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Community: Education's Vessel By August Jaccaci Our ideal intention is that community becomes the vessel in which healthy evolution in support of life occurs. As nature provides the context for the integration and interaction of all life, community provides the context for human integration and organization. In that sense, community can become the enabler of almost everything that is desirable for successful conscious planetary evolution. On the continuum between individuals and the planet, we have decided to place the fulcrum at communities. Community is another name for the multiple relationships that make life work. In any domain or area of enterprise, the quality of creative community determines the quality of productivity, profitability, and sustainability. This need for effective community is as important within nonprofit enterprises, such as cities and towns and Internet groups, as it is within for-profit enterprises that emphasize internal teamwork and strong external relationships with suppliers and customers. Community in this moment in human evolution needs to be redefined as an ideal, a goal, a joint project consciously entered into by all its members, all life. In our definition of community, we can take our guiding ideal intentions of evolution, life, community, and love and use them as part of the process of redefining community. Traditional indigenous cultures always had, and now have, all things as their relations in equal respect and gratitude. They consider humans to be brothers and sisters to all creation in a mutually supportive family that we call nature. That interrelatedness with each other within nature and that mutual support are part of our redefinition of community. The call to community has to do with reuniting ourselves with nature and each other. It has to do with reawakening to our place in the web of life – the web of eternal love – in a gracious, humble, and grateful way. In earth’s environment, we are rapidly approaching an all-win or all-lose situation with respect to the viability of all species, humankind included. Contemporary writing about ecological issues lately indicates that we are heading toward a dire situation. In The Diversity of Life, Edward O. Wilson (1992) details his conclusion that we are now in one of the great eras of extinction of entire species in our planet’s history. Holistic all-win well-being is the evermore apparent necessity for sustainable planetary life. And holistic well-being is both the definition and the outcome of conscious, creative, collaborative, compassionate community. An excellent example of C4 community is the Findhorn community in the north of Scotland. Since its spiritual inception and its miraculous stories of growth of plants in concert with the spirits of nature, Findhorn has inspired and educated a whole generation of social inventors and social entrepreneurs. Their communities and contributions and businesses have shown extraordinary earth-healing profitability both financially and spirituality. Findhorn is really a graduate school of emerging global goodness, conscious evolution, and collaborative alliances. Collaborative alliances that make a profitable union from differences and different gifts are the new winning strategy in the contemporary global culture. We’ve learned the importance of collaboration and cooperation in everything from the disarming of nuclear weapons to the care of the world’s fisheries and forests. Conservation and a host of other challenges are, of necessity, topics and initiatives that require multinational cooperation and collaboration. The challenge before all of humanity right now is that of balancing and harmonizing earth’s generativity, our well-being, and the use of our common wealth. The challenge of creating communities that redefine prosperity and profit in a way that supports all life is a tremendous need in the work of planetary planning. It is time to search for the ideal intention that community is truly the only “profit” worth creating in today’s world and that we are the social entrepreneurs who can generate that profit. |
Articles
Love and the Nature of Being,
Reflected in the Fragments of Empedocles
“…the direct, total awareness, from the
inside, so to say, of Love as the primary
and fundamental cosmic fact.”
- The Doors of Perception,
Aldous Huxley (1954)
People continue to be drawn to the proposition expressed by the social architect,
August Jaccaci, that love is the source, substance, and future of all being. This idea is
axiomatic in an emergent expression of a cosmology that attempts to account for and
assess other events and concepts, such as the varieties of quantum nonlocality,
panpsychism, and the quantum hologram. This note will simply introduce one
historical antecedent, the extant fragmentary poetry of the Sicilian thinker Empedocles,
that confirms the enduring quality of humankind’s effort to understand Love, and
itself, within a comprehensible unity in nature.
Does love have the substance of a basic element of nature? Here is what 5th
century B.C. thinker Empedocles wrote about love:
Here first the four roots of all things:
shining Zeus, life-giving Hera, Aidoneus, and Nestis
who with her tears fills the springs
from which mortals draw the waters of life. (Fragment 6)
And I shall tell you something more.
There is no birth in mortal things,
and no end in ruinous death.
There is only mingling and interchange of parts,
and it is this that we call nature. (Fr. 8)
These two forces, Love and Strife, existed
in the past and will exist the future;
nor will boundless time, I believe, ever be empty
of the pair .( Fr.16)
...I shall tell a twofold tale. At a certain time one alone grew
out of many, and at another time it grew apart to be many out of one:
fire and water and earth and the immense height of air,
and cursed Strife apart from these and equal in every respect
and Love among them, equal in length and breadth.
Her must thou see with the mind, nor sit with eyes bemused:
She it is who is acknowledged to be implanted in the limbs of mortals,
whereby they think kindly thoughts and do peaceful works,
calling her Joy by name and Aphrodite.
No mortal man is aware of her as she circles round among these,
But do thou listen to the unfolding of a discourse that is not deceitful.
All these are equal and coeval,
but each is in a different province and each has its own character,
and they prevail in turn as time circles round.
And besides these nothing comes into our being nor ceases to be;
and what would increase this All? Whence would it come?
And how also could it perish, for nothing is empty of these things?
No. These are just these, but running through one another
They become now some things and now others and yet ever and
always the same. (Fr. 17)
One is reminded, reading this fragment, that Edgar Mitchell, former astronaut and
founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, is said to have described the Universe as
fundamentally diadic, in response to a question about love; that is, if there is Love,
there is always its opposite, Strife. Commenting in part upon the fragment quoted
above, the scholar Charles H. Kahn in 1960 offered that “Love and Strife are described
not only as dynamic principles of cohesion and dissolution, but also as physical
masses on a par with Fire, Water, Earth, and Air.”
W. C. K. Guthrie’s monumental A History of Greek Philosophy informs us that
Empedocles was born in Acragas, Sicily (now Agrigentum) sometime around 492 B.
