Why Sustainable is not Enough

Think about it. Sustainable is getting by-enough to continue to living. It means defining, targeting and ensuring a minimum. Drop below that minimum and we die–either slowly or in spectacularly apocalyptic fashion.

Then there’s the oxymoronic issue of sustainable development. Development, as currently practiced, is a linear process based on targets for growth. The paradigm shaping this practice is competitive, linear and sees growth as something that can continue indefinitely. “Development”, in the sense defined above, is unsustainable. Nothing lives forever. That includes Redwoods, the American automobile industry and George Burns.

Sustainable development also implies doing the minimum in the development process to maintain conditions favorable to development. If you’re mining minerals in a third world country you don’t need to make your workers wealthy, you need to keep them minimally healthy and maintaining community and ecological health is well off the radar. You just need to keep them working or find more workers needy enough to take their places. Doing so sustains the development process. Donating profits to UNICEF or some other NPO/NGO to be “socially responsible” makes little difference.

So, sustainability, asks us to do the minimum. Certainly many of us could get by with much less. We really could lower the bar on “enough” without engendering any suffering for our selves and our families. And, from what I see, I think we should. However, can we not also do more, much more, to generate value, create an abundant wellness, a world (inner and outer) in which we can all flourish?

Wouldn’t it be more interesting, engaging and exciting to focus on creating value for all constituents in the value web?

What would that look like? What would you be doing? Where should you start, NOW?

 

Tags: csr, sustainability, sustainable development

Be Still

Another stirring reflection from Peter Norlin, Executive Director of the OD Network. This one stirs us to be still:

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here. 
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, 
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
                                                   -David Wagoner, “Lost.”

For those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re now moving toward a dark time-and I mean that literally. On the Winter Solstice we’ll awaken in darkness, and darkness will return more quickly than on any other day of the year. This year, it’s difficult for me not to experience this darkness as metaphoric. Every day brings more information about our descent into (what seems like) an economic underworld, and I find myself feeling more and more uncertain about what’s happening, what’s going to happen, and what I should be doing. I have to work myself hard not to allow darkness to infuse my thoughts about the future and to remind myself, as I did last month, that “this, too, shall pass.” I have to work hard not to feel lost.

That’s why Wagoner’s poem feels like such a lagniappe, a Cajun word meaning an unexpected, surprising gift. The general response in our culture-and certainly in myself-when feeling helpless and confused is to act, to do something, and to do it quickly. Perhaps I can quell the rising sense of my own inadequacy by responding to the injunction in the Nike advertisement: “Just do it!” That’s not what Wagoner’s forest asks for, though. In order for the forest to find us, and for us to be found, we have to stop hyperventilating and flailing about. When we don’t know where we are, we have to do something counterintuitive: we have to stop, quiet ourselves, and wait. That’s the only way we can finally meet-and find ourselves befriended by-that which we fear. The power of this poem is its message that if we do not take time to breathe and pay attention to what surrounds us, in the moment, we will unconsciously bypass the resources we need to find the pathway out of our confusion and anxiety.

Marv Weisbord and Sandra Janoff reinforce this message in the title of their newest book, Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There! It’s so easy in our work, as in many so-called helping professions, to over-function. To allow others’ anxiety to propel us to “do something,” or perhaps more dangerously, to allow our own anxiety to prevent us from suggesting to our customers that perhaps now is a time for a different kind of risk: the risk of not-doing. Perhaps it would be better to take time for careful thought, deliberate reflection, and evolving discernment, rather than to succumb to the seduction of precipitous action and risk its consequences. It seems to me that we’ve seen enough of the latter lately, everywhere we turn. I believe that one of our most valuable contributions as a profession is encouraging those whom we serve to watch, to listen, and to think. And then to let the forest find us.

 

 

Tags: David Wagoner, Marv Weisbord, od network, Peter Norlin, Sandra Janoff, Winter Solstice

Sustainable Performance Reviews

On the thread of performance reviews, it occurred to me that one key area in which sustainability is often not embedded in the organization is in the performance review.

Think about it, if your performance review is the demotivating debacle described in my previous post, in terms of valuing and respecting resources it is a barrier to building a sustainable organization. The workforce and even the executives are trapped in a Dilbert like world of double entendre, undiscussable issues and tragicomedy. This is the waste generating opposite of generating value, developing capacity for innovation & implementation and building resilience & responsiveness-let alone holding a space for people to be whole and develop presence.

