Rebalancing the World — Pathways to a Thriving Future
So, here we are. half the population of the world of non-essential workers and people who work from home, staring into their screens, trying to make sense of everything that has happened recently. Welcome!
Breakdowns, Breakthroughs
The first thing most of us are noticing is what has broken down or stopped at this time. Many healthcare systems, governments, businesses, and people have either gone into serious distress, or broken down completely, and many have already died. Some are hanging on for dear life.
The oil price went negative briefly at the end of April and is now still very low historically. Coal projects are being shelved. A significant number of the heavily polluting fossil fuel companies causing climate change and global overheating are running out of money.
Many are struggling with domestic abuse, family stresses, and the raw pain of not being able to see and hug loved ones. Depression, fear, anxiety, and stress are at an all-time high. We’ve lost confidence in our “leaders” unless you are an authoritarian believer in which case you are likely to become the next covid19 victim as you exercise your “freedumb” while spreading the virus to innocent victims.
Our economies and societies are under enormous strain, with the sharpest falls in GDP ever. Wow, things really are bad. People and businesses are going bankrupt, hungry or being evicted because they have run out of money,
Those are the most noticeable breakdowns right now. But what good can we find at the present moment? What breakthroughs might these breakdowns herald?
The first thing that comes to mind is a temporary respite for greenhouse gas emissions, which are estimated to drop 6–8% this year, as we travel much less. The air and water in many places are cleaner now than it has been for years as industry, coal-fired power stations and automobiles come to a near standstill in many places.
But this will be a short term blip in the relentless rise of global overheating unless a deeper breakthrough happens inside of each of us. What could such a breakthrough be?
Our modern lives had become, until a few months ago, an endless round of ceaseless activity, everyone trying to keep up with everyone else, and being proud of being so busy we’ve actually made it a point of honor to be unavailable for many of those that matter to us, or unavailable to try anything that might cause us to slow down and reflect on our lives.
Well, a few months of lockdown has certainly changed that. All of us working from home and/or taking care of children out of school have a lot of time on our hands, although the perpetually busy are no doubt still pressurizing themselves with deadlines and tight screen-driven schedules.
For those of us who have been able to use this time to reflect on our lives, some have discovered the value of spending some time with ourselves, considering our purpose and what is most important to us. Many have been reorganizing their priorities, especially how much shopping and the acquisition of even more stuff is really necessary. Prioritizing relationships and experiences over stuff and consumption. Learning to cook tasty homemade meals, or bake bread.
Although there has been a rise in online shopping, of necessity for many ordering food and essentials, the sale of large ticket items like cars has dropped dramatically, and will take a very long time to recover.
But how much of all this will survive our exit from lockdown as the world economy starts opening up later this year? Can we create space in our lives to enable some of these shifts to lead to more permanent breakthroughs? And how can we get more information on the amazing breakthroughs going on around us that have remained under the radar to date, given the limited attention span our pre-Covid19 busyness resulted in?
Pathways to a Thriving Future
One of the more popular refrains of those who seek to make the world a better place is: “Be the change you seek in the world”. Perhaps one should add: “And support and persuade yourself and others to be the change the world needs”. It turns out that installing energy-efficient light bulbs and recycling and buying fair trade, local organic products, on their own, are actions that are not going to enable us to bring down global warming by much, if at all.
Activism is one way of persuading others who are perceived to be doing harm, to stop doing that harm. For example, just 100 companies produce 71% of the greenhouse gases currently causing global warming; half those companies have shareholders; activists know whom their shareholders are, and if those shareholders are persuaded to sell their shares in those companies, then it would no longer pay to burn fossil fuels. That would really help in addition to the slowdown in transport induced by Covid19.
Another example: activists monitoring rainforests are able to prove that large fast-moving consumer goods companies are using palm oil from suppliers that are involved in slashing and burning rainforests, to make their soaps and ice-creams and thousands of other products. They are able to shame the senior executives of those companies into trying harder to buy palm oil only from sustainable palm oil plantations. That helps a little too.
There are literally millions of examples of good people making good things happen around the world, but you will not find them in the mainstream media. I have spent decades connecting with good people making good things happen, so my Facebook page is filled with half good news and half bad news every day. But I understand that for most people who consume mainstream media, that is not the case. No wonder so many people you and I know are depressed and cynical.
Being depressed and cynical may be an appropriate reaction to the news that powerful interests who seek your compliance and inaction in the face of all this bad news are manipulating you. In fact, they are counting on it, given that making you feel bad means you are more likely to seek the “good life” by going shopping and buying products and services you may not really need.
