- Blue-Green: The True Color of Money?
- Is sustainability serving the wrong master?
- Finding Your Genetic Groove
- Do you believe in life BEFORE death?
- Work for Human Beings
- Living System or Frankencompany?
- Talk to the Machine
- The Key to Sustainability
- Scientists Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman in supercool music videos
- Talkin' 'bout a revolution
The Key to Sustainability
Posted by Michelle Holliday on 10 Jan 2010
My company's work is based on a view of organizations as living systems. Why is this important? It's the key to sustainability, in every sense of the word.
For humanity, and even for most organizations, the challenges we face are too complex and too urgent to solve with individual intellect alone. What is needed is the wisdom and speed of self-organizing collective intelligence in support of individual intellect and initiative. Working, thinking and reacting collectively is a hallmark of living systems -- consider the speed with which the individual cells of your body self-organize to react collaboratively to an injury or an invading virus. The survival of our organizations -- and, more importantly, of humanity -- demands that we learn to understand and work deliberately with this powerful capability that comes with being alive.
But if self-organizing collective intelligence comes naturally, why do we have to work to understand and apply it? Because during the Modern Era, we've focused on honing the skill of thinking and acting individually in order to create the vast diversity that is today's human experience. Nature loves diversity. But at some point, that diversity must be integrated into the whole, or the entire ecosystem becomes compromised.
For humanity, that time is now. The task for us in the emerging era is to participate consciously in the full pattern of living systems: that of (1) divergent individual parts (2) working interdependently (3) within a convergent, unbroken whole, (4) powered by the creative, connective, integrative force of life (which may be thought of as the human spirit in our communities and organizations). In expanding our view beyond the role of the divergent individual, we can recognize the vast opportunities to connect and collaborate. We can open our perception to the will and wisdom of the whole. And most of all, we can create the necessary conditions to engage the human spirit, with all its creative, integrative power.
The good news is that there is no compromise needed, no sacrifice of our individuality. Nature will always love diversity. In working with the full pattern of living systems, we find psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of “flow,” as our individual choices are infused with wisdom, meaning and contribution.
What could be more important than that?
The challenge is that we must question everything we believe about the goals and meaning of life and, in particular, of our economic lives. The problems we face are a result of today's dominant guiding story, which tells us (1) that we are all separate from each other and from nature, (2) that the universe, including our organizations, operates like a machine, and (3) that we exist primarily to compete and consume. The actions that seem logical and inevitable according to this story have proven to be unsustainable. And only with a new guiding story will we be able to conceive of a full set of economic behaviors that are at once "logical and inevitable" and sustainable.
Introducing a new story won't be easy. As I say in my book, "even with a full appreciation of the Living Systems Model, the idea of economic entities as machines is so strongly and subtly present in our society that we need to be quite deliberate in adding a layer of living tissue to the bare skeleton that is the predominant metaphor."
One powerful way to question and evolve our assumptions is through conversation. This is why my hope for 2010 is to host a series of such conversations, both online and offline. Stay tuned!
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michelle Holliday has 20 years’ experience in brand strategy, with particular expertise in authentic marketing. She founded Cambium after observing that the predominant organizational concepts and ways of working are neither optimal nor sustainable. And she is driven by the desire to help usher in an expanded set of beliefs and practices based on a view of organizations as living systems. [Read more]
An excellent post.
However, the job design would be extremely important here -- not the general 'conforming' type of jobs which would basically rule out collaboration and creative thinking.
Thanks for your comment, Dibyendu. And I completely agree with the point you make. The trend that I see is toward automating all such "conforming" jobs (as you call them) -- those jobs that are not able to engage the passion of the people doing them. In other words, they do not contribute to engaging the *life* that we bring to our work.
Great blog post. I am interested in what leaders need to facilitiate a sustainable organization. What are your thoughts about how the creative spirit comes into play in the work place, and how leaders can nurtures that for themselves and teams, organizations they lead? You mentioned: "...powered by the creative, connective, integrative force of life (which may be thought of as the human spirit in our communities and organizations)" above. Have you thought about how that plays out for leaders to be most effective? Love to hear your thoughts? Thanks.
Hi Michelle,
I just joined the Collective Intelligence group because I am currently writing a book on inspired collective intelligence. To John's point, a sustainable ecosystem does not experience leadership in the form we usually think about it. There is no top down. Leadership becomes the ability to trigger the best natural impulses in other people...in contrast to demagoguery: sending signals that trigger the worst instincts of others. This form of leadership exists everywhere in any social system. People who are naturals at signaling it can be identified, and they can become a leadership community of practice which is then broadened into the organization or any other social system.
Thanks very much for your great comment/question, John, and my apologies for such a long delay in responding. How can leaders nurture and facilitate the role of the creative human spirit? I believe that the key is two things. First, they must recognize it, acknowledge it. And then they must create the fertile conditions for it to do its thing.
To understand what those fertile conditions are, I spent a year researching the patterns of thriving biological systems. I also studied the patterns of thriving organizations. And I found that it's the same four-part pattern. (1) There are individual parts (cells, trees, ants, people), the more diverse or divergent the better. (2) There is an emergent whole (your body, a forest, an ant colony, an organization), the more convergent the better (by this, I mean that the level of the whole has characteristics of its own, and those remain recognizable and consistent even as the parts change over time). (3) There is a network of relationship connecting the system internally and externally; the more open and free-flowing the relationships, the better. (4) In biology, we talk about a "self-integrating property": by itself, all that divergence is integrated into a convergent, emergent whole in dynamic relationship with itself and the outside world in an ongoing and continuously self-recreating process. To me, that is the spark or spirit of life, the animating, creative essence of living systems. Its nature is generative and connective. It can't be managed, only given the proper conditions to flourish.
So as leaders, our focus must be on enabling the first three conditions. We must encourage as much life-enhancing divergence as possible among the people within our organizations. But that divergence must be in service to a convergent purpose, typically a meaningful, life-enhancing contribution to a customer or project. And we must enable open and free-flowing relationship and responsiveness, both internally and externally.
This formula is the focus of my company's work. We guide our clients in applying what we call The Engagement Competency Model -- 9 competencies (3 sets of 3) needed to engage the life within the system. I'd be happy to give you more details, if you'd like.
One final note. I started by saying that the leader's first step is to recognize and acknowledge the role and presence of life within the organization. I find that this can't be overemphasized. Today's dominant guiding story about ourselves and our organizations is that it's all one big machine. And the organizational leader is the chief engineer. Much of the focus on employee engagement and customer engagement these days is still very superficial and manipulative, continuing to apply a machine metaphor. And somehow we sense that and it's a limiting factor. My feeling is that a critical step toward sustainability will be more conversation about what it means to be human and alive and at work in the world. Do we exist to compete and consume, to maximize profit for shareholders? Or to connect and co-create, to make life-enhancing contributions? And how would our attitudes and behaviors change if we fully adopted that second set of objectives?
Thanks for your comment, Lew. I wonder how the perspectives you've shared here fit with my recent response to John -- that the leader's role is to create fertile conditions, with recognition that life can't be managed but it can be hosted and nurtured. I also wonder if more people might demonstrate the natural ability you mentioned if our guiding story told us all that this was the most appropriate behavior. What do you think?
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