how we understand and interact with the world around us. Our tendency to categorize, separate, and reduce complex phenomena into simpler components has allowed for significant technological progress, but it has also blinded us to the intricate web of relationships that sustain life on Earth.

The Systems View of Life

To transcend these limitations, we must adopt what Capra and Luisi call “the systems view of life.” This perspective recognizes that living systems are inherently interconnected, self-organizing, and emergent. As Buckminster Fuller reminds us, “Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system’s separate parts.”

This systems view extends beyond biology to encompass social, economic, and ecological realms. It reveals that the challenges we face are not isolated problems but symptoms of a larger crisis in perception and values. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and economic inequality are all interconnected manifestations of our failure to recognize the fundamental interdependence of all life.

Rethinking Economics and Wealth

Our current economic models, fixated on quantitative growth and monetary metrics like GDP, fail to capture the true wealth and well-being of societies. As Gregory Wendt points out, “We need to recognize these blind spots in our current way of doing business. Once we do so, we can reshape the current model by incorporating these values and ways of seeing the world.”

Hazel Henderson’s work on redefining progress and wealth has been instrumental in this regard. She argues for a more comprehensive understanding of economics that includes the “love economy” of unpaid work, the value of natural capital, and the importance of social and ecological well-being. This expanded view of wealth aligns with Riane Eisler’s concept of a “caring economy” that values nurturing, empathy, and collaboration.

Qualitative Growth and the New Prosperity

Capra and Henderson’s concept of “qualitative growth” offers a crucial reframing of economic development. Unlike unlimited quantitative growth, which is unsustainable on a finite planet, qualitative growth focuses on development that enhances the quality of life without necessarily increasing material consumption. This aligns with what Tim Jackson calls “prosperity without growth” – a vision of human flourishing that doesn’t rely on ever-increasing GDP.

As Buckminster Fuller presciently stated, “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” This requires us to design economic systems that mimic the cyclical, regenerative processes of nature. Concepts like the circular economy and regenerative agriculture are steps in this direction, but they must be part of a broader shift in how we conceive of progress and development.

Expanding Consciousness and Perception

To implement these new models, we must expand our individual and collective consciousness. This involves not just intellectual understanding but a profound shift in how we perceive and experience reality. As Henderson suggests, we need to “write the observer back into the equation” – recognizing that our consciousness shapes the world we perceive and interact with.

Fuller’s concept of “Spaceship Earth” provides a powerful metaphor for this expanded awareness. By seeing our planet as an integrated, finite system of which we are all crew members, we can begin to grasp the true nature of our interdependence and shared responsibility.

This expansion of consciousness has practical implications for decision-making in business, government, and civil society. It calls for what Capra terms “ecoliteracy” – a deep understanding of the principles of ecology and systems thinking applied to social organization.

Technology and Collective Intelligence

Emerging technologies, particularly in the realms of artificial intelligence and global communication networks, offer unprecedented tools for expanding our perceptual range. As Wendt suggests, we must ask, “How does the tool of AI harness the collective wisdom of our human, the noosphere, to create futures which enable our planetary species to evolve far beyond the implicit cognitive limitations of our human conditioning?”

These technologies, when aligned with systems thinking and ecological awareness, can help us visualize and manage complex global systems in real-time. They can facilitate new forms of participatory democracy, collaborative problem-solving, and collective intelligence that transcend traditional boundaries of nation-states and disciplines.

A New Story for Humanity

Ultimately, what we are proposing is a new story for humanity – one that recognizes our fundamental interconnectedness with all of life and our potential for conscious evolution. As Thomas Berry put it, we need a new “story of the universe” that provides a meaningful context for our existence and guides our actions toward a sustainable and flourishing future.

This new narrative must integrate the insights of modern science with the wisdom of indigenous cultures and spiritual traditions. It must bridge the artificial divide between the material and the spiritual, recognizing, as Fuller did, that “Unity is plural and, at minimum, is two.”

Conclusion: Toward a Planetary Civilization

The transformation we are calling for is nothing less than the birth of a new planetary civilization – one that operates in harmony with Earth’s ecosystems and realizes the full potential of human consciousness. This vision, while ambitious, is not utopian. It is grounded in our growing scientific understanding of living systems and the creative potential of human collaboration.

As we face the converging crises of the 21st century, we have the opportunity to make a evolutionary leap in our collective development. By expanding our perceptual range, rethinking our economic systems, and cultivating a deeper awareness of our interdependence, we can co-create a future of shared prosperity and ecological harmony.

The path forward requires us to embrace complexity, cultivate empathy, and develop new forms of governance and economic organization that reflect the true nature of living systems. It calls for a revolution in consciousness as profound as any scientific or technological revolution in human history.

In the words of Buckminster Fuller, “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” The choice is ours, and the time for action is now. By expanding our perception and reimagining our relationship with each other and the living Earth, we can navigate the challenges ahead and realize our potential as conscious agents of evolution.”

Systems View of Life Book Article

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 04:40:00 +0000

This is a 2014 review from Resurgence Magazine https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article4162-the-systems-view-of-life.html

Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi explain how their new book captures a different understanding of how life works. The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi is published by Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN: 9781107011366.

The great challenge of our time is to build and nurture sustainable communities, designed in such a way that their ways of life, businesses, economy, physical structures, and technologies respect, honour, and cooperate with Nature’s inherent ability to sustain life. The first step in this endeavour, naturally, must be to understand how Nature sustains life. It turns out that this involves a whole new conception of life. Indeed, such a new conception has emerged over the last 30 years.

In our new book, The Systems View of Life, we integrate the ideas, models, and theories underlying this new understanding of life into a single coherent framework. We call it “the systems view of life” because it involves a new kind of thinking – thinking in terms of relationships, patterns, and context – which is known as “systems thinking”, or “systemic thinking”. We offer a multidisciplinary textbook that integrates four dimensions of life: the biological, cognitive, social, and ecological dimensions; and we discuss the philosophical, social, and political implications of this unifying vision.

Taking a broad sweep through history and across scientific disciplines, beginning with the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, we chronicle the evolution of Cartesian mechanism from the 17th to the 20th centuries, the rise of systems thinking in the 1930s and 1940s, the revolutionary paradigm shift in 20th-century physics, and the development of complexity theory (technically known as nonlinear dynamics), which raised systems thinking to an entirely new level.

During the past 30 years, the strong interest in complex, nonlinear phenomena has generated a whole series of new and powerful theories that have dramatically increased our understanding of many key characteristics of life. Our synthesis of these theories, which takes up the central part of our book, is what we refer to as the systems view of life. In this article, we can present only a few highlights.

One of the most important insights of the systemic understanding of life is the recognition that networks are the basic pattern of organisation of all living systems. Wherever we see life, we see networks. Indeed, at the very heart of the change of paradigms from the mechanistic to the systemic view of life we find a fundamental change of metaphors: from seeing the world as a machine to understanding it as a network.

Closer examination of these living networks has shown that their key characteristic is that they are self-generating. Technically, this is known as the theory of autopoiesis, developed in the 1970s and 1980s by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Autopoiesis means “self-making”. Living networks continually create, or recreate themselves by transforming or replacing their components. In this way they undergo continual structural changes while preserving their web-like patterns of organisation. This coexistence of stability and change is indeed one of the key characteristics of life.

In our synthesis, we extend the conception of living networks from biological to social networks, which are networks of communications; and we discuss the implications of the paradigm shift from the machine to the network for two specific fields: management and health care.

One of the most rewarding features of the systems view of life is the new understanding of evolution it implies. Rather than seeing evolution as the result of only random mutations and natural selection, we are beginning to recognise the creative unfolding of life in forms of ever-increasing diversity and complexity as an inherent characteristic of all living systems. We are also realising that the roots of biological life reach deep into the non-living world, into the physics and chemistry of membrane-bounded bubbles — proto cells that were involved in a process of “prebiotic” evolution until the first living cells emerged from them.

One of the most important philosophical implications of the new systemic understanding of life is a novel conception of mind and consciousness, which finally overcomes the Cartesian division between mind and matter. Following Descartes, scientists and philosophers for more than 300 years continued to think of the mind as an intangible entity (res cogitans) and were unable to imagine how this “thinking thing” is related to the body. The decisive advance of the systems view of life has been to abandon the Cartesian view of mind as a thing, and to realise that mind and consciousness are not things but processes.

This novel concept of mind is known today as the Santiago theory of cognition, also developed by Maturana and Varela at the University of Chile in Santiago. The central insight of the Santiago theory is the identification of cognition, the process of knowing, with the process of life. Cognition is the activity involved in the self-generation and self-perpetuation of living networks. Thus life and cognition are inseparably connected. Cognition is immanent in matter at all levels of life.

The Santiago theory of cognition is the first scientific theory that overcomes the Cartesian division of mind and matter. Mind and matter no longer appear to belong to two separate categories, but can be seen as representing two complementary aspects of the phenomenon of life: process and structure. At all levels of life, mind and matter, process and structure, are inseparably connected.

Cognition, as understood in the Santiago theory, is associated with all levels of life and is thus a much broader phenomenon than consciousness. Consciousness – that is, conscious, lived experience – is a special kind of cognitive process that unfolds at certain levels of cognitive complexity that require a brain and a higher nervous system. The central characteristic of this special cognitive process is self-awareness. In our book, we review several recent systemic theories of consciousness in some detail.

Our discussion also includes the spiritual dimension of consciousness. We find that the essence of spiritual experience is fully consistent with the systems view of life. When we look at the world around us, whether within the context of science or of spiritual practice, we find that we are not thrown into chaos and randomness but are part of a great order, a grand symphony of life. We share not only life’s molecules, but also its basic principles of organisation with the rest of the living world. Indeed, we belong to the universe, and this experience of belonging makes our lives profoundly meaningful.

In the last part of our book, titled Sustaining the Web of Life, we discuss the critical importance of the systems view of life for dealing with the problems of our multi-faceted global crisis. It is now becoming more and more evident that the major problems of our time – energy, environment, climate change, poverty – cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are all interconnected and interdependent, and require corresponding systemic solutions.

We review a variety of already existing solutions, based on systems thinking and the principles of ecodesign. These solutions would solve not only the urgent problem of climate change, but also many of our other global problems – degradation of the environment, food insecurity, poverty, unemployment, and others. Together, these solutions present compelling evidence that the systemic understanding of life has already given us the knowledge and the technologies to build a sustainable future.

Fritjof Capra, physicist and systems theorist, has been engaged in a systematic examination of the philosophical and social implications of contemporary science for the past 35 years. Pier Luigi Luisi is Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Rome. His main research focuses on the experimental, theoretical, and philosophical aspects of the origins of life

Synergetics opening

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 05:41:00 +0000

This is a quote from Buckminster Fuller - from his book Synergetics page xxv

“WE ARE IN an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief. Advancing science has now discovered that all the known cases of biological extinction have been caused by overspecialization, whose concentration of only selected genes sacrifices general adaptability.

Thus the specialist's brief for pinpointing brevity is dubious. In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individu-als. It has also resulted in the individual's leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war. We are not seeking a license to ramble wordily.

We are intent only upon being adequately concise. General systems science discloses the existence of minimum sets of variable factors that uniquely govern each and every system. Lack of knowledge concerning all the factors and the failure to include them in our integral imposes false conclusions.

Let us not make the error of inadequacy in examining our most comprehensive inventory of experience and thoughts regarding the evoluting affairs of all humanity. There is an inherently minimum set of essential concepts and current infor-mation, cognizance of which could lead to our operating our planet Earth to the lasting satisfaction and health of all humanity.

With this objective, we set out on our review of the spectrum of significant experiences and seek therein for the greatest meanings as well as for the family of generalized principles governing the realization of their optimum significance to humanity aboard our Sun-circling planet Earth.”

Michael and Greg reflect on the wisdom of Oikos to inform the pathway forward for human development.

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 23:17:00 +0000

FM Magazine: How do we create value?

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 01:30:00 +0000

What is value and how do we create it?

Interview with Hazel Henderson -- futurist, evolutionary economist and f...