While there is a rapidly growing number of people around the world who are actively seeking to make the world a better place, their impact and power are still not equal to the forces of corporate and political greed, or the predictable consequences of pumping ever-increasing quantities of fossil fuels and plastics and bio-hazardous chemicals into our environment. Our global immune system may have woken up, but it still relies on the acts of brave, often heroic actions by a small number of highly committed activists.
One of the advantages corporations, banks, and politicians have is that they are fully connected and globalized. They really do have their act together and know very precisely what they want, and then go and get it. A century of management science and motivational science have sharpened their capacity to do both great harm and great good. Business schools worldwide pump out graduates who believe that infinite economic growth is possible on a finite planet and that financial and other markets really do take account of all variables, good and bad, in arriving at a price for everything.
The problem with that story is that much of it is false. By ignoring the environmental and social consequences of their behavior, 90% of the world’s 90 000 corporations are doing more harm than good. And they are rewarded for doing so because the people who own our world can make it so. Because economics and finance are not subjects most people are familiar with, “experts” easily dupe them.
Many more sensitive people have decided that the solution is to do what they can locally, or to join an eco-village, or to support permaculture, transition towns, and many other laudable local solutions. That is all well and good, but by itself will not get us where we need to be by 2050.
Changing the system from the outside is only a part of the solution. Changing the system from the inside could be even more powerful. The big question for most people who want to make good happen is: “How can I actually get close to a lever of power inside the system?”
How Can Life on Earth Flourish by 2050?
As many noted scientists have pointed out, life on earth does not need humans to flourish, but humans definitely need life on earth to flourish to survive and thrive. In a four to six-degree warming scenario, it is quite possible that most if not all humans would approach near extinction, especially those living in the places most vulnerable to warming and oceans rising.
That scenario is, unfortunately, going from being an extreme possibility in the distant future to the probability that it will happen within the next century if we continue business as usual. It is worth remembering that all our ancestor species are now extinct. In the past hundred thousand years, we have managed the extraordinary feat of growing from a population of a few hundred thousand hunter-gatherers, to the dominant top predator on earth.
It is predicted that there will be 9+ billion humans on earth by 2050. Along with our billions of livestock, we now account for 99% of the weight of mammals on earth, compared with the 1% we represented a few hundred thousand years ago. For example, 1.5 billion cows account for more methane/greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, and planes put together.
Scientists call the geological age we are living in the Anthropocene because the marks we are leaving on and in the earth show this to be an age in which mankind modified the planet unalterably. Whether this story will end in tears or laughter is in our hands, right now.
There are many brilliant solutions to our current crisis out there, but it is not easy to think systemically about those challenges and opportunities, which are intimately inter-related to each other. Instead of focusing on “problems” and “crises”, we need to get people thinking more deeply about root-causes and systemic solutions to those root causes.
The basic problem is that we are addicted to quick-fix, dramatic, and memorable silver bullet solutions, which are simple and make us feel better immediately. “Save the rainforests”, “Save the coral reefs”, “Help the Syrian refugees”- etc. All band-aids for symptoms, not regenerative surgery for the deep wounds that cause these outcomes.
There is no single, one-size-fits-all, silver bullet solution, despite the claims of the many who would have you donate money to a worthy cause. We have created the most complex global civilization in history. In order to transform this global civilization based on neoliberal capitalism, it is generally agreed we have to transform capitalism itself.
But how? In the past few decades, I’ve written seven books on this topic, from a variety of different perspectives: middle and senior management, entrepreneurs, innovators, change agents, spiritual seekers, activists, and from my own personal perspective. It is only now that I am able to answer that question with any authority, as I have integrated all of these perspectives into six pathways to a thriveable 2050.
The key to this integration is the concept and practice of synergy in all aspects of our lives and work, within the boundaries of a safe and just operating space for humanity. In this century we will redefine, redesign, and deliver the “good life” that we have taken for granted in previous centuries. The process has already begun, as hundreds of millions of people have begun experimenting creatively with different lifestyles, work styles, and organizational designs.
Everything we have taken for granted since the first Renaissance is up for grabs- how we govern ourselves, what and how we manufacture and build the stuff of our civilization, the role and mechanisms of finance, how and why we work, shop, travel, holiday and play.
The fact that economic growth has suddenly gone negative gives us an opportunity to rethink our assumptions about what it means to be “developed”. Is development about living happy, fulfilling, and peaceful lives or is it about accumulating money amid poverty, inequality, violence as well as social and environmental destruction?
This requires us all to be much more imaginative, playful, and open to new ideas and ways of doing things than ever before. And for the many who would resist change and maintain the “old ways”, we have a message: adapt or die. Luckily, as South Africans of all races discovered in the last part of the 20th century, adapting is by far the most fruitful of options, despite the current challenges that society faces after the glory years of Nelson Mandela and the rainbow nation.
