Revolution is Where You Find It by Tony Lamport As we drive, the full generous sun of late morning lights the mass of golden leaves of autumn in Nova Scotia from the inside, in a way that uplifts and overwhelms the eye. Beside me is my son – rock drummer, video gamer, lifeguard, ecological trainer and generally funny guy – who, for every one of his four years at university has placed near the top of the Dean’s list in spite of reading virtually nothing, much to my frustration, but course-assigned texts. As we drive happily and silently together into the richly textured day, I am struggling for a way to begin my promised review of Peter Senge’s new book The Necessary Revolution. My son turns to me, out of the blue, and says with uncanny timing, “I’m reading a new book by Peter Senge and enjoying it a lot.” He pauses for awhile and then goes on, “I like the way he thinks and writes, in a way that allows things to connect across disciplines.” I pop a double eyebrow lift, and he pauses again. “He seems to use exactly the right words in the right amount to explain what I need to know,” he goes on to describe. He’s got my full attention now. “And he doesn’t seem to invest a lot of effort trying to impress or bore me with what’s left over.” (Unlike presumably some others who figure prominently in his life). I’m smiling inwardly at this synchronicity. I have my beginning in these few essential observations about an important book that covers a great deal of ground, bringing the lessons of environmental and organizational learning together in a readable, page-turning call to action. Now I can dig a little deeper. Peter Senge has a distinguished career as a writer of landmark books and as a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. His voice has clarity and patience as it harvests the learning about working effectively together at the often muddy edge of organizational learning, making it not just understandable but useful for the rest of us. In fact, he invented the term organizational learning and was one of the founders of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), a hugely powerful presence in thought leadership and business and management thinking in the last decade or so. The Fifth Discipline and its accompanying Fieldbook are standard texts. Presencing, his third book, co-authored with Otto Scharmer and others, is a powerful exploration of complex problems and creativity – possibly just a few units ahead of its time but still with a clear voice that makes it both understandable and readable. In this new book, The Necessary Revolution, along with his collaborators Bryan Smith, Nina Krushwitz, Joe Laur, and Sara Schley, Senge continues to avoid wasting his and our time trying to impress or bore us. With a thorough, detailed approach, he guides us along the journey into our necessary future, constrained as it is by great social and environmental upheaval but rich with possibilities for those who can adapt and create. Like this one, his books are underpinned by theory, but they are also thick with good examples and lots of opportunities for experiential learning. Karl Marx became one of the most influential thinkers of the modern world, predicting the necessary downfall of capitalism at the hands of its workers. Senge and his colleagues celebrate capitalism not for the harsh exploitation of working people and the natural world it sometimes has been, but for all it promises to be – an expression of the best intentions and wholesome livelihood of those who want to make good and make sense in their lives. This is an invitation to a capitalist uprising for those who see as possible a new kind of natural or regenerative capitalism that can achieve environmental well-being, equity and abundance for all. These are high-flying ideas but they are also rooted in a growing reality in many parts of the world, and Senge and his colleagues provide lots of examples of companies and organizations at its leading edge, from famous brands such as Alcoa, BMW and Xerox to many smaller and lesser known such as Seventh Generation. Through a careful exploration that links the eco in ecology and the eco in economy, and serves as a program of action for individuals and teams, The Necessary Revolution takes us into an uncertain but certainly possible future, where local initiatives can add up to global change. By aligning a drive for competitiveness and profit with an end to costly waste and pollution – waste and pollution can be seen as manufactured products for which there are no customers and no profit – and bringing good intentions into our industrial culture through a systems approach, The Necessary Revolution describes an economic culture where participants find fulfillment in material and spiritual ways and in the end do no harm. However, with the book’s focus being a practical workbook for change, it treats too casually two powerful broad ideas that if widely understood could guide action in the larger field and as a result, were underplayed. The first is the importance of investing in new systems that do good rather than tinkering with bad systems to make them less damaging, and second, the role of design in accomplishing this. By championing design as a tool for creating a better more sustainable world, Senge echoes the wisdom of Buckminster Fuller, the engineering genius who brought us among other things the geodesic dome. Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Those who own iPods or iPhones, have driven a Smart Car or spent time in a solar house can understand directly the power of design to change things. Everything made by humans is designed, but not necessarily designed well. Good design is an expression of human aspiration and intentions, and when it’s practiced in a thoughtful way that includes sustainability and context and the users point of view, it can solve problems upstream before they ever occur. It can bring the actual outcomes closer to the intended ones. We in the developed world are an industrial culture of so many unfortunate and deadly unintended consequences. Business schools such as Rotman and others are beginning to focus not just on design, but also design thinking. This approach takes the wisdom and creativity of design as a specialized field of professional practice and applies it to the work the rest of us do. As a result, we learn to research and nurture new kinds of insight, to think and work together in the round, and incorporate sustainability principles into our innovation process. As visionary architect William McDonough put it, “Designers must become leaders and leaders must become designers.” Biomimetics is the discipline of applying design innovations from the natural world. Lotus leaves are so smooth nothing will stick to their surface – a perfect design for waterless toilets. Underwater shark skins accomplish the same result – a wholesome design replacement for highly toxic underwater antifouling paint. Mollusks create the strongest and most versatile adhesive on the planet – perfect for any number of industrial uses. Gekkos hang upside down effortlessly through microscopic fibres – just the thing for cat burglars and climbers of all kinds. Naturally occurring nanospikes destroy bacteria by rupturing their protective surfaces – a huge step forward for hospitals when added to paints. Trees, plants and animals use the most sophisticated antibiotics anywhere – in fact most antibiotics come from this source. Termite hives maintain cool temperatures in the extreme African heat by the way they are designed – a natural inspiration for high rise buildings in hot climates. A spider’s web is three times stronger than steel by weight – with any number of industrial safety and military uses. Animals draw with great success on solar and geothermal heat in wintertime to stay warm. Nature has had eight billion years or more of lab research and real-world testing to solve most of the problems we currently face in ways that are sustainable, by their very nature - no regulations required. Our arrogant approach to science is a brief and unfortunate experiment compared to this. Some scientists and designers are beginning to now take a more humble approach to innovation and discovery and, inspired by the abundance of natural technology that surrounds us in the form of endless variations and combinations of molecules and structures, create great new sustainable things. To adopt a biomimetic approach to technological development is to reestablish a natural and self-regulating relationship with the natural world and ourselves that doesn’t require vast, expensive, and unproductive regulatory bureaucracies to police them. No one in their right mind would deny that climate change is a problem. But climate change is a symptom of more complex, interrelated problems that will not end with the disappearance of the toxic bloom of CO₂ that plagues our upper atmosphere. How will we know how much carbon dioxide is the right amount? At what speed can we safely reduce emissions? Will the War On Carbon, like the War on Drugs and the War On Poverty create unintended consequences equally as serious? Failing to act to save ourselves and other forms of life would be tragic beyond imagining, but just setting targets for the control of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a reproduction of the simplistic thinking-in-isolation that led to the creation of the problem in the first place. If we are to avoid the constant plague of unintended consequences our best intentions give rise to, we need a convergence of mutually supportive solutions. The Necessary Revolution is a thorough piece of work but could be stronger if it were to more comprehensively explore the complexity of the problems we face together. This complexity has changed how we must engage the world and work together. The methods of the previous Industrial Revolution will not help us in an era of technological and socio-political diversity, where the fragmentation of interests and power wreak havoc on our customary command and control methods. Rather, we must understand that solutions will only grow slowly out of coemergence, reciprocity and collaborative learning on a manageable scale. As Alex Steffen of the now famous Worldchanging book and website put it: To have any hope of staving off collapse, we need to move forward with measures that address many interrelated problems at once. We don’t need a War on Carbon. We need a new prosperity that can be shared by all while still respecting a multitude of real ecological limits — not just atmospheric gas concentrations, but topsoil depth, water supplies, toxic chemical concentrations, and the health of ecosystems, including the diversity of life they depend upon. We can build a future in which technology, design, smart incentives, and wise policies make it possible to deliver a high quality of life at lower ecological cost. But that brighter, greener future is attainable only if we embrace the problems we face in all their complexity. To do otherwise is tantamount to clear-cutting the very future we’re trying to secure. Can we transform capitalism’s restless need for growth into something spiritual and sustainable where a sense of compassionate reciprocity replaces hand-outs from the wealthy, where nature