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Sun, 18 Jun 2023 19:24:00 +0000

“Responsible Finance” Webinar

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 20:20:00 +0000

We are The Movement Of Coherence

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Sun, 14 Aug 2022 19:39:00 +0000

“A specific type of leadership is required that would have the authority and resources to convene and maintain the dialogues for developing shared visions and perspectives. A GCM might develop a new form of leadership—movement diplomats—that would complement civil society’s paid staff, charismatic visionaries, influential philanthropists, community organizers, and organizational heads. Trained and supported directly by organizations or communities, these diplomats would be charged with the task of building systemic coalitions. They would seek to translate the rhetoric of different factions, foster communication, and find common ground. They would provoke learning in their own organizations in addition to reaching out to form alliances. Ideally, this new evolution in leadership would include core competencies of facilitation, strategic dialogue, systems thinking, and familiarity with future scenarios and the requirements for a sustainable world. This new role of leadership would not replace other necessary types of leadership, but would complement them in helping to maintain the balance between coherence and diversity within a GCM.”

“This difficult work of diplomacy, often unglamorous and contentious, could become a highly respected and influential form of leadership. If such roles are given recognition and support, a network of movement diplomats and diplomatic training programs could help a systemic movement overcome barriers of language, class, region, and outdated “issue-silos”. It would be through the work of these diplomats that spaces for engaged dialogue would be developed, multiplied, and enhanced. Movement diplomats could be a key to developing coherence while avoiding the evolution of stultifying movement hierarchies.”

From “Dawn of the Cosmopolitan The Hope of a Global Citizens Movement”
Orion Kriegman

Why do we pursue improving impact investing?

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 01:48:00 +0000

As I read the various books and ideas and learn from my fellow members of the impact investing community, I am increasingly aware that we must fundamentally challenge our premise that the lens from which we operate is based in any form of organizing our economy such as "capitalism" or "socialism" or any other framework, and to recognize that the cognitive leap required is a new way of understanding what the economy is as a tool in the context of revaluating human purpose and our relationship to earth and our future. In other words, from the notions of "saving the earth" or "saving civilization" or "evolving humanity" there is something deeper beyond that. For simply "saving" earth so that the human enterprise can continue begs the question - continue for what purpose?

informing the blind spots in our economic models - through thinking about new ways to perceive and differentiate.

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Thu, 27 May 2021 02:54:00 +0000

"The ferment Heisenberg caused in physics is now leading to efforts by Wheeler, Everett, Capra and Wigner and a host of audacious young physicists to write the observer back into the equation - an overdue recognition of the most basic of the "hard" sciences that, in a very real sense, reality is what we pay attention to. In fact, the humanoid is a perceiving/differentiating device of limited range inevitably distorts the visioning of the totality. Indeed perhaps original sin is nothing more than differentiating, out of which grows such communal grief. Out of more holistic insights we may discover a different view of probability theory, rooted in the understanding that “randomness” and “disorder” are only measures of human ignorance. While of peripheral vision, by the drive of “probabilities,” was an imaginative leap, perhaps we may also embrace the possibility that those “probabilities” actually exist, even though we are not paying attention to them, as the many worlds-interpretation in quantum physics suggests.” ~ Hazel Henderson from her book 1976 book "Creating Alternative Futures, the End of Economics"

Toward a new model framework for finance to build a common good capitalism

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Sat, 30 Jan 2021 22:44:00 +0000

With all of the outrage about finance and the markets, and opining - and so many who are still learning how a stock trade is conducted, much less how a stock is different from a bond - there needs to be a degree of informed and evolutionary discourse to put the us-vs-them nonsense of our last administration behind us and weave together a new path forward - here are two articles first from 6 years ago, and the other this week which I find ironically aligned in intent and pattern, and were we to depoliticize this conversation we have the promise of making true progress to underwrite the resilient and compassionate civilization our hearts know is truly possible, ironically from someone who's views I largely differ, it's time for common ground!

first draft: From Charting A New Course For Impact Investing, To Sailing to New Seas Only Imagined

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 10:12:00 +0000

[this is a rough draft, please pardon the typos]

MONEY MEANING AND MARKETS

Now that nearly 18 moons has passed since Ethical Markets published
this piece, which I co-wrote with Nick Sramek, based on our share visions and experiences, his as a knowledge officer at a thin tank guiding pensions and family offices and mine a nearly three decade passion for sustainable development, green economy and ethical investing.

After the article has opened up so many doors for us, and strengthened the convictions I had about the nature of evolving finance, and while Nick and I had complementary visions, my experience in creating this piece is as if it could been either of ours, and both of ours at the same time. And neither of us really thought we invented any ideas in the article, yet we were simply looking to assess the state of affairs of a movement over the last decade in anticipation of the 10th anniversary of the conference, as a human created demarcation point to pause, and reflect "what will the next decade be like?" We felt that to articulate and corroborate a shared understanding of the thought leadership in the field, we could increase the diffusions of innovation of thought theory and practice more rapidly, thus bringing about the desired futures more readily and rapidly.

The article somewhat draws from the number of years I wrote about my experiences at the Social Capital Markets Conferences (SOCAP) and the people who inspired the movement, and me, the most. The conference is the opening of the article, and the setting is where the conference is held, in golden October sunshine overseeing sailboats and steamships on San Francisco Bay at Fort Mason with an ever present view of the incredible international orange paint on golden gate bridge and the vast redwoods on the other side.

There’s an essential arc in the article, a through line, which is drawn like a golden thread through some of the minds who architected the foundational layers of the new economy and responsible investing movement in the 60's, 70's and '80's and some of the earliest social entrepreneurs and innovators in finance which led to the current forms of ESG and Impact Investing. Yet, as systems grow and evolve, so do it's ideas, and as ideas evolve, so do systems. We cannot create something we cannot imagine. Nor can we see the butterfly in the caterpillar, yet it is encoded within. Similarly each of the people mentioned in the bullet points are calling for something more comprehensive, sensitive, complex, nuanced, contextual, effective or systemic. All based on new ideas and paradigms. In many ways these ideas are the foundational architecture of the new economy movement. There are a range of shifts going on the spectrum of systems, such as:

From Impact Investing to Integrated Finance “The Clean Money Revolution” – Joel Solomon
From Sustainability to Regenerative Economics “A Finer Future”- Hunter Lovins, John Fullerton et al
From Economism to Earth Systems Science – Mapping the Transition to the Solar Age Hazel Henderson 2014
From Reductionist Thinking to Systems Thinking Biomimicry for Finance 2012 Statement for Transforming Finance based on Ethics and Life’s Principles Hazel Henderson, Jeanine Benyus and others at Ethical Biomimicry Finance
From Financial Capitalism to Mutual Impact and Deep Economy Jed Emerson – The Purpose of Capital
From Ego-System to Ecosystem Economies Otto Sharmer Leading from the Emerging Future
From Extractive Businesses to Regenerative Business Carol Sanford Regenerative Business
From Conventional Capitalism to Common Good Capitalism Terry Mollner, Common Good Capitalism
From Billions To Trillions In March 2018 the concept paper From Billions to Trillions: How a transformative approach to collaboration and finance supports citizens, governments, corporations, and civil society to share the burdens and the benefits of solving wicked problems
From Private Banks to Public Banking Public Banking Institute
From the New Deal to the New Grand Strategy and the New Green Deal “New Grand Strategy” Patrick Doherty, Puck Mykelby and Joel Makower

The essential pull in this article is north star of multigenerational human prosperity through rethinking the pathways and means to evolve markets and money systems. Each of these thinkers and social entrepreneurs sought to meet the growing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity in our civilization with more comprehensive systems approach, often born out of the context of their personal experiences. Each of them point toward an increasingly complex form of managing our economy and the store and exchange of value. And essentially we're going through a phase shift from one form of civilization to another. Some are calling this the new axial age.

Not unlike the Copernican Age from waking up to the fact that we orbit a star, or the rennaissance, yet this one feels like a shift toward something deeper, toward the collective interior of thought, and ideation. We are challenged to the core in our belief systems, perhaps because it's not about beliefs, but about meeting the world for what it is now, as what we believe is from what was, not is.

So if our institutions were based on the information processing limits of the technology of their times, then let's evolve the culture of decisionmaking with a broadening of stakeholders, and the contextual data for each and every dimension of our community of life. We can then shift, from reductionist monetary systems based on a rare commodity such as gold, or shells, often associated with self limiting ego oriented cultures, silo thinking and institutional regimens based on earlier modes of civilization toward a more comprehensive systems approach for managing the affairs of our communities and bioregions. From walls to ways to relate.

The notion of evolving economic development, or the practice of evaluating myriad economic development paradigms is an important one for us to have better results from our business clusters and governance systems. We will be able to enhance the value drawn from innovative entreprenuership and business clusters. When we see a larger context from our enterprises, and adding additional bonus points of environmental, social and cultural regeneration, we have a longer view to work from. To the lives of our kids, and their grandkids. And theirs. We can then have a clearer sense of the path ahead, and where the path we are walking are walked by others, on the same ground in a different time.

We can then be focused on the full spectrum of what is going on around us in our places now, incorporating Environment Social and Governance Factors into our planning and decisionmaking for harmony and mutual prosperity for each other and our planet. The various regions on our planet, which have a range of climate, plant and animal patterns - or classification of types of bioregions in frames such as rainforest to desert to coastal tundra, or mediteranean to nordic or tropical to alpine. With these patterns of climate and resource contexts - we see emerging patterns and challenges. For example cities in desert regions have different infrastructure challenges than cities in subtropical cities adjacent to rainforests. Thus the solutions and projects will evolve in bioregional patterns, and also you can see the pattern of agriculture has patterns that map across the globe depending on climate.

We saw this context of place based, full spectrum accounting vision for human activity as a north star, inspired in part based on the patterns and strategies of life over the last 4.3 billion years. I led a series of conversations and panel discussions at the SOCAP Conference in 2014, 2015 and 2016 under the banner of "biomimicry for finance" and the last panel had a bioregional twist. We titled the event "Building an Economic Ecosystem Like 3D Chess - Local, Regional and Systemic" and that is where we began seeing bioregional thinking really enter our thinking, based on the many years of work of scientists in the field.

More recently, OneEarth has created a bioregional map for planet earth. Imagine this as a pattern to organize our cities and their related supply chains. Wouldn't it help us shapeshift agriculture, infrastructure, economic decisionmaking, and long term urban planning with a new set of ingredients?

Were we to allow finance to simply evolve to serve the 21st century needs for what I feel are the 5 R's relationship, resilience, regeneration, reconciliation, and reverence, in partnership with the community of all life. This would turn finance into a better tool in service to our humanity, to meet the needs of current and future generations at the same time, by simply waking up out of our dream of separation from life into seeing our belonging, each of us in community with the whole of humanity and our massive inheritance of the bounty of earth

“Charting a New Course For Impact Investing”

More specifically, you can see that there are some core themes in the article, which I can see a few here.
We feel it is essential that we imagine better ways to approach questions such as:

How economic development be evolved by adopting systems approaches? And shifting economic behavior to the limits of the biosphere in each bioregion, and optimizations for innovation and efficiency of energy use (along the lines that a more efficient form of life often has more longevity)
How can impact investing (also known as Socially Responsible Investing, ESG, Ethical Investing, triple bottom line, SDG’s etc.) evolve to shift the underlying economic paradigm in a community of practice, or industry? How can we collecitvely incorporate living systems to improve our business models and theories of change?
How can we build on the successes of leaders for decades, and help bring our collective visions into form - there are a number of areas where our model of operation is evolving "from -> to” and in some ways the cognitive leaps feel logarithmically more complex than the previous stage. Please see items below.
How can we all come to a better shared understanding the aforementioned themes of economy, longevity and progress in far simpler terms? We know our place, we want to live in tune with the gifts in life. We all want to and to be feel more love and connection, connected to our beloved families and friends, have lives full of prosperity pleasure and meaning filled lives. We can all identify with these fundamental human values - and also to have clean air, healthy tasty food, and enjoying the ups and downs in life in the company of those who we love the most. These are among fundamental human traits, and as we are part of the web of life, then it's clear that somehow we are all part of each other’s living experience in some way, or at least you are connected to anyone who has read this far in the article.

