Nike, Creative Commons and Best Buy Building Collaboration

Interesting post at Worldchanging details an approach by these companies to open up their sustainability innovation using Green XChange:

Combining technology and the Creative Commons licensing structure, Green Xchange provides a platform where companies are able to issue licenses to other companies, allowing them to access patented research. The patent owners determine the terms for use, creating a contract that other interested parties accept before accessing the information. Patent holders can protect sensitive information by screening which types of companies may access it, and they can also set the cost for its use. The funds generated would theoretically provide a revenue stream to fund further research.

Like it. This is the kind of thinking and practice that can make sustainability sustainable. Now we need mindsets to follow practice. As they say at Worldchanging:

The main obstacle in persuading companies to share their valuable knowledge is fear…Green Xchange challenges companies to view them as something transferable, and potentially profitable when shared. 

…If Green Xchange succeeds in changing the way we think about transferring intellectual property and benefiting from shared ideas, it could usher us into a new realm of thinking of sustainability (and potentially other fields like medicine) as a truly collaborative endeavor.

Could not agree more. An abundant world awaits.

Collaboration is where we start unlocking our potential to solve the problems we’re facing at a level higher than the thinking that got us into them. Compliance and Conformity just are not sustainable. Cooperation, though good, is not going to be enough either.

Coherence, a step beyond Collaboration, is where it all comes together-we start being the change we want to see in the world. And if we can start to act in Constellations, our unfolding present and our children’s futures may really begin to shine, brilliantly.

Tags: Best Buy, Coherence, collaboration, Compliance, Conformity, Constellation, cooperation, Creative Commons, Green XChange, innovation, intellectual property, Nike, patents, Worldchanging

Six Levels of Sustainability: What You Be is What You Get (5)

“Sustainability” is not always sustainable. Simply, doing and describing what you do as sustainable does not make it so. For organizations (and us, personally!) to be sustainable in what we do, we have to be sustainable in who we are and how we see the world. This gives us our best shot at doing something that is actually going to get or generate sustainable results.  In the following series of six posts I will introduce the six levels of engaging in sustainability:  Compliance,  Conformity,  Cooperation, Collaboration, Coherence and Constellation.  We use these at Interkannections to help our clients clarify their current goals around sustainability and map out their paths for deepening their practice and impact..  We use these at Interkannections to help our clients clarify their current goals around sustainability and map out their paths for deepening their practice and impact.

Coherence is signified by an organization or reorganization around a clear sense of purpose and deeply embedded principles that promote sustainability beyond the scope of simply doing business in the conventional sense. The organization and its people begin to fulfill an intentionally larger role in the communities and ecosystems in which they operate.

Coherence

• Sustainability is generated from clearly articulated and realized principles and purpose.
• Example sustainability activities: Intentional long-term and multi-win relationships with suppliers that connect with developing and implementing community enhancement programs internally and with community stakeholders while creating and enacting related business practices that create zero waste and actually restore land and stream quality that significantly lowers risk and increases revenue and value for the business, suppliers and local communities.
• Being at Coherence is striving to be the change you want to see in the world while being successful.
• What we see at this level is a multitude of business opportunities and potential through engagement with the value web.
• What we are doing is “walking” our sustainable “talk” by leveraging value web relationships to generate multi-win, interconnected value as the example activities cited above demonstrates.
• What we get from Coherence is excellent risk management, long-term stability through a healthier, more robust relationship with the world.
• Remaining at Coherence has little in the way of negative consequences unless the culture becomes stagnant, insular or arrogant.. As the company evolves it is highly likely that opportunities to begin doing Constellation level business will appear. To seize these opportunities the role of proactive leadership throughout the organization, high levels of awareness, communication, innovation and resilience are necessary.

When we think of companies at this level, Burgerville, a Portland, Oregon area quick service restaurant chain comes to mind. Their mission is simple: To serve with love.  Their inter-relationship with the communities and market in which they operate is complex. In terms of engagement with the value web they are actively generating positive, clearly visible interconnected returns in nearly all of the nodes. They don’t so much have suppliers as they have deep, mutually enriching, value generating relationships. More on Burgerville coming soon.

