Plex: 17 July 2024

The Biweekly Plex Dispatch is an inter-community newspaper published by Collective Sense Commons on first and third Wednesdays of each month. Price per issue: 1 USD, or your choice of amount (even zero).

In This Issue

• Federated Media Platform with Neighborhood Economics (Peter Kaminski)
• Food, Agriculture and Climate Change, a GPT (Klaus Mager)
• Calling Each Other Back From Shadows (Michael Lennon)
• The Chevron Doctrine & the Sustainability Business Case (Gil Friend)
• Earth: Final Conflict (Jack Park)
• Ken Homer with Peter Kaminski, 2024-07-02

Federated Media Platform with Neighborhood Economics

by Peter Kaminski

Kevin Jones of Neighborhood Economics has been talking with Joel Skene of Mindful Marketplace and Michael Shuman of Main Street Journal to explore a partnership to create a federated media platform.

In the discussion, Mindful Marketplace would focus on audio and video content, including podcasts featuring experts in the field. Main Street Journal would serve as the primary archive for written content, leveraging its high readership and content management to maximize exposure. Neighborhood Economics would contribute its media assets. Kevin is currently writing for the Neighborhood Economics newsletter and also for his blog about Neberecon’s partnership with Eagle on the CataCap platform.

Kevin says, “Two players have media platforms. We don’t. We have an events platform and a regular newsletter. I’m suggesting we imagine ourselves part of a federated media platform that together will clarify the field and make investing locally in every neighborhood easier and more possible.”

The initiative is still in its early stages, but it represents an exciting step forward in the world of community-focused economic development.

Food, Agriculture and Climate Change, a GPT

by Klaus Mager

The risks inherent in our global food system are increasing exponentially, caused by droughts, floods, storms, and the loss of crop yields due to deteriorating soils. While there is little attention on this topic in the US-based media, international media is increasingly focused as we can see on the Al Jazeera YouTube channel.

My recent newsletter ‘Thoughts About Food’ is also focused on the risks inherent in our food system. Yet informing the public has been a challenge, and the election noise is taking all the oxygen out of the public discourse. Project Drawdown has (finally) come to the realization that food is a) the major issue, and b) takes the participation of the general public to solve. When I say ‘the major issue’, the industrial food system has damaged millions of acres of soil and watersheds with chemicals and mono-cropping practices, causing the loss of biodiversity, major droughts and floods.

Here is a GPT trained to answer any related questions you may have: ChatGPT - Food, Agriculture and Climate Change. In case the answers are not clear or are insufficient, please drop me a note and I’ll update it accordingly. The GPT will respond in a conversational style to your questions.

Calling Each Other Back From Shadows

by Michael Lennon

Today I learned of this poem, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other” by William Stafford. (My own title for it would “Calling each other back from Shadows”).

Whether the shadows are “political violence” or “alienation from others in our lives,” having rituals to heal & co-compass back to aspirations GreaterThan our present Selves is a long-established practice recently steamrolled by digital distance. This poem offers a way forward and invites us to continue striving to act towards greater clarity in all our digital (and living) affairs.

In future issues, I will share scientific practices which equip individuals and groups to more reliably explore shadows. Still, poetry can transcend limits inherent in Science and objectivity, so it is proffered as an invitation to co-orient forward.

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

The Chevron Doctrine & the Sustainability Business Case

(And why this "pro-business" judicial coup is actually bad for business.)

by Gil Friend

Originally published on 30 June 2024 at The Chevron Doctrine & the Sustainability Business Case

I'm still reeling from last week's events, from the presidential debate to the raft of Supreme Court decisions, of which their reversal of the Chevron doctrine may be the most consequential. (Save the ruling due out tomorrow on the small matter of presidential immunity.)

Sanford Lewis got it right, calling it "a judicial coup against consumer and investor protections, and against environmental, health and safety regulation."

(Here's the decision. And here's Elena Justice Kagan's fierce dissent.)

I’m not a lawyer, but it strikes me as a profound misread of the U.S. Constitution – and a reading more ideological than judicial. It’s a capstone of a 50+ year strategic commitment, and legal and political project (going all the way back to the Powell Doctrine): to cast “government“ as the enemy of the people, rather than as the organized expression of our common will.

I’ll leave it to those with more expertise to deconstruct and challenge the legal basis and implications of this decision. But I will speak to the environmental—and business—implications.

Functionally, it’s a disaster. By declaring that only Congress or the courts can specify how to administratively implement acts of Congress, and stripping executive agencies of the ability to do so, the decision kicks out the legal foundation for most environmental policy of the last 50 years.

And it's not the gift to business it may seem to be.

Business wants predictability. The Supremes have delivered chaos. As Lewis notes "…when you take it to the big picture, it's hard to see how this level of disruption is going to be of benefit to the world of business driven by predictable affairs and relationships."

Think about it for a minute. How will a Congress of 535 elected officials, and a staff of 15-20,000—or for that matter Supreme Court of nine appointed justices, and staff of 500—ever be able to appropriate the responsibility of well over 100,000 Federal regulatory agency employees, or even begin to approximate their professional expertise? They can’t, and that’s exactly the point, and the intention: to cripple the ability of the body politic to regulate the impact of business on our physical bodies, and the physical world we share.

I’ll grant that regulations can seem burdensome, and often can be burdensome. But there are proven ways to serve and protect while reduce the burdens, without eliminating the protections of the intended.

But while these matters are fought over politically, there’s an important angle that I haven’t yet heard addressed. I’d be going too far to call it a silver lining in the dark clouds, but there’s something important to observe here. Regulatory constraints and voluntary initiatives have not been the only drivers of environmental and sustainability progress over these decades. Equally important—perhaps more important—have been companies' responses to consumer preference and pressure, and companies' own recognition of fundamental business risk and opportunity.