To make these ideas more broadly understood, and to translate into a number of contexts, we have written articles, and we produced a series of webinars from which we are now exploring a range of additional activities - TV shows, films - fiction and non-fiction and coordinating with a wide range of investing networks and professional associations.

Our article is also becoming basis of the thinking for perhaps a book, a class for k-12 and college, and some other initiatives, of note are the four stages and the bullet points showing the phase shift in a number of dimensions from one type of industrial paradigm to another:

Excited to learn your perspectives and ideas for where we could go with this, a handful of friends across the world are part of the conversation thus far, looking forward to seeing what we can create from here. Thanks for checking out my ideas

By way of background, I have a wide range of activities with a focus on evolving capital markets and impact investing systems:

- I launched and led the the CA Capital Markets Task Force ( see bottom of page 15 ) with local, regional and statewide leaders to evolve the application of impact investing at the country level scale in the 5th largest economy on the planet, the article is the guiding philsophical framework of the Task Force.

- I also have a small private practice for comprehensive wealth management ESG/Impact

- We are scoping a range projects in development with ESG industry pioneers to bring our greatest ideas for scaling impact investing into communities from regenerative systems and public banking to urban resilience and blockchain capital market innovation.

Please reach out anytime so we can discover what's possible together! Find me on linked in

Here's the original article, as published on July 4, 2019

Charting a New Course for Impact Investing: The Emerging New Paradigm of Living Systems for Capital Markets

“Ethical Markets highly recommends this reframing of the global issues surrounding mainstream finance and its inability to move beyond its anthropocentric, theoretical models derived from obsolete textbooks, now encoded in ETFs, the millions of indices, benchmarks, algorithms and theme-based portfolios.

We refer to these kinds of “theory-induced blindness,” identified as cognitive biases by psychologist Daniel Kahneman in “Thinking Fast and Slow ( 2011)” and in our latest Green Transition Scoreboard ®: “TRANSITIONING TO SCIENCE-BASED INVESTING: 2019-2020” (downloadable at www.ethicalmarkets.com) as unrecognized financial risks: “science-denial.” (beyond the climate-denial exhibited in stranded fossil reserves still in too many portfolios).

The anthropocentrism in the conceptual framing still taught in business schools and used in the global mainstream financial system blinds asset managers to the real world science of planetary processes reported in real time by the 120 Earth-observing satellites of NASA, ESA and other nations’ space programs, which we cover on our Earth Systems Science page.

We hope this thoughtful re-appraisal by two expert financiers, will help sharpen this needed debate we cover in our global TV series “Transforming Finance” distributed by www.films.com. Comments welcome.

~Hazel Henderson, Editor”

Charting a New Course for Impact Investing:

The Emerging New Paradigm of Living Systems for Capital Markets

Nick Sramek & Greg Wendt

July 1, 2019

Summary:

Despite efforts to bring the two closer, impact investing and traditional finance suffer from a misalignment challenge. Since the goals of traditional finance are inherently separate from the qualitative dimensions of values-based investing, creating mechanisms to bridge the gap has been ineffective up to this point. A new framework is needed – and is currently being constructed. All investors must coalesce around principles that have been with us for millennia; the same principles that dictate a natural order have the power to build long-term profitable companies, positive economic returns for investors, resilient communities, and sustainable ecosystems.

Expanding the role of finance is necessary to build long-term resilience which must start with multi-layered systems thinking. Listening to the needs of communities, cities, companies, investors and bioregions – the building blocks of a sustainable society – as a tree listens to its roots – will allow for far greater alignment between companies, investors, communities and the environment. For all of these building blocks, creating systems that have a 100-year vision must be the goal (to create the necessary preconditions for the intergenerational transfer of true prosperity). Taking a long view of how we live today and want to live in 100 years – and perhaps 10,000 years – has the power to not only stave off negative externalities but also repurpose our current systems for a greater good.

I. Remembering the Past

“The whole wilderness in unity and interrelation is alive and familiar … the very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly … No particle is ever wasted or worn out but eternally flowing from use to use.” – John Muir

Imagine yourself strolling below the towering redwoods of Muir Woods in Northern California, needles crunching below your feet, just as John Muir and his friends must have felt when they walked the same path. Can you hear the stones, and perhaps trees talking together? Can you? Even if trees could think, would we be able to listen to their thoughts? Could we imagine what those trees feel, strolling underneath their canopy?

Perhaps Muir has asked himself: are we thinking for the rocks and trees or with them?

In simple moments of reflection on the big picture, we can see that we are part of a living system, what visionary biologists call Gaia. And even reductionists would admit Earth is a system of living systems, an ecology of ecologies.

In order to connect ecology to economic development, in 1988 the UN coined the phrase sustainable development and asked how do we create “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” ?

Or perhaps a more relevant question is:

How do we harmonize the systems of economic development, wealth creation, and finance into greater coherence, to align with living systems upon which our very civilisation is built to actually improve them for future generations?

The good news is that attention is increasingly focused on the challenges of today and tying in the ecology of ecologies of our own systems. Leading groups across the planet have charted a course for this new economic framework based on a whole systems approach. And even established firms such as Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg, Nuveen and Blackrock who in the past resisted weaving environmental and social values with markets, are moving in this direction, perhaps simply motivated to serve the growing demands from customers who want their money managed in alignment with their values (yet movement is being made nonetheless). Many leading impact investing and ESG organizations are touting deepening strategies within values-based investing, promising that billions of dollars of capital will funnel into sustainable investment. They claim to have a real impact on people and the environment; from most accounts, a monumental shift is upon us.

However – is this really the case? Can this growth really be attributed to a growth in investor sentiment? Or merely a growth in opportunities that provide market rate returns? In other words – is the financial community truly creating strategies for long term sustainability, or simply reacting to short term trends for money-making opportunities? I.e. is the growing investment in renewable energy simply due to economic viability or does this represent true growing environmental awareness in the investor community? Which axis is moving? Greater openness to values-based investing – or the emergence of market returns for areas that were previously not economically viable?

One of the challenges we observe is that traditional financial markets operate as if the players are children vying for the attention of their parents rather than for the benefit of the whole family. The dynamics in the wall street model with stakeholders working in competition is antithetical to the necessity of cooperation to build the field and move the whole marketplace to an entirely different paradigm.

This is already happening in many circles such as SOCAP, CERES, GIIRS, B-LAB, TBLI, GIIN etc. yet many actors in the “impact investing space” are playing with the old wall street rules, which do not encourage cooperative behavior and implicitly require zero sum competition. Yet we are no longer competing children building sandcastles on the beach, expressing the virtues of our castle over all others. We must be aware that the very act of creating the castle inspires others to create even better castles, and the impressions we leave on others is the act of creation, letting the castle itself dissolve into the sea. The irony here is that impact investing aspires to be much more inclusive, cooperative and holistic in it’s approach, yet often vies to compete directly with traditional financial markets.

Fortunately, we see a new pattern emerging, a new way of relating, and building the outcomes desired by impact investors. This new pattern shows much promise to improve every community across the planet.

II. Breaking Through: Building New Models for Investors

What you’re supposed to do

when you don’t like a thing is change it.

If you can’t change it,

change the way you think about it.”

-Maya Angelou

What does it take to reinvent finance to achieve the desired outcomes for our planet while building resilient communities and strong economies?

Investing traditionally lives in a two-dimensional spectrum. On one end of this line lies pure capitalism – one hundred percent transactional in nature and uncompromising in it’s goal of profit. On this end, everything goes. Environmental degradation for a quick buck? No problem. Exploitation of underprivileged groups to increase productivity? Why not. At the other end of the spectrum lies pure giving – where economic goals do not matter at all, and every dollar spent towards non-economic returns – such as environmental sustainability and human rights – completely justify the means. No financial return here is necessary or expected. Every other transaction can then be attributed to some point on this continuum.

This continuum has been the focus of modern finance in recent decades as investors choose their position along this line. Chief Investment Officers interpret, re-interpret and occasionally reframe their investment thesis to justify ways their strategy serves the evolving priorities of their stakeholders in light of fiduciary responsibilities. Sometimes, positions change – many point to the glacial evolution of impact investing down the river as a sign of the next great wave of investment into social and environmental causes. Due to announcements such as the 2018 US SIF report, many conclude a sea change is right around the corner.

But what if that sea change is not right around the corner? What if a new paradigm is necessary to achieve these goals?

Finding True North

What if instead the final goal is not sacrificing economic returns for environmental/societal benefits, but leaving the era of transactional finance vs philanthropy and arriving at an era of longevity?

In this space, there isn’t an argument as to which side is right or where we need to land along the continuum. We simply need to ask better questions together. How do we support the betterment of all of our stakeholders, both tangible and intangible? How do we ensure our company will be around in 100 years? Do we want customers to be proud of what our company has embraced toward a shared long-term vision? .

In this space, there is room not only for short-term profit (which will exist, it’s important to note), but also greater coordination – economic, environmental, social – between the needs of communities and the needs of investors. This is not economic development – that misses the point of fully leveraging the financial wealth that has the power to save the world. Financial reform also misses the point – as financial reform without a new sense of a shared long-term goal will only amount to a burdensome regulatory regime that will be actively thwarted by those seeking to return to the status quo. Equally important to creating a shared vision is to honor what each force brings to the table. As we disassemble the spectrum, pieces cannot be discarded, but repurposed in a way that actualizes their best characteristics while heightening the overall impact. Since impact investors have already taken the leap toward weaving all of these factors into investing process, an entirely different mindset and whole systems paradigm is needed.

In order to best utilize these pieces, greater coordination is absolutely necessary between traditional players and the impact investing community to find common ground in every economic development context. A new lode-star must be calibrated to zero degrees, where the long term aims of financial institutions, impact investors, retirement portfolios, sovereign wealth funds, and development dollars are aligned. Perfect alignment should be the goal; but for the time being, the financial sector needs to at the very least be able to sit down and dream about what they want their considerable assets to accomplish. As an example, the growing number of actors working to create development initiatives, funds and investment pathways for opportunity zones are growing faster than ever, yet many in the space are presuming by simply bringing more money to such communities, wealth will spread. Yet very few groups are actually building investments which explicitly measure and incorporate the range of opportunities and factors to meaningfully improve the quality of life in the communities within and surrounding the zones. Applying this larger set of tools and processes to measure all dimensions of wellbeing is needed.

Creating a New, Powerful Framework of Systems

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.

To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

– Buckminster Fuller

The next step in the development of our financial institutions is absolutely crucial to stave off the dual threats that have the power to forever change communities in virtually every corner of the world – inequality and environmental degradation. Resolving this conundrum is quite literally the trillion dollar question – creating the appropriate structure to move trillions of dollars to developing robust communities and resilient ecosystems has the power to transform our world and build wealth in a new and profound way. Greater coordination is at the center of this challenge – which is far outside the bounds of any written expose. Here, the goal is to not pitch a solution, but simply articulate our current standoff and provide an actionable context to create living laboratories.

This article, first of a series, is not an attempt to answer questions, but to outline the range of questions and allow for community and state leaders, financial institutions, and economic development bodies to lay out guiding principles for future inquiry and to build contexts sufficiently robust to fulfill the promise of impact investing. These principles should include actions that allow for long-term alignment for companies, investors, governments, and communities; allowing for all of these groups to build a common resilient structure based on systems thinking must be the ultimate goal.

While our lives are unquestionably global, we reside in communities. We attend state universities, travel on county roads, use city fire departments, and rely on neighborhood watch groups. As communities are and will continue to be the building blocks of society, it is important to base solutions to challenges on the needs of our neighbors. A localized approach to development and financing will allow for greater coordination – financial institutions can then respond and provide long term solutions for community challenges. It is here, where these institutions can clarify a long term vision of what they want their assets to accomplish and thus create a context to find shared values, common language and context of cooperative behavior, community by community.

