The Pinchot Perspective

Intrapreneuring in Accounting

2010-02-22T22:53:14-08:00

In a comment to my blog post Back to Intrapreneuring, Hannah McCorrie asked:

“I have had a lot of trouble trying to convince my supervisors that intrapreneurial skills should be taught to accountants. They feel that accountants are only required to provide information using the tools they learn in training.

However, from my research it is evident to me that business is changing rapidly and all areas of business need to become more innovative, including accountancy. Management accountants are constantly reinventing the methods they use, the main example currently being the "beyond budgeting" movement.”

Right on Hannah!

In my coaching of intrapreneurs I have found that having the support of accountants and finance people who understand intrapreneuring is essential. If your future employer wants innovation, then having accountants who understand and value intrapreneuring will be necessary.

In my two greatest successes implementing the most advanced form of intrapreneuring, The Intelligent Organization, my primary sponsors for the implementation of internal markets and internal service intrapreneuring were from finance and the most essential partners were the accountants in the divisions served by the intrapreneurial teams. Without their desire to make the system work for the internal service providing intrapreneurs, they would never have received the internal transfer payments on which their existence depended. Given the inflexibility of most big company computer systems it often required courage and ingenuity to get the systems to do what was needed to make free intraprise possible.

I also believe that you are right about the need for innovative accountancy in general. Entrepreneurs and small and medium sized enterprises need accountants who can figure out how to account for new business models and new kinds of contractual relationships. So do innovators inside larger organizations. Increasingly routine accounting will move to countries with cheaper labor. If you want to be employed in accounting for a career in the United States and other advanced nations, you will need to be innovative. This means you will need to understand intrapreneuring, or work for an accountant who does.

Another area of innovation in accounting is triple bottom line accounting. Increasingly corporations reporting on their success in the economic, ecological and social arenas. Check out TriLibrium, a triple bottom line accountancy founded by Brian Setzler and André Furin, both graduates of the Bainbridge Graduate Institute. Extending the role of accountants beyond counting the numbers, they note:

“In a triple-bottom-line world, numbers rarely tell the whole story or serve as an adequate guide for making decisions or measuring performance.”

Triple bottom line accounting deals with the larger picture and thus prepares accountants to be better business partners with their clients.

To summarize: As routine work moves to lower cost nations, the work done in the US and other wealthy countries will increasingly be about innovation and major change issues like sustainability. Even if they are not driving innovation themselves, accountants in the richer nations will increasingly find themselves supporting innovation, which will require them to be flexible and innovative themselves. Hannah, don't give up on intrapreneuring. (I never thought you would.)

Recovering from Climate Depression (An Opto Pesso Dialogue)

2010-02-20T12:25:29-08:00

After each new piece of bad news on climate change I find myself struggling to find hope. Most recently, after reading James Lovelock’s book The Vanishing Face of Gaia, I woke up in the middle of the night crying. I don’t cry much, but I believed Lovelock’s prediction that in the coming hot climate, the Earth will only support about 20% of the current population. I lost hope that civilization will turn back in time to prevent a climate catastrophe. This post is about finding my way back to mental equilibrium.

I have hit despair about the future before. When this happens, two parts of me argue as I struggle to reassemble a bearable worldview without denying the bad news. There is the optimistic part of me whom, I’ll call “Opto” and his pessimistic counterpart, “Pesso.” The good news is that after their conversation I usually am back to a reasonably productive mood. This is a summary of the dialogue that brought me back this time.

Pesso speaking: Opto, please pay attention. You know that we are probably already past the tipping point on climate change. If not, we soon will be. There is no reason to believe that humanity will stop pouring CO₂ into the atmosphere until it is too late. Look at what happened in Copenhagen.

Global warming is not just ecological catastrophe. Much of the most productive inland farmland will turn to desert. Rising oceans will flood Bangladesh, the Dutch polders, the Nile valley and the low lying river valleys and deltas that provide much of the world’s food. Billions will starve. Coastal cities will be destroyed. This is the largest social justice issue ever. Humanity will be deciding which billion will live and which five billion will die. Only the rich, the powerful, the well armed and the very lucky will survive. Though I know they have a better chance than average, I am worried for our grandchildren.