C. and that, by Aristotle’s authority, he lived for 60 years. Guthrie places Empedocles
as a pluralist in Presocratic thought about the nature of being. Empedocles posited a
plurality of beings that always existed, being Air, Earth, Fire, and Water, along with
Love and Strife. It is, perhaps, not just a poetic device that Empedocles used in
referring to the elements as divinities. Here is an echo of the Greece of Empedocles’
time, which was not only classically Apollonian, but also romantically Dionysian, filled
with bacchic orgia with their “enthusiasmos” – “god in us”.
Empedocles’ contemporaries were Pericles, Socrates, Sophocles. He was
probably a very young boy when Theron, the Sicilian tyrant, defeated the
Carthaginians at Himera on the same day, according to Herodotus, that the Greeks
defeated the Persians at the decisive battle of Salamis in 490 B. C. He is credited by
some scholars as having founded the Sicilian school of medicine. Less debatably, he
is a champion of democracy who disbanded the plutocracy known as The Thousand,
after Theron’s death. It is said that he refused a kingship.
We know that Empedocles was a poet because his extant writings consist entirely
of the fragments of two poems, “On Nature”, and “Purifications”, totaling in all not
more than 450 lines. These poetic fragments have interest, in the context of an
emerging Love Cosmology, in part because they have been characterized by scholars
as, respectively, works of “science” and “religion”. Guthrie tells us that, although the
evidence is dubious, the complete poems may have extended to six times their extant
length, and, citing H. S. Long’s 1949 article in the American Journal of Philology, that
no more than 24 of the 153 fragments can be assigned to one or the other of the
poems with anything like certainty. So, the scholars have simply aggregated the
fragments according to their view of whether the lines evidence “scientific thought”
(On Nature) or “spiritual speculation” (Purifications). But Guthrie points out that there
is little support in the literature of the time for a dichotomy between people’s religious
and cosmological views.
In the emerging Love Cosmology, nature can be comprehended as the architecture
of Love (consider Frs. 85-87: “The gentle flame met with a very little earth/out of
which divine Aphrodite formed eyes/ Aphrodite having wrought them with rivets of
love”). In nature’s elegant solutions, science and religion can be viewed as facets of
the same roughhewn stone.
Some interesting parallels can be found in the fragments to some of the more
provocative anecdotal events, recognition of which has been barred by “scientific
method” at the door of the prevalent scientific establishment. Ken Hamilton, M. D.,
the allopathic former surgeon and the author of SoulCircling: The Journey to the Who,
has done illuminating work on the ability to love oneself as a key to health and healing.
He is one of a number of observers who have generated a renewed interest in
panpsychism, the theory that all things in nature, or all nature itself, has a psychical
aspect, at least a rudimentary life of sensation, feeling, and impulse, that bears the
same relation to their movements that the psychic life of human beings bears to their
observable activities. Empedocles’ descriptions of the basic elements includes the
view that like substances act upon one another, and that all cognition is of like
recognizing like,
For as of these commingled all things are,
even so through these men think, rejoice, or grieve (Fr. 107)
With earth we see earth, with water water,
with air the divine air, but with fire destructive fire,
with Love Love and with Strife we see dismal Strife;
for out of these are all things formed and fitted together,
and with these they think and feel pleasure and pain
(Frs. 107 & 109).
The more or less continuous reconstitution of being into manifested reality has for
Empedocles an element of consciousness:
In this sense, “It is by chance that men have come to have conscious thought (Fr.
103). Fragment 106, comprised of two lines, puts it this way: “As much as men
change their nature/so much it also befalls them to think different thoughts.”
The phenomenon of information traveling faster than the speed of light has been
referred to as a variety of quantum nonlocality, some instances of which have
reportedly been effected by Edgar Mitchell. The quantum hologram is an expression
used by astrophysicist Rudy Schild to refer to a grouping of photons that identifies the
objects from which radiation is emitted. By definition, to perceive a small fragment of
the hologram is to perceive all of it. And as Rudy Schild has put it, the more of the
hologram you perceive, the more intense is your experience of it. He informs us that
the scalar field, also referred to by some people as the orgone field or the zero-point
energy field, the unifying “something” in the cosmos, is amplified on the surface of
black holes. Black holes in the cosmos are the collapsed matter that tests the limits of
density in physics, in which light and speed somehow combine. Rudy Schild has
identified a field of quantum chaos around the black holes. He thinks that all of the
quantum holograms emitted by all the objects in the galaxy may be heading towards
those fields of quantum chaos, and are somehow stored there.
How can the perception of quantum holograms by people occur? Rudy Schild has
mused that perhaps these holograms are picked up by the spinal column and analyzed
by the brain. The proposition that understanding somehow involves a perception of
something that moves through space is very old. The remarkable poet and translator
Anne Carson, in Eros, The Bittersweet, discusses breath as a vehicle of transmission
and reception in the oral society of the ancient world. She reminds us that words are
“winged” in Homer when they issue from the speaker. She notes further:
"Space and the distance between things are not of first
Importance; these are aspects emphasized by the visual
sense. What is vital, in a world of sound, is to
maintain continuity."
She then refers to Empedocles’ doctrine of emanations, as maintaining that everything
in the Universe is perpetually inhaling and exhaling aporrhoai in a constant stream.
“Know that effluences flow from all things that have come to be”, said Empedocles
(Fr. 89). An example of the manifestation into popular culture of the concept of
effluences is found in Tarzan And The Ant Men, by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1924),
who has a prince of his ant men explaining to Tarzan an instrument that he hopes will
restore Tarzan to his normal size (p.228):
From all matter and even from such incorporeal a thing as
thought there emanate identical particles, so infinitesimal
as to be scarce noted by the most delicate of instruments.
Such manifestations suggest that, down through time, our kind may be apprehending
more than it knows.