In the first case, consider the rise of the natural food and organic agriculture sectors, driven much more by consumer demand than by pesticide regulations. In the second case, think of the ongoing improvement in energy efficiency, And the growth and penetration of renewable energy technologies across the world, driven by the fundamental business logic of "waste less stuff in order to waste less money." And increasingly by recognition of the very real business risks that a chaotic climate future portends.

So the “business case for sustainability“ returns to center stage. Not in a fruitless debate over whether sustainability is profitable, or whether E.S.G. initiatives correlate to profit, but in a much more fundamental way. You see, the purpose of a business case, as I have argued, is not to tell you what to do, but to identify and guide how to best do it. Whether or not to address safety, quality, toxicity, planet, justice or inclusion are strategic and moral commitments, guided by risk and heart—by both the dispassionate and the deeply passionate. How to move effectively and profitably on those commitments are the job of the business case.

It echoes the old management rubric: either tell somebody what to do or how to do it, but not both. What to do is to "do business as though we actually belong to the living world." How to do that, and how to do that profitably, is the job of business.

Therein lies one of the keys to the kingdom: Succeed by outperforming—deliver better products and services, more efficiently, more economically, more profitably, and more in harmony with the living world on which all that we value ultimately depends.

Easy? Perhaps not. But prove me wrong. (It's called innovation. And leadership.)

This has implications for our now-threatened regulatory infrastructures, and the legislatures that are now poised to take on (or abandon) those responsibilities. One option: regulations that focus on outcomes to be achieved rather than prescriptions of how to achieve them might just be more effective in driving change, as well as more politically tolerable in the current political environment.

Our other task, of course—in addition to inventing new ways to do business—is to transform that political environment. And that’s the hard work of the next 128 days.

Earth: Final Conflict

by Jack Park

Amazon Prime is streaming Season 1 of “Earth: Final Conflict” (EFC), which was created by Majel Barrett Roddenberry from notes she found in Gene’s desk after he passed away. Did you know that Gene was a B-17 pilot in WWII, then flew as an airline pilot until he was involved in a crash?

EFC premiered in 1997. My (now ex) wife Helen saw the show and created one of the first online fan sites, which became popular for a while. EFC features complex, twisted, and intertwined narratives: a good alien Da’an and an evil one Zo’or, both answering to the Synod and existing in a fully connected community. On the Earth side, there are good cops and “bad” cops, eventually “white nationalists,” and the usual archetypes. Majel Roddenberry appears in many scenes as a physician under the name Majel Barrett.

What surprised us is that in episode 19, we are introduced to Dr. Park (that’s all we know about her). She appears in later episodes, including Season 2. By episode 21, they are exploring white nationalism in the context of the aliens - known as Companions.

We may never know why “Dr. Park” suddenly appeared in Season 1.

We may actually learn how Vint Cerf appeared as himself in an episode where he serves as a representative of the President.

What is curious is this: the relevance of Season 1 - with all its explorations into matters greatly similar to those we face in an election year.

Ken Homer with Peter Kaminski, 2024-07-02

A Plex Conversation

Pete: I feel like the theme today is the bit of a tension between acting individually and acting collectively. So if we act too much individually, then we kind of end up where we are now.

Ken: Exactly.

Pete: But if you only act collectively, then if you don’t take care of yourself, that doesn’t work either. So I don’t know. How can we get more people to work together collectively for good? How do you know what your role in that is? How do you find other people to do the work with? How do you make sure not to be in despair as you see that we can’t be collective? That kind of stuff.

Ken: Well, that’s a good place to start. Let’s unpack the binary, because that tends to be a binary for people. It’s either individual or collective. Really, it’s “both and.” The way I look at it, the collective always has the individual inside of it. And when the individual gets too important it moves to the outside of the collective. When you get too many individuals on the outside, the collective collapses. Then there are individuals fighting over whatever’s remaining and the commons becomes a tragedy and people are polarized while those who are sowing division walk away with the spoils.

So that weaves in the idea of the commons. What is common to us all? Let’s start with the planet, which is our commons and our common origin and our common fate. As Chief Seattle remarked, “Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the children of the Earth.”  We all come from the Earth and are a living expression of Earthian intelligence. And I think most contemporary people have forgotten that.

In Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk, he says, “All lawbreaking arises from the original sin of placing yourself above the other people or above the land.” And I thought, “Well, that’s a really profound statement.” And quite incisive. I think, if we can recognize that the unit of survival is not the individual, it’s not even the family, it’s the tribe that’s big enough to provide requisite variety, then we can start working on collective projects where individuals see the benefit of taking part in the project of creating a robust commonwealth instead of dismantling it and privatizing the commons in the name of individual freedoms.

You have to have requisite variety. Look at what happened to the folks from the HMS Bounty. They went to Pitcairn Island and hid. And now they’re all cross-eyed and crazy. They didn’t have enough genetic diversity to keep healthy. They all went nuts. Too much inbreeding made them stupid.

I’ve been reading a book called The Social Brain, and Robin Dunbar is one of the authors. One hundred and fifty is known as “the Dunbar number” and it shows up again and again in lots of different contexts. It has to do with brain size and social relationships. For much of our existence humans lived in groups that didn’t exceed 150. Today, I think there’s too much focus on me, me, me, and not enough we or us. There’s an old saying, “Me against my brother. Me and my brother against my cousins. Me and my brother and my cousins against the world.” That’s a kind of tribalism that infects a lot of our thinking at an unconscious level.