These building blocks can then be stacked – from individuals, to, community to city, city to state, and state to nation, allowing for a coordinated capital flow where incentives are tied to creating better, safer and healthier communities. This would of course rely on a massive leap of faith from those who benefit from inequality and extractive industries. A new Modern Portfolio Theory must be constructed for the 21st Century – one that takes into account sustainability, biomimicry, and economic development – in order to coordinate long term incentives. Luckily, since our wealth and power are tools can be used in many different purposes, with the power to build up or tear down; multiply or disappear. It is incumbent on us to build on the success of over 50 years of values driven investing to organize in a new form, like creating 21st century buildings with new mortar and the bricks of the current system’s players. From this simple shift of approach of weaving impact investing with economic development we can transform unlike any economic development agency has the potential to do. Finance transformed can help build a new world – if we allow it to.

No Institution is an Island

Shared prosperity requires the ability to see the forest for the trees – while not losing sight of the path in front of us. The ability to see the forest floor, to listen to the animals at our feet, while also soaring above with a birds-eye view. Unfortunately, while proper coordination is far and few between, it is central to reducing inefficiencies and maximizing the potential of investment dollars, governments and communities. Coordinating public and private institutions at the regional and sub-regional level will allow for a heightened understanding of our unique challenges – and shared goals.

Pockets of community-based thinking are beginning to emerge in regions across the world. One small example is the “pledge LA” program in Los Angeles that seeks to connect venture capitalists across the LA basin with community development organizations, government groups and economic developers in order to accelerate investments into startups and initiatives that will have a positive impact on communities and the environment. Pledge LA seeks to address equity, diversity and inclusion. This type of coordination has the ability to build new conversations among traditional players for the public good, while sharing risk, ideas, and innovations in communities.

In turn, this allows investors to do more with their influence and dollars and provides regional civic leadership and economic development authorities the means to accelerate their own mission for improving the quality of life for all participants in the regional economy. What remains to be addressed is the creation of robust and effective tools and incentive structures to allow for this high level of coordination to take place and demonstrate measurable results for communities from the dollars and influence invested. Here, a consensus needs to be reached on appropriate risk-sharing and profit-sharing mechanisms.

Similarly, in Silicon Valley, a community we have all looked at as a leading example for innovation and wealth creation, Victor Hwang of the Kauffman Foundation once compared the successful tech market of ideas and capital to a rainforest. Yet was he studying the way a forest really works in order to listen and learn from it? Or simply projecting his views into a transactional understanding of what a forest actually is? Does one tree stand triumphant over all the others, or is there some coherent order beneath the soil, which every tree knows, and every critter knows, to create a system designed to be regenerative?

In both examples the question remains; are the traditional tools for investing, economic development, measurement and decision-making on a regional level sufficient to take on the grander aspirations of regenerative development?

III. Joining a Community: The Transition is Happening All Around Us

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”

– Andy Warhol

Luckily, programs as inspirational as Pledge LA and the Kauffman Foundation’s efforts continue to inspire brilliant people to continue building the components for a new economic reality toward a true triple bottom line economy. All of these building blocks are heading in the same general direction. These communities of practice continue to create novel impact investing frameworks which provide the meaningful preconditions to fulfill the promise of full economic transformation and to create living laboratories to test and apply novel development frameworks.

In recent years, a growing number of thought leaders have been articulating the systemic shift needed for impact investing to truly accomplish its goal of transforming the economy. The vision we are calling for here is well underway.

Each of these perspectives are speaking toward a more comprehensive and inclusive set of activities to build on the success of the past, and weave a more coherent fabric for investors to support advanced economic development for the well being of communities across the world. We’ve compiled a list of recommended pathways to explore this revolutionary change:

From Impact Investing to Integrated Finance “The Clean Money Revolution” – Joel Solomon
From Sustainability to Regenerative Economics “A Finer Future”- Hunter Lovins, John Fullerton et al
From Economism to Earth Systems Science – Mapping the Transition to the Solar Age Hazel Henderson 2014
From Reductionist Thinking to Systems Thinking Biomimicry for Finance 2012 Statement for Transforming Finance based on Ethics and Life’s Principles Hazel Henderson, Jeanine Benyus and others at Ethical Biomimicry Finance
From Financial Capitalism to Mutual Impact and Deep Economy Jed Emerson – The Purpose of Capital
From Ego-System to Ecosystem Economies Otto Sharmer Leading from the Emerging Future
From Extractive Businesses to Regenerative Business Carol Sanford Regenerative Business
From Extractive Economics to Inclusive Economic Development Blueprints Restoring Dignity to Economic Development with Individual Collectivism
From Conventional Capitalism to Common Good Capitalism Terry Mollner, Common Good Capitalism
From Billions To Trillions In March 2018 the concept paper From Billions to Trillions: How a transformative approach to collaboration and finance supports citizens, governments, corporations, and civil society to share the burdens and the benefits of solving wicked problems
From Private Banks to Public Banking Public Banking Institute
From the New Deal to the New Grand Strategy and the New Green Deal “New Grand Strategy” Patrick Doherty, Puck Mykelby and Joel Makower

Now, a coherent throughline is emerging, where all of these voices are speaking to a central theme of a more systemic approach to the key challenges of our time. We aim in future articles to further explore this growing coherence and common themes arising from the community of thought leadership.

IV. Towards Greater Cooperation

“We’re like bees, you see, bees that go out looking for honey without realizing we’re performing cross pollination” – Buckminster Fuller

Yet, we are not bees, we are humans, so it is time to cooperate to create an even better system of cross pollination as it were, in context of every bioregion and evolve the system together as many are calling for.

We must change our approach, as outlined above, and then apply this new vision and methodology in the context of communities and bioregions across planet earth. From this, there is an opportunity to accelerate toward a blue ocean shift that weaves these evolutionary efforts to transform the paradigm which guides us.

Many groups are well under way with exploring and applying the possibilities of these new approaches, such as Impact Assets, RSF Social Finance, Regenerative Communities Network, BluePrints, Ethical Biomimicry Finance, Social Capital Markets, Transform Finance, Transform Community, and many others. Yet the vast majority of investors and economic development professionals in these circles are still encumbered with siloed thinking – by simply focusing on one issue or one dimension of the system. Many have been listening to the call for collective action for some time, yet in order to weave our thinking and evolve traditional approaches to economic development and finance, we must build novel approaches and perspectives outside the box.

It’s encouraging that new pathways are being developed all over the world that aim to expand on the central ideas outlined here today – to revisit our assumptions about capital markets evolution, to increase the efficacy of impact investing, and to build in systems thinking to our long term plans. It’s through the development of this long-term plan that we can first ensure that we create resilience for the next 100 years, repurposing the effective but incongruous models of today for the needs of future generations. Here, we are creating fertile soil for an intergenerational transfer of stewardship to improve our environment, communities and economy, and create the preconditions for a regenerative capital markets framework to fully take root.

“There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.” – John Muir

Now, with our feet firmly planted in the dirt, feeling the roots beneath our feet and under the canopy of leaves over our head, we must walk together on this path towards long-term resilience.

NS & GW

[Obviously, the ideas contained within this article go far beyond its intended scope and should be seen only as a place of departure. If you wish to continue this conversation, and contribute to future articles or join the events we are creating – please reach out to us on LinkedIn Nick Sramek & Gregory Wendt]

“EVOLVING MARKETS IN METAPHYSICAL RECONSTRUCTION”-By Hazel Henderson

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 01:20:00 +0000

Here's piece from my friend Hazel who outlines a rather comprehensive cognitive reset necessary to bring about new economic activity, with insights and recommended pathways for a number of key sectors for civilization to thrive.

“EVOLVING MARKETS IN METAPHYSICAL RECONSTRUCTION”-By Hazel Henderson

NEWSROOM: Ethical Markets

The earliest markets for metaphysical reconstruction evolved continually from changing belief systems, religions, creation stories, cultural fashions, and later from science fiction, futures forecasting scenarios. These changing styles of being and behaving are ubiquitously and profitably expressed in the arts: paintings, poetry, fiction books, music, dance and theatrical performances. These markets flourish in all Information-based societies and now dominate all other forms of globalization. In our Information Age value is shifting from material production and trading things you can drop on your foot to digital assets: intellectual property, patents, brands, recipes and reputational “goodwill”, which accountants are still learning to measure. Most mature industrial societies have made the shift and up to 80% of their GDP accounts are for these intangibles. For examples: the value of Coca Cola’s caramel-colored sugar water recipe is carried on their books as a primary asset of up to $70 billion, while Donald Trump’s real estate company morphed years ago into a “branding” operation for hotels, beef, vodka and other products, with others building and owning the actual real estate and producing the products.

Stock markets based on bouncing fiat currencies are ever more at risk of “flash crashes” and crises, as more investors are trading digital assets electronically on private liquidity networks and using cryptocurrencies with no tethers to the real world, as I reported in “Money, is Not Wealth: Fiats v. Cryptos“. Accountants now measure six different forms of capital: finance, built factories and facilities, intellectual capital, social capital, human capital and natural capital, and measure the performance of corporations as the extent to which they enhance or degrade all these six forms, (my visual “Shifting forms of valuation”). GDP is a simple cash flow statement of goods and services transacted in money, measures all public debts, but not the investments they create: public goods (education, municipal services, R& D), infrastructure and other assets, simply because GDP does not have an asset account, as in formal double-entry book-keeping. Education is classified as “consumption”, even though it is the most important investment all societies make in the health and competence of their future citizens. All these shifting forms of metaphysical re-construction are often referred to as “paradigm shifts’, as in Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, (1962). They are creating thriving new markets for consulting firms, marketers and internet platforms re-intermediating our complex societies in new ways. For full disclosure, Ethical Markets Media Certified B. Corporation, which I founded in 2004, is such a digital asset-based enterprise, creating intellectual products based on futures research and scenario-building of possible pathways of technological and cultural evolution.

These often highly lucrative markets for such metaphysical reconstruction are the necessary foundation for new infrastructure and plumbing for the new technologies and economic activities. All human societies are transitioning from the fossilized Industrial Era of the past 300 years to the cleaner, greener, knowledge-richer and more equitable Solar Age I continue to track and document since my “The Politics of the Solar Age”, (1981,1988), now in 800 libraries in 20 languages. Instead of digging in the Earth to produce our goods, we are learning from plants’ photosynthesis how to use the sun’s free photons which have always powered our planet and provide all our food, shelter and very survival.

These tectonic social transitions feedback to expand human cognitive skills and widen our mental and emotional horizons, as described by Harvard-based systems synthesizer, Prof. Joseph Henrich in his monumental “The WEIRDEST People in the World”, (2020). Henrich ransacks human history, religions, cultural styles and economies and focuses on this kind of human cultural evolution which outpaces the slower evolutionary process described by Darwin as evolution by natural selection under changing environmental conditions. Henrich rightly criticizes psychology and economics for their scholars’ cookie-cutter models of human behavior and preferences. These practitioners are blind participants in this same cohort of “Western Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic“ (WEIRD) people acculturated during the Westernized Enlightenment-driven Industrial Revolution. This herculean book is still engrossing me as Henrich focuses on the role of reading and literacy and how these skills actually change our physical brains, expanding our behavioral repertoire and thickening our corpus callosa!

I was stunned, since many neuroscientist I know have commented on how this bridge of tissue linking the left and right hemisphere of our brains: the corpus callosum, affects our cognitive abilities. Some had told me that my own corpus callosum was probably much expanded, as a lifelong author and bookworm! Henrich traces this rapid widening of literacy as stemming from Martin Luther in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517, who opposed the Catholic bishops’ monopolizing access to their Holy Bible and selling of “indulgences” to speed their elites into heaven. Luther demanded that all people be allowed to read the Bible for themselves and that they be taught to read. Thus, Protestant literacy spread with the speed of historic means of human interaction, mostly by proximity to the town of Wittenberg, and people began to acquire expensive hand-written Bibles and learn to read them.

A new market was created for cheaper Bibles, filled by an enterprising printer, Johannese Gutenberg, who created the first movable type printing press, and began producing cheap Bibles. Thus, Henrich describes how literacy went viral and public schools spread across Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Britain, seeding the Enlightenment scholarship of Adam Smith, David Hume and others in Scotland. He described the WEIRD cohort of the global population as beneficiaries of this literacy and educational transformation. They wrongly assume such human behavioral traits as the universal model of human nature. Instead they miss the tremendous variation in most of the other cultures and societies on this planet, which led to all the mistakes of GDP-led globalization, mal-development, poverty, nativist backlashes and populism we see today.

