"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.
Room to Read
My partner, Chad, and I have been providing Room to Read, a non-profit organization, that is doing an outstanding job of bringing literacy and education to Southeast Asia and Africa with pro bono consulting services. However the chapter in Tokyo that we are supporting is such a dynamic and exciting group of people, we often find ourselves doing more than just consulting.
John Wood, the founder, left a very promising career at Microsoft to start this venture. I highly recommend reading his book, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World. If not only provides a template for how a non-profit could and should run, it also is a simply inspiring read.
We just came off a big event with John, here in Tokyo in which we were able to fund the building of multiple schools, several reading rooms, thousands of books and over 300 years worth of scholarships for young women in Asia and Africa.
The work Room to Read is doing doesn’t stop at increasing literacy and education levels, though. They are investing in the capacity for sustainability in the students and their countries and regions. Simply, as these children come of age they, by virtue of their education, bring with them greatly enhanced potential to reduce poverty, stabilize population, innovate sustainable food production and water use and land use practices as well as research and implement alternative fuel and energy generating plans.
All of that potential for less than a new car. Talk about Return on Investment.
Tags: capacity evolution, room to read, sustainability
We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us
Was reading the newspaper this morning when I came upon this article: On Climate, Symbols Can Overshadow Substance. It begins with a description of the “Earth Hour” campaign:
The idea was to get 2 million residents in Sydney to turn off all the lights in their homes for one hour. The campaign generated wide publicity, but the energy saved was small — the equivalent of taking about five cars off the city’s roads for a year.
Earth Hour, Earth Day and the Miss Earth beauty pageant — “saving the planet, one pageant at a time” — generate lots of publicity, but they also tend to prompt people and companies to choose what looks good over what works
Not what we would call a raging success. As Rod Williams states on “A Disgruntled Republican” blog:
We don’t need another Al Gore Earth Aid concert. We don’t need another self-indulgent celebrity showing us how much they care by flying their “green” car around the world so they can be seen driving “green.” We don’t need another company selling phony carbon offsets. Enough already of the “green washing.”
Another very interesting aspect of the article comes later:
While the idea that people who are emotionally committed can change their behavior in ways that help the planet seems appealing, a growing body of research suggests that this is not the way large-scale changes in behavior occur. The behavior of individuals, companies and nations is largely determined by structural factors, not personal choices.
“Some people react to ethical and environmental concerns, but a vast majority of people react to price,” Flomenhoft said. “The biggest effect on people’s behavior is price. When gas reaches $4 a gallon, everyone talks about hybrids.
“We are not going to solve this problem with voluntary measures — it is a problem of externalities,” [Borenstein] said. “It is true of pollution and the way we use oil. We address tailpipe emission problems by asking people to make sure they meet emission requirements — we actually check. We have found voluntary approaches don’t work when it comes to pollution.
Take a good look at the message of hopelessness in the above statements. To restate: people will only change when we force them to change. Behavior must be regulated, motivation must be extrinsic. Is there another way?
Here are several more open (and definitely loaded) questions. What would it take for us to live and work in eco-systemically coherent ways? What changes would we have to make in the ways we perceive our selves and our relationships with the eco-systems into which we interwoven?
Where are our individual and collective leverage points to catalyze a paradigm shift where a carrot and stick approach is no longer necessary and appropriate? How do we develop the intrinsic motivation to be sustainable and the wisdom to act effectively?
I have some ideas. How about you?
Tags: capacity evolution, global warming, leadership, sustainability
The Seven Transformations of Leadership
In a landmark 2005 article David Rooke and Bill Torbert outlined leadership stages as defined by the Leadership Development Framework. The framework is a list of the seven action logics and their characteristics. The action logics correspond to the Interkannections system in the following manner:
(X) Opportunist: Wins any way possible. Self-oriented; manipulative; “might makes right.”
(G) Diplomat: Avoids conflict. Wants to belong; obeys group norms; doesn’t rock the boat.
(I) Expert: Rules by logic and expertise. Uses hard data and force of opinion to gain consensus and buy-in.
(T) Achiever: Meets strategic goals. Promotes teamwork; juggles managerial duties and responds creatively to market demands to achieve goals.
(H) Individualist: Operates in unconventional ways. Ignores rules he/she regards as irrelevant. Recognizes value and is inclusive of multiple perspectives.
(A) Strategist: Generates organizational and personal change. Highly collaborative; weaves visions with pragmatic, timely initiatives; challenges existing assumptions.
(U) Alchemist: Generates social transformations (e.g., Nelson Mandela). Reinvent themselves, organizations and communities in historically significant ways.