Love – “…Joy by name and Aphrodite” - is not the only divinity for Empedocles.
So also is any one of us, for, Love is … “implanted in the limbs of mortals” who in
the cycle of rebirth have “come into this low-roofed cavern” (Fr. 120), each a
“daemon…who must wander thrice ten thousand seasons…”(Fr. 115).
At the end they become prophets, bards, physicians
and princes among men on earth.
Thence they arise as gods highest in honor,
sharing hearth and table with the other immortals,
free from human sorrows, unwearied. (Frs. 146, 147)
Rudy Schild surmises that black holes may in some way be interconnected at their
source, that all galaxies have a black hole, or microquasar, at their center, and that
some kind of “wormhole” connects them; that the idea of god, of “guiding principle”,
can manifest in this connection. Empedocles also speaks more directly, as it were, on
the idea of god. These reflections on quantum nonlocality brought me back to
Empedocles’ image of the divinity:
The sacred mind, whole and ineffable,
flashing through the whole universe with swift thoughts
(from Fr.134)
- Anthony Bernini
Reflected in the Fragments of Empedocles
“…the direct, total awareness, from the
inside, so to say, of Love as the primary
and fundamental cosmic fact.”
- The Doors of Perception,
Aldous Huxley (1954)
People continue to be drawn to the proposition expressed by the social architect,
August Jaccaci, that love is the source, substance, and future of all being. This idea is
axiomatic in an emergent expression of a cosmology that attempts to account for and
assess other events and concepts, such as the varieties of quantum nonlocality,
panpsychism, and the quantum hologram. This note will simply introduce one
historical antecedent, the extant fragmentary poetry of the Sicilian thinker Empedocles,
that confirms the enduring quality of humankind’s effort to understand Love, and
itself, within a comprehensible unity in nature.
Does love have the substance of a basic element of nature? Here is what 5th
century B.C. thinker Empedocles wrote about love:
Here first the four roots of all things:
shining Zeus, life-giving Hera, Aidoneus, and Nestis
who with her tears fills the springs
from which mortals draw the waters of life. (Fragment 6)
And I shall tell you something more.
There is no birth in mortal things,
and no end in ruinous death.
There is only mingling and interchange of parts,
and it is this that we call nature. (Fr. 8)
These two forces, Love and Strife, existed
in the past and will exist the future;
nor will boundless time, I believe, ever be empty
of the pair .( Fr.16)
...I shall tell a twofold tale. At a certain time one alone grew
out of many, and at another time it grew apart to be many out of one:
fire and water and earth and the immense height of air,
and cursed Strife apart from these and equal in every respect
and Love among them, equal in length and breadth.
Her must thou see with the mind, nor sit with eyes bemused:
She it is who is acknowledged to be implanted in the limbs of mortals,
whereby they think kindly thoughts and do peaceful works,
calling her Joy by name and Aphrodite.
No mortal man is aware of her as she circles round among these,
But do thou listen to the unfolding of a discourse that is not deceitful.
All these are equal and coeval,
but each is in a different province and each has its own character,
and they prevail in turn as time circles round.
And besides these nothing comes into our being nor ceases to be;
and what would increase this All? Whence would it come?
And how also could it perish, for nothing is empty of these things?
No. These are just these, but running through one another
They become now some things and now others and yet ever and
always the same. (Fr. 17)
One is reminded, reading this fragment, that Edgar Mitchell, former astronaut and
founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, is said to have described the Universe as
fundamentally diadic, in response to a question about love; that is, if there is Love,
there is always its opposite, Strife. Commenting in part upon the fragment quoted
above, the scholar Charles H. Kahn in 1960 offered that “Love and Strife are described
not only as dynamic principles of cohesion and dissolution, but also as physical
masses on a par with Fire, Water, Earth, and Air.”
W. C. K. Guthrie’s monumental A History of Greek Philosophy informs us that
Empedocles was born in Acragas, Sicily (now Agrigentum) sometime around 492 B.
C. and that, by Aristotle’s authority, he lived for 60 years. Guthrie places Empedocles
as a pluralist in Presocratic thought about the nature of being. Empedocles posited a
plurality of beings that always existed, being Air, Earth, Fire, and Water, along with
Love and Strife. It is, perhaps, not just a poetic device that Empedocles used in
referring to the elements as divinities. Here is an echo of the Greece of Empedocles’
time, which was not only classically Apollonian, but also romantically Dionysian, filled
with bacchic orgia with their “enthusiasmos” – “god in us”.
Empedocles’ contemporaries were Pericles, Socrates, Sophocles. He was
probably a very young boy when Theron, the Sicilian tyrant, defeated the
Carthaginians at Himera on the same day, according to Herodotus, that the Greeks
defeated the Persians at the decisive battle of Salamis in 490 B. C. He is credited by
some scholars as having founded the Sicilian school of medicine. Less debatably, he
is a champion of democracy who disbanded the plutocracy known as The Thousand,
after Theron’s death. It is said that he refused a kingship.
We know that Empedocles was a poet because his extant writings consist entirely
of the fragments of two poems, “On Nature”, and “Purifications”, totaling in all not
more than 450 lines. These poetic fragments have interest, in the context of an
emerging Love Cosmology, in part because they have been characterized by scholars
as, respectively, works of “science” and “religion”. Guthrie tells us that, although the
evidence is dubious, the complete poems may have extended to six times their extant
length, and, citing H. S. Long’s 1949 article in the American Journal of Philology, that
no more than 24 of the 153 fragments can be assigned to one or the other of the
poems with anything like certainty. So, the scholars have simply aggregated the
fragments according to their view of whether the lines evidence “scientific thought”
(On Nature) or “spiritual speculation” (Purifications). But Guthrie points out that there
is little support in the literature of the time for a dichotomy between people’s religious
and cosmological views.