One assumption of Henrich and of Kurt Anderson in his “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire“ (2017) is that they both take adult literacy rates in the USA in 2015 as given at 100%, whereas more recent surveys by the US Census and the National Institute for Literacy estimate that 32 million adult Americans are still unable to read. Much of this is due to earlier racist policies preventing black Americans from learning to read, as well as suppression of voting rights, inferior schools and assimilating foreign-language immigrants. All this contributes to the chronic unemployment, low self-esteem, and lower quality of available work…all exacerbated by the Covid-19 unfair impacts and evidenced in today’s opioid and other addictions, rural and nativist anger at being left out. These feed tendencies to absorb misinformation and form conspiratorial-thinking sub-groups that distrust science and believe most mainstream information is “fake news”. As I pointed out in “Steering Social Media Toward Sanity”, it is now urgent to curb these monopolistic platforms spreading misinformation, aiding conspiracy groups, propaganda from Russia and other foreign sources poisoning our democracies.

Today’s global digitization requires metaphysical re-imagining and reconstruction if we are to “build back better“. Internet-based disruption from Silicon Valley is still rolling through brick-and-mortar sectors: manufacturing, transportation, construction, finance, insurance, real estate, travel, hospitality, print media, education, medicine, law, public health and services. Meanwhile these digital platform companies are booming and re-intermediating services in new online ways, such as robo-investment advice. All this is still leaving millions unemployed, looking for casual jobs in the expanding gig economy, described by Juliet Schor in “After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win it Back”, (2020). They compete with each other as Uber drivers and bidding for odd jobs and household tasks serving those fortunate since Covid-19, to be able to work from home. Help can come after January 20th, 2021, from the Biden Administration’s $2 trillion-plus plan to accelerate the transition to green infrastructure, renewable resources and the required thousands of new, well-paying jobs.

So, let’s look at this economy-wide transition to the Solar Age, circular economies based on renewables and upcycling all resources back into production, minimizing waste and mining for virgin resources. The opportunities for these expanding markets in metaphysical reconstruction, re-thinking and reshaping whole sectors by innovative designers, futurists and paradigm-shifting consultancies include:

Energy: Re-configuring electricity grids and shifting fossil investments toward all the now rapidly growing solar, wind, efficiency, storage markets with micro-grids, cooperatives and community-owned local consortia, which Ethical Markets has tracked in our annual Green Transition Scoreboard® reports since 2009.

Carbon: Ending all combustion of this valuable resource, leaving fossil assets in the ground and devising the optimal capture of ambient CO₂. The are many methods of capturing CO₂for re-use: generating carbon-free fuels for air travel, cement-making, zero-emission buildings, retro-fitting older building stock. Using alternative, plant-based foods and beverages, ending animal-grown meats in favor of meats and fish grown from stem-cells. Saltwater agriculture of halophyte food plants can conserve the planet’s 3% of freshwater relied on by our current wasteful unhealthy, corporate industrial foods and factory-produced animal meats. Nature captures and sequesters CO₂ more efficiently than any of the current CCS, CCUS, or BECCS methods touted by incumbent fossil industries.

Efficiency: The envisioned circular economy model is already illuminating the systemic waste in the USA across our entire economy estimated as only 18% efficient. All current energy inputs, beyond this 18% simply burn off as waste heat and pollution, as efficiency expert Skip Laitner explains in “As the Climate Warms? The Economy Grows Colder—Both Driven by the Same Scale of Inefficiencies”, (2020). Current upcycling companies include Terracycle for consumer waste and ECOR for larger-scale total re-design of manufacturing plants using their former waste as inputs for onsite upcycling into new products. For full disclosure, I am a technical advisor to ECOR, with future stock options.

Cities: Redesigning streets for pedestrians and cyclists, restoring local neighborhoods as “15 minute communities” with local services all walkable with many more home-based businesses, groceries, laundries, hairdressers and health clinics for preventive care. Banning cars from downtown areas and local communities. Addressing sea-level rise with natural water barriers, dunes, and catchments, as in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, for example. Relocation to higher ground as the last option.

National Parks: Redesigning access and maintenance of forests and natural areas. Shifting funds from no longer appropriate projects to better-designed uses. Managing public early-warning systems predicting longer-term sea level rises. Earmarking former unsafe residential zones for removal of endangered houses and facilities so as to create new parklands and restoring catchment basins.

Transport: Shifting from internal combustion petrol and diesel cars to fully electric vehicles, mostly mass transit and two-wheeled bikes and scooters. Preventing waste of public funds to connect EV charging stations to fossilized grid electricity. Instead, allow markets to continue growing for independent, solar-powered EV charging units, such as those produced by companies like San Diego-based Beam for All (full disclosure, I am an early investor). These units roll of trucks and can be installed anywhere in less than 5 minutes, in regular parking places on every parking lot in every gas station and motel. This can end “range anxiety” without spending millions on denser batteries and endless research.

Food: Ending the global food system’s total reliance on the planet’s dwindling 3% of freshwater. Expanding the 150 start-ups producing healthier plant-based foods and beverages, use of indigenous, regenerative agriculture, local and wild food plants. “Investing in Saltwater Agriculture” and nutritious halophyte crops, which also capture ambient CO₂ in their long roots better, faster and cheaper than in forests, which should be re-grown as well. All de-forestation can stop if we employ saltwater crops, as well as kelp farms on shorelines and shut down all animal-grown meat and fish, favoring plant-grown and cultured meat and fish alternatives. Continue shorting the big global meat producers as risky “stranded assets”, which emit 15% of global greenhouse gases.

Mining: End all unnecessary mining, starting with global gem mining which is now obsolete, disrupted by the global artisan sector of cultured gems chemically identical to mined gems, and grown in small laboratories. Adopt our EthicMark®GEMS global standard certifying only gems NOT mined from Mother Earth. Take our pledge at www.ethicmarkgems.com. Shift from mining rare metals and earths from the land, which cause immense piles of toxic tailings and polluting debris, destroying ecosystems, land and biodiversity. Instead, select and collect from ocean floor sites in the Pacific Ocean, the natural mixed metal nodules of these needed rare earth metals: molybdenum, manganese, cobalt and lithium, such as planned by Vancouver-based DeepGreen Company and its Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) indicating efficiency gains of up to 95%.

Education: Move from over-built expensive campus-based colleges to online courses, free to all students worldwide, for rapid up-skilling. Cancel all student debt, so as to enable former students to form families and live less-debt-burdened, more normal lives. Fund free community colleges and local public schools up to advanced degrees, as in most other advanced societies. Re-categorize education in GDP as “investment” in a newly created asset account.

Health: Move away from the sickness-oriented, medical-industrial complex based on chemical and surgical interventions and hospitalization. Re-design toward public health standards, clean air and water, less toxics in products and foods as well as home furnishings and environments. Prevention should be the goal and health care recognized as a human right, funded as an essential strategic public safety service.

Building and Construction: Mandate all new building be constructed with non-toxic materials and to use energy and resources so as to be zero-emission. Mandate upgrading of all municipal and government buildings to highest efficiency standards, as well as offering free upgrades to homeowners which can pay for themselves in energy savings.

Finance: Must be re-oriented away from the obsolete textbook concepts and models which have led to numerous losses, “flash crashes“ and systemic crises. All the current algorithms are still programmed with these obsolete models, concepts, indexes, ETF and robo-investing. Instead, finance must turn its attention to the real physical risks it misses while looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Finance must give up its magical thinking, based on abstractions and faulty macroeconomic metrics such as GDP, “Transitioning to Science-Based Investing”, (2019-2020).

All these above sectors will require this underlying re-thinking, and paradigm shifting so as to avoid mal-investments and further mistaken approaches. This burgeoning market for metaphysical re-construction will be worth several trillions of dollars over the next four years. Shift into sustainable, climate-friendly models based on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Watch McKinsey, KPMG and the World Economic Forum compete with all the start-up consultancies now disrupting their markets! Markets have always evolved as human knowledge, technologies and currencies continually evolve, along with our own cognitive capabilities.

Evolutionizing the economy through revolutionizing accounting

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Sat, 21 Nov 2020 17:49:00 +0000

Podcast Interview - Evolving Economics & Impact Investing to Design a Better Future

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Thu, 08 Oct 2020 00:20:00 +0000

I am grateful to have had the opportunity to explore some of the deeper issues with my friend CK Lin on his podcast.

To listen, please go to this link of the interview for either audio or video.

Enjoy!

Four Strategies for Large Systems Change

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 21:08:00 +0000

Four Strategies for Large Systems Change

[original article on SSIR here.]

To create systems of societal change, we need to become clearer about the archetypes of societal change strategies, their strengths and weaknesses, and their interactions. By Steve Waddell Spring 2018

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Greenpeace, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), and Unilever all tout their commitment to change in support of the natural environment. But a look at their websites reveals big differences in how they translate this into action.

In July 2016, Greenpeace’s homepage featured a huge “RESIST” banner attached to a construction crane with activists rappelling down, and the words “The Summer of Resistance starts with you—Bring resistance to your community!” The Nature Conservancy’s showed serene fields and “Help us protect cherished landscapes that unite us in all 50 states.” The FSC’s described its commitment to the “environmentally appropriate,” “socially beneficial,” and “economically viable” with pictures of forests, Forest Champions, and businesses. And Unilever’s showed a picture of a farmer in a developing country and the words “Sustainable Growth: Value + Values. We are changing the way business is done.”

Responding to a difficult challenge such as environmental sustainability can produce a wide range of actions. How can diverse change efforts that aim for a similar outcome be thought of comprehensively? What are their relationships? How do they interact most powerfully to speed change? These questions led me to conceive of all the diverse efforts to create change on a difficult issue such as climate change or poverty, collectively as a “societal change system.” Such a system comprises all those initiatives and programs that are working to change a situation or issue. Seeing the whole of this system—through mapping, data visualization, and other methods—yields unique insights about how to create coherence; identify gaps in effort; exploit synergies; and reduce duplication, conflict, and inefficiencies.

Four Change Strategies

Economist Joseph Schumpeter’s famous description of the “creative destruction” of capitalism is instructive for change more broadly. There is a natural tendency among those who work for societal change to focus on the creative part of the task—developing the new. But change also involves destroying the old, whether it be institutions, relationships, or ways of doing things.

Schumpeter’s insight into the continuous churn of free markets forms the basis for proposing one dimension for distinguishing change strategies: destruction to creation. Extreme destruction might be depicted as the collapse of civilization; less extreme forms might include the rejection of a traditional social value or the breakup of a company. The extreme of creation is captured by the birth of a whole new societal order, while a less extreme form of creation might be the formation of a company or the adoption of a new social practice.

A second dimension is confrontation to collaboration. The extreme of confrontation is war, but there are many less confrontational actions, such as those of Greenpeace activists. At the collaboration extreme, consider the facilitation of deep mutual respect and common commitment in a group to work together to realize a change goal through transcendence of diverse perspectives, similar to the FSC’s work.

These two dimensions form the basis of a matrix that captures four kinds of change strategy. (See “Change Strategies” below.) Each quadrant is named for the archetype of change it reflects. I have developed this model over 20 years of work on large systems change internationally—for example, on poverty in Guatemala, global corruption, renewable energy, and the financial system.

How do we transform a group of well-intended but collectively incoherent change initiatives into a powerful societal change system? The matrix serves as a device to raise valuable questions and spark insights for understanding change strategies or initiatives holistically. All change initiatives reflect some mix of the two dimensions. Although a particular change initiative may shift position within a quadrant as it evolves and its emphasis on particular dimensions changes, moving to a different quadrant would transform its core logic—its rationale, principles, and capacities.

To further explore this model, I also offer a table that describes each quadrant generically and then addresses our two examples of societal change. (See “Characteristics of Change Strategies” below.) Let us first examine each of the quadrants generically, then turn to the two cases.