Tags: Burgerville, Coherence, collaboration, Compliance, Conformity, Constellation, cooperation, innovation, Interkannections, Oregon, Portland, principles, purpose, resilience, risk management, sustainability, walking the talk, zero waste

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

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

Sustainable Leadership: Innovate & Implement

Innovation & Implementation is where the rubber hits the road. This is where your desire, commitment, accountability and discipline are put to the test. Innovation & Implementation is all about getting others to become interested in and, in some way, buy what it is you’re selling.

Whether you want people’s money, time, effort, simple acceptance or fervent support they must find a way-in their own way-to connect with the quality of your work. The quality of what you and your people come up with here is closely interwoven with:

• The quality of your individual collective Presence
• Your ability to integrate Pattern & Practice
• How you choose to Generate Value
• The degree to which you can generate No Waste

Tags: innovation, leadership, sustainability, sustainable leadership

The Real Work Begins

The election of Obama is an opportunity for those of us with the courage, vision, accountability and commitment to start the Real Work. That is the work of changing the way we think about our selves, each other and the way we see and act in “the world”–A world that lies not outside of us but within and around us.

We permeate each other; life is inextricably connected and dependent on all other life. We must know this deeply and live it authentically.

And as we do…

We will create new economic models that profit from leveraging eco-logical principles. Why? Because these principles are the bottom line principles of exchange, growth, development and change. You want sustainable economy? Go learn from the mountains.

We will emerge new organizational models that do not rely on boxes & arrows, gears and oil.

The new models are organic, self-organizing, fluid & flexible, dispersed yet deeply connected by faith. Faith in our selves, faith in the need to do well by helping others be well, faith that we are co-creating a meaningful future in which our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will flourish, faith in simple acts of kindness and compassion, faith in that which connects and binds us, draws us together.

We will transform from consumers to creators of value, community and wellth.

We will innovate new technologies that actually do no harm, or do as little harm as possible–a six sigma of ahimsa will be born. 

We will live with the awesome power of wind & sun, rain & revel in the joy of compost. Waste will dwindle and, in many places, disappear. C’mon, how many kinds of toothbrush do we really need?

We will do all of this. We’ve already started. We’ve missed you and we need your help.

Please come join us. We are not waiting anymore.

Tags: innovation, obama, self-organizing, six sigma, sustainability

Innovation & Climate Change Pt. 4: Alex Evans

As noted in previous posts, Alex Evans and others spoke on inter-related elements of the implications and science surrounding global warming and climate change. Present only for the first half, my impressions are recorded below:

Alex Evans ended his presentation with the pronouncement that he doesn’t believe that the G8 leaders can fully grasp, develop and relate the climate change story in a meaningful way. This begs the question, “OK, well then, who does get it?

Actually, it’s not so much “getting it” as it is the storytelling aspect that is eluding our leaders. Al Gore, certainly has no trouble getting his point across in An Inconvenient Truth. Yet his story is one that falls well short of relating the inter-related complexities of food production & distribution, food availability, energy availability, climate change. 

I think the problem is choosing what story to tell. Where do you begin? Where do you end? What do you leave out? What do you include? Evans pointed out that without shared awareness acting as an attractor for attention it’s very difficult to craft a moving national or global narrative. Also, with little causal fuel for creating a sense of urgency, getting the public or a leader’s constituency to support sustained action (and sacrifice) regarding climate change is also quite a challenge.

What Evans said we needed was a “shared OS” and “shared platforms” that would allow multilateral functionalism and cooperation on climate change issues. I would add that the OS and platforms should be “open source” to allow development of shared applications that can be localized and run “glocally.”

With the above architecture in place Evans implied that it then becomes more plausible to

• create systems level measurement and detection tools
• implement strategically targeted and transparent financial interventions
• refocus trade policy along systemically apparent needs and dynamics
• develop useful risk management and assistance programs

Tags: climate change, innovation, sustainability, United Nations University

Innovation & Climate Change Part 4: David Sanborn Scott

As noted in previous posts, Dr. Scott and others spoke on inter-related elements of the implications and science surrounding global warming and climate change. Present only for the first half, my impressions are recorded below:

David Sanborn Scott presented an elegantly systemic overview of the patterns which underlie energy consumption (reproduced below). The overview identifies “roles” as opposed to the “things” that fill those roles during different eras of energy use. 