In the emerging Love Cosmology, nature can be comprehended as the architecture
of Love (consider Frs. 85-87: “The gentle flame met with a very little earth/out of
which divine Aphrodite formed eyes/ Aphrodite having wrought them with rivets of
love”). In nature’s elegant solutions, science and religion can be viewed as facets of
the same roughhewn stone.
Some interesting parallels can be found in the fragments to some of the more
provocative anecdotal events, recognition of which has been barred by “scientific
method” at the door of the prevalent scientific establishment. Ken Hamilton, M. D.,
the allopathic former surgeon and the author of SoulCircling: The Journey to the Who,
has done illuminating work on the ability to love oneself as a key to health and healing.
He is one of a number of observers who have generated a renewed interest in
panpsychism, the theory that all things in nature, or all nature itself, has a psychical
aspect, at least a rudimentary life of sensation, feeling, and impulse, that bears the
same relation to their movements that the psychic life of human beings bears to their
observable activities. Empedocles’ descriptions of the basic elements includes the
view that like substances act upon one another, and that all cognition is of like
recognizing like,
For as of these commingled all things are,
even so through these men think, rejoice, or grieve (Fr. 107)
With earth we see earth, with water water,
with air the divine air, but with fire destructive fire,
with Love Love and with Strife we see dismal Strife;
for out of these are all things formed and fitted together,
and with these they think and feel pleasure and pain
(Frs. 107 & 109).
The more or less continuous reconstitution of being into manifested reality has for
Empedocles an element of consciousness:
In this sense, “It is by chance that men have come to have conscious thought (Fr.
103). Fragment 106, comprised of two lines, puts it this way: “As much as men
change their nature/so much it also befalls them to think different thoughts.”
The phenomenon of information traveling faster than the speed of light has been
referred to as a variety of quantum nonlocality, some instances of which have
reportedly been effected by Edgar Mitchell. The quantum hologram is an expression
used by astrophysicist Rudy Schild to refer to a grouping of photons that identifies the
objects from which radiation is emitted. By definition, to perceive a small fragment of
the hologram is to perceive all of it. And as Rudy Schild has put it, the more of the
hologram you perceive, the more intense is your experience of it. He informs us that
the scalar field, also referred to by some people as the orgone field or the zero-point
energy field, the unifying “something” in the cosmos, is amplified on the surface of
black holes. Black holes in the cosmos are the collapsed matter that tests the limits of
density in physics, in which light and speed somehow combine. Rudy Schild has
identified a field of quantum chaos around the black holes. He thinks that all of the
quantum holograms emitted by all the objects in the galaxy may be heading towards
those fields of quantum chaos, and are somehow stored there.
How can the perception of quantum holograms by people occur? Rudy Schild has
mused that perhaps these holograms are picked up by the spinal column and analyzed
by the brain. The proposition that understanding somehow involves a perception of
something that moves through space is very old. The remarkable poet and translator
Anne Carson, in Eros, The Bittersweet, discusses breath as a vehicle of transmission
and reception in the oral society of the ancient world. She reminds us that words are
“winged” in Homer when they issue from the speaker. She notes further:
"Space and the distance between things are not of first
Importance; these are aspects emphasized by the visual
sense. What is vital, in a world of sound, is to
maintain continuity."
She then refers to Empedocles’ doctrine of emanations, as maintaining that everything
in the Universe is perpetually inhaling and exhaling aporrhoai in a constant stream.
“Know that effluences flow from all things that have come to be”, said Empedocles
(Fr. 89). An example of the manifestation into popular culture of the concept of
effluences is found in Tarzan And The Ant Men, by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1924),
who has a prince of his ant men explaining to Tarzan an instrument that he hopes will
restore Tarzan to his normal size (p.228):
From all matter and even from such incorporeal a thing as
thought there emanate identical particles, so infinitesimal
as to be scarce noted by the most delicate of instruments.
Such manifestations suggest that, down through time, our kind may be apprehending
more than it knows.
Love – “…Joy by name and Aphrodite” - is not the only divinity for Empedocles.
So also is any one of us, for, Love is … “implanted in the limbs of mortals” who in
the cycle of rebirth have “come into this low-roofed cavern” (Fr. 120), each a
“daemon…who must wander thrice ten thousand seasons…”(Fr. 115).
At the end they become prophets, bards, physicians
and princes among men on earth.
Thence they arise as gods highest in honor,
sharing hearth and table with the other immortals,
free from human sorrows, unwearied. (Frs. 146, 147)
Rudy Schild surmises that black holes may in some way be interconnected at their
source, that all galaxies have a black hole, or microquasar, at their center, and that
some kind of “wormhole” connects them; that the idea of god, of “guiding principle”,
can manifest in this connection. Empedocles also speaks more directly, as it were, on
the idea of god. These reflections on quantum nonlocality brought me back to
Empedocles’ image of the divinity:
The sacred mind, whole and ineffable,
flashing through the whole universe with swift thoughts
(from Fr.134)
- Anthony Bernini
Creating Sustainable Organizations
By Chuck McVinney
©2007 McVinney & Company
Please contact Chuck McVinney at chuck@mcvinney.com for the full bibliography
The new century is already making new demands on all of us. Among these are events and conditions
like the 2001 surprise attacks on America and the resulting focus on terrorism, the Iraq war, a new
urgency about global heating, ongoing strife and cultural clashes in other key areas of the world, and
continued uncertainty about nuclear armaments and their future implications. Many operant core
values behind our human enterprise are under siege. Nevertheless, as a species, the challenges of
sustainability have always been with us. Likewise, sustainability has always been a core issue of any
organization’s leadership. It’s just that it’s now getting a little harder than before to ignore the
increasingly complex and life threatening changes occurring all around us.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. The Idea of Sustainability:
The ancient but brand new issue of sustainability is moving to center stage in the lives of individuals,
communities and organizations of all kinds. And it’s about time, too.
