Today’s contribution comes from the desk of our Executive Director, Glen McDermott.
Who loves to be out on the water this time of year? Indeed, boats and beaches in the summertime make for great quality of life in Connecticut. However, we also have hard-working harbors that bring in cargo from all over the world. With this in mind, and in light of our recent Decarbonization panel for Earth Day, Board Member Greg Robbins, PhD, brought this little gem to our attention this week:
A return to sail power for cargo shipping sounds like an eco-friendly slam dunk, doesn’t it? Indeed, sailing ships are making a comeback for this purpose.
We find, though, that sometimes words like “sustainability” and “carbon neutral” can become somewhat…squishy. It’s important to look closely at real numbers, as the Dutch company Fairtransport has.
Since 2007 Fairtransport’s mission has been to raise awareness of climate-friendly transportation and to minimize our communal carbon footprint. With an engineless sailing fleet, they trade organic and traditionally crafted goods, and ship sustainable cargo overseas by wind power alone.
In this article you will learn how exactly they measured the cost:benefit ratio and ecological impact of building their next vessel for this purpose. In fact, prior to building, they analyzed the life cycle of a proposed ship part by part, function by function. You’re likely to be as surprised and fascinated as we were by all they had to consider, as well as their results.
The full article might be a 7-8 minute read. I’d say it’s worthwhile for any conscious leader aiming to balance positive intentions with effort and return on investment. We’d love to know what you think.
CHEERS for Friday and the start to a pleasant and productive Summer in CT!
In my work in the Agile business community, I have long been fascinated by the “hidden gem” nature of this report. Its findings support so many of the points Gavin Watson has been making in his Friday Reads series. I appreciate an opportunity to offer it a place within the connective tissue of ideas we’ve been exploring about self-organization, employee engagement and where leadership resides across the continuum of established institutions and emerging, ‘start-up’ ventures.
‘Power to the Edge’ reminds me of an anthem seen on a poster at a college radio station or a chant you might hear at a community protest. However, it was actually a report commissioned by the Department of Defense’s Command and Control Research Program (CRRP). According to the report’s introduction, the CCRP “pursues a broad program of research and analysis in information superiority, information operations, command and control theory, and associated operational concepts that enable the DoD to leverage shared awareness to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of assigned missions.” An important aspect of the CCRP program is its ability to serve as a bridge between the operational, technical, analytical, and educational communities.
So, DoD thought it was important to set up a research program focused specifically on the national security implications of the Information Age! If the military has become aware of this information gap, then perhaps there are useful lessons here for the rest of us fighting our lesser battles, day-to-day.
The publication’s central thesis is that Industrial Age structures – often organized with hub-and-spokes centrality as a key support to their command-and-control functions – must develop greater interoperability and agility in order to respond to the needs and crises of the Information Age.
Moving the seat of institutional power from the center to the edge achieves control indirectly rather than directly. While this can feel threatening to commanders who fear chaos, it is often faster, more efficient and life-savingly more effective in today’s fluid missions and environments.
Enabling technology has come in the form of advances in communications that can keep individuals and networks richly connected at minimal cost. The enabling mindset to accompany the new technology, however, is still emerging.
“As bandwidth becomes ever less costly and more widely available, we will be able to not only allow people to process information as they see fit but also allow multiple individuals and organizations to have direct and simultaneous access to information and to each other.”
David S. Alberts & Richard E. Hayes, Power to the Edge
As John Stenbit writes in the foreword, “Our future success requires that we think about information and relationships differently. We need to move from a set of monopoly suppliers of information to an information marketplace. Only by doing this will we be able to ensure that our forces will have the variety of views and perspectives necessary to make sense out of the complex situations that they will face.” The battlefields of Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, among others, have provided proof-of-concept for the value of such network-centric capabilities.
Empowering the edge, these authors propose, is a transformation more fundamental than any other the military’s command-and-control structures have had to handle since the early to mid-19th century. It is also absolutely essential for navigating the complexity in which we find ourselves today.
You see, the edge of an organization is where the organization interacts with its operating environment to have an impact or effect on that environment. Empowerment of the edge involves expanding access to information and the elimination of unnecessary constraints. Whereas in the past, perhaps many procedures were needed to deconflict various elements in the absence of quality information, today the emphasis is on establishing clear, consistent rules of engagement that the forces can implement themselves. By unbundling command from control, commanders become primarily responsible for setting the initial conditions that make their teams more likely to succeed.
Edge organizations thus often move senior personnel into roles that place them at the edge. This can reduce the need for middle managers whose role is to manage constraints and control measures.
John Sviokla summarized four fundamental principles of the agile, “edge-based” organization a few years back in the Harvard Business Review: situational awareness, skills, values, and decision rights. Let’s take a look at each of these in turn to see how you can empower the edge in your organization.
Situational Awareness. Traditional command-and-control structures evolved from a set of assumptions about fog and friction in warfare. In the Industrial Age, information to thoroughly assess a situation was costly and difficult to attain. However, information flow is fast-paced and cheap, changing the economics for the Information Age. Today,in the time it would take for a network to convey information from the edge to the center and then back out to the edge, the situation would have already changed, making such centralized conclusions obsolete! Find ways for edge-stationed personnel to communicate directly with one another to acquire and convey robust awareness of a given situation. Situation awareness will always need to be developed and shared, but whose task this is and how it is accomplished are evolving.
Skill. When professionalism and creativity among a force are in question, very little can be accomplished. Mission-critical competence – that is, the ability to know what exactly to focus on – is best demonstrated under pressure when there has been sufficient preparation in advance. Preparing for a range of shifting circumstances is key (note: this is not the same as planning for a single, desired outcome, which often assumes certain circumstances which may or may not materialize in the field. Perhaps counterintuitively, too much of this type of planning can make an organization more fragile.)