How we think and organize terms of groups matters. If 150 is a natural number for organizing, then what would organizing look like if organizations embraced the utility of groups of 150 people? What would change in our outlook and planning? What could be done? What would be useful? I think those are fascinating questions that I would like to see a lot more people exploring. The Social Brain points to many examples, including W. L. Gore and Associates who successfully organized their business in units of ±150.

And this actually ties - I know further down the list of your questions, you’re going to ask about current projects - to a current project of mine.

I was recently tapped to be part of a facilitation team for a pretty big project. A French company bought an American company so there’s a big merger underway that involves several thousand people. As one of the facilitators on this culture change project, I am grappling with questions like: How do you successfully blend two corporate cultures that have decidedly different national identity flavors to them as well as different corporate cultures? There’s this amazing opportunity here to do an appreciative inquiry into what works in each culture and then attempt to take the best of both and make an even stronger culture out of that by engaging as many of the people as possible – as active agents, not passive recipients. They need to be engaged for this to work. How do we make it attractive for them to participate wholeheartedly?

I’m seeing this trend in the companies I work with where there’s a shift toward recognizing the need to cultivate influence. The world is a lot more complex these days and line authority is limited. It tends to be a bottleneck. At the beginning of covid there were a lot of supply chain disruptions that forced companies to think and work differently.

Pete: I apologize. I just missed about 20 seconds–network problems.

Ken: Oh, okay... So I’m noticing the trend in the organizations I’m working in, which are not gigantic, but are in the $15 to $20 billion range. That’s a pretty good size. For me as a sole practitioner, it constitutes a huge organization. I’m noticing a trend towards collaboration, towards influence, leading through influence, not leading through edict and positional power. Not, “I have control over you, you’re under me, so do what I say,” but rather, “Hey, we work for the same company. Let’s figure out how we can work together effectively. I may need you for something where I don’t have any authority to ask for it. If we’ve got a relationship, then we can support each other and everyone will benefit.” If we only see each other as transaction points, that’s not going to build a culture of cooperation and collaboration.

So I’m noticing a growing recognition of the importance of the relational context at work. Of the need to cultivate social and emotional intelligence. Because those are critical areas in which to develop competence. I see this as a hopeful sign after so many years of downsizing, so many years of treating people like cogs in a machine instead of intelligent agents in a dynamic system.

Pete: I missed about 20 seconds again.

Ken: I’ll turn my video off and see if that helps.

Okay, here’s take three… I’m seeing a shift to valuing a more relational context in business these days. People are recognizing that to be successful you need to cultivate influence, to build relationships. You have to influence up: your bosses - and down: your direct reports - and in: internally -  and out: clients and vendors. So building a reputation for being trustworthy, for being competent, and demonstrating care will go a long way in that regard. Now, people don’t have to like you and think you’re their best friend in order for you to be an effective leader. But they do have to trust you. They have to believe that you’re competent, that you are good for your word, and that you’ve got their best interests at heart. Those kinds of work relationships make for effective teams and fulfilling workplaces.

Fernando Flores, in his book Building Trust, says there are three things that are necessary for trust. There’s probably more, but I like three and I use alliteration to help me recall (it’s been over 20 years since I read that book so, these may not be what he used for terms in that book, but they capture his main points):

The first is C is care. Do you care enough about me that when you say you’ll do something for me, I can trust that you mean it? Another word for that would be sincerity.

The next C is competence. Are you skilled enough to do what you say you’re going to do? Can I trust that you have the capability to do what you say you will?

The third C is capacity. Do you have the bandwidth to complete this? If you make a promise to produce some work product for me, do you have the space and time to see it through and deliver on your promise?

Lots of people say yes to things they shouldn’t say yes to. It doesn’t matter why they say yes, but they end up overworked and overloaded. Then,  despite their good intentions, they start breaking their promises because they are stretched too thin. The result is that people stop trusting them. Then they’re like, “Oh, I’m such a nice person. Why don’t people trust me?” It’s because they didn’t set good boundaries. For whatever reason, they weren’t capable of saying, “I’d love to help, but I’m really over my capacity right now and I can’t take this on.” I’d much rather somebody tell me that than say, “Sure, I’ll do that,”  and then have them fall down on the job because they couldn’t say no and keep a strong boundary around what they do and don’t take on in terms of work.

If any one of those three Cs of care, competence, or capacity  is missing then, trust, which can take a long time to build up, can disappear almost instantly. Trust is foundational in being able to work together well and, based on my limited experience in the workplace over the last decade, I’d say more and more businesses are awakening to the need to create cultures of trust. That’s one reason for DEI and ESG - people want to trust that companies they work for will do the right thing. And this requires a more reasonable assessment of what people can do in a 40 or 50 or even 60 hour workweek.

So that’s what I’m observing about groups working together more effectively. I’m pretty sure you know that my focus is collaboration and collective intelligence. I’m interested in learning from the inquiry of how we can make groups smarter together than they are as individuals? I’ve learned that a lot of that has to do with building relationships. And a lot of relationship building has to do with humility. No matter how smart I am, I’m never as smart as the whole group of people in the room. And there’s always individual people who are smarter than me anyways. Recognizing my ignorance keeps me humble. When I walk into a boardroom or an offsite setting I set my ego aside and do all that I can to honor and elicit the knowledge and wisdom of every person in the room - from the frontline worker to the CEO - each person represents some kind of intelligence of the larger system and if we put all the viewpoints together we can see more than if we just listen to the experts or the senior people.