And then there is the fact that the ecosystems and social systems we are working on will soon be destroyed. What is the point of anything? I swear, if I could get my spirits up enough, I would just party through the last good days and forget about saving the world. It is too late.

Opto: (Deep breath) OK. As you say, the situation appears to be horrific. But let’s not just assume that Lovelock is right. Collapse is not inevitable. Lovelock underestimates the adaptivity of the human species. We can still hope for a precipitating event that drives humanity to a sudden change of heart in time to avert the worst.

Once we wake up there is a lot that we can do. Geoengineering technologies may temporarily hold back the temperature increase until we can reduce our emissions enough that it is no longer needed. We have had a good cry; let’s not sink into depression. In the words of Alex Steffen:

“The opposite of pessimism isn't “doing something,” it’s whole-hearted engagement with systemic reinvention.”

So let’s embrace the opportunity to do important work. Let’s go on the journey of a systemic reinvention of society.

Pesso: So be it my glib and fatuous twin. Let’s look at the system we need to address.

Lovelock became famous when he noticed that since life emerged on Earth 3½ billion years ago, the sun has heated up 25%. The Earth should have gotten much hotter, but it didn’t. Instead, with some minor ups and downs like ice ages and the current interglacial period, the temperature has had no long-term upward trend. Lovelock concluded that the planet has a self-regulating system controlling temperature, similar to the way a thermostat and a furnace control the temperature in your house or the way your body controls its temperature. But what causes this homeostasis?

Lovelock then made a startling discovery: Life plays a major role in the regulation system that kept the global temperature and ocean salinity in a zone that is habitable for life. When a purely mineral Earth would have been too cold, life put CO₂ into the atmosphere which warmed it. When the sun warmed and a purely mineral world would have grown too hot, photosynthetic organisms in the ocean bloomed and pulled more CO₂ out of the atmosphere, cooling the planet. Lovelock concluded that life acts as superorganism, doing what organisms do, adjusting its environment to suit its own survival (see great Rolling Stone article).

The idea that life as a whole acts to create conditions habitable for life is called the Gaia Hypothesis. It does not sit easily with the neo-Darwinist "selfish gene" paradigm and therefore is troubling to most scientists. However seeing life on Earth as part of a homeostatic control system fits the data better than any other theory to explain the historical stability of the climate and ocean salinity. For this reason it is now widely, but not universally accepted.

Opto: This is not like you. This sounds like good news. Life is taking care of us. She may have more tools than you or Lovelock can see.

Pesso: Currently life acts to cool the planet. The sun is very slowly getting hotter, which means that life has to work ever harder to cool the planet. Sooner or later the task of cooling the planet will be too great and life will fail. The temperature will shoot up and life as we know it will be over.

Humans are now making Gaia’s job harder by adding to the warming. At some point the system shifts from the negative feedback that keeps the system under control to positive feedback, that will lead to a runaway temperature increase. Lovelock suggests that the move from negative feedback to positive will result in rapid runaway temperature rise, much of which may occur in less than a decade from when it starts accelerating.

I always thought climate change was about the fate of my grandchildren and their descendants. Now I see that it will probably affect me as well. Worse, I fear for my descendents even more than I did when I thought there was still time to fix the situation.

Opto: The good news, if you can call it that, is that there is a likely stopping point to this rapid temperature rise. Lovelock points out that there are three stable temperature regimes which have repeated themselves over time:

The ice ages;
The interglacial periods (one of which we are in now); and
The “greenhouse” periods that average about 6°C (11 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than now.

The Earth’s climate ran away into a greenhouse period 55 million years ago. Eventually Gaia recovered and the temperature came back down. Even if we go to a greenhouse period, we can come back again.

Pesso: Sure but the recovery took 100,000 years. I take less cheer in this than you do. In Climate Change on a Living Earth Lovelock presents a graph showing that “when the CO₂ in the air exceeds 500 ppm the global temperature suddenly rises 6°C and becomes stable again despite further increases or decreases of atmospheric CO₂.”

I find the stability of the hot periods depressing for three reasons:

The stability means it is hard to get back to a cooler climate. Just reducing emissions 80% may not be enough. We will probably be stuck in the greenhouse for a very long time.
The stability means that most of what we are doing is meaningless. Slowing down emissions a bit may alter the timing of the sudden temperature increase by a year or two, but we still end up in the same hot state at the same temperature with the same disastrous results.
At 6°C hotter than now Lovelock predicts the planet will only able to feed about 20% of today’s population. Billions will starve.

