If you are reading this column, chances are you are already part of the emerging Green Industrial Revolution. Whether you are starting in a business, serving in a non-profit organization, a government agency or participating as citizen and consumer, you are an architect, designer, builder, and endorser of our mutual destiny. This is welcome news, yet, with it comes tremendous challenges. Those of us operating as visionaries for a sustainable future have been creating the supply way ahead of the demand. Now the demand is catching up and overtaking the supply. Are you ready? We are gearing up for exponential growth. Smart, value-guided growth is imperative as the “green” tipping point approaches.
This time of transition is critical. Although as pioneers we are galloping through the cracks of an era that is quickly becoming obsolete, we are still immersed in its institutions, government structures and culture. Many of us have taken up the mantle of setting new standards, values and practices of a promising, life-sustaining new era. Every new technology, service and purchase we make votes for or against the future.
Getting Smarter
This new column is a resource for growing smarter businesses, organizations and communities. As midwives in the emerging green business movement we have a particularly awesome job. Business is the dominant paradigm in the world today—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Globally, business has the most influence on governments, economies, the development and distribution of goods and services, and ultimately whether people thrive or simply survive. We cannot afford to perpetuate the mistakes and shortsightedness bringing humanity to the brink of its own destruction. Technology alone will not reverse the damage and give birth to new ways. To gain real momentum we have to get smarter by being conscious of the human factors—the social side of our work environments. We need to utilize the kind of social technologies that create the best spaces for creativity and innovation, full participation and collaborative leadership, high productivity and coordination. Every person from the intern to the CEO is constantly making decisions on issues that arise every moment. How do you make the smartest decisions when every consideration is new and tied to the integrity of our values? The amount of research emerging daily, however rich and overflowing, can be daunting. Some observers are referring to this coming era as the knowledge paradigm, an improvement on the information age where we’ve been bombarded by sometimes useless information that we’ve had to sort through. A whole new body of knowledge is guiding the coming paradigm, and that’s precisely why our contribution is a vital part of its development.
From Chaos to Full Capacity
There is no blueprint to guide us into the future. It is completely unknowable. We can’t imagine today what our world will look like in 5, 10 or 50 years. Right now we are in the midst of great chaos. It’s like making soup without a recipe. There are millions of us putting our own ingredients into the pot. Some of us can put in a lot, others only a little, some bring organic ingredients, others believe we still may need pesticides. Some turn up the flame, while others yell “fire! fire!” and try to turn it down.
Our soup will be the sum of all the flavors and cooking methods blended together. No one person or group can accurately predict its outcome. Many try to educate us on the virtues of healthy ingredients, others warn us to guard against the dangers of enemies dumping or stealing the soup. Every single component of the cooking process will help determine whether the soup is ultimately nourishing and beneficial or depleting and dangerous. The moral of the story is that everything we think, say and do counts. The learning is, if instead of doing our own thing unconscious of or in competition with the other, we pull together in a collective effort, we could harness the intelligence, natural gifts and passion of all the participants, mitigate the fears that we’d be left hungry, and create a great, healthy soup that can nurture us all.
How does this translate to growing green business? The key to successful, sustainable green business is when you and your organization can transform the chaos of growth and increasing demand into a high-functioning, full capacity, workplace that is in harmony with nature while people work harmoniously together.
Staying Smart
Green organizations of today are the new and early models for the businesses of the future. Rather than imitating “Best Practices” they will emulate “Best Processes” that will give them the flexibility to develop an infrastructure and culture to fit their individual needs.
How do you write a whole new story while still operating inside the old one? It’s similar to an adolescent living at home evolving into adulthood and eventual independence. We naturally question the assumptions and expectations of our elders—parents, teachers and society—to decide what serves us and what we’ve outgrown.
Taking time to ask bigger questions is an important strategy for staying smart in the transition and beyond: What does it mean to be a green entrepreneur, a green organization? How do we put our values into practice and keep them there through growth and change? What is the role of a pioneer? What are new models for a leader in a collaborative culture? Can a business work as a self-organizing organic organism and thrive in the marketplace? How do we create the best infrastructure for us? What tools can help us ride the waves of change? How do we design our organizations so that accountability and productivity occur naturally? How do we keep everyone’s interests, competencies and strengths alive?
You Get What You Think
A culture of consciousness and evolutionary thinking is the most important transformation we can make for sustainability to become our new story. Our unconscious thoughts are the source of all the choices we make, whether we’re putting in a garden, making dinner or working together. They are the well of our life-affirming creativity. Western cultural thinking is mechanistic, reducing everything to its smallest parts. In our current knowledge base, our messages come in sound bytes, 30-second commercials, e-mails, voice-mail. Albert Einstein and more recently Bill McKibben, among others are showing us that everything is interconnected, all related to everything else. We have to think more deeply in order to honor the whole system that we are. The opportunity we have is a dance of transforming life by intentionally shaping our future. We get what we think about and what we pay attention to rather than longing for what we don’t have. The social side of sustainability is about building the capacity for creating increasingly smarter, more conscious workplaces.
Hina Pendle Ph.D., Organizational Development, brings you this column so you can chew on ideas for growing new working models of sustainable business.
She has been successfully guiding businesses, organizations, governments, communities and individuals, helping them develop new, powerful, cooperative, collaborative and innovative models for living and working. These new social technologies transform workplaces into life-affirming, creative, and productive organisms that bring out the very best in each and every participant, naturally. Create synergy at its best!! She is also a co-founder of The Foundation of Sustainable Living http://www.thefosl.org
Upcoming Free Tele-Salons for Working Smarter Naturally
Business owners, managers, Directors join us for complementary salons via telephone conference call on the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays, beginning January 16th, 2008 from 5pm-6pm Pacific Time. Our dialogs will support your journey into creating conscious workplaces for a sustainable future. Write to hina@uspartners.com for the call-in number.