For me personally, if I come in thinking I’ve got to be the guy on top, if I have to be the expert, if I have to have the answers, if I require that  people respect me for my expertise, then I put myself in a very precarious position because sooner or later I’m going to fall down on that. But if I come in and ask, “What do you know, Pete?” And “Hank, what do you know?” And “Susan, and Pam, and George, and Belinda, what do you know, what has your experience taught you about how things work here?” I want to tap the wisdom of all these different people. I want to be respectful and solicitous of their opinions. I want to reflect to the whole group what each person knows. Then, I can learn a lot and everyone else in the room learns too. And if, when making decisions, a manager says to people, “I took your input into account and here’s what I came to as a result of listening to you all,” that’s going to create a stronger network of trusting relationships and that’s going to hopefully have a number of positive impacts.

That sort of flow of information and those kinds of relationships builds much stronger teams and better cohesion and understanding among people. And it also tends to tap a lot more collective intelligence because you’re no longer the person that has to know everything.

Pete: Let’s see. So you’re seeing a trend to more relational work inside corporations.

Ken: Yes.

Pete: Where do you think that comes from? How did we end up here? I’m a little bit surprised.

Ken: I think the pandemic upended a great many work structures. We’re still recovering. I don’t think we’ve really plumbed the full depths of what the pandemic did to people’s work. There was always that assumption of you’ve got to be in the office to get anything done. And then all of a sudden it was like, “Oh no, if you have to stay home, how can you get work done?” And there were a lot of problems with supply lines and problems motivating people.

One thing I became aware of when people first started working on Zoom or Teams was the inequity in many organizations. At the start of the pandemic, not that many people knew how to use zoom backgrounds. So, you’d see their houses and their apartments and sometimes you’re calling in from a really tiny little cold water flat and you’re looking at your boss who’s got this big palatial mansion. And I think that had a lot of impact on the way people were looking at work and how some people are rewarded differently than others.

And on the positive side, a lot of folks saw their co-worker’s kids and their pets, and we all knew that people were wearing dress shirts with their pajama bottoms. I think that humanized things in a big way. Along with the need to pull together, we were all so lonely and isolated during COVID that first year. Doing a check-in at the start of many business calls became a lot more important. People were hungry for connection because they were so socially deprived. Taking the time to talk with co-workers about their lives and families and how they were coping changed the workplace dynamic in a lot of ways that are still being felt today. Building more personal relationships with our colleagues was important, because we didn’t have access to a lot of the other relationships that were so important to us.

And I think that’s perhaps one of the streams that’s feeding into this need for more relationship focus at work. I also think complexity plays a big role here. I was consulting at this one company and they had a problem at their warehouse. And they realized they couldn’t figure it out by themselves. So, they brought everybody in from every point in the supply chain: vendors, customers, and employees. And they had each person tell the story of how things worked from their perspective and they mapped out a much more detailed picture of what was happening with inquiries into things like: “What’s going on here? Where are the breakdowns occurring? How does A influence B? What can we see now that we have put all these pieces together?”

And they couldn’t have created that map without everybody’s input, because no one had the whole picture in their head. They needed to convene people in a joint venture of understanding a system with a lot of moving parts. And when they saw what emerged from their efforts they were really jazzed. “Wow! This is really cool. We solved our problem. When we bring people together and ask the right questions and use visualization tools, we can get a much more accurate picture of what’s going on and we can figure stuff out better.”

I think it’s a natural, organic unfolding of group or collective intelligence. As folks get smarter about how to work together, they recognize that nobody has all the answers and it’s just so much more effective to bring other people into a collaborative environment, and inquire into: “How can we make this better for everybody? What would it look like if things were working well? How would we know it was working well? What would we see happening all along the line?”

A big part of the inquiry is not just how people work together but how they relate as well.  This comes from Peter Block, one of my favorite management consultants whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with. Peter says, “Everybody talks at work about how to work together, but people rarely talk about how they want to be together while we’re doing their work.” If you look at his book, Community: The Structure of Belonging, he offers different kinds of conversations that help people to create better workplace environments.

I often tell people I work with, we’re going to be spending time together here. This is our life. This is our life energy. We’re not going to get it back. We’re the architects. We can make this a great place to work or we can make this hell. And I don’t think a lot of people have grasped that until recently.

Here’s a little anecdote. I was working for a large healthcare organization and I conducted 15 hours of customized training on Collaborative Conversations with the two senior IT teams. Then they sent me a layer down in the organization and when I got there people said, “Just want to tell you, if senior management’s not on board, there’s no point in you even being here. So think about that before you start talking to us.” I was like, “Ooookay.”

I showed folks a little video from the Conscious Leadership Group entitled: Location, Location, Location. It’s about three minutes long and it’s done in the style of an RSA video with someone talking while an artist draws pictures to illustrate what the speaker is saying. This video ends with the question of: Are you above the line or below the line? This is a nifty shorthand for assessing moods. Below the line means closed, defensive, and committed to being right. Above the line means open, curious and committed to learning. After I showed the video, I asked people, “How many of you are above the line?” Not one person raised their hand. I thought to myself, these people are all in a mood of resignation. I’ll have to try and switch that. Next, I walked them through an exercise on embodied listening and then I asked them to sit in pairs and answer a list of questions that included: What drew me to this work? What do I most love about what I do? Where do I feel I am making a contribution? And, how do I want my colleagues to think of me?

After that was over, I asked again:  “How many above the line?” Everybody raised their hand.