Getting any job done typically involves things that need to be accomplished prior to undertaking a given task or mission – known as ‘readiness’ – and things that need to be done to accomplish the mission. Likewise, leaders at any level must have sufficient insight to know when to undertake different approaches to both, given the specific, on-the-ground circumstances. The comfortable position of selecting a single philosophy and working to establish it in both doctrine and training – then marching forward to a centralized leader’s drumbeat – has disappeared now that we are in the Information Age.
Values. This is what can replace that former security found in following the leader. Edge organizations seek to make command intent congruent throughout a whole organization, so that any part of it can ‘figure out’ how best to proceed in a complex situation. (It is not just the ‘head’ anymore that does the thinking!) This is made possible through reliance on a shared value system. Values can serve as a reference to guide every day-to-day decision as well as organizational design features. When structures are imbued with values, the results are congruent. It turns out that it is not lack of information but lack of clear and consistently-applied values that create fog and friction in our organizations.
Decision Rights. The most mature form of an edge organization is recognized by its self-synchronizing capacity. In edge organizations, peer-to-peer interactions are paramount, enabling high degrees of trust. Only through very rich personal interactions, guided by the values, skill and situational awareness outlined above, can sufficient information be conveyed in a fluid manner to overcome the uncertainty and volatility associated with complex field operations. The Power to the Edge report found that commanders do well to increase the degree of creativity and initiative that subordinate decision-makers in the force can be expected and even encouraged to exercise.
For example, General Douglas MacArthur, when organizing his campaign to island hop and retake the Philippines, is reported to have called in the commander of his theater Army Air Corps and told him to “keep the Japanese air forces out of my way.” That was the only order issued and the subordinate was left free to decide how he would accomplish the mission.
At the risk of repetition, in order to do this, his troops had to have access to four key things, also necessary for business organizations seeking the speed and effectiveness of self-synchronization. These essentials are:
High quality information enabling shared situational awareness;
Competence at all levels of the force;
Clear and consistent understanding of command intent; and
Trust in the information, subordinates, superiors, peers, and equipment.
Today, even in our home state of Connecticut, nicknamed ‘the land of steady habits,” responsibility for the use of resources and the health and wellbeing of personnel cannot afford to stand on ceremony based on tradition or the false security of what’s worked in the past. It cannot even rest on the strong shoulders of one or two supposed heroes who are ‘in charge.’ In fact, taking care of the important things to achieve a group’s mission is a distributed responsibility. And the power to carry out these responsibilities lies not at the center of an organization, but truly at its dynamic edges.
The time has come to structure ourselves accordingly! Take a look at this fascinating read and let us know you YOU think it applies to today’s organizational leadership. http://edocs.nps.edu/dodpubs/org/CCRP/Alberts_Power.pdf
PS: Did you know you can book time with Gavin Watson to discuss how the principles of Conscious Capitalism are working inside your organization? It’s true – and while we cannot hoard these riches, supply is somewhat limited. Schedule your appointment now!
For today’s Friday Reads, I decided to offer a close read of two significant lines that have been tumbling about in my head this week. One is from David Sloan Wilson and the other is from David Attenborough. I think these may have given me a new and simpler way to explain the benefits of Conscious Capitalism.
I was reminded of the Attenborough quote last week while watching a series featuring Greta Thunberg called “A Year to Change the World.” She had just finished the Davos climate summit and was feeling discouraged. Attenborough was sharing his long perspective that comes with many years. During the conversation he said; “Self interest is for the past. Common interest is for the future.” It was just so simple, and so profound.
The David Sloan Wilson quote is; “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. All else is commentary.” This needs a bit of unpacking.
When there is a selfish individual or several selfish individuals within a group, those selfish individuals will take advantage of the altruistic members of the group and take more than their fair share. Therefore; “Selfishness beats altruism within groups.” Only that’s not the whole story.
“Altruistic groups beat selfish groups.”
David Sloan Wilson
In groups containing selfish members, not only are members of the group being unfairly treated, groups containing selfish individuals have to spend effort creating rules, policing individuals, and watching their backs. They are forced to waste potential creativity on guarding against a cheat. Altruistic individuals are forced to start thinking more about their own self interest for their own self preservation. Performance of the group is going to be miserable.
Altruistic groups who have no selfish individuals are focused on helping each other. This generates lots of win-win-win scenarios, and people are happy about it. Individuals think every day about how they can contribute more to their group. They love their group, and their group loves them. There is great positive energy and collaboration, more creative ideas and more energy. When someone needs help, the others gladly step in to lend a hand. There is no place within the group’s culture to be asking, “what’s in it for me?”
This is why Conscious Capitalism works. This whole concept of altruistic groups of individuals is fractal. It looks the same at whatever scale you are looking at it. A group of five people or a group of five companies. The same principles are at play. In either case, an altruistic group will beat a selfish group.
What could be more selfish than a company focusing solely on generating profits for its shareholders, especially if it is at the expense of everyone else in the company or any suppliers or customers? Pay the employees less, buy materials at a price almost sure to drive the suppliers out of business, and cheat oops… I mean charge your customer as much as possible.
On the other hand….
What could be more altruistic than a group of Conscious companies acting for the benefit of all their stakeholders; the employees, the suppliers, the customers, the community, and the planet? This altruistic group will beat similar groups containing selfish companies.
What company culture could be more Conscious than one composed of altruistic employees intrinsically motivated and fulfilled by doing what they do best every day to benefit everyone else for a shared higher purpose?
They will certainly outperform a company focused on shareholder profit in a culture that allows selfish individuals to contribute less and take more.
A Conscious Leader is engaged in the common interest of her people and all of the other stakeholders. She has an abundance of altruism.
Today I started a 12 month course on becoming certified as a Conscious Capitalism Consultant.
As all good first days of a course should be, it provoked some new thinking for me. A question was raised. How do we as consultants expect to transform business into something more Conscious?
For me that requires answering the question: how did we get here in the first place? Why is business done the way it generally is? I can think of three possibilities; you may think of more.
