Sustainable Leadership-Generating Value

In this third post on the practices of Sustainable Leadership, I want to look at the process of Generating Value.

Value is generated when resources are brought together. The quality of the value created depends on the quality of the resources and the quality of the space and dynamics of the combination process. Sustainability depends on what those resources are, how their use affects the systems around them and, simply, on what value is being generated.

Generating value is a key function of leadership. The quality of the value we generate as leaders depends greatly on the quality of our practice. If we are talking about people, we want to attract the RIGHT people to help us be as effective as possible.

Who we attract depends on who we are: our presence, perceptiveness and the power of our vision and conviction.

What we can do depends on who is with us and what we, together, can create. If we are talking about creating green technological innovation we need people who not only have the knowledge, skills and experience but also share a similar sense of mission and belief in what is being created. The “green-ness” of the innovation is related to how deeply we delve into the value generating process.

Quick question: how “green” is innovation when the materials and processes to create it are damaging to the people and eco-systems involved in the creation?

It is no longer enough to be an inspirational, visionary leader. It is no longer enough to simply foster and generate creativity and innovation. It is no longer enough to be wildly profitable. It is no longer enough to simply be successful. It is no longer enough to live comfortably and provide solely for our families. 

Sustainable leadership is about quality: the quality of inspiration and vision we create. The quality of creativity and innovation we foster. The quality of our success. The quality of comfort for all that we touch and embrace. 

Look around you, what value are you generating and what is the quality of that value? Is it sustainable? How do you know? 

Tags: green innovation, green technology, presence, sustainable leadership, value generation

Sustainable Leadership: Pattern Yields Practice

In an earlier post I wrote:

Pattern Yields Practice: From the application of Presence comes an understanding of the patterns or dynamics of a particular field or area of endeavor. The more refined, expansive and deep your Presence, the greater the capacity to perceive pattern. 

In reality, what does this mean and how does it work?

The process comes from Permaculture. It is one of the Key Success Factors for creating a self-sustaining, ecologically coherent and high yield agricultural system. The concept is simple: the better we understand the ecological system we are disturbing with our practice, the better we can align our practice with that system. The greater the alignment and coherence with the system, the lower our material, labor and energy costs and the more sustainable our yield. 

If we move in the opposite direction of misalignment and incoherence we get higher material, labor and energy costs coupled with potentially higher (but unsustainable) yields. If we look at current large-scale agricultural practices they clearly tend toward misalignment and incoherence. The language and practice of large-scale agriculture is that of war and escalation of conflict with the very eco-systems that support us. Diminishing returns are a self-evident result of these practices.

Large-scale energy harvesting and the exergy generation (combustion, electricity generation) have followed a similar path of misalignment and incoherence. In order to live we are destroying, dirtying and damaging the eco-systems that have supported us for tens of thousands of years. Simply, as these eco-systems unravel, we are presented with patterns (global warming) that touch us and (temporarily) move us to change our practice. The key is that we are reacting in fear to patterns after they emerge as opposed to proactively seeking out and observing patterns as they emerge or as they have been emerging and subsiding for thousands of years.

Applying Pattern Yields Practice to business means fundamentally altering the way we perceive our organizations, our selves as constituents of these organizations, and the way we and our organizations choose to behave in the market, in the communities we inhabit and in the web of life that allows us to flourish. Simply it means, expanding our circles of stakeholders to include not just people but the eco-systems in which we do business and in which we, as people, live. 

The benefits? Less material, labor and energy costs, less fear and anger, less unhealthy, unhappy employees, and a more stable, strong, flexible and sustainable business model.

Applying Pattern Yields to your Self as community member and leader means creating the space and time to:

1. Observe and reflect upon the way you see the world around you.
   1. What habits of thinking and perception do you have?
   2. What patterns of behavior do you have?
2. Observe and reflect on the world around you, specifically:
   1. What patterns do you see (for example: rain, diversity of people, plants & animals, water flow)
   2. What patterns do these patterns link to?
   3. What larger patterns are these patterns a part of?
3. How are you related to and affected by these patterns?
4. How do you and other members of your community affect these patterns?
5. What meaning is to be made from these interactions?
6. To live in a more eco-systemically coherent manner (saving money, energy & time) what needs to change?
7. How will these changes affect you and the patterns you’ve observed?
8. What are you going to change–starting NOW?

Easy? Absolutely not.

Essential? I suppose that depends on whether you want to be part of the solution or continue being part of the problem.

Tags: global warming, leadership, permaculture, sustainability, sustainable leadership

Wild Solace

Peter Norlin, the Executive Director of the OD Network, recently sent out this message:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

                                                                        –Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things.”

We’ve had a beautiful summer here in Michigan, and I’ve been reminding myself yet again why I’m so glad to be here, and not in Chicago, Nashville, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Killeen, Texas, or Kerkrade, The Netherlands-all places I once lived. Though I enjoyed every one of those places, it’s good to be home again. I grew up in Michigan, but for many years my life and work seemed destined to unfold in other places, and I felt pleased that it did. But gradually I began to notice the tug of psychogeography (the emotional phenomenon connecting us personally, deeply - and inexplicably - to a particular place), and I knew I needed to go “home” to a less urban place, with more trees and grass, and to the peace of wild things.