So, I asked, “How many senior managers are in the room?” And of course they said “None.” I said, “So, I’m going to posit that many of you walk around with an attitude of ‘not being  able to do anything without senior managers to guide you’ and you’re below the line because you’re resentful of that. And yet when you took the time to talk to each other and listen to each other, you found that you were lifted above the line. You shifted into being much more ambitious and curious about what can be done. That’s your power. You are the architects of your day-to-day interactions. You are the ones who are working here every day shaping how things unfold through your talking and your listening. Senior management’s not looking over your shoulder every minute. Build relationships at work that work for you.” And they were all pretty surprised by that.

Pete: You know, Coase’s The Nature of the Firm says that the reason you have a company at all is because it reduces internal transaction costs. I wonder if Coase needs an update.

Ken: I actually don’t know his work, so I’m not sure I can make a coherent comment on that. I always get nervous in big conversations about the purpose of business because I never went to B-School or studied management theory outside of reading a few books here and there. I understand that business is all about making money and that’s a primary anxiety for me because what’s led to the calamities we’re facing is the focus on making money and the lack of attention to the social and ecological contexts that money-making is embedded inside of. Business and economics are social constructions, not biological structures. And by only focusing on the money-making, we leave out the social and environmental costs and externalize them. And then we end up with biological degradation that most businesses refuse to acknowledge because to do so presents an existential threat to them.

Ted Levitt says in The Marketing Imagination, that the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer but I think a lot of businesses focus more on creating profits. Clearly there are things we can do together collectively we can’t do on our own. So there’s a lot of reasons for forming organizations. Nor am I against hierarchy. Hierarchy can be extremely useful. Neither am I against flattening hierarchy and using network approaches. I think one of the issues that I see coming up in so many people is they get hung up on it’s got to be one or the other rather than a both and.

I guess I’m more in the improv mindset of, oh yeah, let’s do that and let’s do this. Maybe it’s a holdover from the way people my generation were educated, but I find that the old systems of command and control are breaking down a lot as is the idea of beating everyone else by being the best at something and putting them down to elevate yourself. It’s great to be the best at what you do and learning how to collaborate with others who know things you don’t and sharing credit with them, is an approach that I see coming to the fore more often.

I see business as the dominant institution on the planet. It’s not governments, because there are plenty of businesses who are larger than many countries and some have revenues that exceed many country’s GDPs. Businesses are the ones who are running the show for the most part. Scarily, some of these businesses are run by megalomaniacal CEOs who have more power than the heads of most countries and are answerable to no one. They’ve got their hands on the levers of economic, political and social orders, and they’re making decisions that are affecting billions of people every day now and billions of people in the future with little thought to the impacts those decisions will have on the people who are waiting for their chance to walk through this world. I think we need to shift the context of business from making money to nourishing life.

As far as I can tell, when it comes to the really big companies and the really big governments it seems very little thought is devoted to considering the future impacts and consequences of their actions today, because they’re operating out of a mindset that the Earth is inert, that it’s there for us to use. They see ecosystems as “resources to be extracted and exploited” rather than the life support systems of a living planet. It really amazes me that this needs to be said, but if we destroy ecosystems in the name of economics, we destroy the basis not just for economics but for our very existence. One of the biggest issues that we’re facing is how do we get enough people to wake up to that reality and then start thinking together and thinking really creatively on how to align human behavior such that it will allow all of us-humans to live well for millions of years to come. To me that is the point of collective intelligence - to harmonize all the tribes of humans to collectively adopt lifestyles and behaviors that will allow us and the other than human/more than human world to flourish.

I choose to work with businesses because I think that business is where there’s more leverage to get things done. Not always at the level of scale that I would like to see it done, but it’s a place where I can make a difference. Where I can go in and help people learn to collaborate more effectively, think together more effectively. And then, if they want to make some change in the world, they’ve got the tools. I can’t direct anyone and say, “Now, only use this for good.” But at least I know I’m making a difference in terms of increasing people’s competence for collaborating and thinking more comprehensively.

Pete: Yeah. There’s two parts to waking up. One of them is realizing that we’re interdependent in lots of really deep ways, back into time and forward into time and across geography and space. But the other one is getting out of the thrall of the dominant mind system. And that’s tricky.

Ken: I call that a worldview. I spent a little over two years of my life at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which was a very interesting place to be and not a place I’d actually recommend. In fact, while working there, I coined Homer’s Maxim, which is “The amount of dysfunction in an organization is directly proportional to the loftiness of their mission statement.” That was a place where the mission was to study and evolve consciousness. But there was no one there who could actually answer the question of what consciousness is. Everybody had a different idea and there was virtually no agreement among people who’d worked together for years on the topic.

I was in charge of The Worldview Literacy Project, which was supposed to take 40 years of consciousness research and come up with a product that would be useful to teach people about  metacognition. To help people notice and understand how they are thinking about their thinking. To grab ahold of the edge of your mind and peel it back a bit to reveal the frames of reference you use and to recognize different states and developmental stages. Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey talk about subject/object relations or  looking “at” versus looking “through.”

We’re all acculturated in our families growing up to look at things in the way our family culture instructs us to. Our upbringing creates that first map and is our default worldview. And then we hit 25 or so and now our prefrontal cortex is fully formed. Then we look out at the world and say, “Hmm, my map doesn’t match the territory. I think some of the things I got handed along the way are absolute bullshit. They don’t help me make sense of the world.” And it can be very threatening to look at that and think, “Wow, I’ve been sold a bill of goods.” The world you observe no longer lines up with the ways you were told the world is structured and this is a tremendous opportunity for growth.

Those who are scared may withdraw while those who are brave can say, “Wow, let’s poke under the hood. What else is here?” They can find themselves realizing that they are looking through a pair of glasses the lenses of which were ground by their upbringing. I have an image of people in movie theaters in the 1950s with 3D glasses on. In order for the 3D effects to work you have to look through those glasses while watching the movie. Take them off and the film doesn’t look right.