There is much good news we can celebrate: with transparency increasingly the foundation in corporate reporting, we are seeing unprecedented action. Several hundred companies, including Dell, Sony, Microsoft and Tesco, have committed to set emissions reduction targets in line with climate science. They are getting well ahead of the curve in preparing themselves for the changes ahead, setting out a clear pathway to future-proof growth and positioning themselves to capitalize on the opportunities that await.
Companies are also driving a surge in demand for renewable energy, with hundreds of multinationals — including several dozen Global Fortune 500 companies — now targeting 100% renewable electricity. Together, they are creating hundreds of terawatt-hours (TWh) in demand for renewable electricity annually — enough to power several mid-sized countries.
As I put it in my book Making Good Happen (2017), where I first developed the six pathways to a thriving future
“Companies and cities are reaping the benefits of their action. Last year, 6000 companies reported cost savings of US$12.4 billion while reducing emissions equivalent to the size of France’s annual carbon footprint. And in a historic shift, the companies proving that revenue and emissions don’t have to go hand in hand were identified: the 62 companies that achieved this decoupling enjoyed an average 29% increase in revenues, compared to a fall of 6% for the others.
As for cities, they have eyed more than 1,000 economic opportunities from climate action, with hundreds of cities looking to develop new industries and jobs linked to the green economy.” Those good numbers are now dramatically higher three years later, and if we do the right things following our exit from lockdown and this ongoing crisis, we can actually drive transformational, epoch changing change.
For those of us already on this journey, our own challenge is how to keep it as simple and relevant as possible- not only for ourselves but also to be able to enroll and inspire others to come on the journey too, wherever they may be. It is in this spirit, that I now offer you a map of the next 30 years, and how we can create a world in which all life thrives by 2050.
An Operating System for Transformation and Synergistic Innovation
In order to move beyond incremental to synergistic innovation in most of our large socio-economic systems, we need a better operating system for transformation that unfolds in four steps:
A. Current Betterworld Initiatives
We already know that our current betterworld initiatives will not get us to a thriveable 2050 where all life on earth can thrive. Making good happen in incremental ways in communities, healthcare, education, employment, food, homes, cities, logistics, and design is now one of the largest industries on earth.
Many of these current initiatives are, moreover, dominated by self-serving foundations and NGO’s whose priority is to fund their own siloes of activity, often presented as “silver bullets” to weaponize their funding campaigns and “solve the world’s most pressing problems”. This almost guarantees incremental change, rather than breakthroughs, together with the risk-averse budgeting processes in most large corporations.
Creative imagination and visions that synergize ideas, people, and resources relevant to the often narrow missions inherent in the better world and corporate industries need to complement the passion for beneficial change that fuels those committed to making a better world possible.
This implies an appreciative intensification of what people stuck in siloes are already doing, adding a rich pool of ideas, people, and resources to their efforts, rather than serving as a distraction. In other words, it makes your day job easier and more fun and delivers different but much more significant, thriveable results.
B. Future Glue — Relationship and Knowledge Capitals
In order to build on and move beyond the current quagmire of competing initiatives, we need copious amounts of “future glue”. In order to transcend the usual endless campaigns to “save the planet/whales/rainforests/ support the social entrepreneurs/invest in less bad companies” conducted in armored siloes, the making, and mapping of new connections between such initiatives through locally empowered programs is key.
Rather than “doing unto” we need to shift to a “transform with” approach to generate context-sensitive, synergistic innovations that are driven by local needs and possibilities.
This involves embedding both relationship and knowledge capitals in local contexts to define the transitions that those local people are in, rather than a one-size-fits-all model beloved of NGOs, charities, and foundations. Every current “making good happen initiative” should incorporate an automatic review of their capacity building, future glue activities to ensure that complementary initiatives are interwoven into the fabric of current initiatives and siloes.
This creates an environment in which synergistic innovations become more likely and also supplies the often rare resources needed to make all the difference. Being able to look across the six pathways and build multi-stakeholder coalitions that honor multi-capital synergies, and measure them, becomes the critical skill that enables us to get to a thriveable 2050 together.
C. Desired Outcomes
Each of the six pathways involves a stream of related decisions that have an impact on one or more aspects of our lives and work. We call these areas of impact “Capitals”, to underline that every capital has the same priority and claim to be used wisely, and most importantly, regenerated.
While financial capital has been elevated to the top priority in the neo-liberal economics of the past 40 years, the world is now valuing nature (natural capital), people (human capital), society (social capital), infrastructure that supports the common good (infrastructure capital) and sustainable manufactured goods (manufactured capital) as equally important as financial capital.
The transitions delivered by synergistic initiatives need to be measured coherently, using a context/ science-based, multi-capital set of synergistic metrics. The minimum acceptable outcome should now be to ensure a safe and just operating space for humanity, as represented in Kate Raworth’s “Doughnut Economics”.