Doing Change: The Entrepreneurs | The upper-left quadrant is that of entrepreneurs who are out to create a new approach that defies the prevailing logic and ways of operating. This often takes the form of a social or commercial enterprise. The entrepreneur can be an individual, but for societal impact it is more often an organization or movement. Social innovation labs, Ashoka Fellows, and Impact Hubs all specialize in nurturing this type of activity. In business, this category covers entrepreneurs who are causing radical change, such as M-Kopa (providing solar energy in Kenya through innovative financing) and Revolution Foods (bringing healthy food to K-12 schools).

Entrepreneurs are not fixated on destroying the old, although that is typically the effect of their innovation. Their energy is devoted toward creating the new. These change agents usually face substantial skepticism and resistance by incumbents. This, problems with scaling, or simply the inadequate power of the invention may make the entrepreneurs unable on their own to bring about broad societal change.

Forcing Change: The Warriors | Activists as warriors are the archetype of the lower-left quadrant. They are the energy pushing for widespread change, trying to influence others through their pressure and advocacy. They must be willing to risk harm—perhaps only breaking windows, perhaps forcing a business to close and lay off workers, perhaps breaking the law. They focus on gathering strength through followers and supporters often associated with social movements. However, in the same way that social activists can attempt to force change through warrior-like tactics, capitalists can withdraw investment in the name of change, and governments can use the power of the state to incarcerate and fine resisters of change. The danger for this quadrant is failure to gather sufficient support and power to emerge from the margins—which leads some to become more violent and can even result in civil war.

Directing Change: The Missionaries | Those who are in positions of power and authority and are committed to change have a particularly challenging position. They can use that power and authority to secure change, but that often requires fundamental disruption in the structures that give them power and authority in the first place. They typically have a missionary’s zeal often associated with charisma for pursuing transformation, since such work involves overcoming immense inertia to break up and reinvent organizations and structures to become something very different. Their energy can easily be suppressed by status quo interests and skepticism that arise from trying to create something that no one has yet seen or experienced fully. Unilever CEO Paul Polman is an example of someone grappling with this change strategy to create a new business model that does not just do “less bad” but contributes positively to all aspects of society.

Cocreating Change: The Lovers | This is the popular but complicated strategy of “Let’s get all the stakeholders in the same room and figure out how we’ll work together for change.” It can be described as the “lover” strategy, because it is based on the proposition that people want the same thing and are willing to work together to get it. It depends on the willingness of everyone to change, since almost always every participant is part of a transformational problem—it’s not just others that have to change, but we all hold values, beliefs, and ways of understanding that have to change. Along the way, however, a more powerful or well-resourced stakeholder may induce others to settle for less change than is needed, resulting in co-optation.

The German Energy Transition

To illustrate these four archetypes of change at work, let us turn to Energiewende in Germany, the first of two case studies of largescale societal change that help to flesh out the model. The term “Energiewende” was introduced in 1980 by Germany’s Institute for Applied Ecology (Öko-Institut e.V.) as a call to abandon nuclear and petroleum-based energy. Translated as “energy transition,” it describes Germany’s commitment and ongoing transition to a sustainable energy future. In 2016, about a third of energy consumed in Germany came from renewables. (By contrast, about 15 percent of US energy consumption came from renewables, with a large amount of that from hydropower.) On one auspicious day in April 2017, Germany received a whopping 85 percent of its electricity from renewables. As a change challenge, the case is distinctive for the important role of technology.

In terms of change strategy, Energiewende illustrates the role of cocreation. Such an approach is part of the core post-World War II logic of Germany more broadly, as seen in joint labor-management boards for companies and in coalition governments. In the energy sphere, this approach was demonstrated in the 1980s with collaborative experimental work on alternative energy by the science, engineering, and industrial communities. Although there have been some shifts in strength, there has been broad support publicly for the change.

The ongoing collaborative approach must be understood in contrast to the United States: In Germany there is no oil and gas industry, so the main question was how to achieve sustainable energy technologically, financially, and pragmatically, by transitioning (destroying) traditional forms of power generation. Along the way, more widespread collaborative strategies for implementation have included broad public consultation and engagement around specific aspects of Energiewende, such as development of new transmission-line corridors.

This cocreation logic supported a directing-change approach reflected in 1991 national legislation called the Feed-In Tariff Act (FITS). It comprised two key elements: one requiring electric utilities to purchase electricity from renewable energy sources at minimum prices higher than the electricity’s real economic value, and the second requiring consumers to carry the financial burden.

This approach also supported a doing-change movement for energy transformation that pushed more decentralized energy generation. Farmers became solar and wind farmers, as well as agricultural producers; subsidies for solar panels led to widespread generation by homeowners. This doing-change activity became critical following the legislation, as a myriad of small producers of solar and wind energy arose. Individuals who earlier had thought of themselves simply as farmers or homeowners became energy producers as they installed wind turbines and solar panels. Individuals who were traditionally consumers combined energy production for sale through solar installations on their properties to become “prosumers.”

This has had wide-ranging implications for other directing-change actions, such as the decision in 2014 by Germany’s top utility, E.ON, to sell off (a form of “destruction”) its traditional coal and nuclear power businesses entirely, in order to focus on clean energy, power grids, and energy-efficiency services.

The distinctions among the four strategies can be blurred. For example, the city of Munich is working with the utility it owns to become, by 2025, the first city of more than a million residents to use 100 percent renewable energy. Given the city’s ownership of the utility, this can be seen as a directing-change strategy. But it also can be seen as a collaborative strategy, considering that it is a product of multiple stakeholder groups working with the producer and owner. And it is a doing-change strategy, considering that a geographic location has decided to simply go ahead and create the new system.

The energy transition is not occurring without resistance. But the main questions concern how to transition—with traditional energy generators and energy-intensive industries being the primary losers, who were largely bought off by the structure of FITS. As the new energy producers grew in number, they became key advocates for pushing ahead with the transition when it looked as if it might falter. Political mobilization was critical as a forcing-change strategy, leading to the Green Party joining a coalition government (1998-2005) that reinforced the original path with strengthened legislation in 2000. With local public utilities providing an important portion of the country’s energy, local elections also became periods of (re-en)forcing change with demonstrations and other actions to press forward with the energy transition.

Marriage Equality in the United States

In 2015, in an ultimate directing-change move, the US Supreme Court ruled that marriage between same-sex couples was a constitutionally protected right. Today 62 percent of Americans support it, according to the Pew Research Center. But only a half century earlier, every American state had laws that criminalized some form of same-sex sexual intimacy; until 1973 homosexuality was described as a “mental disorder” by the American Psychiatric Association; and in 1996 President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, prohibiting same-sex marriage. The victory of marriage equality in the United States is arguably one of the most rapid changes ever for a core social institution and for fundamental values.

Perhaps predictably, given the very personal yet cultural quality of the issue and its US setting, the first challenges were by doing-change entrepreneurs. Individuals did not have to have someone “approve” their marriage to consider themselves married, and the United States has an individualistic tradition. Gays and lesbians simply lived as married couples, minus the legal recognition. In the 1980s, this increasingly became associated with commitment ceremonies of various forms, with those supportive of them present. Gay couples often brought children into their family from traditional marriages, through adoption, through surrogates, or simply through extended family. They became defiant role models.

On the streets, warriors took action by the public assertion of gay identity. In 1969, when policed applied routine harassment practices on homosexuals at the Stonewall Inn bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village, a riot ensued, and from this tiny, isolated protest a powerful gay rights movement grew. In 1979, between 75,000 and 125,000 individuals participated in the first national LGBT march on Washington, D.C. Gay parades became annual events in major cities, promoting gay pride and civil rights. In the 1980s, protests and aggressive actions were organized around the AIDS crisis. This experience provided a firm base for similar organizing tactics when the issue of marriage equality came to the fore in the 1990s. It became a dominant theme in the annual parades and fueled protests for legislative action.

Attempts to secure a directing-change strategy through legal rules started early. In 1970, the first legal challenge by a same-sex couple against the restriction of marriage rights to heterosexual couples was filed. The US Supreme Court dismissed it without a hearing. Gay activists took up the issue in the 1990s as the AIDS crisis forced more people out of the closet and more gays and lesbians decided they wanted the legal benefits associated with marriage. Eventually, legal victories piled up, beginning with arguments under state constitutions. In 1999, the Supreme Court of Vermont held that excluding same-sex couples from marriage was unconstitutional, prompting the legislature to create “civil unions” as marriages in all but name. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 2003 issued the watershed ruling that made marriage between same-sex couples legal for the first time in an American jurisdiction. In 2012, voters in four states supported marriage equality through referenda—after 32 referenda had been lost around the country.

These victories built on cocreating change strategies of coalition building. Religious coalitions were especially important, given that opposition to same-sex marriage was often claimed on religious grounds as being against the will of God. At the turn of the millennium, the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry in Massachusetts included more than 1,000 clergy, congregations, and organizations from 23 faith traditions. Lobbying in a warrior tradition grew into new coalitions cocreating change as Democratic Party leaders and legislators came on board.

In the background, a huge shift took place in business: By 2013, 67 percent of Fortune 500 companies offered health benefits for same-sex couples. The earliest significant examples were more experimental in a doing-it tradition, in industries that had a disproportionate number of gay employees and a more liberal workforce where employees could come out. There was a mix of concerns about fairness and ability to attract and retain employees. The early adopters gave way to a more directing-change strategy as businesses became convinced through lobbying and example setting that they should support their gay and lesbian employees.

The environment that led to this monumental shift was supported by a similar move by media companies. They started with a doing-change strategy of very occasionally bringing gay lives into popular entertainment. But this grew into a directing-change strategy, whereby the regularity of gays and gay marriage in popular entertainment became a message about what should be accepted as the new “normal.”

One of the first media breakthroughs on gay issues in general came in 1971 with an episode of the leading television sitcom All in the Family, which featured sympathetically two gay men. More direct issues of partnership, love, and commitment between two men were featured in the highly acclaimed 2005 hit movie Brokeback Mountain; the top-rated sitcom Modern Family, which premiered in 2009, included a gay couple with a child; and in 2012 Marvel Comics gave one of its superheroes a homosexual wedding, ensconcing it as a new norm to support.

Six Lessons of Societal Change

Applying the framework to the two cases not only helps to clarify the strategies and logic at work, but also offers more general insights about the process of societal transformation and the workings of societal change systems. Six lessons, in particular, stand out.

Each of the four strategies can contribute critically to one transformation. All four strategies play an essential role in both cases. The energy case provided individuals with a way to realize their ideals as prosumers, to advocate in various forums their beliefs and values, to develop collaborations with the existing system to create change, and to access power in institutions to support and direct the change. In the same-sex marriage case, doing change was reflected in individuals living as though they were married; forcing change provided a chance for supporters to demonstrate their position publicly; cocreating with early adopters such as supportive clergy provided important ways to pressure the establishment; and as supporters grew in legislative and judicial forums, they created a directing-change legal environment.

This suggests that the strategies are collectively important for providing a range of ways of supporting transformation, since different people and organizations have different roles in the change process. Property owners in Germany became doing-change leaders when they became prosumers; others supported the effort by being warrior activists. In the fight for marriage equality, only gay couples were capable of doing change, whereas non-couples and the broader community could participate in forcing change through demonstrations, parades, and referenda; cocreating-change efforts were particularly important for developing more sustained interactions among institutions that were early marriage-equality supporters; and the directing-change activity gave supporters a way to create change within their own institutions and in society more broadly.

Particular transformations emphasize a particular strategy. The four strategies were not of equal importance in the cases. For Energiewende, the directing-change legislative strategy was particularly important. Its salience arose in the context of broad agreement about the end, the value of the change, and the need to focus on the means to realize carbon-free energy. Under such circumstances, the ease of doing change through modest solar and wind energy commitments by individuals was also important; this group grew in power to become particularly strong advocates to offset the influence of resisters such as major industrial electricity users and private power companies.