Door #1 Was it originally a garden of Eden where businesses (like my grandfathers) cared deeply about their employees, generously shared profits, and went out of their way to help their people and the community? My father is another example, in the 1960’s he was known to pay people more because they had families and needed to care for them. (A crazy idea nowadays – and probably illegal – but there it is.) He acted generously based on his compassion for a parent struggling to raise a family. The New England Shaker communities would have agreed with him “to each according to need”)
Did the garden of Eden come to an end because of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Milton Friedman and Neo-liberal economics? Was that a more compelling story?
Door #2 Or is it a stage of development thing, like Piaget’s stages of cognitive development and Kohlberg’s stages of moral development? Do businesses move from selfish to selfless on some sort of continuum? From ruthless and profit driven, to higher-purposeful? Is it dependent on the leaders’ stage of development as Keagan and Lahey suggest in their book, An Everyone Culture: Deliberately Developmental Organizations.
Door#3 Or are selfish organizations, neo-liberal economics, extractive capitalism on the one extreme and Conscious Capitalism near the other end of the spectrum reflections of personality type? On the one extreme narcissistic and psychopathic leaders and their companies and on the other extreme companies run by a near Mother Teresa type personality and acting accordingly?
If it is Door #1, that Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand destroyed the garden of Eden then we just need to work on a more compelling story than the one Ayn Rand tells in Atlas Shrugged. David Sloan Wilson, an Evolutionary Biologist, has done just that in his new book Atlas Hugged. Kate Raworth rewrote economics and destroyed Milton Friedman’s neo-Liberal economics in her book Doughnut Economics.
If it is Door #2 a stage of development problem and a company can’t go beyond the level of development of it’s leader then we would employ a strategy of leadership coaching and development. These programs are a dime a dozen. I think a lot of these programs fail. The ones I witnessed certainly did.
My bet is on Door #3. It is personality based. It is the personality of the leader that is relevant. So the temptation is to ask the question: how do we change someone’s personality? The problem is that we can’t. Every personality trait is highly heritable. It’s mostly genetic. We are who we are and we get more entrenched in our personality the older we get (see the work of Robert Ploman and his book Blueprint.) Compassion is an element of personality therefore it is highly heritable. Both the extent to which someone is compassionate, and who that compassion is directed towards – only our family, only our close group members, or absolutely anyone who is suffering – gets passed down.
Everyone I have met so far in our Conscious Capitalism tribe felt strongly that something was deeply wrong with corporate life. Some of us had developed our own versions of something similar to Conscious Capitalism and were fighting to make it real. Then we discovered Conscious Capitalism and realized this was what they were looking for. It was not the other way around. We did not think corporate life was great (as clearly some people do) until we read about Conscious Capitalism and only then realized it could be better. People find us and express the genuine feeling that they have found their tribe. Reading and attending lectures did not convince them. They already felt out of place in the corporate world and upon discovering a Conscious Capitalism group feel right at home.
John Mackey is himself a great example. He was not a born capitalist. He was on a mission to serve a community by providing good wholesome food. Later on he discovered capitalism enacted in a conscious way could help him, and was indeed necessary to serve this mission.
I am arguing that people will either have a combination of personality aspects to be genetically disposed to get it and feel excited about Conscious Capitalism, or not. No amount of pounding on the door of a person who is not tuned to that frequency is going to persuade them. You might at best get them to agree that it is an option on the table, but they just don’t want to taste it right now… maybe later.
So if this is the case what do we do? Certainly not give up! There is a rich audience of people out there who are going to get it when they hear it and immediately and joyously join the tribe. We need to be speaking much more clearly and passionately so they hear us.
One of the things that struck me recently was the Gallup engagement survey data. It just hit me that the 15% who are “actively disengaged” who are drilling holes in the boat are actually engaged and just pissed off. They would not have that negative emotion if they did not care. They feel strongly that something is just wrong. Drilling holes in the proverbial company boat is not constructive behavior, but I would bet that if they were in a Conscious Culture with a high degree of autonomy and they felt free to bring their whole selves to work and that they were appreciated for their uniqueness, we would not see that behavior. Instead most in this group would become highly engaged. The problem is not the people, it is the system and culture. But I digress.
Turn up the volume! I think we Conscious Capitalists are soft selling our idea because we are generally more thoughtful and understanding than most.
We have experienced the pressure from the traditional business leaders to conform to the traditional practices and we don’t want to behave like that. There is also a desire to win over a larger audience so we don’t want to offend any potential business owners. If it is door #1 or door #2 that is the right strategy. But if it is door #3 that is a mistake. If it is door #3 then we need to be loud and unapologetic about what we believe, while at the same time acknowledging it is not going to be for everyone and that’s ok.
If we are unabashed and unapologetic, loud and clear, those who are predisposed to connect with the principles of Conscious Capitalism will hear us and show up. They are members of our tribe that have not found each other yet. We can then help them along the journey they already yearn to be on. We can provide a language and a framework with which they can explore their feelings and ideas and share them with others in their organization. This is the most effective path to converting the highest number of companies to this framework. This is the way we will have the highest positive impact on people working at companies who deserve to be fulfilled by work, when they are investing 90,000 hours of their lives there. This is the way we will change our societies and save our planet.
These conscious companies will of course continue to dramatically outperform the regular companies, but don’t expect that to sway any non-believers. They will continue to take a wait and see, maybe I will have a taste of it later, approach until the cows come home. It’s just not their thing and it is never going to be.
Of course, there is an upside and a downside. On the downside we won’t get everyone to become a Conscious Capitalist. I never expected we would. On the up side we can take a bolder stand, attract the leaders who are looking for this tribe, and assist in converting more companies to these principles faster. People deserve to have fulfilling work lives, and our planet desperately needs more conscious businesses. For me the mission is clear. The urgency is great.