These are stages of development world leaders and the guy and gal down the street pass through. For a great description of these stages in action in a business context I strongly suggest you download The Seven Transformations of Leadership from the Harvard Business Review website.
Check back for more on leadership stages soon!
Tags: capacity evolution, I-shaped people, leadership, leadership stages, leadership transformation, t-shaped people
People in Glass Houses…
…should throw stones-and lots of ‘em. Browsing Seth Godin’s blog I came upon this post about this sculpture:
It’s a clock, turned off, not ticking, showing no progress, encased in glass.
When you’re ready to make the leap, to commit, to make something happen, you break the glass. The sculpture is ruined. All you have is shards of broken glass. And a working clock. It’s alive and it’s changing and moving forward.
I liked this metaphor because it’s a lot like what happens in capacity evolution. Everything seems to be going fine and then-it isn’t. Suddenly (or slowly) you or your organization realizes that you’ve been living in a world encased in glass. It was a world you thought would never change. You thought you had it all figured out. Now, as you realize you really don’t, the glass case is shattered. There’s a rush of air, you breathe it in and then, you breathe out, ready for action, no longer prisoner to the illusion of stability and permanence that contained you. It’s new, exciting and frightening. Still, there’s no going back and, you don’t want to.
There’s so much more going on than you could ever have guessed. So many opportunities, so much to engage, understand, absorb.
For many of us this only happens once or twice in our adult lives. There’s potential for it to happen a lot more. It means a lot of broken glass, a lot of deep breaths and a lot of learning.
Have you pushed your self lately, tested your limitations and tapped on the glass holding you back. Let me know if you need a hammer.
Tags: capacity evolution, seth godin
Capacity Evolution?
To give you a sense of what I do, let me explain what we do at Interkannections
We are a consultancy dedicated to evolution of human and human system capacity to engage the world. It is not just what we do that matters but how we are as well. We explain this as the relationship between “Be-Do-Get.” How we are-how we see, understand and make meaning-in the world determines what we do. The results of our worldview and our actions are the results we get.
There is a lot of energy being directed toward and focus on helping people do better. Skill development, competency improvement and technology all help us do better. There are times, though, when what we need is not a new way to do the same thing differently. At times, we need to evolve a new way of seeing that allows us to overcome the limitations of our current ways of doing. The development of this new way of seeing is a result of deepening our capacity to see. This is what we do. We help people and human systems deepen their sense of their selves and deepen the way they interact-are interconnected-with the world around them.
Recently, we have realized that one valuable way we can be of service is to turn our practice and technologies to the development of sustainable ways of Be-ing and Do-ing. We-the greater human community-need to evolve the capacity to engage the world from a deep systemic understanding. This is not environmentalism, a focus of climate change, green business or LOHAS. It is the capacity to integrate the linear with the non-linear, to see the forest and the trees and come up with a way for the loggers, environmentalists, paper business, bird-watchers, bears, flowers, fish, toads and people living downstream to all benefit from their relationship to that forest. This requires a new way of seeing and thinking and doing. What enables this new way is our capacity to see, think and do.
Are you ready to change?
Tags: capacity building, capacity evolution, sustainability
What is your (food) stock investment strategy?
In this installment of the C+C News we look at food. This article originally published in the Wall Street Journal can also be found here. Hold onto that can of beans-it’s appreciating faster than pretty much any low risk savings options in the market. To quote:
Reality: Food prices are already rising here much faster than the returns you are likely to get from keeping your money in a bank or money-market fund. And there are very good reasons to believe prices on the shelves are about to start rising a lot faster.
Do the math. If you keep your standby cash in a money-market fund you’ll be lucky to get a 2.5% interest rate. Even the best one-year certificate of deposit you can find is only going to pay you about 4.1%.
The latest data show cereal prices rising by more than 8% a year. Both flour and rice are up more than 13%. Milk, cheese, bananas and even peanut butter: They’re all up by more than 10%. Eggs have rocketed up 30% in a year. Ground beef prices are up 4.8% and chicken by 5.4%.
What’s causing this chaotic rise? Commodity prices are on the rise because staples like corn (and the arable land used for other crops) are being diverted to fuel. However, the cost of making biofuels is still high, making them expensive. Oil prices continue to skyrocket making the shipping of just about everything exorbitant. The market responds by re-orienting itself around these price spikes (and the potentially big profits to be gleaned from the turbulence). Demand continues to rise (population increases, we all gotta eat) so prices follow suit.
Conventional linear thinking is not going to get us out of this wicked mess.
Tags: capacity evolution, complexity, food prices