However, sustainability is an odd word. It conjures up notions of crazy environmentalists with protest
placards blocking entrances to the national park, and endless local battles over the construction of new
subdivisions. Nevertheless, the call to acknowledge sustainability as a leadership issue is real, and goes
well beyond the need to guarantee quarterly profits or competitive advantage.
Sustainability seems to be a miss-understood and misused word. At its core, sustainability it is the
ability to survive and thrive over time and in a variety of circumstances and conditions. But, the word
and its extended meanings, have deeper implications than most people acknowledge or recognize,
since it clearly embraces concepts of growth and change, as well as preservation and stability.
Consider this set of definitions from the American Heritage Dictionary, 1981.
Sustainability:
1. “To keep in existence; maintain or prolong.” The quote used in this edition to exemplify the
word in action sheds interesting light on the broader meaning; “The historical process is sustained by
man’s desire to become other than what he is.” (Norman O. Brown)
2. “To supply with necessities or nourishment; to provide for.” (Note: The same dictionary
defines “nourishment” as: “That which supports life and growth in living organisms.” And again:
“That which promotes the development or vitality of something.”
3. “To support spirit and vitality – encourage – as in ‘devotion to his trade sustained him’” (Mark
Van Doren).
4. “To support from below – to prop up and keep from sinking.”
Since the word “nourish” is used to describe “sustain” in the dictionary definition, and nourish is
described as supporting growth, we find, as we might expect the following definition of growth;
Growth: (Again from the American Heritage Dictionary – 1981)
1. “The process of growing (grow: to increase naturally in size by addition of material through
assimilation or accretion – to expand; to gain – to increase in amount or degree; become extended or
intensified).”
2. “Development from a lower or simpler to a higher or more complex form; evolution.”
3. “An increase, as in size, number, value or strength; extension or expansion.”
In short, we find that sustainability is all caught up with growth and nourishment, as well as
development and change. It’s not just a word describing the status quo or referring to survival at the
level of mere subsistence. This casts a new light on the word sustainability, which because of these
simultaneous meanings, takes on a somewhat paradoxical quality.
Some feel that sustainability confronts capitalism with a certain paradox, as well. On the one hand, we
succeed by growing and growing our markets and bank accounts, but on the other we deplete the
environment that supports us by turning it into disposable goods using non-renewable energy sources.
Sustain but grow is, on the face of it, a contradictory message.
Furthermore, the phrase “sustainable development” is also used abundantly these days, and as such
presents a core challenge to 21st century business. With our definitions in mind, we can see that
business today must ask itself: “In addition to supporting our companies by making them economically
successful, are we contributing to the well being of our communities, nation and planet? Are we
attending to the needs of life, and the future of life in the work we do and the way we do it?” Some
have called this the emergence of the three-part bottom line. In addition to the economic measures of
success we have to add the social and environmental measures to assess the real success of
businesses and other organizations. Most new models of sustainability also include these three
components; economic, social and environmental, in their descriptions of what the future will expect
and measure in business activity.
Finally, Sustainability is a natural order concept – it is a dynamic that has been present since the
universe was born. The earth has sustained itself for billions of years, and we have been nurtured by
that capacity. Now, in a more conscious way, we must begin to learn from that success story about
ways to live and work without jeopardizing our future, and preferably, while enhancing it.
To better understand the scope of this challenge, we suggest a number of core principals and
practices that define sustainability. Among these are three key concepts that smart leaders and
mangers will be learning more and more about in the coming years.
2. Why care about sustainability?
There are those who will argue that the notion of sustainability is not relevant to every business
organization, process or dynamic. That it makes sense to build longevity into a commercial enterprise,
some say, is a debatable point. In light of the primary agenda of business, which is to make money,
the short term is as good a motivator as any. But there has to be more to business in this century than
fast financial killings from fast growth and dissolution solely for the sake of profit. The business
models which have been driving economic growth and presumed prosperity for the last century, are
not the ones that will drive prosperity in this century. Simply put, the rules of engagement have
changed – or maybe we’re becoming aware that the rules are different from the ones we have been
following.
It is an ironic result of “Globalism” and advanced technology that we are beginning to see the Achilles
heal in our economic formula. Burning fossil fuels for a couple hundred years at an ever-increasing
rate has lead to the ever increasing potential of environmental degradation and likely disaster.
Constructing a society of rampant consumerism creates huge piles of garbage with no place to “put
it.” Exporting the consumer culture around the world and feeding it with more and more stuff, leads
to lives encumbered with debt and stress, as is the natural environment of the biosphere itself.
3. The Challenge Ahead for Business is Immense: Change Your Core Values!
For the business world, especially, sustainability is more than a strategy or a technique – it is an
emerging core ideology that businesses will have to embrace in order to create the survival skills they
will need to exist at all.
As an emerging core value, sustainability challenges many other more traditional core values that are
already operating in organizations. For most profit driven organizations the notion of sustainability as
an essential core value presents a significant problem. As all the literature on this topic suggests,
changing core values within organizational systems is about the hardest shift that can be undertaken.
The cultures of our business organizations have grown up around a broad worldview that systems
theorists like to call a “cosmology.” A cosmology describes why we exist, and what led to our birth
and now drives our being. The cosmology most prevalent in business organizations is usually built on
the basic acceptance of human greed and the derivative value of consumption. Matthew Fox and Brain
Swimme in their many writings on our evolving cosmology have called the economy we live in the
“cosmology of consumption.”
Sustainability challenges that cosmology. The new cosmology of sustainability acknowledges that the
earth is an abundant and prosperous planet, but it is an oasis. Far flung as we are from the center of
our own galaxy, relegated to the rural outposts of the Milky Way, we are, at least for now and the
foreseeable future, alone. There are no friends from other worlds to share their experiences in solving
the problems of growing population and shrinking resources, of rampant inter-cultural distrust and
warfare, and ecological depletions like those we are dealing with on Earth. We have to go it alone,
solving these things by ourselves, and if we ruin it – there is no place else to go. Creating a sustainable
planet that nurtures and feeds a huge and diverse population of human beings is a challenge we have
never before in history faced. It does not get solved the way other problems have been solved; it
requires new ways of thinking, working and being.