is welcome as an ally and a teacher, and where the value of money is grounded in genuine wealth? Within its 400-odd pages, The Necessary Revolution provides an uplifting glimpse of what this might look like and identifies a starting point close enough that there really is no reason for us all not to begin. This is not just a matter of we can – we must. One day, I asked my six-year-old daughter whether she thought it would be possible for us to make things in a way that would end this great avalanche of garbage, pollution and wasted resources we hurt ourselves with every day, and allow things to be recycled or returned to the natural world as food. ”You mean they don’t do it that way now?” she said. “I don’t understand.” And then, because the wonderful thing about six-year-olds is they have no mercy for adults, she said, “Dad, please ask them to stop.” — Tony Lamport is a sociologist, environmental designer, applied economist and sustainability strategist who lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His preoccupation is with understanding natural intelligence, in time. To read a Business Week interview with Peter Senge about The Necessary Revolution, click here. 1 BusinessWeek Innovation & Design Peter Senge's Necessary Revolution June 11, 2008 In a new book, the management guru discusses the environmental woes facing business and some steps that may lead to a more sustainable world Peter Senge, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management and founder of the Society for Organizational Learning, is perhaps best known for his 1990 bestselling book, The Fifth Discipline, which introduced the idea of the "learning organization." Now, Senge has a new work that promises to be as influential as the first. In The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World (Doubleday, 2008), Senge and his co-authors grapple with the daunting environmental problems we face, and highlight innovative steps taken by individuals and corporations, often in partnership with global organizations such as Oxfam, toward a more sustainable world. It may seem surprising that an expert in management and organizational change is focusing on sustainability, but there is a strong connection to Senge's work. In his earlier book, he laid out an approach to management that combines systems thinking, collaboration, and team learning. As he describes it, a learning organization is one in which "people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together." Such organizations tend to be more flexible, adaptive, and productive—critical qualities in a time of rapid change. In The Necessary Revolution, Senge applies the same thinking to a system bigger and more complex than the organization: global society. The book is a call to arms, an argument to business leaders that they must rethink their approach to the environment or, as one executive told Senge, "we won't have businesses worth being in in 20 years." But the authors don't linger on the problems, focusing instead on the stories and insights of successful innovators, on creative solutions, and on practical approaches to meeting these challenges. Jessie Scanlon recently met Peter Senge at his Cambridge (Mass.) office to talk about the critical role that business will play in the coming revolution, the visionary leaders at companies such as Nike (NKE) and Costco (COST), and the future of the corporation. An edited version of their conversation follows. Why did you title the book The Necessary Revolution? I don't really like the word "necessary" because it makes it seem we have no choice. On the one hand, we don't. There's only so much water in the world. There's only so much topsoil. There's 2 only one atmosphere, so there's only so much CO2 that can be stuffed into the atmosphere. But real change occurs when people make choices. We're not going to get out of the predicament that we're in by a lot of teeny incremental things. It's going to take bold ideas. The word "revolution" was meant to be in the spirit of the Industrial Revolution. Not a political revolution because this absolutely has to be a nonpartisan issue. The future doesn't belong to one party or another. In the book, you argue that we must shed "industrial age beliefs." Can you elaborate? One industrial age belief is that GDP or GNP is a measure of progress. I don't care if you're the President of China or the U.S., if your country doesn't grow, you're in trouble. But we all know that beyond a certain level of material need, further material acquisition doesn't make people happier. So you have a society predicated on the idea that you have to keep growing materially, and yet nobody actually believes it. How dominant is the price-value model in business today? Has the success of products like the Toyota Prius convinced companies that consumers care about more than narrowly defined selfinterest? It's still dominant. Now, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with price-value. [The problem is] the unquestioned assumptions about how we define it. At some point it becomes tautological. How do you know what people value? Well you watch what they buy. How do we know what products to create? Well, it's based on what they value. We've done a lot of work with companies in Detroit, and when the Prius came out, I asked them what they thought of it. Everyone said the same thing: "It's a niche product." They said: "In focus groups, we ask people how much they would pay for a 10% improvement in fuel efficiency, and it's always a small number." But you're never going to learn latent demands from focus groups. Toyota (TM) didn't introduce the Prius because