To extend the metaphor a little, the way we learned from our upbringing to structure our observing and our thinking is like those 3D glasses. They work fine for home movies, but out in the world the film doesn’t look right. If we take those glasses off, we can look at the assumptions they represent. We can examine the mindset that we’ve grown up with and see that that mindset or worldview exposes some levels of reality while obscuring others. We might notice a lot of things we thought were either/or are actually both/and. Once we can look at the glasses we’re looking through to view the world we can learn how to change the prescription and see things differently with finer detail or new wavelengths of light. And after a while we’ll find the edges of what those glasses reveal and we’ll look for another pair that shows us even more. It’s an iterative development process.

I think one of the big challenges that people have when they’re waking up is overcoming the cognitive dissonance that arises when the way we view the world is insufficient to what the world is showing us. It can be terrifying to see what’s really going on. I started in 1987 to become ecologically aware. It was Buckminster Fuller’s Critical Path that woke me up. And in the last 37 years, I’ve done a lot of work, inner work, and group work, and organizational work, to try and come to grips with what’s going on. And it’s terrifying.

I don’t think I’d be able to be rational and grounded in this time had I not spent at least two weeks a year with Joanna Macy for the first few years when I arrived in California. I did a lot of really intense cathartic work and grieving work with her. It was so needed because in the 1990s I was starting to recognize the extent of the human-caused destruction of our planet. And it was crushing my soul. Amitav Ghosh calls it “Omnicide”, which to me is a chilling term because it so accurately captures the extractive neo-capitalist worldview:  we’re killing everything in the name of economic growth.

My stance is informed by Buddhism, Taoism, and Deep Ecology. I’ve been grappling with how to work in a business context and not be really angry at the destruction that businesses are causing. It helps to recognize that no business or industry is monolithic. There are good people everywhere. But a lot of them are unconscious. In my experience, it’s not very helpful to be angry at people and judge them for being unconscious. You just entrench their resistance if you take that approach. So you have to be very compassionate and open and forgiving. To operate out of:  “Okay, you don’t understand the consequences here.” So, rather than make anybody wrong, I try to connect up some system feedback loops so that people can start to see the unintended consequences of their actions, then they change on their own. I don’t have to force anything - the change will happen as a result of greater systems connectivity.

I love Steve Bhaerman, aka Swami Beyond Ananda, who says, “There’s no need to change the world. We just have to toilet train the world and it will change itself.” And I think once we (yes, I am the guy always asking who is “we?” – here, “we” means, all of  us humans collectively), get enough feedback loops connected that people recognize most of the 8 billion of us are, for the most part, living in ways that are not only not sustainable, but are actively omnicidal, then we will see some rapid changes.

I’ll tell a personal story here. When I was much younger, I had an alcohol problem. And when my father was dying I was really freaking out. I didn’t know how to handle it. I was drinking heavily and it was interfering with my work. So, I started seeing a therapist because I was really in a bad way. And she said, “You’re going to see me twice a week and I won’t treat you if you’ve had anything to drink within three days of seeing me - and I will be able to tell if you lie to me.” Which meant I really couldn’t drink at all. And it was horrible for me because my whole world was built around going to bars and drinking and I had to just shut everything down and adopt a completely different way of operating in my life.

My friends were my drinking buddies. I had no other friends at the time who could support me in getting sober. My family certainly wasn’t going to help. And it was really hard. And I think that collectively, us-humans are highly addicted to an omnicidal lifestyle and we’re going to have to make ginormous changes to our lifestyles and it’s going to be bewilderingly hard to make those changes. I have great compassion for when people wake up and think, “Oh my God, look at how horrible this is. I don’t want to know. I’m going to just turn my back on the horror and stay focused on what I’m doing here because I don’t want to know how bad it is.” It’s really hard to look with clear eyes at what’s happening in the world right now. And yet if you don’t, it just keeps getting worse and worse.

Ken: Are you a Doctor Who fan, Pete?

Pete: Not really. I’m appreciative of the fact that it exists, but that’s about it.

Ken: There’s a really scary, scary villain in Doctor Who and they’re called the Weeping Angels. And they are angels that you would see in a cemetery, concrete angels, except every time you blink, they get closer. So you end up like, “I can’t blink or they’re going to take me over.” Because every time I blink, they move three or four feet closer until they’re right there in my face.

Stephen Moffat wrote that episode. I thought, “What a fantastic metaphor for what’s going on.” Because the state of the world is like that now. Every time we open our eyes after a blink, the danger has crept a little closer. Each time you blink, the danger gets closer. And if you keep your eyes open, you get really paranoid and kind of go crazy. So I think we need to get back to the relational stuff as work. We have to be much more relational in our lives with our friends, colleagues, and communities, because dangers are going to hit home soon and it’s not going to be pretty. If you’re not working on local resilience and if you don’t have a network of support, you will be in trouble.

I had really bad COVID in February this year and I felt so blessed because I live in a driveway with two duplexes - four families - and we know everybody in the driveway, we’re all good friends. And our neighbors were coming by and bringing soup and bread and checking in on us to see how we were doing? They were doing the shopping for us because I couldn’t do anything, I was so sick. My wife also got it from me. Not quite as bad, but she’d have been hard pressed to shop and cook. And we felt so blessed because we had people demonstrate their care for us. And I’m thinking, “This is really important.” If you don’t have somebody to care for you when you’re stuck, it’s going to be very hard.

