Hey there!
This is my story.
I invite you to empathise with it and share the feelings, images and gestures that came to your mind while reading.
Also, feel free to add any recommendation :)
I don’t know where exactly my concern about what us, humans, are doing on our Earth came from, but the fact is that I have it since at least 4 years ago. I’ve studied environmental engineering, be it a cause or a consequence, and the fact is that my environmental concern was always a negative concern; in the sense that I always felt that if we wanted to solve anything we had to do it as an act of goodness. I felt it was an either or situation, a win-lose situation: if an industry wants to pollute less they will have to invest money, we want everybody to source segregate waste which is a pain in the ass, I want to move from A to B and reduce my carbon footprint but it will take me longer, etc.
At some point I came across an article by Gabriel Grant that put my view upside down.
What if we turned the common problem-oriented minimisation of unsustainability into the co-creation of a vision-oriented sustainability?
Positive psychology has proven how humans have the proper skills for achieving great things when intrinsic motivation drives us; in this case towards the vision of a thriving Earth where we flourish.
Around the same time I re-read the concepts of the circular economy and for my gladness, they made a perfect combo with vision oriented sustainability. I remember one specific idea from Jordi from Inedit: "ask yourself:
Do you really want to own a chair?
You will realise that what you really want is to be able to sit down in a specific place at a specific time. This opens up a world of possibilities; you could just rent chairs from the manufacturer and they’d take care of them, offer you their best designs, and since they still own them they’d make sure that they design them so that they can reuse parts or materials for their next chairs.” Product service system is just one of the many possibilities the circular economy opens.
During my master thesis time I decided to research how transitions take place and I designed a methodology to foster the transition to a Circular Economy. I learned interesting ideas such as John Ehrenfeld’s suggestion to create products and processes that help us to reflect and understand the groundless of being , so that we might choose to be the way we present ourselves to others.
Theories about human needs, intrinsic motivation and the conditions that allow the integration and internalisation of values taught me that we could accompany those reflection moments with conditions of relatedness, autonomy and competence so that we foster human emotions and skills that are necessary to reach the envisioned sustainability.
In addition, I’m now able to see that transparency and trustworthy information are essential to make sure that whatever we do is actually what we think we are doing and has the right consequences. Ehrenfeld defined sustainability as the possibility that life on Earth will flourish forever, i.e. that we will care for us, for others and for the world.
I designed a design thinking methodology where everybody within the organisations participated (and even external stakeholders). The methodology created conditions for integration and internalisation, it was itself a reflection moment and it aimed to change procedures within organisations so that they became circular and thus, made sure that the organisation cared, at least, for the world.
During the final stages of the thesis I met a great guy. From him I learned to flow, to let things be, to have a compass but not a map, to enjoy life as it unfolds, to be opened to the unexpected, . . .
And I don’t really know how a paper that talked about self-organisation came to me. It explained how there are some organisations with no manager, where workers make their own decisions autonomously but taking into account their peers’ advice, because they are the masters, the ones that know most about what they are doing. Such working conditions where exactly what I had seen that was necessary for the integration of values that were pivotal for sustainability, so I decided that those participating in my methodology would work in a self-organised environment (still not knowing how exactly).
I handed out my thesis, got a good grade and went on holiday . . . nobody was impressed or delighted by my findings.
Summer was over and new papers and ideas came to my desk while I started “working” on setting my own organisation to put the methodology in practice.
Donella Meadows said that the key learning after a life of systemic research was that we should learn to dance with systems; there is no way we can control them. Conversely, Jack Harich used systems thinking to point at the resistance to change of powerful people as the root cause of environmental unsustainability. And Ken Webster suggested, citing the Panarchy framework (image below), that sooner or later, in one way or another, no matter what, we will move into a release phase followed by reorganisation.
The paper about self-organisation, I found out later, was an extract from Reinventing Organisations by Frederic Laloux. In my opinion this book is a breakthrough: there are examples all around the world of organisation (teal) where the conditions for the integration of values are held: they are purpose driven organisations, where people in their wholeness (nor parts of them, nor people with masks ) work, they self-organise and aim to collectively evolve as an organisation. WOW!
And all this is linked to the evolution of the human consciousness: these organisations let humans thrive.
My doubt: do these organisations organically care about the world? Do they continuously innovate towards a circular economy?
Around the same weeks I got to know two people who opened up a complete new world for me: the world of facilitation (creating spaces for reflection) through techniques that allow deep communication. Open Space Technology , Theory U, Art of Hosting. Soon after I got the book by Peggy Holman: Engaging emergence. It explained concepts about Panarchy and how to better dance with systems making use of some of the previous techniques.
I was interested in how to integrate the processes that teal organisations use into my methodology and of course into the organisation that I was building. I got to know Holacracy a bit and read something about Sociocracy.
I read about blockchain and its power to decentralise. I got formation on the basics about running and setting up a business and the blockchain made even more sense. Everything is insanely and increasingly complex. . . basically due to the need to command and control, what if that was no longer necessary and we could just sense and respond making sure that we can trust each other thanks to technology?
Happy to read your what you experienced