One of my favorite song lines is from the original Dr. Dolittle movie. Matthew is singing to young Master Stubbins, and one of the lines goes: “I know that what the Doctor tells me isn’t all together true, but I love every tale he tells me. I don’t know of any better ones, do you?”
I think Matthew hits the nail on the head. The stories might not be true, but they are really good stories.
Most of us adults think that kids and imaginary magical worlds are fun stuff, but when we are adults we need to be based in reality and as adults we undoubtedly know what reality is.
On the contrary, I think kids have a much better sense of reality than we adults do. After all, most kids know when they are playing, make believe, don’t they?
We adults tend to get a bit confused on this. Think of the ancient mystery cults, for example, or the idea of divine right of kings whereby the king ruled because God said so. A lot of adults used to believe this stuff. But surely we have got it all sorted by now right?
Modern business-people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. The principal difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger tales.
Yuval Harari gives as an interesting example: What about those Wizards called lawyers? They write the correct spells on a piece of paper and get them signed and stamped with magical stamps and Poof! A corporation exists where there wasn’t one a minute before. And then possibly a few years later an even more powerful wizard called a Judge decides she does not like the corporation so she has her cort scribe create another magical document and she signs it and puts her magical stamp on it and… Poof! The corporation no longer exists!
The people who were employees are still there, the suppliers, customers and even the former shareholders are still there. The equipment and the building are all still there but the corporation is gone! Very magical thinking and unlike the kids we don’t even know we are doing it.
Another song that comes to mind is the song co-written by Kenneth Ascher & Paul Williams called The Rainbow Connection. You know the one Kermit sings while sitting on a log. Why are there so many songs about rainbows?…Rainbows are visions but only illusions, and rainbows have nothing to hide…Somebody thought of it and someone believed it, and look what it’s done so far!
Maybe Conscious Capitalism is about doing some magic in the mythical world of capitalism and making it a better story. If some of us think of it and more of us believe it imagine what it can do! After all, since capitalism isn’t altogether true anyway I think we need a better story, don’t you?
TELL US WHAT YOU THINK! Leave a comment on this blogpost or email us at [email protected]
“I was surprised when I learned that what sounded like a small increase in the global temperature – just one or two degrees Celsius, which is 1.9 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit – could actually cause a lot of trouble. But it is true: In climate terms, a change of just a few degrees is a big deal. During the last ice age, the average temperature was just 6 degrees Celsius lower than it is today. During the age of the dinosaurs, when the average temperature was perhaps 4 degrees Celsius higher than it is today, there were crocodiles living above the Arctic Circle.”
– Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
This was the most shocking thing I read in this book. I had to stop and read it again. Crocodiles swimming north of the arctic circle. The vision of crocodiles comfortably swimming where polar bears still do now was a shock to me. We are already responsible for a 1 degree Celsius rise in average temperature. We are easily on track to hit crocodiles in the arctic range by the end of this century.
I have been fixated on fuel efficiency since the early 70’s. Maybe it was because I turned 16 and got my driver’s licence in the middle of the 1973 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo, during which gas prices nearly quadrupled. With a new licence to drive and being the oldest child it became my responsibility to take the two family cars down to fill them up whenever they got below half a tank.
For those of you who are too young to remember, fuel was in short supply. To encourage saving fuel the law changed and, you were only allowed to fill up your car on certain days. If your license plate ended in an even number then you could fill up on even numbered days and if it was odd numbered you could fill up on odd number days. We were lucky enough to have several cars and license plates with odd and even numbers.
So I got to sit in long lines waiting for hours to fill up our cars. One of our cars was a Ford Montego Wagon. It was rated the lowest mileage car in the U.S. at the time. It had a V8 450hp engine and got about 8 miles to the gallon. It idled at a very high speed. If you took your foot off the brake it would probably get to 35 mph without touching the accelerator. Waiting in those lines for hours served to provide me with plenty of time to contemplate everything that was wrong with this picture.
My father also had a diesel Mercedes. Not only did it get great mileage but he could pump fuel out of the home heating oil tank right into his car. Most people don’t realize that #2 heating oil and diesel are the same thing. This allowed my father to continue commuting to NYC from Greenwich Ct. every day without much inconvenience.
My first attempt at a more efficient vehicle was a three wheeled motorcycle I built in my college years out of a small Suzuki 60 cc dirt bike and a snowmobile frame. Later on I bought a 1973 Porsche 914 and converted it to an electric car. But lead acid batteries were quite heavy and due to all the lead I was moving around I only had a range of about 45 miles. I had a 40 mile commute which was cutting it close so the car mostly sat in the driveway to be used on weekends.
By the late 80’s I was working at the family food business. In the early 90’s bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) hit England. In England up until that time to provide cows with protein, cows were being fed leftover cow parts mixed into their feed. Brains and nervous system parts contained these things called prions which infected the brains and nervous systems of the cows who were fed this. (gross right?) It turned out that these prions could then be passed on to people. Anyway they had to stop this and find another source of protein for the cows. One of the sources was soy protein from the U.S. Soy contains a lot of oil though which was believed to be not so good for the cows so the oil was pressed out and left behind. Due to the glut of soy oil, soy oil prices plummeted.
Eventually the price of soy oil was the same as #2 heating oil. I wondered if our #2 fuel oil fired boilers that created steam for food processing would run on soy oil. I found some articles that suggested it would, so one Saturday we filled up a 55 gallon drum with soy oil and brought it to the boiler room. We hooked it up and the boiler continued to run as though nothing had changed. So we began to run our boiler on vegetable oil until the price of it got too high again.
That got me thinking though, the boiler ran on #2 fuel oil and vegetable oil. Diesel cars would run on diesel and on #2 fuel oil. So could a diesel car run on vegetable oil? It was early internet dial up modem days but I checked online and sure enough found some Sweedish farmers who were pressing the oil out of their canola seeds and feeding the meal to their animals and the oil to their diesel, tractors, Volvo’s and VW’s. All I needed to do was heat the oil to 140F and it would have the same viscosity as diesel and the engine would run the same.