Opto: I know the predictions and I struggle with the images Lovelock evokes. But I see no reason to be paralyzed by them. It is not inevitable that we flip into the hot zone. The history of climate change suggests less predictability than Lovelock suggests and I still believe humanity will wake up to the danger and respond vigorously.

We do not understand the dynamics of global climate well enough to make firm predictions. For example, suppose the ocean conveyer (including the Gulf stream) stops and we shift rapidly into a new ice age. As large sections of the Earth turn white, more of the sun's energy would be reflected back into space, lowering the average temperature of Earth. Furthermore, the ice age would be quite a wake up call. People would begin caring about and doing something about human impact on climate and we would have some time to reduce emissions before flipping into another hot era.

Suppose we go beyond 500 ppm of CO_2.We still might delay the temperature increase long enough to get our emissions under control. For example, we might cool the planet by putting sulfur into the atmosphere, As we have learned from volcanic explosions, sulfur in the atmosphere blocks some of the sun’s heating energy. Pinatubo’s explosion cooled the world for several years. We might cool the planet by increasing photosynthesis in the ocean thereby sucking CO₂ out of the air. We …

Pesso: “I know an old lady who swallowed a fly.” Sometimes the solution is worse that the problem it solves. How do you know that that is not the case here?

Opto: I don’t. But that is why we should get to work testing and modeling and discussing geoengineering ideas. We don’t want to suddenly find out we have to use them on a large scale without having done smaller tests first.

Pesso: If geoengineering becomes popular, people will think we don’t have to curb emissions, that we can pollute all we want and geoengineering will fix it. As a result doing the research may make the situation worse by delaying action to cut emissions.

Opto: The reason human efforts to stop climate change have been so pitiful is that we haven’t seen the sudden catastrophic event needed to alert the population to the danger. New Orleans almost did it, but the press did not report it as a climate change story. This will change when we have a sufficient sudden demonstration of climate change. Once the powers that be decide that stopping climate change is in their interests, the media will change its tune and shortly thereafter the population will be ready for something serious to be done about climate change.

Pesso: By then it will be too late. Like Alex Steffen, I do not think technological fixes will allow us to green our consumptive lifestyle. Stopping climate change would require a complete change of lifestyle as well as of technology. That will not happen nearly in time.

Opto: Perhaps not, but even if we flip to a hotter period, the human species will survive and rebuild as we have done after the ice ages. There are many things we can do to adapt and thereby reduce suffering, death and ecosystem destruction. And we can begin building the systems that will eventually get us back to an interglacial period. Lovelock has underestimated the ability of our ingenious species to figure out ways to feed itself and amuse itself under difficult conditions.

After the great plague came the Renaissance. I believe that after whatever horrors there are in reducing human population to fit what may be a significantly reduced carrying capacity of Earth, humanity will become much more responsible for our impact on the planet. We will have another, much deeper, renaissance, a coming of age as a species.

If Lovelock’s predictions of rapid climate change come to pass, Gaia and her power will become an ever present reality in human consciousness. Our religions, our myths, our history and our science will make us afraid of angering her again. Religions will reemphasize the role of humanity as stewards of the Earth. In partnership with the dynamics of Gaia, we will restore ecosystems and bring the temperature of the planet back to a more habitable range.

For now there is good work to be done getting humanity ready for the hotter times ahead. As we despair of stopping climate change, we can move some of our attention from fighting climate change to finding ways to reduce the human suffering in the likely event that Earth does get much hotter and dryer. For example we can work on the post-warming food supply, rising water, drought and refugees. These can supply many generations of meaningful work.

Business opportunities in solving these challenges that I will cover in future blog posts include:

Low water use food production
Rising ocean solutions
A rising ocean hedge fund
Refugee hosting systems
Offshore aquaculture
Sea colonization
Vegetarian diets
Fostering resilience
More nearly self sufficient communities
Peace and security in a time of declining resources
Resilient energy systems
Higher HappoDammo Ratio ways to be happy

Pesso: That all sounds great, but how do you live with being a member of a species that is destroying the planet and shows little sign of learning to be responsible. Some days I am deeply ashamed of being a human.

