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