One of the points he made is that policy makers don’t understand the “energy architecture”, the structures and patterns that undergird energy issues. They tend to focus on “things” and outputs without understanding the relationships between those things and outputs. This creates debacles like the Kyoto Protocol and the emissions trading ridiculousness that arose with it.

Instead, what policy makers and energy producers should be looking is something like Dr. Scott’s model:

(services) – (service technologies) – (currencies) – (transformer technologies) – (sources)

This model begins not with the source of the energy (coal fields, gas deposits, crude oil) but with the service that source enables (for example, heating). To provide heat there must be heat providing technologies as well as “currencies” that power the service technologies. These currencies are what we generally call “fuel” such as coal, natural gas, and gasoline. The transformer technologies are things like coal mines and mining tools and oil refining technology. 

Dr. Scott went on to explain why hydrogen is a compelling choice for a “new” major currency. It can be transformed using a number of currencies as sources including sunlight, wind, natural gas and uranium. In terms of sustainability, then, Dr. Scott argued that renewable resources are neither wholly necessary or sufficient. For example trees are renewable but if we switched to wood as a primary currency we would still have emissions problems. destroy a key CO2 absorbing mechanism and run out of wood in pretty short order.

What is necessary, he claimed, is a diversity of sources that yield currencies (like hydrogen) that do not destabilize the atmosphere and climatic conditions. In broader terms, the currency when transformed to a service needs to have a minimal intrusion on eco-systemic flows. 

Dr. Scott concluded with how hydrogen could assume a greater role including powering vehicles like cars, submarines and planes as well as generating power for other electrically powered services.

What was really compelling about Dr. Scott’s presentation was the way in which he re-framed the energy consumption process and how, when we begin to see it as a system, we can begin to see where we can apply leverage to generate meaningful change and what is required to enable that change. 

Also, he convinced me that hydrogen may very well have an important role to play in reducing emissions and stabilizing supply and demand issues.

Dr. Scott left us with this message concerning the role hydrogen can play in affecting climate change:

The needs are critical.

• The fundamental ideas, simple.

• The lack of understanding, stupefying.

• The dithering, scary.

• The promise, brilliant.

Tags: climate change, hydrogen, innovation, sustainability, United Nations University

Innovation & Entrepreneurism in the Time of Climate Change Part 2: Jim Hansen

CLIMATE CHANGE – Messages to the G8 from UNUChannel on Vimeo.

The above video is from the United Nations University symposium entitled: “Innovation & Entrepreneurism in the Time of Climate Change.”

As noted in the previous post, Hansen and others spoke on inter-related elements of the implications and science surrounding global warming and climate change. Present only for the first half, my impressions are recorded below:

In general, what I found most interesting and disturbing is the panelists agreement that there is no shared understanding of the problem much less any coherence on what needs to be done.

Central to Hansen’s presentation is that there is an absence of strategy addressing climate change and how to engage it. His approach is, first, to set a limit of 350 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. He bases this calculation on paleo-historical evidence that indicate this has been the relatively stable level of CO2 in the atmosphere during times in which the Earth’s climate has most resembled the climate we, as humans, have been enjoying for the last few thousand years. In order to realize the above limit, Hansen recommends 

1. Post fossil fuel thinking + behavior: Phase out emissions from coal plants and stop building more. Institute carbon taxes which are returned to people in the form benefits for reducing carbon emissions and using and developing alternatives to carbon producing technologies (a “cap-dividend” model). Create “low loss” electric grids for the dispersion of energy. His letter to Prime Minister Fukuda that outlines this strategy can be dowloaded here.
2. Changes in agricultural practices (not elaborated)
3. Reforestation + soil stewardship (not elaborated)

Hansen, I believe, wisely is pushing for action closer to the roots of climate change dynamics. Pushing for an end to emissions from coal burning is a powerful and very challenging goal as both China and India are revving up their infrastructures through-you guessed it-coal burning power plants.

Climate change and the human influenced dynamics responsible for it are a lot like kudzu. Topical spraying and hacking away at the edges of the plant do little to stop it from spreading. We’ve got to find the roots and stop proliferation there. In this case the roots are us. We’ve got to change or change will change us. Guaranteed.

Tags: climate change, entrepreneurism, G8, global warming, innovation, sustainability