Opto: Self hatred will not make anything better. I believe that humanity is not a mistake, that in the end we will prove to be good for Earth. If we get depressed because Gaia theory suggests faster and deeper climate change than the IPCC, let us also look at positive implications of Gaia theory. Whether it is God or Gaia, there appears to be an intelligence at work taking care of our planet.

In an almost religious way, I choose to believe that Gaia (or God) has allowed humans to evolve for a reason. If we think of each species as an organs in the planetary super-organism, what is our function? Here are a few possibilities:

In order to protect herself against asteroid strikes, Gaia had to allow the development of a dangerously technologically competent species. Of existing species, only humans are equipped to predict the trajectory of asteroids or conduct operations in space. Since a major asteroid strike could sterilize the planet down to the level of a few extremophile bacteria, building such an asteroid defense system is a high priority for Gaia’s health (and should be for humanity).
Humans will probably turn out to be the reproductive organ of Gaia. Of the species around today, only humans are close to being able to package up a variety of other species and carry them across space to find other hospitable worlds. Noah’s Ark may be the metaphorical instructions for this enterprise.
The sun will continue to grow hotter. Gaia has held the temperature in the hospitable zone for 3 ½ billion years, but the hotter the sun gets the more Gaia must do to keep the temperature down. At some point removing CO₂ from the atmosphere will not be enough. At this point humans can build sun shades in space. There are even plausible plans for moving the Earth’s orbit further from the sun to compensate for the sun’s growing heat. [BBC, New Scientist]

Thinking about things humans can do for the survival of Life on Earth makes me feel good about being a human. It let’s me believe that Gaia or God has created us for a reason. Are we in the toddler or the adolescent stage as a species? Either way, the fact that we are irresponsible and breaking things does not mean we will not grow up to be a highly valuable member of the earth-life community. Although we are not nearly as unique as we think, there are some things that only humans can do. My bet is that we will be kept around to do them. I’d like to work on that premise. Now is a good time to begin practicing for our role as stewards of the Earth.

Pesso: Arrghhh! Do you have any idea what people will say if you talk like that? Calm down!

Opto: OK, let’s not publish this post. But I feel better anyway. Off to work.

(Credits: Photo of Opto and Pesso by Cayusa using cc-by-nc, Photo of Cracked Earth by Qousqous using cc-by-nc-sa, Photo of Ocean Conveyor Belt by Thomas Splettstoesser of US Global Change Research Program and is public domain (a work by the US Federal Government), Photo of Berber Tents by Robbie's Photo Art using cc-by-nc-nd, Photo of Asteroid Impact by Don Davis of Nasa Images and is public domain (a work by the US Federal Government). )

The HappoDammo Ratio

2010-02-16T16:43:46-08:00

In the summer of 2004, I was in a workshop at Hollyhock in BC when my son, then about 28, said, “Dad, you can’t stay indoors all week in weather like this. Why don’t you play hooky for one afternoon and let me show you how my generation has fun.”

He took me to the Linnaea School’s disc golf course. It was in a beautiful forest, mostly Douglas Fir and Western Red Cedar, with a knee-high understory dominated by Salal and Sword Fern.

Disc golf (or frisbee golf ) is played much like traditional golf, except that one throws Frisbee® like discs instead of hitting a golf ball. The “holes” are traditionally metal baskets, though in this case they were just old five-gallon paint buckets painted red and nailed on top of a cedar post.

We played 36 holes and then decided to go to for a swim. At Haig Lake we took off our clothes, swam to an island half a mile away, ran around on the cliffs, were chased by yellow jackets, dove back in and swam back to our clothes.

As I put them back on, I realized that we had had a very happy afternoon and done a tiny fraction of the environmental damage done by a typical afternoon of golf followed by a dip in the club pool. No bulldozers were used to make the Linnaea course. No trees were cut down; no sand hauled in; no pesticides, herbicides or fungicides or irrigation were used. I guessed that we had achieved at least the same level of happiness with less than one thousandth of the environmental damage.

As those thoughts were drifting through my head, I saw a simple arithmetic formula that seemed to me to point to an important and obvious truth.

The name “HappoDammo Ratio” seemed a little goofy, but I couldn’t think of one I liked better. Now it seems to have stuck.