So a lot of folks out there need to get into the relationship building business. They need to be considering how to be more resilient, to survive when the big shocks hit. This is where you can work at the hyperlocal level to create neighborhood resilience. Here, where I live, we’ve actually got a program called Resilient Neighborhoods, which combines a low carbon diet with community building. You use this book, I think it’s called The Low Carbon Diet, How to Lose 5,000 Pounds in a Month, to trim back your carbon footprint and at the same time you’re getting to know your neighbors because you’re doing it in groups of 10 or 15 people. And so there’s potlucks and study groups and then you end up with some people who you can hang out with and some people will become friends. I think this is key to surviving in the next bit of time.

Pete: That makes a ton of sense. Going back to your seeing relational interaction happening in corporate environments, how does that happen between corporations or how does that happen more in neighborhoods or within a city or especially within a city, I guess, where everybody’s kind of anonymous and doesn’t want to know what’s going on?

Ken: I wish I had a better answer for that. It can happen between corporations but it doesn’t seem to be a thing. I can give you one example. Let’s see, about 15 years ago, I was asked to work with Nike, Best Buy, and Creative Commons, on  something called the Green Exchange.

Here’s an aside, I went to Nike’s corporate campus and I’ll tell you if there was a volcano nearby that erupted like Vesuvius and people dug it up 2000 years later, they would think that Tiger Woods was a god. There’s monuments to Tiger Woods all over the place. The whole thing was like a temple complex with areas devoted to worshiping Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan.

Nike had looked carefully at their supply lines and realized that cotton and water were the two biggest inputs for their products. Now, cotton is a hugely damaging crop because of the pesticides used and it’s also very water intensive. And even today, the labor demands around cotton are not very good. So they worked to dramatically reduce those inputs.

They came up with a product that is essentially green rubber for the soles of their shoes. They wanted to give green rubber away to corporations who could use it so long as they weren’t in the same business. So they’d willingly give the recipe for green rubber to a Goodyear or a Firestone because they’re not in the footwear business and that way their patent could be used in non-competing environments and do more good in the world. And that would certainly revolutionize the tire industry. I don’t know that it ever went anywhere. It was a fabulous two day event that I helped facilitate. There was lots of energy. And I think it just got abandoned. But it’s a glimpse of what’s possible.

Pete: I like that story. And what’s the dynamic there? How did that... I guess, so nobody in Nike needed to decide to do that. But somebody did. Somebody said it’s important, at least for long enough to focus on it for a little while.

Ken: Well, I think Nike had been beaten a lot about their labor practices in Indonesia in the 1990s and early 2000s. They had used what amounted to slave labor. They were really sensitive to how that damaged their brand and they were determined to prove that they could be a good corporation for the world. At that point, they had cleaned up their act quite a bit. So, their next step in reducing their carbon footprint was to offer their knowledge to the world in ways where others could benefit from their knowledge without being a competitive threat. They were showcasing products that are ecologically sensitive.

I think they wanted to create a whole ecosystem of cooperating industries where patents could be shared among non-competitors. And I don’t think it ever took off. There was this initial meeting that was held and then I never heard anything about it again after that.

Pete: Yeah. So in that case, at least, it was... I’m sure there were a few people of good conscience, but the Jedi mind trick is, “Hey, big company, you’re actually losing money or losing mind share and you can get more money or mind share by doing a good thing. I know that you don’t think of it as a good thing, but if you did this, it would be better for you.” So maybe that’s a transition strategy to talk to corporations.

Ken: You have to talk to them in their language, which is money and success. And corporations are structured in such a way they have fiduciary duties to maximize profit. And so that means they can’t do sensible things because their shareholders would come down on them. I read recently where Elon Musk diverted a bunch of batteries from Tesla to his AI project. And people are like, “The shareholders can sue. You committed to this course and you can’t change. You signed contracts to get these batteries in here for these vehicles. And now you’re directing them to a different business. Even though you own it, you can’t do that. That’s a breach of fiduciary duty.” And I think that’s going to land them in some hot water.

So that’s an example that shows a different kind of corporate mindset. Here’s a really interesting thing. It’s something that I’m in the wilderness about and wondering how to approach. I’ve tried for 35 years to work inside corporations as a gentle prodding voice of reason and sustainability. I work hard not to use a strident, accusing tone. And during that time, things have gotten hugely worse. And there’s a lot of lip service paid to sustainability and ESG. And now there’s this backlash against it. It’s as if whenever a good thing comes along, there’s been some think tank that’s already thought about what happens if it gains traction, and they have a strategy for taking it down.

It’s all part of the mindset underlying extractive capitalism. The roots go all the way back to Bacon, and his claim that humans need to torture nature for her secrets. The dominant corporate worldview doesn’t recognize that heating our atmosphere or filling the oceans with plastic or destroying the fecundity of our soils, or polluting our groundwater and poisoning the drinking water for future generations are unintended and unacknowledged consequences of the paradigm from which their understanding of economics springs. All of those consequences are externalities - literally, out of sight and out of mind. They don’t show up anywhere on the balance sheet or in the annual report. The thinking is all focused on value creation in the narrowest sense of profit making and no attention is paid to value destruction in social or ecological terms. The thinking is, as long as it’s possible to extract gas from the ground through drilling and fracking we should do so because it makes money and that’s our reason for existing. So what if we leave a bunch of mine tailings behind and it destroys aquifers and groundwater? We’re not going to be around for that. It’s not our problem. That’s an externality. Besides, we’ll come up with a technological fix for it and that will also be a profit-making venture.

And that to me is a horrifying way to think and live because it presses the pedal to the metal of the omnicide project.