I could not find a used diesel car so I bought a new VW Golf in 2001 and converted it straight away. For the next 10 years I drove to work on vegetable oil, a renewable fuel!
At the same time that electric Porsche was sitting in the driveway because it’s battery range was so poor, so I also converted the Porsche 914 to vegetable oil. I installed a Yanmar 40HP turbo Diesel in it and with that car I won the 2006 NESEA TourDeSol prize for most environmentally friendly and highest mileage bio fuel vehicle.
All this to say that I have been obsessing about energy efficiency and climate change for decades. Not only in my cars, but at work, and at home as well.
Gavin Watson
I really enjoyed reading Bill Gates’s book. As he says in the beginning he is a technical guy so when presented with a problem he immediately looks for a technical solution. He is also an optimist, (as I am, at least as far as technology goes). We have a lot of solutions at hand already. Some are actually less expensive than the fossil fuel alternative. Heat pumps are a good example of this. In these cases it is really a matter of getting the word out. In other areas there are promising technologies that we can probably use but it will take a bit more time and investment to get us there. There are new breakthroughs in solar, wind, and especially in batteries that are coming out almost every day.
I am aware that I am an imperfect messenger on climate change. The world is not exactly lacking in rich men with big ideas about what other people should do, or who think Technology can fix any problem.
Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
On the other hand there are big issues to overcome in some areas like making cement and steel, and the ways we do manufacturing and agriculture. According to Gates we need to get to ZERO net carbon emissions in the wealthier countries by 2050. We are currently adding 51 billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere each year. (Just like the volcanoes were adding carbon to the atmosphere back in the days of the dinosaurs) A 50% reduction in the wealthier countries is going to be the easy part. We have some relatively easy things we can do to get us there like electric cars and heat pumps and less sexy stuff like caulking air leaks and insulation.
But as Gates says “this is going to be really hard”. We have developing countries who will want and deserve to have a similar standard of living. That is a lot more people who will need a lot more energy. Since we wealthier countries are responsible for getting us into this mess it only makes sense that the burden for getting us out of this should also start with us. We need to be investing in numerous potential solutions that might or might not work out. The benefit to this investment is that the countries who figure it out will have technology and goods they can export. The Danes invested a lot in wind energy early on and they are currently the world’s largest exporter of wind technology and equipment.
This same race to higher levels of expertise is happening in solar and to an even higher level in batteries. Battery competition is exploding and whoever wins this development race will have car makers and others banging on their doors.
Despite Gate’s admission to being a technical guy, this is a very readable book written in a conversational voice. I have listened to Bill Gates speak, and as I read this I can actually hear him talking to me as I read. The book is a good blend of why we need to do this, what we need to do, and how it can be done. He is also clear on the technology that we have and the technology we will need to develop. He presents the large numbers like 51 Billion tons of CO2 in terms you can get your head around. He is both practical and realistic. A good blend of how hard it is going to be and also examples of similar large scale transformations we have already accomplished in a similar amount of time. He is quite humble admitting he is part of the problem and he knows it. He is also genuine about admitting that there is a lot we don’t know about climate change.
Of course what we don’t know could mean it might be better than we think but it could also be worse. We only have one planet and the future of generations of humans for the next 10,000 years or longer depends on us in this generation getting this right.
Bill has a lot of experience working with governments around the world through the work he has done with Melinda at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He understands the complexity of getting to consensus.
Global cooperation is notoriously difficult. It is hard to get every country in the world to agree on anything – especially when you are asking them to incur some new cost.
Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
The biggest problem we face is getting global consensus. As a friend of mine says it is 90% attitude and 10% everything else. As the wealthiest nation we need to get our attitude right and go first and set an example. This is the best way to get others to adjust their attitudes.
I think the book is great. The details, the conversational tone, realism, practicality, and humility are all a good balance. There are only two things that I think more time could be spent on. The first is regenerative agriculture. Not only do we need to modify our agricultural processes to emit less carbon as Gates suggests. But we can also use agriculture to store carbon in the soil and improve farming at the same time. This is something that is currently being done and it needs a lot more experimentation and research.
The other thing I would have added in are more creative ways we can conserve energy. Conservation is not as sexy as solar panels and batteries but it is the first and most important thing. There are a lot of opportunities in the details of how we live our lives that can make a big difference. Gates does not expect us to be willing to change our lifestyle much and he may be right. As a person who has modified and built his own vehicles out of frustration for what is available in the commercial market though I think that harnessing determination and creativity of all of us (especially young people) has a huge potential for positive impact. I intend to continue to keep working hard on this issue. People who are 18 years old now will be 50 in 2050. I think we can expect big things from them.
If you have been reading my book reviews, you may be experiencing a bit of deja vu. A previous post was also titled “Blueprint,” but it was by Robert Plomin. You can find that review here. I suggest reading both, because the ideas go together (and not just because alphabetically these two works would be next to each other on the bookshelf!)
Plomin’s book is about each individual’s set of genes responsible for our unique personalities. In essence. Plomin’s thesis is that (identical twins aside) we are unique individuals primarily because of our genetically determined innate characteristics. Anyone who had kids close together raised by the same parents in the same household knows this; they are very different.
Genes do amazing things inside our bodies, but even more amazing to me is what they do outside of them. Genes affect not only the structure and function of our bodies; not only the structure and function of our minds and, hence, our behaviors; but also the structure and function of our societies.
Christakis’s book, on the other hand, is about how we are the same. Christakis is a sociologist at Yale and writes about how our genetic coding ensures the ways in which we tend towards social sameness. His argument is that our evolutionary success came about because we were predisposed to express particular qualities and behaviors in groups.
This resonates, because, as you may have heard me say before, we are group creatures. Our success depends on our group more than we care to admit. It has been this way for hundreds of thousands of years, and it is probably even more true today than it was 50,000 years ago. We are not likely to survive long on our own… but as a group we do remarkably well.