As it turns out, the HappoDammo Ratio is a useful compass for navigating the challenges of our time. In order to deal with climate change, poverty, toxic accumulation, resource exhaustion and a host of other problems, we are either going to have to figure out how to get more happiness from less stuff or we will keep on increasing consumption until the systems on which we depend crash. The HappoDammo Ratio defines the fundamental challenge of our times. It points to the possibility for vast improvements over the current course of society.

I use the HappoDammo ratio for lifestyle and purchasing choices, new product design, organizational improvement, analyzing government policy, etc. In my own life, I fly less and enjoy life at home, which is higher Happo and lower Dammo. I have a motorcycle that gets 50 mpg and is more fun than a car. However, if I take a systems view it may not be higher HappoDammo because it makes my wife unhappy. So I take the bus and meditate along the way. I'm just learning.

In business, I look for creative ways to make customers and employees happier using less stuff. More happiness is what people want and will pay for. Less stuff is usually less cost. Understanding what makes people happy is a critical 21^st Century business skill. This way lies profit as well as hope for our society.

For those hoping to shape society in other ways, the HappoDammo Ratio provides a powerful creative paradigm. For environmentalists it suggests a shift:

From: Recommending sacrifice for the good of nature and future generations.

To: Advocating for greater happiness today as well as in the future.

This is a far more appealing proposition.

The HappoDammo Ratio gives me hope. Many current ways of striving for happiness are so ineffective that it won’t be hard to discover less resource intensive ways to produce greater happiness. In future blogs I will discuss business opportunities that the HappoDammo Ratio uncovers, ways to measure happiness and damage and more information about what actually makes us happy.

(Credits: Photo of Disc Golf Woman by Oberazzi using cc-by-sa, Photo of Riviera Country Club Golf Course by Dan Perry using cc-by, Photo of Disc Golf Course by Dave and Lisa using cc-by-sa, Photo of Happy Cambodian Girl by mrcharly using cc-by-nc-nd)

Gaia was Glad: A Poem

2010-02-07T09:31:03-08:00

Gaia was glad that the difficult phase

Of adolescent rebellion was over.

Her biosphere had finally recovered

From loathing and self-destruction.

She was moving again in the direction

Of self regulation and a salubrious complexity.

Her very promising brainy biped, the humans,

Had been through a rough period of adolescent aggressiveness,

Both with themselves and with other denizens of earth.

Finally they had learned the benefits of impulse control

And found ways to behave as a species

With harmonious restraint.

They were beginning to practice

Their role in asteroid defense

And cooling the planet.

As she told her friends in other galaxies,

Like any mother, she was relieved to see

That the life she had reared

Did not come from a bad seed.

Back to Intrapreneuring

2010-01-21T11:08:29-08:00

Although in a fall 1978 paper with my wife Libba I originally coined the term intrapreneur, I have been ignoring intrapreneuring for a while to focus launching the Bainbridge Graduate Institute. Now intrapreneuring is suddenly becoming relevant to me again (and increasingly to others).

Intrapreneuring means two things to me:

A set of business practices that liberates people with entrepreneurial personalities to innovate rapidly inside larger organizations for the benefit of that organization and its customers.
The actions of an individual and/or a team that is acting in an entrepreneurial manner to serve the best interests of larger organization and its supply chain, with or without official support.

Intrapreneuring is suddenly becoming more important because bureaucracy can’t respond rapidly enough to respond to challenges like climate change and cultural turbulence.

Civilization is at a turning point. We are becoming aware that our economies and lifestyles need massive amounts of innovation to remain viable. Only those institutions that can reinvent themselves will survive. Creating the climate for intrapreneuring is an effective way increasing innovation and sustainable innovation manyfold.

In advanced nations the need for intrapreneuring is even greater.

To maintain full employment in the face of low cost global competitors, advanced nations, must innovate far faster and more cost effectively than they do today.

In studying hundreds of innovations inside larger organizations, I found that in every case the success of the project was driven by a passionate and persistent intrapreneur. This does not mean intrapreneuring was company policy, in most cases it happened despite the rules. But the lesson is still stark. Intrapreneurs are essential to innovation in large organizations. For this reason it pays to create a culture that encourages intrapreneurial activity. Not doing so in today’s innovation hungry world will lead to an organization’s extinction.

In future blogs I will address both how to increase the effectiveness intrapreneuring and how to be a successful intrapreneur.