In more concrete terms, sustainability addresses the use and preservation of everything from human
energy to natural resources. The notion of sustainability is redefining the “bottom line” as a measure of
how well we care for the source of our abundance as well as how much we “make” from it. As many
others have noted, the new bottom line is as much about social and environmental success as it is an
indicator of financial results. Recently, voices are raised for the fourth bottom line, the well being of
spirit. This means creating work that has a sense of purpose and provides connections between the
worker and what matters to humanity’s survival. That bottom line, the spiritual, may be on the way
to transcending all the others.
Furthermore, and central to our argument, organizations that embrace sustainable concepts and
practices embrace the keys to their own survival. And not just survival of their specific enterprise,
but, also of the context in which that enterprise lives and grows. Sustainable values contribute to
organizational success and longevity by providing the basis for visions that mean something to people
and motivate them to contribute, learn, and grow over time.
A living commitment to the principles and practices of sustainability supports traditional organizational
goals, like recruiting members and retaining them, and building more and more viable relationships and
solutions with and for customers. Some say, sustainability starts at home. By building it into the core
fabric of the organizations self-image and identity, it allows the company to reach out into the world
with “built to last” mind-sets and behaviors. What we are committed to for ourselves we can commit
to for our customers and other stakeholders.
Sustainability is something more than a concept forming a new cosmology. It is something that can
actually be done, and, we suggest, it has discernible components that drive action. These can become
real to us in the everyday world of work and commerce. As such, they can become a new foundation
for more socially conscious business communities, and enhanced profitability and durability, if we are
willing to expand, not shrink, our understanding of sustainable behaviors. Many companies are moving
toward more sustainable choices about use of raw materials, what gets left as waste, and how to
creatively use and re-cycle those wastes. That is one element of what can be “done,” and there are
many others. Next, we begin to address further potential actions that can be taken by looking at the
components of the sustainability value itself.
4. The First Principle of Sustainability:
The first principle component of sustainability is stewardship. But, again, not the notion of
stewardship we typically embrace. Since we have done our homework about other definitions of
words associated with sustainability, let’s start with the dictionary on stewardship:
Stewardship: (American Heritage Dictionary – 1981)
“Managing another’s property, finances, or other affairs.”
Stewardship is crucial, but its not really enough, or even quite the right concept. We are guests on
planet earth – renting it from the universe, you might say. None of us gets to stay long, though we
hope the species might. As Peter Block, the well-known business consultant has pointed out,
Stewardship is more than care taking – it is sophisticated involvement. As a dynamic combination of
responsibility and accountability, stewardship in our age embraces the best aspects of empowerment
while challenging all the notions of entitlement. This is true of companies doing their business as well
as environmentalists protecting the wild places. Stewardship now means understanding the
sophisticated concepts and dynamics that run human institutions and how they interact with the
sophisticated and dynamic processes that govern the natural world we live in.
Stewardship has a traditional base – caring for the land, the property of others. Whether the earth is
God’s or man’s or only a random accident of creation, we are now called on to be the master
caretakers of its present and its future. In addition, we are stewards of our own lives and well-being.
We have to ask ourselves what behaviors assure our optimum health, and that of our surroundings,
and, simultaneously sustains us as individuals, families and communities? It is unlikely that our
contemporary work and life styles will be proven to assure that outcome.
5. The Second Principle of Sustainability:
Second, sustainability means co-creation. Co-creation is creating together. It is collaboration to invent
the future. The addition of creativity to our understanding of sustainability, further defines
sustainability as more than a status quo notion of static preservation; it makes sustainability a
generative notion. Creativity as the same dictionary says, is:
Creativity:
“Having the ability or power to create things (create = bring into existence), characterized by
originality and expressiveness.”
So, co-creation is the extension of empowerment to active participation in creating the future. It
means engaging in the conscious evolution of organizations, their work, and their means of doing the
work. Co-creation makes us partners in sustaining life on earth and in enhancing the quality of life
now and for generations to come. It means that how we act today affects, as the Native Americans
said, the 7th generation. Co-creation makes us co-partners in the future of work, life, and what the
quality of both will be in the present and the future.
The key behavior supporting co-creation is enlightened collaboration, or, generative thinking and
behavior. Enlightened collaboration is more that just working for an effective solution; it is putting
aside the usual agendas of personal gain and glory for the well-being of everyone who is touched by a
decision. Enlightened collaboration is not a new religious cult anymore than it is a utopian fantasy or
an oxymoron – it is the new survival skill. Generativity is a word we coin to combine the notions of
sustainability and enlightened co-creation.
Generative sustainability then, is an idea that goes beyond maintaining the status quo – “keeping things
as they are” – to re-inventing and evolving as necessary and efficacious. In classical terms, it is not a
conservative notion, it is a dynamic notion; one that embraces change and development without
harming the sources and resources that feed the change process. The difference between inertia and
development is generative, natural order driven, sustainable evolution. What is preserved in generative
sustainability by enlightened collaborators (us!) is the wildness and authenticity of the natural order
that created us - - for in that wildness, as Thoreau said, “Is the preservation of life.”
6. The Third Principle of Sustainability:
The last key principle of sustainability is generative community. Again, our reference says of
community:
Community:
1. “A group of people living in the same locality and under the same government;”
2. “A social group or class having common interests.”
We get to define the communities of the new century all over again. That’s why they are generative.
The structure and dynamics of the old order communities will yield new ones. Already some
businesses are leading the way, by challenging the long held assumptions about how large groups are
organized and managed. Already we are seeing in the early 21st Century, flatter, nested hierarchies of
shared leadership and decision making, new models of democratic action in the work place, as well as
new models of decision making, accountability, and ownership. Each of these is diving further and
further into the organization’s membership.