So…what would sustainable performance reviews look like? In my thinking they would:

•  Inquire into the health of the employee. How are you doing in this organization? How is your manager / the organization doing for you? What do you do to take care of your self? How could your manager / the organization take better care of you?
• Have a clearly designed, defined and operable approach to sustainability. This should be done in a way that engages “the whole system” of internal and external stakeholders to help the organization and leaders see what needs to be done, who needs to do it and what competencies and capacities are necessary to make it happen at all levels of the organization.
• Make the employee a partner in sustaining the organization. What are you doing to sustain and grow this organization? How well is this organization helping you sustain your self and your family? What would it take for you and us to flourish?
• Set targets and goals that blend the following:
  • The corporate bottom line and the necessary efficiency and effectiveness to support it.
  • The employees needs and the necessary work/support, achievement, recognition & development to achieve it.
  • The values and principles that will allow both bottom lines to co-exist and grow.
  • The needs of other internal and external stakeholders that either affect the above or are affected by the above.
• Make goal/target setting and performance reviews something to look forward to. What would an engaging, appreciative, empowering and uplifting review look and feel like? Ask your self. Ask your friends. Ask your team. Ask your subordinates. Ask your mentors and leaders. 
• Be the change you all want to see.

Tags: be the change, capacity, Dilbert, generate value, goal setting, implementation, innovation, performance review, presence, resilience, responsiveness, sustainability, sustainable leadership

Performance Review

For some reason, in the last few months, I and my firm, Interkannections have been involved a lot with performance management and feedback issues.

Working with the leadership team of one company, we learned from them that most of them had never had, and presumably were not giving, positive performance reviews. They have a hard-driving culture and, it seems, that positive comments or reviews are seen as “soft” or not critical to the success of the business. After uncovering this issue they are now in the process of figuring out how to be more appreciative of their subordinates and each other.

Another group of senior managers gathered together and frankly admitted that they did not know what to evaluate their people on. They had globally imposed categories and competencies that resonated rather weakly with the local realities of their business. Furthermore they were at wits end regarding measurement. How, they sincerely questioned, are we supposed to evaluate intangibles like “commitment to success?”

Then I stumbled upon this article in the Wall Street Journal. Written by UCLA professor Samuel Culbert, the unambiguously titled article, “Get Rid of the Performance Review” makes some pretty good points:

Two People, Two Mindsets: There are books that could (and have) been written on this point. How many of us have been in the same different meeting with our colleagues? I’ve written at great length in this blog about I-shaped, T-shaped, H-shaped, etc. people. An important thing to remember is that each of these shapes sees the world very differently. Throw in national culture and personal values and it’s amazing we understand each other at all.

Performance Does Not Determine Pay: Very true. Performance is a small piece of a much larger and complex political, financial, market-driven and personally influenced puzzle. I can think of one team leader I worked with who was livid because, for the last two review sessions, his team had outperformed the other teams in his division yet there was no recognition of this in their pay or bonuses. His management team was unable (or unwilling) to justify the reason and-literally-just asked him to help them think of a good way to explain this inexplicable situation to his team.

Objectivity is Subjective: This is something a lot us still have to fully understand. Objectivity is a myth. Meaning and understanding are socially created. Data is based on how and what we choose to measure. Performance is a matter of opinion, priorities and, quite often, a fair amount of luck. Agreement on KPI’s help as long as the Two People, Two Mindsets dynamic doesn’t render the agreement nonsensical.

One Size Does Not Fit All: Competencies, Key Success Factors and Key Performance Indicators are useful but they are only as useful as far as they relate directly and meaningfully to individual behavior. Trying to shoehorn individual behavior into these categories can be disastrous. People don’t want to (and, I believe, can’t) be crammed into weighted matrices and a list of performance standards. These tools need to be integrated and resonant with individual contexts and roles.

Personal Development is Impeded: In performance reviews this is, unfortunately, highly likely. If you dread your review or leave it bitter, confused or underwhelmed it is a clear impediment to your development. We grow and development to fit our environment while constantly and creatively interacting with and changing it. That creative interaction is driven by a desire to be and become something personally meaningful and life-giving. For performance reviews to contribute to personal development they need to be resonant with that which is meaningful for the person being reviewed. 