of a focus group. They were convinced that cars needed to change. In The Necessary Revolution, you profile people, working independently or within companies or organizations, who are trying to bring about a more sustainable world. As you learned their stories, what patterns emerged? The first is obvious: People have to be passionate. These are innovators in a fundamental sense, and innovators innovate because there is something that they are passionate about. Second, they all in different ways were able to step back and see a bigger picture. This is a huge challenge for people in companies, because so many companies are dominated by short-term perspective and 3 because lots of people in key positions simply aren't very good or don't care very much about the bigger picture. Watch how the decisions are made. Are they thinking of the value of the company 10 years after they retire, or are they thinking about the value of their stock options this year? The other two things we focused on are the ability to connect with lots of people and collaborate across boundaries—you could call it high levels of relational intelligence. The final element that we saw again and again is a shift [in strategy] away from "we've got to stop doing x, y, or z" and all the negativism that tends to pervade these issues. Can you give some specific examples? Nike is a great example of these last two qualities. The company's [eco-friendly Considered system] came into being because of two women who were consummate networkers and who realized that "we're never going to change this culture by convincing people that toxins are bad and that we should be less bad. What's going to make people really passionate is the idea that we can do something that no one has done before and that it will be a great thing for athletes." So they started talking to designers and getting them excited about different kinds of shoes. They created the Organic Exchange for cotton because there wasn't enough on the market. They wanted to design running singlets that were compostable. Within five years they had a network of their best designers really passionate about these design challenges. These are all tough, tough problems; the only way to solve them is to get people excited. How can companies shift their focus away from quarterly earnings to take a longer view? That's an issue that has come up periodically during the development of the Society for Organizational Learning network. Usually it comes from an elder, a retired CEO who says: "If I really look back, a big blind spot for all of us is that we take as given the primacy of the shareholder." When the limited liability corporation was created 140 years ago, this made sense. The shareholder had to be protected. But it makes no sense any more. We live in a world that has a surplus of financial capital, and great shortages of natural capital, human capital, and, in some places, social capital. We're optimizing around one input! How else does the corporation need to change? You go to any MBA program, and you will be taught the theory of the firm, that the purpose of the firm is the maximization of return on invested capital. I always thought this was a kind of lunacy. A well-managed business will have a high return on invested capital. But that's a consequence. It's not a way to manage a business. I remember a great quote of Peter Drucker. He said: "Profit for a company is like oxygen for a person. If you don't have enough of it, you're out of the game. But if you think your life is about breathing, you're really missing something." The 4 purpose [of an enterprise] is never making money. And I think a lot of the best innovators inside big companies, the reason they succeed is that they really understand the theory of their business. Costco is about long-term, reliable, quality supply. It's the key to the business. When the woman who got the Food Lab work embedded in Costco first started talking about the predicament of farmers, people were a little suspicious. They thought the predicament of farmers is a big problem in the world. That's why there are charities, and that's why we give money to charities. They couldn't see the connection to their business until she got them to see that they wouldn't have long-term quality supply if farming communities were destroyed. So she connected the issue to the theory of their business—but not the economic theory of the firm. Well-managed businesses could not possibly have gotten where they are believing this [economic theory of the firm] nonsense. Where are we in the adoption of the Necessary Revolution? We're pretty much in the beginning. I can certainly say that from the 10 years since we organized this network, the people who joined were small bands of radicals in their companies, even if they were senior. But in virtually all of those companies, those people aren't radicals anymore. There are wild cards obviously: major economic decline. Innovation requires resources to invest, and you can see many companies pulling back and going into an intense protective mode in a major extended period of financial distress. What role can governments play? If you are realistic about how our present society works, the economic clout—and a lot of the political clout, frankly—is in the business sector. And it's the locus of innovation. But you've got to build these networks. I think Paul Hawken's recent book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming (Viking Press, 2007) was on the money. The growth of the civil society is historic, and in some ways it's a response to the inability of government to deal with these kind of