Our individual differences in skills and abilities are essential for our group’s survival. At the same time our survival and the group’s survival depends on cohesiveness of the group. As suggested in last week’s review of An Everyone Culture, there is no tension between individuals growing in skill and self knowledge and the group’s success; it is one and the same thing, inextricably tied together.
Christakis is focused on the things that keep us together. He calls it “the Social Suite”. At the core of all societies are 8 critical things. They are:
1. The ability to have and recognize individual identity
2. Love for partners and offspring
3. Friendship
4. Social networks
5. Cooperation
6. In-group preference
7. Mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism)
8. Social learning and teaching
Early in the book, Christakis illustrates the importance of these things. We can’t of course test an hypothesis by setting up a control group in a social setting. However sometimes natural experiments occur, and we can study those.
He compares many instances of groups of people who have been shipwrecked. Some of the groups did remarkably well even under very adverse circumstances. All or nearly all of the people survived and were eventually rescued even years after being shipwrecked. They did so he argues because they modeled these eight essential things for optimal group performance. Other groups in arguably better circumstances, some who were even shipwrecked on the same island at nearly the same time (almost a perfect controlled experiment), had very few or no survivors because they did not embody these essential principles.
Just musing on some of these items in the “social suite” above will probably make it sort of obvious. Groups with authoritarian leaders who were not concerned about the lowest ranked members in the group did much more poorly than those led by more egalitarian leadership of groups who treated members with equality. Bonds of friendship and social learning were also important. The more skills and abilities everyone has the better off the group will be.
The social suite offers a successful, time-tested strategy for group living. Sometimes, groups cannot coalesce to express the social suite. Nevertheless, they do not have any viable alternative to it.
In other words, he argues that this is the only successful strategy there is, with success equated to survival. We must embody these things if we are going to survive as a group.
If you were going to be shipwrecked tomorrow would you choose to be shipwrecked with the other people in your company? If not there is work to be done.
Admittedly, this is pretty strong stuff! And of course, in our daily lives we are not in such dire circumstances as a shipwreck (hopefully!) Therefore, we can sometimes get away with poor performance.
Without the social suite, we may survive, but our performance will be miserable. And we will feel miserable. Does this sound familiar?
Autocratic self centered people in leadership positions…people reluctant to share what they know for fear that the organization will no longer need them and will boot them out…lack of compassion and friendship at work… lack of trust in, and care for the group…fear of getting cut from the payroll when the chips are down…sound like a workplace you know of?
Think about it – there is no better example of the “chips are down” than being shipwrecked! Some groups took care of everyone, even the very sick and injured who were unlikely to ever be much help. These groups did far better. Other groups almost immediately left the sick and injured behind. These groups failed catastrophically, even though their circumstances were in many ways better.
Just because we are lucky enough not to be shipwrecked does not mean that we should not be doing everything we can to improve our groups.
When I compare the “Social Suite” with the prosocial core design principles, I see the same theme emerging. And wouldn’t you want these things in your shipwrecked group?
Strong group identity and understanding of purpose.
Fair distribution of costs and benefits.
Fair and inclusive decision-making.
Monitoring agreed-upon behaviors.
Graduated sanctions for misbehaviour.
Fast and fair conflict resolution.
Authority to self-govern.
Appropriate relations with other groups.
And wouldn’t you want these qualities in the members of your shipwrecked group?
If you are a leader in your company, it is your job to make sure your group is “coalescing” around the social suite and the prosocial design principles. Or to put it another way, if you are engaged in the embodiment of these things, you are a Leader. That is what leadership is.
This book is by two Harvard organizational psychologists who go out in the field to research what they call Deliberately Developmental Organizations – or DDOs. These are companies that invest much more time and energy in their people’s development than most companies. It is also their central focus every day. DDOs do this because they know that it is essential for the people and the company to grow. Focus on development is what has created their success.
There is no tension between investing in the growth of their people and being profitable. It is one and the same thing for these companies. “Decurion’s Christopher Forman says “We do not see a trade-off, and the moment we consider sacrificing one for the other, we recognize that we have lost both.”
Each of the companies used as examples in the book is a deliberate system that is all about growing people. Because the company focuses on this, as a consequence it also does extremely well.
If you ask someone in one of these companies whether they focus on the development of their people because it is the right thing to do or because they believe it is the best thing for the organization, people will look at you funny because for them it is a non-question. It’s both/and. The two go inextricably together.
There are engaging stories told about each of the companies in the book. I encourage you to read them. Each of the companies has unique ways in which it goes about consciously and deliberately engendering the development of everyone who works there. Even the leaders are not exempt from the process they have set up.
The company’s other primary commitment—to radical transparency—goes much deeper than the glass office walls. Every meeting is recorded, and (unless proprietary client information is discussed) every recording is available to every member of the organization. Each office and meeting room is equipped with audio recording technology. For example, if your boss and your boss’s boss are discussing your performance and you weren’t invited to the meeting, the recording is available for you to review. And you don’t have to scour every audio file to find out whether you were the subject of a closed-door conversation. If your name came up, you’re likely to be given a heads-up, just so that you will review the file. In effect, there is no such thing as a closed-door conversation; everything is part of a “historical record of what is true.
Most of us are familiar with the concept of child development. We know that children grow in capabilities. At one point, kids like to play Peek a Boo. It is because they have recently discovered what Piaget called “Object Permanence.” Before this stage, things are just there sometimes and not there other times. When our brains figure out that the thing is now somewhere else but still exists, that’s object permanence. We take great delight in covering our eyes and everything is gone and then uncovering our eyes and it is still there! How exciting!