Disruption to Teamwork: There is that famous line “There is no ‘I’ in team.” Yet in performance reviews we are often inclined to take as much credit for our team’s success as we credibly can. Conversely, we may also find ourselves trying to shift the burden for underperformance to that very same team. Imagine a series of performance reviews where each member of a team provides a different story to explain the same results and/or lack of results. These Rashomon style performance reviews are definitely not what anybody wants. 

Immorality of Justifying Corporate Improvement: For a corporation to be sustainable, minimally, it must fit well and do no harm to the environments in which it operates. To flourish, a corporation needs to be generating and adding value not just for shareholders but for it’s people and the eco-systems (economic & ecological) that support and sustain it. Performance reviews should, optimally, enhance and stimulate better performance in positive, value generating ways. Currently, most don’t and, often, do just the opposite.

The Cure to the Performance Review Blues: To remedy these issues Culbert recommends dialogues between superior and subordinate that focus on problem solving, mutual accountability and, ideally, multi-faceted value generation. He calls these Performance Previews. It is management’s job to inquire and help the employee build objectives, plans, targets and goals that enrich the individual, his/her team and division/function, the company as a whole and extra-company stakeholders as well. 

The manager and employee need to consider each other and function as a team, each supporting the other. Like many other issues we’re facing this is Easy to say. Hard to do. Making the shift takes courage, time and real sense of respect and compassion for the people you work with. The choice is, as always, ours to make. 

There is a way out of our suffering. Are we willing to make the leap of faith and take it?

 

Tags: H-shaped people, I-shaped people, key performance indicators, key success factors, motivation, performance reviews, Samuel Culbert, sustainability, t-shaped people

The Story of Stuff

Saw this awhile back. Wonderful animated narrative about how we create, sell, (often not wisely) use stuff. Great educational material. Thank you Annie Leonard!

The website is here: The Story of Stuff

 

 

Tags: Annie Leonard, recycling, story of stuff, sustainability, waste

Enlightened Capitalism Calls for Capacity Evolution

Great article over at worldchanging called: Enlightened Capitalism: Building a New Corporate Consciousness.

Rachel Botsman writes that for corporations to make the shift to new, truly sustainable ways of doing business they need to look at the best practices of companies like Timberland, Seventh Generation, Eileen Fisher, Patagonia and Stonyfield Farm. I would also add Burgerville in Portland OR to this list of sustainable business leaders.

She lists the following practices as key to making and maintaining the shift to sustainability:

• Abolishing the term or notion of “Corporate Social Responsibility”: Couldn’t agree more. The thinking behind CSR tends to create a separate culture of giving, donating and contributing to causes. It is often a band aid approach instead of a coherent, organization wide commitment to generating value.
• Shifting from linear to systems-based thinking: The world is neither linear nor solid. Everything is connected, constantly changing and affecting that around it. Markets are fluid and unpredictable. We, our communities and organizations are open systems. To understand them and their interactions requires systems thinking capacity and competence.
• Teaching employees new types of collaboration: Creativity and innovation emerge from the chaotic soup of interaction and interrelation. This requires unlikely and unconventional partnerships and communication. Co-opetition in place of competition.
• Showing respect for employees: Why, if everyone I speak with wants a Theory Y workplace, do we have so many Theory X organizations? People want empowering, life-enhancing relationships and work. Yet what we often create for each other are demotivating, controlling and dispiriting working conditions. Showing respect means finding a way to help employees live and work in fully engaged and healthy ways.
• Empowering employees by helping them to make a difference: Increased capacity for performance needs learning, development and sincere support. When people can see how to and actually do make a difference in or outside of work they grow in unpredictably wonderful ways. 
• Setting goals that challenge the imagination: No waste! Try that one on for size. 
• Using transparency to solve problems: It’s amazing how many problems remain problems simply because no one is willing to discuss them. Or, we just shut them out. Many problems are actually not problems at all. They’re dilemmas or polarities that need to be managed. Understanding that can free many of us from the dark traps our problem avoidance routines put us in.

Tags: Burgerville, capacity evolution, creativity, csr, Eileen Fisher, enlightened capitalism, innovation, Patagonia, Seventh Generation, Stonyfield Farm, sustainability, systems thinking, theory x, theory y