issues. Governments, especially democratic ones, are short-term and nationalistic. These problems are long-term and global. And businesses are inherently more global? Yes, they're global, and because they're global they've begun to build partnerships across their value chains. But I don't think business is sufficient. We're going to see a lot of partnerships, as companies partner with global organizations like the World Wildlife Fund and Oxfam and, eventually, with governments. Business Exchange related topics: 5 Sustainable Business Practices Leadership Globalization Organizational Practices Spirituality in the Workplace Module 9: Sustainability and Self-Regulation RELS 3330 Instructor: David Sable david.sable@smu.ca copyright © 2017 David Sable 1 Objectives Explain the “Tragedy of the Commons” ➢ Explore how assumptions shift ➢ Consider how thinking about environmental issues shifts. ➢ copyright © 2017 David Sable 2 The Necessary Revolution copyright © 2017 David Sable 3 The Tragedy of the Commons ➢ “Commons” refers to an old custom of grazing livestock on common pastureland. ➢ “Tragedy” occurs when each farmer has the incentive to expand, but if they all do, the total herd size eventually exhausts the grazing land and livestock die off. ➢ The tragedy of the commons applies to fish, land, oil, water – any resource shared by businesses. copyright © 2017 David Sable 4 The Fish Banks Game Slides 11-14 Story from Peter Senge, The Necessary Revolution (2008) pp. 170-172 Fish Banks, Ltd. © 2001 Dennis L. Meadows copyright © 2017 David Sable 5 A Shift in Thinking ➢ Short-term or self-first, competitive thinking inevitably caused everyone to lose. ➢ The Harley-Davidson team realized that thinking about the well-being of the larger system was necessary for sustainability of the industry. ➢ Competition and collaboration were not either-or options; it made sense to share information on fish catches and expansion plans. ➢ The “tragedy of the commons” can be averted. copyright © 2017 David Sable 6 Connections to Spirituality in the Workplace ➢ Key      phrases: …be able to see the whole situation …always think of the well-being of the whole, not only my personal interests …have the same ethical expectations for a company as you would for a person … feel connected with everybody that I worked with or at least tried I am responsible for this society… copyright © 2017 David Sable 7 Making Ethical Judgments About Others vs. Open Inquiry ➢ Few people appreciate being told that their thinking is too limited, that they need to see the bigger picture. ➢ Inquiry about people’s assumptions is far more effective than making ethical judgments and telling people they are too limited, stuck, or wrong. copyright © 2017 David Sable 8 Real World Outcomes ➢ ➢ Unilever, the largest seller of fish products in the world, became so concerned about over-fishing that they formed the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) with the aim of certifying sustainably fished products around the world. www.msc.org/ 23 October 2007: Seven pioneering non-profit organizations including the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) have reached the highest standards for credible behavior in ethical trade by complying with the ISEAL Code of Good Practice for Setting Social and Environmental Standards. www.isealalliance.org copyright © 2017 David Sable 9 Spirituality in the Workplace Module 10: Creative Capitalism and Conscious Capitalism RELS 3330.2WW Instructor: David Sable david.sable@smu.ca copyright David Sable © 2016 1 Objectives ➢ Introduce the concepts of creative capitalism and conscious capitalism ➢ Provide examples of how they work copyright David Sable © 2016 2 Creative Capitalism ➢ Creative Capitalism: “an attempt to stretch the reach of market forces so that more companies can benefit from doing work that makes more people better off.” – Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft Video: Bill Gates – Creative Capitalism ➢ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA1ioym5OYA&ob=av3e ➢ Example: The RED campaign  http://https://red.org/about// Example: Access to Medicine ➢ ➢  ➢ http://www.accesstomedicineindex.org/ These are examples of capitalism with “higher purpose.” copyright David Sable © 2016 3 Technology Transfer ➢ Philanthropy is not the only way capitalism can be creative. “The Japanese company Sumitomo Chemical shared some of its technology with a Tanzanian textile company, helping it produce millions of bed nets, which are crucial tools in the fight to eradicate malaria. Other companies are doing the same in food, cell phones and banking.” -- Gates (2008)  copyright David Sable © 2016 4 Food for Health and Profit ➢ ➢ ➢ Whole Foods Market is a high-end food chain that was started by two people with $45,000 in loans and cash in 1980. Sales were $12.9 billion in 2013 with more than 380 stores in North America. In relation to their suppliers in developing countries, the Whole Foods team combat poverty in developing countries and treat their employees according to values well-aligned with spirituality in the workplace. copyright David Sable © 2016 5 Conscious Capitalism 1) www.consciouscapitalism.org/ 2) Criticism of Whole Foods copyright David Sable © 2016 6 Weekly Assignment ➢ Research an organization of your own choice. Briefly describe to your group why or why not you think the organization fits our definition of spirituality in the workplace using our three frameworks: corporate social responsibility, respectful pluralism, or authentic leadership. (Be sure to cite your sources.) copyright David Sable © 2016 7
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