Why Do I Blog?

2010-01-13T22:26:16-08:00

The theme of this blog is dreams, large and small, of a positive future. The beat, in the newspaper sense of the word, is the future of business, the economy, civilization, and living systems of our planet.

I am interested in plausible positive visions of the future because they are much needed and in short supply. By plausible positive visions I mean visions of a future worth living that take into account the evidence that civilization is on a path to disaster. To steer our way to a decent future we must embrace challenges such as climate change, the growing distance between rich and poor, future natural resource shortages, racism, toxic build up and loss of genetic diversity. How can we find the courage to do so?

According to Rollo May in The Courage to Create:

We are called upon to do something new, to confront a no man’s land, to push into a forest where there are no well worn paths and from which no one has returned to guide us… this requires a degree of courage for which there is no immediate precedent…
This courage will not be the opposite of despair. We shall often be faced with despair, as indeed every sensitive person has been during the last several decades in this country. Hence Kierkegaard and Nietszche and Camus and Sartre have proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is rather the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.

I live with the knowledge that the path our civilization is on threatens the life support systems on which we rely for our existence. And yet I have hope that there is much we can do both to reduce the climate changes and to mitigate their effects. Let us imagine a plausible future worth living. Then we will find the energy to work aggressively towards its realization.

The human race is failing to act boldly to address critical challenges that we must address to guarantee the continued existence of a peaceful orderly society. It is time to act, otherwise, as we run out of resources and habitable lands, humanity will descend into barbarism, widespread starvation and continual war punctuated by frequent terror attacks. In the future, even more than now, social justice and the environment are part of a single system.

Why, for example, do we not act to stop catastrophic climate change? It is not for lack of information pointing to the problem. Is it because most people, short of giving up most of what they believe makes them happy, do not see a alternative to going on more or less as we are.

I will be seeking a future that spreads the benefits of society more broadly to all members. We need this not only because it is fair but because the power of the disenfranchised through terror is increasing. We can’t afford to steal from others to the same degree that we have done in the past.

This blog is a creative exploration of more positive ways to face the future. I hope the conversations this blog participates in will contribute to what I believe is one of society’s major creative challenges: the creation and sharing of new visions that attract people in their lifesyles, politics and businesses to move joyfully toward a future that can work for future generations.

This blog will contain:

Designs for small parts of a future worth living
- Product and service designs that point to a happy future
- Social and cultural patterns and institutions
Larger system visions
- Economic system ideas
- Geopolitical dreams
- System conditions for long term viability, ecosystem health and human happiness
- Design principles for a happy future
Discovery of leverage points for large system interventions to get us moving toward positive futures. See my blog post Where to Intervene in a System.

Where to Intervene in a System

2010-01-08T23:19:26-08:00

So you want to change the world (or some part of it)? According to Donella (Dana) Meadows, you can be a more effective change agent if you choose the right place to intervene. She goes on to say that most people pick the wrong places to intervene, which makes it hard or impossible to succeed.

We knew Dana Meadows not only as an thought leader, but also as a farmer. She loved working on the land and was at home with animals. Once on a horse and buggy ride, our horse shied vigorously at a mailbox. Where others might have been scared, Dana just laughed and laughed. Despite her fame, part of her was just a down-to-earth farmer. She was also one of the pioneers in using systems thinking to address big environmental and social challenges.

Even when Dana knew the direction in which a system needed to change, she often found herself struggling to change it. However, over the years of both frustration and success, she became wise about what works and what doesn't when changing large systems. She came to believe that most of the things people do to change systems are either ineffective or worse, effective, but in the wrong direction. She distilled her learning in the classic article Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System.

In Leverage Points Dana lists and then explains the relative usefulness of 12 different ways of changing a system. Like a David Letterman Top 10 list, she goes through her list backwards, starting with the least likely to be effective and ending with the most. This lets her show why the leverage points most people start with are unlikely to work and why intervening in other ways works better.