Honoring environmental ceilings and social floors should be the starting point for strategies developed to deliver desirable outcomes. Thriveable new business models capable of delivering these synergistic innovations can then be designed to be robust and adaptive to local needs and specific kinds of transitions. In such contexts, it is possible to “wire in” synergistic metrics that help the local systems in transformation navigate their journey toward their desired outcomes, while generating learnings and improvements in an agile and timely fashion.
D. Pathway Drivers
Each of the six pathways to a thriveable 2050 has a unique driver that helps focus those on the journey.
In Pathway One, Values and Visions, the primary focus is on building social capital, which enables communities, organizations, and societies to align their priorities. There is a much greater chance that thriving, ethical cultures will both drive and emerge from contexts with growing social capital.
On the other hand, the lack of trust which has now become endemic in many nations, organizations, and societies (one of the features of low social capital), will make it much more difficult to overcome the rigidity traps that stand in the way of transformative change. In particular, Pathway One is where more thriveable definitions, designs, and initiatives of and for the “Good Life” will emerge and be articulated and shared.
In Pathway Two, Human Development, the primary focus is on meeting the basic needs of all by 2050, by developing the human capital needed to transform communities, organizations, and societies from within.
Investments in transformations in healthcare, wellbeing, education, and lifelong learning will be at the forefront of transitioning the currently dysfunctional systems in place to more sustainable, thriveable outcomes where future generations can look forward to healthy, fulfilling lives that do not cost the earth and other people’s wellbeing.
In Pathway Three, Thriveable Economies, the key focus is on redesigning our economic and financial capital systems so that we can move beyond purely financial metrics of success such as return-on-investment/ economic value added at a project or organisational scale, and gross domestic product at a national and global scale.
Healthy, thriveable growth that delivers true future value across all of the capitals in synergistic ways is the goal. Corporate, industry and national development plans should move beyond addressing competitive advantage models to addressing how they are designing and delivering the transformations needed to ensure they will be healthy entities in a thriveable world by 2050.
Financial markets that measure and reward true future value creation rather than ROI and “less bad” ESG (environmental/social/governance) concerns will be a key driver of this shift.
In other words, in a thriveable 2050, it will no longer be possible to make excessive returns on financial capital at the cost of any or all the other capitals for the sake of a tiny rich elite. All capitals will need to be regenerated and distributed inclusively for the thriving of all life and all beings on our amazing planet.
Once we each awake to our individual and collective power to make better choices, making good happen becomes a natural, inevitable outcome.
In Pathway Four, Flourishing Biosphere, the focus is on working with the web of life to regenerate natural capital. This is currently a hotbed of activity globally with a vast array of imaginative initiatives in green agriculture, forestry and fisheries, to name but a few.
The valuation of natural capital, which began with carbon and water, is now rapidly extending to an understanding of the real value of entire ecosystems and the initiatives capable of regenerating forests, farms, fisheries, coral reefs, marshes an deltas and much more.
Inner city vertical farms and permaculture also offer hope to the urban masses whose food sources will be increasingly threatened by climate change and global warming. Learning to work with the web of life with humans playing a regenerative rather than an exploitative role becomes a critical new capability and skill set.
In Pathway Five, Resilient Habitats, the focus is on designing and delivering the infrastructure capital, common spaces and architectures that make for thriveable cities, suburbs and rural spaces and places. At a minimum, such places and spaces will be carbon and water neutral, powered by renewable energy and healthy to live and work in.
The transformation of the electricity, transportation and construction industries will also contribute to making the design and building of garden villages, towns and cities desirable and doable.
In Pathway Six, Circular Manufacturing and Mobility, the focus is on manufactured capital being transformed by a sharing, zero waste, cradle-to-cradle design and production process that uses approaches such as biomimicry to ensure a one-planet footprint for manufacturing industries.
The ultimate goal will be for manufacturing, logistics, and packaging to become regenerative, inclusive activities with the help of 3D printing fabs and distributed energy and communications grids, approaching the “zero marginal cost economy” envisioned by Jeremy Rifkin.
In PART TWO of this article, we will explore some of the very practical ways the breakthroughs in each of these six pathways can be accelerated and scaled-up.
In the meantime, stay safe, stay well and stay strong in the face of the current crisis- and do not lose hope, because YOU can be one of the keys to unlocking one or more transformations in one or more pathways with the help of the Humanity Rising program and these new methods and tools featured in “Strategies for Change”.
If you are interested in digging deeper into any of this material, please feel free to visit: Books by Dr Robin Lincoln Wood
All the best!
Robin
Dr Robin Lincoln Wood
