"If you're in a bad situation, don't worry, it'll change. If you're in a good situation, don't worry, it'll change."
-- John A. Simone Jr.
Sustainability: Five Stages of Engagement
Ok, it’s time to take the Stage of Engagement challenge. Where do you rate your self, your organization, community, government and other institutions with which you are involved. Don’t feel like any of the categories below hit the nail on the head? Suggest a new one. Find one that fits? Let us know. Have fun!
- Compliance: We do what we have to do until no one is watching. Rules are made to be broken. Things aren’t that bad for me/us at the moment, so why worry? This green, sustainability clap trap is killing business-let’s make money!
- Conformity: We need to become more sustainable because that’s what the media and experts say. Look at what other people and organizations are doing. We’d better fall in line. “They” say its the right thing to do.
- Co-operation: We have to do what is right. I/We know what’s right so follow us! We must fight poverty/global warming/hunger/whaling/AIDS, etc. This is a good cause and look at the way they manage their donations. We need to strategically support causes that meet our criteria for support. We’ve set aside this amount of money to spend on sustainable/socially responsible/green causes so let’s analyze what is the best way to invest our funds.
- Coherence: We have to re-organize, re-design, re-engineer the way we live/operate do business. We have to organize around socially responsible/sustainable principles and act with integrity and coherence around these principles. Sustainably incoherent action is intolerable and makes no sense. Half-way, half-baked sustainable is not sustainable.
- Constellation: Isolated action is not enough. Issues are systemic with multiple causes and feedback loops. The only way out of this mess is create constellations of sustainable/social responsible thinking and action that act to deeply influence embedded system dynamics. If you want to fight poverty you must simultaneously target poverty, population, local and global economic dynamics, individual and cultural mindsets, education, governmental policy and corporate resource allocation…to name a few.
So at what stage are you? Your company? Your community?
Tags: csr, sustainability
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[…] the only way out of this cycle is to move as individuals, communities and organizations toward Coherence. At that stage of engagement we begin to re-design, re-organize and re-create from eco-centric, […]