Will government action ‘fix’ sustainability? Really?

Adapted from “Are your beliefs limiting your effectiveness?”, published in our September newsletter.

Most human behaviour is dictated by our opinions and beliefs about the world. If we don’t examine and test them, we can end up becoming impotent, angry and depressed.  In the sustainability game and especially in the media, one limiting belief I come across repeatedly is that “Sustainability requires government action.”  

Sustainia’s top 100 for 2014 makes interesting reading

Top 100 report 2014

It’s a chilly winter’s afternoon in my home town down under, and I’m catching up on my reading list.  The Sustainia Top 100 came out last month and it’s an inspiring way to spend some time.  It’s the third annual report on the practical, happening, fundamental shifts underway in how our products and services are being delivered.

Is attack your last option – or your only strategy?

(First published in “Regenerative Thinking in Action” – April 2014)

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
– Richard Buckminster Fuller

Are you in automatic fight mode?

One of our great modern philosophers – Humberto Maturana – has commented, that we live in an age where society’s prevailing mood is one of aggression.  One of the implications of this is that we can get trapped in the assumption that the way to change a system is to fight it.

Galileo, heresy, physics and the emerging regenerative economy…

Many years ago, the subject History and Philosophy of Science was a required subject in my undergraduate degree.  In it I learned about Galileo – the Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who championed heliocentrism – the then controversial proposition that the earth went around the sun.  The mindset change he championed resonates strongly with the shift to regenerative thinking.

Can you afford to miss out on the business opportunities of the emerging circular economy?

I’ve been watching a LinkedIn conversation about “taking the immense risk that Climate Change is posing” and watched it transform into a believe/don’t believe conversation about human-induced climate change.

To me, sustainability advocates have a much more powerful challenge to make, especially to business players.  We can ask them a different and more immediate set of questions:

• “What does the market place think about environmental issues?
• What are your customers doing?
• What are your suppliers doing?
• What are the market leaders doing?”

We don’t necessarily need to prove “climate change is true” – we just need to prove that it’s there is a real case for business understanding of environmental issues.