New structures of working communities that go beyond paternalism and family models are emerging,
and suggesting even more dramatic changes ahead with the arrival of new and bold communication
and worldwide connection technologies. Even the old notion of a “job” is in transition as communities
speak out for new skills and new expressions of leadership and ask for expanded creativity from more
and more of their members. Even the notions of teams and teamwork are giving way to a community
value that is more about collaboration and the actualization of co-creation than winning ball games or
business contracts. That is not to say that forms of competition are not alive and well – they always
will be – but that is one aspect of our nature – not the whole story. When competition and greed are at
the center, community takes a back seat. When community and stewardship are at the core,
creativity and collaborative sustainability can lead us to new heights of human fulfillment. In the end,
work, like the rest of life, is not about productivity; it’s about fulfillment.
7. Some Common Sense Guidelines for Sustaining Organizations:
Creating A Durable Culture Through Systems Thinking
We hear a good deal about systems thinking, but many organizations have trouble putting the concepts
of systems thinking tangibly enough for people to know what actions to take. We believe systems
thinking starts by creating a culture and a community where the values that support sustainable
thinking, working and living can flourish. Furthermore, we posit that durable cultures are cultures of
integrity. That is, cultures where a common bond of values creates an ethical framework that support
the notions of sustainability we are discussing here. Cultures of integrity promote values based
relationships and decision making that sustain quality of life for all affected by the organization –
including the natural order context of its origin.
What follows is a discussion of the components of systems thinking that allow organizations to create
sustainability and durability over time. These components are:
• A Commitment to Authenticity and Fulfillment
• Cultures of Integriy
• Shared and Articulated Living Values
• Distinct Visions
• Specific Missions
• Understandable, Meaningful and Achievable Goals
• Fair and Meaningful Metrics
When these are integrated and aligned and the whole organization believes they are true, the
possibilities are extraordinary. Here are some ways these components create corporate culture.
Values Based: Organizations that last, that is, that are durable and sustainable, have at their center
certain core values which in turn drive the whole system. These core values reflect their commonly
held beliefs about what is important about their work and the way they work together. It is the
defined and shared values that create the culture of integrity.
Values have to do, then with what is really important over time and experience. They are indigenous to
the organization and shape its culture – they are not phony bullet points on a plaque on the reception
room wall – hanging there dead. They are living concepts and practices, that define the very landscape
of the everyday experience of work within that place. An example of a real value produced recently at
one of our “Creating Sustainability” sessions follows:
“Prosperity is a core value – it means to us that we create and share abundance with our customers,
our employees, and all we touch, affect, or meet while pursuing our vision and our work. And we do
it while enhancing the natural resources that allow us to prosper”
Vision Driven: In addition to a well formed value system, the most successful organizations have a big
picture vision of what they are trying to accomplish. But most companies don’t understand what a
real vision is. Ironically, real visions are not about you – which will come as a shock to just about
every CEO and senior manager we know. Vision is about the effect we want to have on the world;
that is, what we want to do for our ultimate customers, and the long-term legacy we are trying to
create. Put another way, a responsible, sustainable and empowering vision statement is about the
world we want to create, not about he company and its business goals. Business goals are great, and
we want to envision achieving them; vision is bigger than that. As Collins and Porras point out in their
book “Built to Last” we have to make clear distinctions between vision, values and big business goals,
which they refer to as B-HAGs (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals). An example of a vision that is bigger
than a company, but drives the company, comes from an Internet infrastructure provider we know
whose vision is to create:
“A world where people can connect with each other instantly regardless of time, culture, geography
and politics.”
That vision statement is about the customer – the world outside the organization – it doesn’t say
anything about the company. That comes later – after the vision of the world you wish to be part of
creating is clear to you.
The world health organization might declare its vision to be:
“A world without hunger or disease.”
That statement is one which is clearly enough to occupy a lifetime and which is not about the
organization or individual holding it.
The Creative Education Foundation in Buffalo, New York has as its statement:
“We envision a world where people can create lives they love from the unlimited choices they can see
for themselves.”
For example, McVinney & Company our vision statement is: “We envision a world where individuals
and organizations apply generative thinking (“Creativity”) to sustaining and enhancing life.”
These vision statements provide more than a core purpose, they are also a kind of value based test –
that is - - is what you are imagining and doing a sustainable enterprise? Does your vision provide a
frame for a sustainable culture of integrity?
Mission Centered: Real mission statements derive from and support the vision. Mission statements are
descriptions of the work we do to serve the values – in that sense they are statements of purpose. If
the intranet infrastructure provider in our example above believes their own vision, than their mission
statement might be to;
“Build, deliver, and maintain the hardware and software necessary to advance communication
technology and capacity world wide.”
That might be the opening line of a more extensive description of the company’s day by day work; the
starting point for creating a business strategy and executable plans.
At McVinney & Company our mission is to work with business and other organizations to apply
systems and creative thinking to the challenge of creating sustainable organizations.
Results Dependent: All of the above components are measurable in one way or another. To assure that
the organization is meeting the challenge of focusing on its mission, measures can be created and
implemented that are goals and objective based. These measure in the longer term (goals) and in the
shorter term (objectives). They are tied to the values, vision and mission, and no measure should
violate the spirit or intent of any of those other components. The measures allow us to determine the
level of effectiveness at achieving each of the other components. The right measures, working
together as an integrated strategy, assure the ability of the organization to track its work daily, shift
tactics quickly, and reward its members in a timely way for successes and accomplishments.
