You don’t change things by fighting existing reality.
To change something build a new model
that makes the existing obsolete
Buckminster Fuller
Because we are the system, we can change it in the places we have agency; our home, business, community, wherever. This demands innovation, but not as defined by our limited perspectives on value.
This moment requires a new renaissance to work in the service of life, not simply our latter-day lesser gods.
It demands a systemic transformation of our ways of being alongside our ways of doing.
Such a transformation will not be manoeuvred into place with the old levers of technologies and hierarchies; it demands a redistribution of power and resources, not just within businesses, such as the shift to employee or steward ownership, but amongst stakeholders and collaborators and between generations.
This redistribution, is the counter to the rampant inequality that threatens all our futures.
System Transformation
We are a key process element in life’s great system. Far from the only change agent, not even the most powerful, but definitely the most disconnected. The most disruptive.
We puny humans have bent the system into a crude projection of ourselves. Hello Anthropocene!
We have not used our great powers responsibly. Too grasping, self-obsessed, we don’t play well with others.
But we could. We can. We do.
The collaborative instincts that nurtured global companies and institutions, the imagined zenith of our might and power, are the same that tune our attention to the needs of this moment. They are the threads we pick up when the old myth fails; progress wasn’t uninhibited, infinite, it was bounded extraction and exploitation and it is heading, eventually, for the buffers.
A Three Horizons approach for the Association of Sustainability Practitioners
The Association of Sustainability Practitioners are a remarkable organisation with a 20-year history in bringing sustainability professionals together to create change and learn from each other. They recognised the unique contribution they have to this moment, and the potential of handing their future direction over to members.
I worked with them to establish a process that would enable members to contribute their unique perspectives by using a Three Horizons Framework to enable them to ‘step-in’ to the process of change, and visualise the dynamic change within a system; what is in decline, what is emerging and what is bridging between the two.
By enabling sustainability professionals to bring their practice to the process, we’re mapping an archetype of ways that members complement each other in creating change.
We’re attending to the how and why along with the what.
We are making the path as we walk it,
Is it time?
If you and your team are ready to do the work required by our futures, let’s make a start.
I specialise in meeting people where they are, metaphorically speaking, so don’t worry if this agenda seems daunting or sprawling, we’ll find a good way in.
Book some time for a quick 30 min chat.