Here is her list of “Places to Intervene in a System” (in increasing order of effectiveness):

12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards)
11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows
10. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures)
9. The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change
8. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against
7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops
6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to what kinds of information)
5. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints)
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure
3. The goals of the system
2. The mindset or paradigms out of which the system – its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters – arises
1. The power to transcend paradigms

If you, like me, yearn to be a more effective change agent, I suggest checking out Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. Dana gives real examples of interesting change projects, the underlying systems which needed to be changed and where effective leverage could be found. She explains each of the list's intervention types and why she found some types more likely to be effective than working directly on the variable you want to change. I reread this paper from time to time and I always learn something new.

Who is Gifford Pinchot?

2010-01-06T19:36:16-08:00

I have been an author, an entrepreneur, a consultant, a husband and father, a blacksmith and a school founder. I am best known as the author of Intrapreneuring: Why You Don’t Have to Leave the Corporation to Become an Entrepreneur and as a founder and President of the Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI), a #1 rated school of socially and environmentally responsible business.

Currently, in addition to facilitating the growth and evolution of BGI, I am writing my fourth book, enjoying my new granddaughters, being a husband, a father of adult children and chairman of both Sustainable Business Transformations and Pinchot & Company.

And yes, I am related to the Gifford Pinchot. Being his grandson, I was sheep dipped as a child in concern for the environment, a dislike of the concentration of power and wealth and a love of adventure. My grandfather was not just a conservationist and a forester, he was a trust buster, a fearless explorer and a proponent of public electrical power. He fought the corruption in which the rich and powerful dominated the agenda of government. He built roads to “get the farmers out of the mud.” I embrace my family's goals of conservation and social justice, but am struggling to lighten up and find more playful ways to pursue them.

I believe in fun and the playfulness for their own sake and as needed for creativity. To make the innovations needed to save our civilization, change makers will have to be less serious and more fun. People will only give up the status quo if they imagine themselves as happier living the new paradigm.

In my youth I wanted to be an inventor. My first success at age 8 was an underwater diving apparatus using a bicycle pump, a garden hose, a giant pot and a bag of stones. It worked nicely as long as my younger brother pumped. I liked it at the bottom of the pool.

In college I studied physics, social relations and economics, but bad grades led me to take a year off, during which I was a civil rights worker with CORE and SNCC.

I wrote my undergraduate thesis on alternative ways of measuring the performance of an economy using Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development as a rough measure of the benefit provided by an economy. I used historical evidence of the impact of slavery on the slaves’ ability to move beyond the struggle for autonomy as an example of how economic systems affect psychosocial development. The economics department accepted my thesis for honors and told me I was not an economist but rather a sociologist. In sociology graduate school the first major paper I wrote was on the evolution of altruism, starting with the ants and working forward to marriage customs, group size and patterns of conflict in humans. The sociology department told me I was not a sociologist, but rather a biologist.

I ended my academic studies in neurophysiology when the department told me that given my desire to understand consciousness, I was clearly a philosopher. I decided it would be best to make an honest living, because an academic career was not going to work. I became a blacksmith, dairy farmer and leader of an intentional community in upstate New York.

Since then I have built and sold the ironworks, launched a consulting firm that provided creativity, innovation and intrapreneuring services to half the Fortune 100, and helped found and later became CEO of an internet security software firm. Fearful of the tech bubble, we sold that firm in 1998. My wife and I used the money from that sale to build the Bainbridge Graduate Institute.

What I stand for is building a world that works for all, as soon as possible and in the future. I stand for the responsibility and opportunity of business to play a major role in making it so. I stand for those who believe they have enough talent to make a living making the world better. I stand for freedom and creativity and the social systems that make it profitable to trust people to be freer and more creative. I stand for helping intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs to seize the opportunity to create products, services and productive relationships that move us toward the world that needs to be.

By a world that works for all, I don’t mean just that everyone has enough to eat and a place to stay, though we are a long way from that. What I work toward is a world in which most people have meaningful lives filled with joy and a sense of accomplishment. I realize that given desertification, sea rise and population increase this may be an unrealistic goal, but I still am moved to work in that direction. We must adapt to what will be regardless of the difficulties.

I am seeking examples of what the world could be like. I am seeking visions of whole societies, designs physical and social, new ways of thinking, inspiring goals, system interventions, promising technologies and new ways to meet people’s physical, psychological and spiritual needs without destroying the planet or exploiting others.

Though this blog I am hoping to connect to people who are also thinking and writing, designing and living these issues. Please comment and send me to other places where I can learn.

(photo credit: William Hertling 2006 )