Here is a summary of the definitions of the key components of system building and culture
management essential to creating sustainable organizations:
Values:
Core beliefs held by the company about what is important about the work they do and about how they
work together to accomplish it. Core values can last 100 years. They are hard, nearly impossible to
change. They are at the root of the company’s identity and culture. Organizations will change every
other aspect of themselves, including products, structure, missions and goals – and sometimes people
– to preserve the values.
Values shifting occurs when major world views shift at such deep levels that no one is untouched. Old
paradigms may be forced to surrender to the new, but even then, old values born of those paradigms
die-hard. Those individuals and organizations that can evolve fast enough and keep their wits survive –
others may not.
Vision:
A statement of the future you wish to create. It is not a statement about the organization that holds the
vision – it’s about what they want to leave behind or are dedicated to doing for the world. It is a
concept larger than the company or organization, but drives it over time and through all conditions.
Vision statements tend to start with phrases like “We imagine a world where…” Or “We envision a
world where…..”
Mission:
A statement of the actual work you do in order to support the values and achieve the vision. Missions
evolve to support the more lasting vision and values. The definition of a company’s mission provides
the framework for strategic planning, informed as it is by the values and vision.
Measures: Goals:
Long term but measurable achievements support the mission and serve the vision and values. Long
term may be a concept that varies from company to company, but usually goals drive organizations
from 6 months to two years.
Measures: Objectives:
Shorter term, specific and measurable tasks that derive from the goals and create a matrix of
feedback, which allow us to determine whether or not we are achieving the goals. The measures serve
the other components of the organization best when they are integrated and comprehensive and “tell
on each other.” That means the measures are potentially interactive, suggesting remedies and
approaches when they are achieved or not.
More and more organizations are using these concepts to create a sustainable hierarchy of business
planning. The approach allows for the conscious creation and management of a supportive culture
where the business can better grow and flourish. In addition, the shorter term goals and measures can
be embraced by everyone in the company and co-created more frequently. This allows for broader
employee participation in planning and thinking about organizational identity. Sustainability is more
assured by empowered participation than by hierarchical structure. This is a lesson we learn from the
natural order around us. Just as the whole human organism is protected from disease by the tiniest T
cell, so the vision of the whole enterprise can be assured by the achievement of the shortest term
objective.
In nature, hierarchy mitigates Darwinism. The Hierarchy exists, finally, for the well-being of the
system as a whole, not for its own sake. Hierarchies are servants for distributing and conserving
energy, not simply as command and control operations. The sun may be the most powerful entity in
the solar system, the source of all energy – but life and consciousness exist millions and millions of
miles from it. The two entities, a star and a companion planet, can enjoy a collaborative relationship.
By keeping its distance and fueling rather than annihilating planet earth, the sun becomes the servant
leader of life in its own mini-universe. The planet and the star are in a generative relationship,
following natural order laws, but changing, evolving, and co-creating life, experimenting with
possibilities.
8. In Summary:
Finally, the clarity of purpose and direction that are determined by the nested hierarchy of the vision-
values-mission-goals and measures leadership strategy, however traditional on the surface, allows
individual jobs and roles in an organization to be more tied to the overall direction and spirit. This is a
natural, organic approach to business and community development, allowing for more collaborative
relationships, more useful and concrete feedback, enhanced company learning processes, and more
manageable performance systems, which are more likely to be fulfillment strategies, as noted. For, in
the best situations, it also promotes real personal and organizational growth, better alignment between
individual interests and the available work, and more successful teamwork.
These are only the front edges of the sustainability model in action. There are new and bigger
questions to ask than we as a consumer society have dared ask before. Some of these are:
• How can we assure organizations include sustainability as a core value?;
• How can we create enlightened leaders who understand that business is destroying the
ecosphere and only business can lead the way to saving it? (Hawkins, et al);
• Is it possible to marry the profit motive, as we know it with the responsible stewardship of the
Earth?;
• Is stewardship enough?
• Will traditional business practices continue to drive the destruction of the biosphere, or can
business exercise its potential to become the salvation of the planet?
• Can we base capitalism on a world view not driven primarily by consumption?
• How do we sustain the kind of standard of living we have become, or are becoming
accustomed to, because of cheap fossil fuels, in a post-fossil fuel world? Or do we?
• How do we respond to the obvious and resurging need for enhanced community, revitalized
connection with nature, and commitment to higher purpose (spirituality) in a world more and more
characterized by strip malls, automobiles and 7x24 work demands? Can we actually reverse this trend
in time to save the wildness which is in the end our salvation?
• Can we leverage technology to solve the huge environmental problems we have created with
technology?
• Are organizations that were built for the world of the 20th Century structured for the work of
the 21st Century? How do we apply co-creative, and generative sustainability to force their evolution
to positive economic, social and environmental influences instead of mutually destructive ones?
• Is religion ruining the world? Or can our search for connection and meaning in life be focused
on the ethics of survival and co-creation that contribute to mutually assured survival?
So, in the end, sustainability starts at home. It is fast becoming our core ethical imperative. If we build
the values and behaviors of co-creative, generative, sustainable living and working relationships into
the fabric of our communities and organizations, we have taken the first step toward reinventing the
ethic that will save our species in what could be the deciding century for the human experiment. Then
we may begin to dig deeper and deeper into harvesting the lessons of our ancient planet and its place
in the universe; to learn even more about what makes things last. If we are to succeed as a species in
the next century, indeed, the next decade, say nothing of the millennium, we have to shift from our
short-term urge to consume everything to a long-term co-creative partnership with life.
Finally, we have come to realize that the last arbiter of human ethics is the Earth itself. As Robert
Kennedy of the Natural Defense Council has said: “Make no mistake about it; the entire human
enterprise is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.” If we ruin our home, there are no other
options. If we preserve our wild inheritance, celebrate our natural relationship with the universe that
made us, embrace with respect and love the planet that sustains us, and exercise generative thinking
with the minds that connect us, maybe, just maybe, we may make a lasting and brilliant contribution
to the ongoing and fabulous story of the universe.
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