There is a growing wealth of tools available for getting change happening in human systems. They come from a range of fields from education to linguistics. If you’re serious about sustainability, then you know that the real work isn’t in the technology – it’s in changing human systems. Some great tools that I keep coming back to are: The fundamental …
Talking regenerative business and systems thinking the other day, we came around to Donella Meadows and her classic article “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System”. Some web research found this Prezzi Points of Power that gives a nice summary of levels of influence, including:
Many sustainability people I meet are full of stories about “the evil of marketing”. To me, it’s a powerful tool that changes human behaviour – so we’d be much better off taking the tools it’s developed and using them to deliver the change we want to see in the world.
Biomimicry is a label for a design process that’s been developing over the past few decades – it’s a design process that happens where technology meets biology and physics. It challenges our traditional approaches of mechanical and chemical engineering with elegant new solutions. Biomimicry has been happening since Leonardo sketched designs based on nature, but it has been named and …
Yuval Noah Harari’s recent book “Sapiens” is a fascinating insight into human history and how humans use language. “…the truly unique feature of our language is … the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched …
Darren Pearson of Diversified Property Group started as a conventional property developer building project homes. He’s become a “stealth player”, integrating products from leading edge innovators to deliver smarter, greener homes in Sydney, Australia. He credits his mid-course correction primarily to two people: A Harvard professor in his global business group His small daughter The Harvard professor challenged him to …
(Adapted from The Prime Innovation Pattern in The Innovator’s Way) The use of the nouns “entrepreneur” and “entrepreneurship” hide the reality that what we’re dealing with is a process that’s been intensively studied and defined over recent decades – particularly under the label “innovation”. Innovation is another process hiding inside a noun – and what is hidden is the process …
Once upon a time entrepreneurs were thought to be born rather than made. However, like any human craft there’s a strong element of skill. We now know a lot about the skills and habits of successful repeat entrepreneurs. These are 3 of my current favourite skill-builders – along with video intros – for finding, funding and building new business opportunities. …
Smart new business models are delivering radical forms of sustainability – without any mention of the “S” word. eBay, Gumtree and others are enabling product reuse and recycling across the globe and in all sorts of market places. Whether it’s a 10 year old girl updating her toy collection, a home handman acquiring tiling tools, or a larger scale purchase, …
Not getting the results you want? Maybe there’s a reason. I’m repeatedly amazed at how little many (extremely smart) sustainability advocates seem know about the art and craft of influencing. Poorly crafted sustainability messages are as destructive as any other form of junk mail. How many of these screw-ups have you seen recently? 1. Only talk about the bad news …
When leading brands start turning regenerative thinking into business innovation, you know there’s a fundamental mindset shift underway. Here are a few big brand indicators that particularly caught my eye: Adidas collaborates with Sea Shepherd to make running shoes out of ocean plastics: http://www.fastcoexist.com/3048033/adidas-knit-these-sneakers-entirely-from-ocean-plastic-trash McDonalds hooks up with Rocky Mountain Institute to design a Net Zero Energy fast food outlet: …
You know the world is changing when the Golden Arches crowd hooks up with the Rocky Mountain Institute to design a net zero energy fast food outlet – largely achievable with today’s technology! In this case, Net Zero Energy means that a store must offset its energy consumption with on-site renewable energy generation on an annual basis. It’s not a …
A good friend loaned me the book “This Changes Everything” by social activist Naomi Klein. It’s a massive book and I’m still processing a lot of its content. One thing that I’m always on the lookout for in sustainability is to understand the triggers that enable people to engage with something so potentially overwhelming. So the bit of the book …
In her classic paper “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System”, Donella Meadows pointed out that one of the most powerful places to change a system is in how it thinks about itself (“the paradigm out of which the system arises”). Environment = Opportunity We have an exciting new paradigm – the result of 30+ years of creative R&D …
“Human behaviour doesn’t fit into a simple cause/effect model…. Resist simplifications…” – Margo Main In an increasingly complex world, “just” is a symptom of over-simplification that blinds us to possibilities for systems transformation. Maybe it’s an excess of super-hero movies, technology overwhelm, or an industrial culture of production line thinking. A single-answer “solution” about sustainability (or any other wicked problem) …
Changing human systems starts with understanding them and the glue that holds them together. Human systems are heavily geared towards maintaining themselves and they often actively resist change. They want to conserve themselves. (Equally true for individuals, families, communities, organisations and societies.) Human systems also have the potential to transform themselves when the need arises. Given a big enough breakdown …
Being an entrepreneur is fundamentally about being in the business of behaviour change. Behaviour change is a process – hence the word “entrepreneuring”. The real work is in convincing your target market to adopt the new behaviour implicit in your product or service. To sell smarter phones and tablets, Steve Jobs had to convince people to use them – …
Whether you’re considering joining our Summer School in January, setting personal objectives for 2015 or planning some quiet world changing, here are two tools for a kick-start. Each has a more detailed version for you to download and explore. Beginning with a WELL-FORMED end in mind… Five quick questions to check the quality of the objectives that you’re setting are: …
If you’re into influencing and personal effectiveness then you’re in the conversation game. It’s a game that many of us learned like we learned walk – by copying others without too much conscious consideration of the specifics of what we were doing. For some of us, even the suggestion that there are different types of conversations with different purposes …
At the heart of all sustainability challenges is the core system requiring an upgrade – the human system. “Business”, “the economy”, “the supply chain” etc. are ultimately processes where human beings act and interact in social systems. Understanding HOW humans go about the process of organising themselves as individuals and in groups (their ontology) is critical to sustainability at all levels – from personal …