Adults can grow. Around the age of 25 our frontal cortex is nicely formed. The wiring of this part of our brains begins in our teenage years and takes until our early 20’s. Our brains develop so slowly precisely so that they can be wired for our particular societal norms. That’s an evolutionary adaptation for creatures living in complex societies. During these years we are being socialized into our culture’s environment by parents, friends, and teachers. This results in what Keagan and Lahey call the Socialized Mind. This is the young person who may have just started working in their first job. They are working out what is expected of them and how to fit in. Keagan and Lahey describe this using the terms: “Team Player, Faithful Follower, Aligning, Seeks Direction, Reliant”.
The next level that most of us get to is the self-authoring mind. At this level we become more conscious, we wake up and realize that we have been socialized into our world view and it is not really our own. Sometimes this starts to happen when people are in their 40’s as a midlife crisis which gives us a kick. We go on a hero’s journey to discover meaning and purpose and create our own view of reality. This is called the Self Authoring Mind. This is a journey to discover our own one best way to understand the world. We use this perspective to change our environment. These are the terms used to describe this stage: “Agenda driven, learns to lead, has their own compass, own framework, problem-solving, independent.” While having your own compass and framework is better than being unconscious of the societal framework you were living in it can be limiting. It can be hard for people at this stage to hear information contrary to their personally developed worldview.
A very few of us get to the stage Kegan and Lahey call the Self Transforming Mind. At this stage the person becomes aware of the many many other frameworks out in the world and that many of them are more complete and may work as well or better. They begin to shrug off the limitations of their own self-authored framework and explore these other frameworks. This is a journey to discover many best ways. They use a framework to examine the other world views and continuously recreate their own framework to better reflect what they are learning. This stage is described in these terms: “Meta Leader, leads to learn, multi-frame, holds contradictions, problem-finding, interdependent.”
If you are fluent in Conscious Capitalism, you will have heard that an organization can’t progress beyond the consciousness level of its leader. The three levels above show how true this is. I am going to exaggerate the descriptions below just a bit to make it clearer. In reality, it is usually not so black and white.
At the level of the socialized mind a company leader may be just doing what they were taught in business school or as part of an MBA program. They are following the social norms for running a business checking off all the boxes on the ‘how to run a successful business list’ that they were taught. If a person is at a supervisory or manager level they will be acting just like their first manager or supervisor did. That is the model they are following.
Hopefully at some point they wake up. Maybe it is a midlife crisis. They get to their 40’s and they ask, is this all there is? Is making money what it is all about? Maybe they have been treating their people like they are just a resource and they have a conversion experience where they realize that each of these people is someone’s precious child. Just like their own son or daughter. They begin to rethink what they were taught and they “Self Author” their own world view based on their own values. Their company begins to run much better. More people are engaged in their work. The company has discovered values and possibly even a purpose beyond profit.
As time goes by some leaders who are now comfortable in their Self Authored world view become confident enough to feel safe (and even excited by) exploring alternative views. They realize that their Self Authored view, their secret sauce, that gave them success is now probably holding them and their companies back. They realize that the world is a lot more complex than they once thought. They realize that they must begin continually trying new things. They find joy in exploring possibilities and encourage others in their organization to do so also. They go way beyond their once-accepted way of doing work. They encourage others in their organization to lead from wherever they are and explore their own leadership views. They seek to continually recreate a framework that can be used to understand the other frameworks. Their own drive comes from a deep desire to learn and they want everyone else in their companies to be learning and growing also. Ultimately, they understand that all of these realities are our own creations, and therefore we are free to create new, more beautiful ones for people to enjoy.
Keagan and Lahey do share evidence to suggest that the higher the level of development of the company leader (and therefore others in the company), the better the company’s performance will tend to be.
Of course, this book is just another framework with which to look at ourselves, our businesses, and the world. I think it is a useful one. It certainly rings true to me as a person who loves learning new ideas and seeing how they fit together with my current understanding.
Also, it seems that many of us are operating at one level in one area of our lives and at a different level in a different area of our lives. It could be more a matter of how much of the time we spend thinking at a particular level. For me, this indicates that it may not be so much a stage of development (like Piaget’s object permanence) but a subjective worldview that is holding us back, particularly in our work lives.
If you would like to listen to a podcast on a similar vein I would suggest the Conscious Capitalist podcasts https://www.theconsciouscapitalists.com/ especially #24 Values and Consciousness with Richard Barrett and #26 Leaders get the Organizations they deserve which explores the journey to Conscious Leadership.
If you’re anything like me, you have an ongoing list of quotes that you gather while reading. Today I’d like to share with you 25 quotes from a very long list. You may recognize a few of them if you been keeping up with my Friday Reads book recommendations. I hope you find them inspiring and thought provoking.
“Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.”
Richard Branson
“Conscious managers exercise a minimum amount of control. Their role is not to control other people. It is to create the conditions that allow for more self-management.”
“Truly human leadership protects an organization from internal rivalries that can shatter a culture. When we have to protect ourselves from each other, the whole organization suffers. But when trust and cooperation thrive internally, we pull together and the organization grows stronger as a result.”
“The question is not how you can make better rules, but how can you support teams in finding the best solution. How can you strengthen the possibilities of the team members so that they need the least amount of direction setting from above?”
Jos De Block
“When we see life as a journey of discovery, then we learn to deal more gracefully with the setbacks, the mistakes, and the roadblocks in our life. We can start to grasp the spiritual insight that there are no mistakes, simply experiences that point us to a deeper truth about ourselves and the world.”
“When success is measured solely in terms of money and recognition, when growth and the bottom line are the only thing that count, when the only successful life is the one that reaches the top, we are bound to experience a sense of emptiness in our lives.”
“When you force people into slots you get slot shaped contributions. You want to turn sheep into shepherds.”
Drew Williams
“If you create an environment where the people truly participate, you don’t need control. They know what needs to be done and they do it. And the more that people will devote themselves to your cause on a voluntary basis, a willing basis, the fewer hierarchies and control mechanisms you need.”