The marriage-equality example makes more balanced use of all the strategies, although the directing-change action was the result. The doing-change strategy was critical for bringing gay relationships into the open and creating discussions among friends and family to challenge the traditional definition of family; forcing-change activities created space for a broadening number to express their support; building coalitions across traditional religious perspectives was critical to challenging religion’s role in the debate; but it was state legislation and finally the US Supreme Court rulings that were critical to ending the debate in the face of a still-divided public.

As a transformation progresses, the comparative importance of each strategy changes. Energiewende really took off with a cocreating-change strategy generated by broad support, which opened space for a shift to the directing-change legislative action. Legislation, in turn, enabled the doing-change strategy of individuals pursuing their own renewable energy production; forcing change provided secondary support for the overall transformation. In this case, all the strategies continue to interact as the transition continues.

Doing change was the original strategy for gay couples. But this was highly marginal, until the forcing-change activities associated with the assertion of lesbian and gay equality and demands for AIDS services created space for similar marriage-equality forcing-change activities. This produced directing-change actions first by some municipalities, states, and corporations, and eventually through the final resolution by the US Supreme Court.

The particular circumstances and environment that a transformation confronts determine the order of the strategies and their interaction. In our two cases, there is a notable diversity in stage order, and there is no obvious pattern. This suggests that characteristics of the cases themselves determine interactions between the strategies.

The most obvious question is why people do not simply start in an organic fashion, with the doing-change strategy growing into widespread adoption and a new dominant way of organizing and acting. This seems to have been the case for marriage equality. However, that case demonstrates that realizing an enabling environment for doing change usually first requires some forcing-change work. An important precursor to doing-change commitment ceremonies was elimination (or at least lack of enforcement) of laws against sex acts between members of the same sex. This required substantial forcing-change action by gay activists, although their efforts started with a desire to be left alone rather than to be married.

Qualities of the change issue itself can make a doing-change strategy on its own highly problematic. There were certainly early solar and wind energy entrepreneurs, but a doing-change Energiewende strategy was destined for irrelevance in the traditional operating environment, since developing technologies at scale requires substantial investment and change in rules governing energy transmission. However, in this case a cocreating strategy of collective education was the predominant predecessor of the creation of an enabling legal environment.

Therefore, there seems to be a dual lesson on strategy interaction: In permissive enabling environments, there can indeed be an organic change process that emphasizes doing change. These are environments where legal structures and norms provide the basis for, rather than impede, experimenting and innovating culturally, technologically, and philosophically. But in the absence of such an environment, forcing change is not the only strategy possible: Cocreating change can provide an important avenue if there is broad agreement that change is needed.

Enabling environments support experimentation and the creation of networks. The fourth lesson suggests important qualities of an enabling environment to ease transformation. There is particular value in structures and traditions that support exploration: the ability to try out new lifestyles, technologies, and values associated with transformations. Institutional rigidity, narrow definitions of what is acceptable, large interdependent structures where change requires complicated coordination, and weak processes for developing broad consensus about change directions all contribute to a brittleness that is associated with more problematic transformations, such as the United States’ transition to sustainable energy. Part of this is a question of political systems and the beliefs associated with them. Both cases involve political democracies. However, the multi-party German parliamentary system is more change friendly, as demonstrated by the important role of the Green Party. The range of options in the one-party Chinese system, for example, would be very different.

However, an enabling environment is not simply one of passive acceptance of diversity. The marriage-equality case demonstrates the importance of creating networks and adopting forcing-change strategies as well. The German case represents the importance of creating large-scale conversations and experimenting with transformational challenges to promote a cocreating-change strategy.

Each strategy requires distinct competencies. This article began by observing that different change organizations tend to be associated with different strategies. The cases illuminate the distinct tactics associated with each strategy, which in turn implies that they require different competencies. Experimenting with doing change is associated with entrepreneurial startup talent; forcing change emphasizes abilities to attract and organize mass numbers of people to take demonstrative action; cocreation focuses on facilitation and group-process skills; and directing change requires management, policy making, and enforcement capacity. This point about competencies further suggests that an organization is unlikely to be good at more than one strategy.

Yet, the two strategies build off each other. Sustainable energy, for example, can be seen not just as a technological question within the current power structures, but also as an opportunity to create more just and resilient societies. But within the latter, broader vision, negotiations are needed for how to get there. This also suggests the importance of one change initiative being able to hand off the change work to another.

Beyond Classification

This typology of change strategies promises far more than simply a system of classification. More important, it can inform an overall strategy of change for any particular issue in a societal change system. It can also guide the development of resilient societies, by illustrating the qualities that help address and resolve large change challenges.

This strategy analysis leads to important questions about processes for supporting productive interactions between strategies. For those working on change initiatives, the focus shifts from questions about how your initiative can be successful to how you can best serve the needs of the societal change system as a whole. Are there synergies, gaps, redundancies, or conflicts between your change initiative and others’ that should be addressed? The very concept of a societal change system suggests that whatever particular strategy your initiative adopts, there will be a need eventually to adapt to a cocreative strategy for the change system as a whole.

Our Webinar series to evolve capital markets: "Evolving Impact Investing to meet Today's Challenges in Every Community"

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 19:48:00 +0000

I produced a series of webinars in July with the Opal Group, the following episodes are the first five of a number of other topics to be covered. You can review the videos of each of our engaging discussions in the links below. You will be required to register to view the videos, and your email and information will be added to our list for future events and programs.

OVERVIEW

"Evolving Impact Investing to meet Today's Challenges in Every Community"

Although the discipline of values-based investing, widely known as Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) and ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance), has been an option for investors for decades, many are still unaware of the evolution of the guiding vision behind impact investing to address the greatest challenges of our time. In order for our communities to achieve environmental resilience, inclusive economic development and cultural evolution, multidisciplinary leaders at all levels will need to reimagine and restructure financial tools and capital market instruments for all types of projects. This next step in the development of our financial institutions is absolutely crucial to build on the gifts of our past and shape the new emerging framework. All types of investors must coalesce around principles that have been with us for millennia; the same principles that dictate a natural order have the power to build long-term profitable companies, positive economic returns for investors, resilient communities, and sustainable ecosystems. Join us for an engaging webinar series with some of the leading minds in the space to expand the conversation and build solutions and tools for investors in every community.

EPISODE 1

July 2, 2020

What does a 21st Century Capital Market Look Like?

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The broad opportunities to meet the needs current and future generations by combining finance and economic development

The challenges we face in today’s economy are a result in part of the blind spots within our business models and mindsets. Expanding the role of finance is necessary to build long-term resilience and must start with recognition that we are facing a systemic crisis. Such a crisis requires systems thinking and inclusive, broad-based solutions. The blind spots of economic theory require a new model - and new tools based on that model.

EPISODE 2

July 9, 2020

"Investing in 100% of Humanity

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The recent events force the question: what is the asset management industry really willing to do to increase equity, diversity and inclusion? How do create real change and progress? There is growing attention for conscious investors and financial institutions to address the inequities for all asset classes in the global financial ecosystem, with a focus on inclusion across gender, ethnicity, sexual identity and race. We need to increase programs contributing to financial literacy, access to capital and economic independence for the resiliency of every community.

EPISODE 3

July 16, 2020

"Infrastructure, Housing and Inclusive Economic Development"

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In order for the world’s cities to sustain economic growth and enhance resident quality of life, leaders at all levels of business, policy, and key community stakeholders will need to reimagine and restructure infrastructure and housing investment. Historical approaches to financing projects, including large-scale infrastructure, are proving ineffective and inefficient to meet traditional demands. With expectations rising among all stakeholders, new models need to be explored as infrastructure adapts to meet sustainability, resiliency, and affordability goals while addressing decades of deferred maintenance and disinvestment.

EPISODE 4

July 23, 2020

"Forest Resilience to Housing: Economic Pipeline Financial Innovation"

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How do we place resilience at the center of regional forest management & material supply chain development, while significantly reducing waste and carbon emissions from forests to creating better buildings on main street? The beneficial effects of mimicking nature's principles for forest management and resiliency are widespread for communities, ecosystems and the economy. The outcomes improve dimensions such as biodiversity, water supply and other ecosystem services to enhance much-needed bioregional resilience. While at the same time create solutions for the interwoven unemployment and housing crisis. This can be done through regionally resilient building material supply chains to support critical housing for every major urban setting on the planet while reducing negative environmental impacts.

EPISODE 5

July 30, 2020

Food and Agriculture Systems Transformation and Rural Inclusive Development

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At all levels the current systemic crisis is revealing the gaps and opportunities for transformation and resilience in all levels of agriculture and food systems. We create the best solutions to simultaneously achieve prosperous food systems and regenerate ecosystems by harnessing the benefits of multidisciplinary and multi-stakeholder solutions.
Please message me on linked in to connect and explore ways to participate in our initiatives, and to learn about future episodes to the webinar series.

Returning to the riddling road to Delphi

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Sat, 09 May 2020 07:30:00 +0000

Perhaps “Dear Oracle” was the phrase weary travelers said, just off the ancient road to the Oracle of Delphi. They wrestled with the riddles of their time, seeking better questions and insights these ancients opened to the wisdom at the pinnacle of their vision quests.

A pilgrimage to Delphi was the ayahuasca of the time for leaders, pundits, philosophers and politicians who sought counsel from a deeper perspective. Some would return again and again to ask better questions, and to rethink thought, born from the confounding answers they surmised which were drawn from their interpretations of the riddles from the oracle.

Visionary economist and thought innovator, John Elkington reflected on his experiences pre and post a visit to Delphi this year surrounding one of the most riddling set of circumstances and moments that our civilization has ever encountered...

The story begins with "My 50-Year Journey to Delphi" where he shares that “the world severely disrupted and ultimately truncated the trip, but the net result was glorious"

During the time that most of us were all safe at home, and sufficiently kerfuffled, as if we were asked by the great mystery to go to our room and think about what we’ve done, he wrote a subsequent article, fresh with clarity.

He reflects again, perhaps like every other person after their return from Delphi, new insights forming new imaginings that maybe the oracle would say something in the future like:

"Is not our heart centered leadership to emerge fully for our world from within our hearts now?"

Maybe merely asking the question in our hearts is enough, yet for most of us, a sea change would come about when we walk the heroic path of daily life, by diving deep within our hearts in the most common moments, to our own inner oracle...

While in our kitchens doing the dishes, or driving on the phone with a friend, or in zoom calls with our colleagues, we can ironically find the most precious moments of clarity, from a gaze deep into the unknown inside with newfound curiosity.

May we discover the next step on the path before us, through our hearts, by only listening to our hearts.

Can we imagine that the source of light and illumination is already inside us, as us?

Maybe this open inquiry reveals to us the many ways to expand and savor the joyous sensations born of heroically meeting the challenges of the moment?

From here, now, we can lead our lives knowing the oracle of beauty, light and wisdom lives unexpectedly in the depths of our very own heart.

Rethinking money and recognizing our inherent value?

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Sat, 09 May 2020 06:04:00 +0000

A keynote about inquiry to create better futures collectively

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Sat, 09 May 2020 04:56:00 +0000

Next Decade of Living Systems Paradigm Shift

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Thu, 07 May 2020 19:08:00 +0000

This Article is an excellent view of the course ahead from now - and a mapping of the current dynamic tools visions and ideas in our backpack as we walk up the unknown mountain of the life before us - we are creators of the future, not victims of it to paraphrase Buckminster Fuller.

Here's the full article:

Welcome to the Decade Ahead: Prescient Practicality for 2020 and beyond

JANUARY 2, 2020

tags: business transformation, firm of the future, future fit, leadership, regenerative business, regenerative leadership

There is an old Chinese saying,

‘May you live in interesting times’

When someone said that to you, it was viewed as both a blessing and a curse.

A blessing, because interesting times meant change, volatility and uncertainty which invoke adaptation, transformation and a reaching beyond the existing status quo into new found heights.

A curse, because change and uncertainty disrupts the status quo, upsets ego-comforts, and challenges norms and routines.

Facing into the decade of 2020-2030, humanity finds itself amid interesting times of breakdown/breakthrough.