I don’t know how to be a calm voice around that. I don’t know how to not be accusatory around that. And I just was on a webinar this morning with a woman on LinkedIn that I follow, her name is Alice Kalro. She’s from Estonia. And she talked about the traps of sustainability. And when you look at what corporate sustainability plans are, they’re not guided by science-based targets and they’re certainly not hitting them. And it’s just a lot of greenwash and lip service. And even the very best ones don’t really have robust plans that are going to make a real difference.

And meanwhile, things are getting worse and worse. I just read recently that between 2010 and 2020, humanity used up as much of the Earth’s, and I hate this word “resources”, but I’ll use it here, as much of the  Earth’s resources as us-humans used the entire 20th century. That’s how fast the rate of acceleration is today.

To me, that’s frightening. I’m thinking we can’t do that again. We can’t repeat another building boom like that - and most projections say that we’ve only got about one third of the total built environment needed for a population of ten billion. I think it will all come crashing down. And yet there’s no sign from the folks with their hands on the levers of control that they have any intention to try to slow things down.

So my question now is how to be a good consultant to corporations and help them to see that the emperor has no clothes, that the path they’re on is leading to what Daniel Schmachtenberger would call a self-terminating end. And we still have time to act and do things, but there’s no more time to be pussyfooting around and talking nice, like, “Oh, well, let’s have some study groups on this.” There’s enough science out there - we know what’s going on. The time to act is now.

And the amazing thing to me is that for virtually every major problem that we’re facing, the technical know-how exists to handle it. Not all of them, but a great deal of them. And so we’re faced with what Ron Heifetz would call an adaptive challenge: we need to change our thinking.

You have a question in your email to me of what’s the greatest challenge we face. And I think the greatest challenge facing humans right now is how do we change our thinking, our worldview? And I have a very easy answer. And it’s been shared on LinkedIn and on OGM. Gil posted a question to ChatGPT, and I made a slide deck out of the responses with images of what happens if we place the wellbeing of the living world at the center of our lives and our institutions. If our purpose is to enhance the wellbeing of every living system and every fractal of living systems, how can we create more wellbeing? And by wellbeing, I mean acting in ways that nourish, support, and regenerate life.

That pivot to creating wellbeing versus, I won’t use the word “wealth” because Bucky was very clear that wealth is not money, so the word I’ll use is profit. Wealth is something that regenerates and allows people to live off of it and money doesn’t do that. But if we’re focused collectively on creating wellbeing instead of creating profit, then all kinds of avenues and options open up. And I don’t think it’s an impossible shift. And AI is showing us how easy it can be to do that. So that’s one of my great hopes for AI.

And here’s another thing. I read James Lovelock’s final book, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence. He calls AI “inorganic intelligence”. AI shares the same goal that humans do: keep the planet cool. If the planet heats up to an average of 45 degrees Celsius for any length of time, then very rapidly Earth will become Venus. Once we get to 45ºC for any period of time, there’ll be a bunch of tipping points and we’re on the Venus Express and there’s no more life. And we are already seeing areas around the Equator where that temp is regularly being exceeded.

So that’s the big hairy scary abyss staring back at us. Us-humans stand on the brink of self-inflicted extinction. Not only that, us-humans are about to take out perhaps all the other life in the known universe. And that’s a tremendous… stupendous… enormous…  I don’t even have a word for how big that is! It’s a monstrosity. It’s a calamity of epic proportions. I don’t know how, once someone wakes up to that, they cannot go through a stage of despair.

And despair is the natural response to such horror. Joanna Macy’s work in the ‘60s on nuclear waste and nuclear war showed that. Her book was called Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age. And she recognized the natural thing when confronted with such horror is to go into despair. And if you’re afraid of despair and push it away, then you’ll be overtaken by it. You will be stuck forever. But if instead, you embrace the despair, if you willingly go into it, you’ll come out the other side, and you’ll find you have more agency. It’s not a pleasant journey. It’s a hell of an initiation. There’s a lot of dismembering that goes on and things get really ugly, but there is something on the other side that is not despair but is a renewed sense of possibility and agency.

I like this framing that I’ve heard recently for the metacrisis of: pre-tragic, tragic, and post-tragic. Pre-tragic are the people who are in denial. They don’t believe in climate change. For them it’s all a hoax. Everything’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Climate change has been going on forever. Climate heat’s up, it cools down, no big deal. Every year the fossil fuel industry spends billions of dollars to keep people in pre-tragic because they know once enough people wake up it’s game over for them.

Next, there’s tragic, which is the equivalent of looking into the face of the Medusa – you get turned to stone. “Oh my God, I’m so paralyzed by fear and despair. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m just freaked out and I can’t handle it. I’m either going to shut down or I’m gonna go run screaming through the streets.” It’s a terrible place to be and not a place you want to be stuck for very long. So you search desperately for a way out.

The way out is through, which leads you to post-tragic - and it’s very Buddhist. This stance recognizes that, yeah, it’s going to be terrible. Enormous suffering is on the way. Even if everybody woke up tomorrow, fully enlightened, the inertia in the system would see to it that there’s going to be unfathomable suffering and ugliness. But people in post-tragic still get up in the morning and do whatever they can to make the world better in whatever way they’re able. They don’t give up, they take action to realize possibilities and create hope.

It was thanks to all the despair work I did with Joanna back in the nineties that allows me to be in post-tragic. I’ve known for a long time how bad things are going to get. I just didn’t expect to see it happen so quickly in my lifetime.

Thank you for reading! The next edition will be published on 7 August 2024. Email Pete with suggested submissions.

Grateful appreciation and many thanks to Charles Blass, Gil Friend, Ken Homer, Michael Lennon, Klaus Mager, and Jack Park for their kind contributions to this issue.