Herb Kelleher
“We need to put individuals before organizations. To do this we need to do the following: 1. Decentralize power whenever possible. 2. Emphasize community over hierarchy. 3. Ensure transparency in decision making. 4. Make leaders more accountable to the led. 5. Align rewards with contribution rather than with power or position. 6. Substitute peer review for top down review. 7. Steadily enlarge the scope of self-determination.”
“Hierarchy of human capabilities at work. 1 obedience, 2 diligence, 3 expertise, 4 initiative, 5 creativity, 6 passion. 1, 2 and 3 can be rewarded externally by incentives or demands. 4, 5, and 6 are internally driven and can’t be demanded or required. They are gifts that can’t be commanded.”
“How many policies exist just to preserve the fiction that the higher ups are in control? How many rules enforce standardization at the expense of initiative and passion while delivering few if any benefits?”
“How Many policies exist just to preserve the fiction that the higher ups are in control? How many rules enforce standardization at the expense of initiative and passion while delivering few if any benefits?”
Blair Vernon
The informal organization which does not appear on any organizational chart consists of the informal contacts among themselves that employees use to get things done.
Gary Dressier
“A good Game has 4 elements. 1. A clearly defined Goal. 2. Clear understanding of the rules. 3. a way to easily and quickly track progress towards the goal. 4players must opt in voluntarily.”
“Let’s take golf to start. As a golfer you have a clear goal: to get the ball in a series of very small holes, with fewer tries than anyone else. If you weren’t playing a game you’d achieve this goal the most efficient way possible: you’d walk right up to the hole and drop the ball in with your hand. What makes Golf a Game is that you willingly agree to stand really far away from each hole and swing at the ball with a club. Golf is engaging exactly because you along with the other players have agreed to make the work more challenging than it has any reasonable right to be.”
“The prevailing positive-psychology theory that we are the one and only source of our own happiness isn’t just a metaphor. It is a biological fact. Our brains and bodies produce neurochemicals and physiological sensations that we experience, in different quantities and combinations, as pleasure, enjoyment, satisfaction, ecstasy, contentment, love, and every other kind of happiness. And positive psychologists have shown that we don’t have to wait for life to trigger these chemicals and sensations for us. We can trigger them ourselves by… undertaking a difficult challenge… accomplishing something very hard for us…making someone laugh…or…being part of something larger than ourselves that has lasting significance beyond our individual lives.”
“Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”
Bernard Suits
Everyone’s a manager here. The job of managing includes planning, organizing, directing, staffing, and control, and everyone at Morning Star is expected to do all of these things.
Chris Rufer
It was a whole different business, nothing like I’d ever known, like night and day… Thirty seconds of play and I am on a whole new plane of being, all of my synapses wailing.
David Sudnow about playing the video game Breakout
“We have been conditioned to believe that the wrong things will make us lastingly happy.”
This is about a new way of thinking about economics.
The traditional economic model is just a model of an economy floating in empty space. The Doughnut economic model recognizes that the economy exists within the earth’s boundaries and is reliant on life and the resources that the planet provides.
If we exceed what the planet can sustainably provide and adsorb eventually we crash the whole system. As she says we take and use (sometimes we use just once) and throw it away. “There is no away”. Generations in the future are going to look back on us and ask did we know? Previous generations did not know and therefore could not have drawn a model like this but we know.
Kate Raworth describes her idea in the short video below.
Below is the structure of Doughnut Economics.
The outer rim of the doughnut symbolizes the outer edge of what we can take from our planet and return sustainably. The red fields illustrate by how much we are exceeding the earth’s ability to support us.
The inside of the doughnut is about fairness. It is about human needs for food, water, and other goods as well as education, equity, and political voice. The inner ring symbolizes the minimum boundary below which we should not let other humans fall. The red in these areas illustrates how much we are failing on this.
Doughnut Economics 7 ways to think like a 21 century economist:
1. Change the goal (it is not continual GDP growth)
2. See the big picture
3. Nuture Human Nature
4. Get savvy with systems
5. design to distribute
6. create to regenerate
7. Be agnostic about growth
This is about discarding the old very limiting economic reality that has been taught to so many students and is running so many of our governments, and imagining a new one with a new picture.
As Lisa Feldman Barrett said in her book 71/2 lessons about the brain, our ability to imagine different realities and believe in them so they become the new reality is our “super power”. “Superpowers work best when we know we have them”.
If we start to think of our economy as a doughnut and we know we are creating the economy then we are all economists and changing our reality based on our beliefs and actions.
About 1 hour in to the video above, Raworth talks about companies. She says she is not particularly interested in product packaging, or how the ingredients are sourced, or how the employees are paid, though that is important. She is interested in the company design. “How the company is designed matters. This will determine if the company is regenerative or not.” This is more of a systems thinking approach. In systems thinking the thing we get is shaped by the process we use to get there. In this thinking we should focus on setting up the system (company) properly instead of the details. This will make it more likely we achieve and even exceed our expectations.
5 design traits of a company:
1. A living Purpose bigger than themselves
2. The network your company lives in. What are the values of the network? Does it reinforce or pull from the purpose?
3. Governance Who is in the room when decisions are made?
4. How is the company owned? By a family, a VC capital group, financially motivated shareholders, or shareholders who love who you are, and share your purpose.
5. How is the company financed? Is finance in service to the purpose? By people or institutions who are committed to the same purpose and a fair return? Or just a maximum return?
Obviously there are a lot of similarities with Conscious Capitalism. A higher purpose, shareholders who care about and support the purpose, and a stakeholder view which includes the planetary ecosystem as even more than a stakeholder. In this model it is the ecosystem in which the economy lives and is dependent on.
Cities (Amsterdam and Brussels) and even some countries are beginning to play with the doughnut economic model. In a complex system a solution can not be put in place through central control. It needs to evolve through experimentation. It happens by variation, selection, and replication of the things that work. (Recognizing that what works in some cases may not work in others.) We can learn from each other.
For this reason they have set up this Doughnut Economics ACTION Lab for people to communicate what they are trying and how it is working.