Back in 2010, as we entered the 2010-2020 decade I wrote articles and spoke at conferences about the decade ahead becoming one of volatility and uncertainty – a time when the old logic, the old way of doing things, would start to be seen by the mainstream as no longer adequate to deal with the challenges of the day.

As we leave the 2010-2020 decade behind us, our hindsight may see that it was the beginning of the VUCA Age – volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times of disruptive innovations and wicked systemic challenges becoming the ‘new norm’.

During the decade just passed, leadership research has shown a widening ‘complexity gap’. The old mechanistic logic we used to lead and operate by is no longer fit-for-purpose. Our status quo leadership consciousness is left wanting, unable to deal with the systemic challenges organisations now face.

Whether it be the intent of business shifting from the unflinching focus on shareholder value to a wider perspective of stakeholder value, or corporate responsibility shifting from a narrow focus on risk, control and compliance to wider systemic value. The widespread take-up of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, integrated reporting initiatives such as Future-Fit Business Benchmark, and the shift towards the Circular Economy exemplify a sea-change in business. Come 2020, and we find positive signs that business can become a force for good in the world. The rapid rise of B-Corps, for instance, with over 3,000 organisations across 150 sectors in its ranks, and rising by the day. I predict 2020-2030 will see significantly more of these systemic adaptations, as business evolves to a new-norm. It’s the Law of Nature – adapt or die.

This is just the beginning; there is much work to be done for leadership and operational practices to be truly future-fit. The challenges as we enter 2020 are seismically bigger than when we entered 2010. Yet, there is increasing acceptance amongst leaders of a ‘new norm’ demanding a new way of leading and operating. My contributions to Professor Peter Hawkins’ ground-breaking research at Henley Business School on Tomorrow’s Leaders Today’s Leadership Development helped flesh out the need for this next-stage leadership development.

What enables organisations to thrive in the transformative times ahead is their ability to cultivate life-affirming regenerative leadership across all levels of the organisation.

It’s this that transforms our organisations from 19^th & 20^th century bureaucratic, soul-sapping, toxic, monolithic machines into 21st century agile future-fit organisations. This calls upon a step-change in leadership consciousness.

Adult developmental psychologists and leadership development specialists have spent decades researching different levels of leadership consciousness. For instance, a robust and detailed study of adult developmental research from Clare Graves has been further enhanced by practitioners like Don Beck, Christopher Cooke, Frederic Laloux and Ken Wilber.

In the book Regenerative Leadership, which has been referred to as an evolutionary blueprint for next-stage leadership, Hutchins & Storm explore this next-stage leadership consciousness now unfolding. It correlates to the Orange, Green and Yellow/Teal levels of Clare Graves research. Hutchins & Storm draw on contemporary leadership and organisational development approaches such as Teal/Evolutionary (Laloux’s work on Reinventing Organisations) and Theory U (Otto Scharmer’s work at the Presencing Institute and MIT) as well as living systems theory, Complexity Theory, and latest research on developmental organisations.

This image below shows the step-change. It’s a model taken from the book Regenerative Leadership where Hutchins & Storm articulate the shift from 19^th/20^th century organisation-as-machine into 21^st century organisation-as-living-system:

This is a momentous step-change in how we lead and operate. The 2020-2030 Decade of Transformation will witness life-affirming business practices becoming mainstream. This is the leading-edge of organisational innovation beyond techno-led digital strategy, AI and robotics.

Here are some key words for future-fit leaders to contemplate as we enter 2020: Purpose, Diversity, Emergence, Regenerative, Synchronicity… let’s briefly unpack each of these key words:

Purpose: The word ‘purpose’ is bandied about a lot in business circles these days. Suffice to say, Purpose is much more than the crafting of a catch-all mission statement. It’s about cultivating a ‘living purpose’ – a lived intent that pervades the organisational culture, where a threshold of people in the organisation deeply resonate with this purpose, and live it in the day-to-day. The living purpose is not just espoused but embodied through the behaviours and cultural glue that binds the organisation. It provides the coherence and inclusivity that counterbalance the living-organisation’s thirst for agility and diversity.

Diversity: Life itself banks on diversity. And human evolutionary conditions in the 21^st Century demand we embrace diversity. The ability to tolerate and thrive amid a wide variety of conditions, perspectives and contexts is critical to becoming future-fit. Such diversity of experience, perspectives and outlooks builds resilience and increases the capacity to cope with stress – individually and organisationally. Co-authors John Rety and Richard Manning of Go Wild call this ability to embrace diversity ‘re-wilding’ ourselves, breaking free from the restrictions and regimentations of modern life that estrange us from who we truly are. We literally unlock the power of life-affirming evolutionary forces within us when we learn to embrace diversity.

Rather than the monocultural, corporate mentality we see practiced in many areas of society, we need to think outside the box and invite in unconventional mindsets, work across departments, and bring in different perspectives. As explored in the book Regenerative Leadership, Hutchins & Storm show that the best ideas are not born in silos or by avoiding feedback and input from a broad spectre of stakeholders; the best ideas are created by going beyond borders and getting curious about other approaches, cultures and procedures. 21^st century Regenerative Leadership welcomes diversity in terms of age, creed, culture, gender and differing perspectives across the working environment. Leaders can stimulate diversity by working across boundaries both within the organisation (holding space for people from different silos across the business to share perspectives) and beyond the organisation (holding space for external stakeholder groups to share perspectives).

This diversity thrives amid a coherent sense of purpose and a rich developmental culture. The diversity sparks creative tensions, vibrancy and new thinking (divergence), while the coherence of the living-purpose provides the alignment and sense of direction (convergence). Out of this alchemy of divergence and convergence comes emergence. Emergence is the dynamic through which the living organisation adapts and evolves.

Emergence: All living-systems including the living-organisation exhibit the property of emergence. A key for leaders navigating the transformative times ahead will be their ability to sense into the emergent patterns unfolding within the living-organisation they are working in. Next-stage leadership development needs to enhance our capacity to sense and stimulate emergent patterns within the social systems we lead. The first step is for leaders to let-go of perceiving the organisation-as-a-machine that can be control through push-pull levers, and out-dated management tools. Instead, start to perceive the organisation as a complex adaptive system made up of non-linear emergent human relations. These emergent human relations can be nurtured so the organisation becomes more responsive and future-fit.

Christopher Alexander’s work on pattern language, Warren Weaver’s research on organizational complexity, Ralph Stacey’s research on organisations as complex responsive processes of human relating, Steve Johnson’s work on emergence, Jane Jacobs’s work on energy-flow networks enriched by Sally Goerner, Dan Fiscus and Brian Faith’s research on Energy Network Science, etc., contribute to a rich body of research exploring emergence within organisations and other social systems. In Regenerative Leadership, Hutchins & Storm draw upon these sources and others while exploring emergence for next-stage Regenerative Leaders.

As philosopher Alfred North Whitehead noted, emergence is nature’s creative advance. It is the way of nature – the way life adapts and unfolds to the ever-changing terrain. Understanding the emergent patterns within the relational dynamics we lead will be a critical success factor for the Decade of Transformation ahead.

Regenerative: The word ‘regenerative’ means creating the conditions conducive for life to continuously renew itself; to flourish amid ever-changing life-conditions. This primary principle underpins life-affirming leadership and organisational development. Organisations that thrive in the volatile times ahead will be ones that learn to become regenerative, to serve life rather than plunder and pollute life. See here the DNA model of Regenerative Leadership which is unpacked in Hutchins & Storm’s book of the same title:

This Regenerative Leadership DNA model embraces both the inner and outer technologies, tools, and consciousness that are required for the new regenerative business paradigm to unfold. It’s a unifying framework that integrates vast bodies of research, different domains, and specialist methodologies.

‘Giles Hutchins and Laura Storm bring their vast experience and deep wisdom to create an evolutionary blueprint for a sustainable future for business, people and the planet’

Richard Barrett, President of the Barrett Academy for the Advancement of Human Values

Regenerative leadership is about creating life-affirming cultures where people learn through developmental and respectful cultures, and where value-propositions and products create real value that enhance society, our wider humanity and the fabric of life on Earth upon which we all depend. This is not some utopian dream, it’s quietly going mainstream, and the business examples packed into the 350 pages of Regenerative Leadership evidence this. Business can – and must – become a force for good in the world. There is no other viable option for 21^st century leadership.

This book invites leaders to lead the world into the 21^st century

Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary UNFCCC 2010-2016

That leaves us with the final word to contemplate as we begin this Decade of Transformation:

Synchronicity: The ground-breaking psychologist Carl Jung explored synchronicities as ‘meaningful coincidences’ – seemingly unrelated events have a meaningful relation that defies our orthodox understanding of space-time. Quantum discoveries help give scientific explanation to such synchronistic moments that we have often felt occur in our lives yet struggle to explain through rational logic. The more we sense into how life works, the more science shows us a sea of interconnections that pervade all living systems – whether in our organisations, communities or everyday life.

In terms of leadership consciousness, recall the image earlier in this article with the levels of Orange, Green and Teal. At the Orange level of leadership consciousness we perceive the organisation-as-machine and we view life through a mechanistic lens. At the Green level, our lens of perception has widened to include wider society and a systemic perspective of stakeholder interactions. At the Teal level, we embrace a living-systems perspective where we intuit the innate interconnectedness of how life really works. We learn to sense not only the emergent patterns of organisational behaviour but also sense the synchronicities that abound amid everyday interactions. We cultivate a leadership consciousness that can see past the surface noise and sense the underlying wisdom pervading every person, interaction and learning experience life affords us. This ability to see beyond the surface and sense the synchronistic interconnected nature of life provides a foundation for peace, empathy and gratitude. This wisdom underpins our leadership capacity amid the hectic busyness of the transformational times ahead.

This book is full of wisdom and determination! It will inspire leaders to succeed in the 21st Century.

Tim Flannery, scientist

Welcome to the future manifesting today. As leaders in organisations, institutions, teams and communities the world-over, we have a duty to step into a way of leading that is life-affirming and regenerative. Why wish for anything less!

As the well-respected business futurist John Naisbett predicts:

‘The greatest breakthroughs of the 21^st Century will not occur because of technology. They will occur because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human.’

What an exciting yet challenging time to be alive, when the old rule-book is being ripped up before our eyes, leaving a wide-open horizon for our leadership consciousness to expand into.

Living in interesting times may be seen as a blessing or a curse. It’s up to each of us whether we wish to transform ourselves and our systems amid this time of challenge, or get sucked under by the fearful ripe-tides of change.

Giles Hutchins is a pioneering practitioner, business futurist and senior adviser at the fore-front of the [r]evolution in organizational and leadership consciousness and developmental approaches that enhance personal, organizational and systemic agility and vitality. He is author and co-author of several leadership and organizational development papers, and the books The Nature of Business (2012), The Illusion of Separation (2014), Future Fit (2016) and Regenerative Leadership (2019). Chair of The Future Fit Leadership Academy and Founder of Leadership Immersions, he runs a 60 acre leadership centre at Springwood Farm in an area of outstanding natural beauty near London, UK

Biomimicry for Capital Markets

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Thu, 07 May 2020 15:35:00 +0000

Sixty Minutes with Hazel Henderson and Mathis Wackernagel from Security & Sustainability Forum on Vimeo.

Based on Hazel Henderson's and Jeanine Benyus’ community of practice invention of “ethical biomimicry finance” in 2013, we began discussing biomimicry for financial and economic development paradigms in 2014 at a series of panels at the Social Capital Markets Conference in San Francisco.

Now it’s time for us to build this into a more robust frame & model for the new model portfolio theory and new capital markets. In the same way that IMF/IFC etc have a multistage & multi year design process for emerging markets to develop liquid and effective capital markets - we now have the context capacity cooperative community and connectivity to build the new tool for humanity now in coherence with earth systems... essentially this is what Hazel Henderson has inspired me to see and commit to. Yesterday she did an excellent overview of her nearly 50 years of work with Mathis of the Global Footprint Network in their one hour video - very much worth the time.

This is our theory of change. It is the mission of those who hear this call to to evolve, build and implement a more effective means with and for the community of practice of impact investing and economic development to create better tools and systems for the implementation of 21st century capacities for capital markets now!