This poem has always been one of my favorites, and I find that it sings a different song, and in a different language, from last month’s poem, “we are running.” One of the reasons we run is to escape the anxiety that grips us when we think of a future filled with loss and grief. How do we tolerate the truth of an inevitable ending, and how, as human beings, do we cope with our collective responsibility for our larger role on this planet? Mercifully, the natural world is much more than a stockpile of physical resources. In its fullness-too often reduced to the flat, generic word, “environment”-it reminds us we are each a part of something much larger and infinitely more mysterious. And if we could find and nestle into our place, our home, in this “web of life” (Fritjof Capra’s phrase), we might also find an antidote to despair.

To “rest in the grace of the world,” and to taste its freedom, we must intentionally stand for its future. And to do that as OD consultants, we must step in from our necessary, chosen position on the margin to commit ourselves to defending the natural world. We’re in a unique position, since most of us are students of both systems and complexity, and the natural world is perhaps the most obvious - and fragile - example of a complex adaptive system. For many people, “doing something” about our environmental challenges-global warming, resource depletion, competition for habitat-means a call to advocacy. And thank goodness. But as a profession we can also “do something” by helping people to stop running in circles. Help them to ask the right questions. And help them to untangle the trapped world’s web of remaining choices so that they might see what can be saved. As experts in human systems and human process, I believe we can do this. And if we ever seek solace in a loon’s call, or in a forest’s majesty, or in the sound of waves lapping on a sandy shore, I believe we must.

Thank you Peter. Beautiful words. A compelling Imperative. What sustains?

Tags: Organization Development, sustainability, wilderness

Sustainable Leadership: Presence

Presence is a constellation on a number of practices. Building presence means evolving your capacities to perceive. To do this means an evolution of:

• Action Logic: This means increasing our capacity to perceive and deal with the complexities facing us as we try and maintain work / family / personal / practice balances. Managing and transforming dilemmas depends on the capacity to see through and beyond the horns of the bull facing us.
• State Engagement: Through meditation, aikido, yoga and a host of other practices we can deepen our sense of that which grounds and connects us to our selves, others and the eco-systems into which we are interwoven. Compassion springs from this engagement as does our access to intuition, creativity and transcendence of the daily grind rat race prison of helplessness we often find our selves within.
• Action Learning: This is the process of doing, reflecting, learning, and doing it all over again. In a sense, we often do this without conscious consideration. The Action Learning process helps us bring our developmental practice to a clear and explicit place in our lives and those whom with we engage.
• Character Assessment: Assessments like the DISC, MBTI, LSI, etc… help us see where our preferences, tendencies, habits are in terms of engaging others. They help us see our strengths as well as how we limit our selves by relying on those strengths. At some point, through the insight gained from Action Logic evolution and State Engagement it is possible to create a Presence that extends beyond the limitations of character.
• Group Resonance: Learning how to engage fully with others and create elevated learning and creative ba is the practice of understanding and being able to generate group resonance. The tricky thing is the harder we try to create resonant or peak experiences the less likely it is to achieve them. 

Next up: Pattern Yields Practice

Tags: action learning, action logic, leadership, sustainability

Evolving Sustainable Leadership-Engaging the Core

In my previous post on Evolving Sustainable Leadership we looked at some of the technologies through which leaders can deepen their practice to become more fully engaged with their selves and the people and world around them.

The question I frequently get, though, is what can we do deepen our practice on a daily basis?

The following process I consider to be the core means through which leaders can sharpen, deepen and expand their capacity to live, work and lead sustainably:

Presence: Presence in the form of awareness and perspective forms the foundation for action. The greater your presence, the deeper your capacity for action.

Pattern Yields Practice: From the application of Presence comes an understanding of the patterns or dynamics of a particular field or area of endeavor. The more refined, expansive and deep your Presence, the greater the capacity to perceive pattern. From the understanding of pattern action arises to fit coherently with systemic needs.

Generate Value: Generation of Value is the gathering together of necessary elements and resources for a particular project or endeavor. The “shopping list” is generated from the Key Success Factors for a particular practice in a particular field. Resources take many forms including tangibles like materials for technology creation to intangibles like know-how, networks & relationships.

No Waste: No Waste means what it says and says what it does. On a tangible level it could mean looking for and implementing lifecycle oriented solutions that incorporate technology into the eco-systems into which it will be introduced. Intangibly it is about integrity: matching action with words and espoused values: being the change we want to see in the world.

Innovate & Implement: Implementation of plan. Marketing of concept, service, product. Do-ing, execution. Walking the talk. Digging into the earth, planting seeds, getting technology to market in sustainably, eco-centric ways.

Resilience & Responsiveness: Stewardship, support, service, maintenance & improvement. Building and maintaining flexibility. Everything changes. At the core of eco-centric, sustainable action is the heart of flexibility and the perceptive wisdom to respond with change.

Tags: capacity building, sustainability, sustainable leadership

Sustainable Leadership: We do as we do

I hear many leaders (from CEO’s to team leaders) talking about driving change, driving the business, driving results.

The question that continually comes to mind when I hear these phrases is: Where?

Clear targets exist, clear goals have been set. This I get. 

What I want to know and, what I believe, we should all be asking is, where is all of this effort, energy and passion taking us? There’s no doubt we’re driving, we’re firing on all cylinders, pedal to the metal, red-lining and leading the pack. But where are we going?

As we continue to drive and thrive on our short term gains take the time as CEO, Senior Director, Manager or Team Leader to ask your people: Where are we going? How do you know? Do they know?

As you continue to ponder, expand your scope: Where are you taking the rest of us? As you, your team, function, business unit, organization speed on ahead,

Where are you taking the communities in which you work and live?

Where are you taking the fish, birds toads and bears?

Where are you taking your children?

We do as we do. We go where we are going. 

Tags: strategic planning, sustainability, sustainable leadership