Major New Fernando Flores Work Product

Both the Wall Street article and the report ‘Surfing Towards the Future’ are well worth reading if you’re interested in the practice of radical hope. LB

Chauncey Bell Blog

Fernando Flores has just delivered a major report to the nation of Chile on the subjects of innovation and preparing for the future. In English, SURFING TOWARDS THE FUTURE: CHILE ON THE 2025 HORIZON, explores “strategic orientations for innovation” for the nation over the coming decades. The document, and the work of preparing it, comes from the Chilean National Council on Innovation for Competitiveness, under Flores’ leadership.

In a blog posting reprinted in The Wall Street Journal CIO Journal, Irving Wladawsky-Berger praised the report for its creation of a new historical background for understanding and interacting with innovation. You can read his comment by clicking this title: Wall Street Journal_Innovation as a Journey Into the Future

For those with serious interest in how innovation occurs, this report is a treasure. It examines the phenomena of innovation, the background in which innovation occurs, the current historical state of the world…

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Learned Helplessness: a recipe for sustainability INACTION?

Back in the 1960s, psychology researcher Martin Seligman and his team discovered how to create helplessness and passivity – first in animals and later in humans.  Some sustainability campaigners could learn an important lesson from his research about how to present their message so it generates action rather than helplessness.

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.

Environment: Be angry, but not aggressive…

In a global culture where an underlying mood of aggression and distrust is deeply and subtly embedded, it’s easy to respond to the multiple and increasing threats of ecosystem breakdown with the same aggression that we see played out on a daily basis.

However, this is a place where Einstein’s famous quote is absolutely relevant:

“Problems cannot be solved with the same mind set that created them.”

It’s as important to learn to shift out of aggression and operate from more constructive moods as it is to understand the systems shifts of the emerging regenerative economy.

How could understanding Gerber’s eMyth Technician improve your sustainability results?

Michael Gerber first published his business classic “The eMyth” in 1986, and it’s been a business book bestseller for decades, revised as “The eMyth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It” in 1995. (NOTE: The “e” is nothing to do with the Internet – it stands for “entrepreneur”.) Its insights into how business works – and doesn’t work – are highly useful for sustainability success as well as business success.

Understanding the motivations, preferences and key stress points characteristic of Entrepreneurs, Managers and particularly Technicians can help us craft more relevant sustainability messages.

Do you have evidence of regenerative thinking being put into practice?

To me, the Regenerative Business revolution began back in the 1990s.  Where I see examples, I post them into the LinkedIn Regenerative Business discussion group.

To me, the more we observe and applaud the emerging shift to truly win/win/win sustainable business models, the more we can accelerate their spread.  Whether it’s a suburban accountant installing a master power-off switch in a building refurbishment or a plastics manufacturer turning post-consumer waste into quality packaging, there’s a lot going on.

So now it’s your turn – what shifts are you observing towards business models where:

• there are no products  – only valuable services
• there are no wastes – only valuable by-products
• products are designed for total safety
• products are designed for re-manufacture as products-of-service
• products are designed to copy nature’s smart thinking – renewable materials, renewable energy, room-temperature processes
• resource usage is radically reduced
• small, smart local solutions are replacing big infrastructure/big waste solutions

Share them as a comment here, in the LinkedIn Regenerative Business group, or through the Balance3 Contact page.

 

 

Enough with the ‘why’ already – let’s talk about the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of profitable sustainability…

Humans need more than why stuff for behaviour change.  If a good reason why was enough to create behaviour change then we wouldn’t have problems with smoking, obesity or any number of other ‘challenges’.  To make effective change, most of us need more than “reasons why” – we also need to know what to change, we need to know how to do it, and we need some rewards along the way.

Where are the (guilt-free) sustainability videos and audios about the ‘what‘ and ‘how‘ of profitable, regenerative sustainability?

I’m a bit cranky today.  I’ve just watched another video on sustainability – and it’s still about “why sustainability is important”.  A whole 20 minute TED talk – and over 15 minutes of “why“.

This tiny house uses mushrooms as insulation

Fascinating example of leveraging nature (biomimicry)

Who specifically? What specifically? What’s beyond ‘someone should do something’…

OK, so you want a change in your world – what’s that change going to look like?  Do you know ?  Can you describe what you want instead?

A web post I was referred to recently said that: “Those in charge of our world currently are clearly not doing the job that needs to be done“.  The response to that post was:  ‘What are “our current leaders” failing to do? What are you hoping we … [the alternative leaders]…  do?‘

Who specifically….

Who specifically do you want to influence?  Who has the power now, today, to make a decision that will lead to direct action in the domain that you want action? Who is the person who has the power to make that change happen?  Do you know?  Can you get beyond “the government should” or “business shouldn’t” to describe what change you want and who truly has the power to get it initiated?

What specifically…

What specifically do you want them to do?  What process do you want them to follow?  What results will it generate and for whom?   What specific evidence will tell you that the change you want has been achieved?

Going Beyond Cradle to Cradle: The Upcycle and the Future of Sustainable Design

I was inspired by ‘Cradle to Cradle’ when it first came out – as a business analyst in the manufacturing game it just made so much sense. Good to see a followup – “The Upcycle” is going on my reading list – after I get through “The Blue Economy”.

As an Ontological Practitioner who believes that we create new realities by describing them, to me these books are a celebration of the ongoing emergence of Regenerative Business.

It’s like the tide starting to come in over sandflats – a trickle here, a trickle there.  It doesn’t look much individually, but add it to stories like the major $ performance improvements of UK DIY retailer B&Q and to me there’s a trend emerging – one that started over two decades ago.  When you get players like B&Q facilitating consumer carbon footprint reduction, it looks like it has potential to accelerate.

What’s your evidence that the tide might have already turned?  Do you know what you’re looking for as evidence of positive change?

Be Green Packaging LLC

The Upcycle – Taking Cradle to Cradle to the Next Level

When William McDonough and Michael Braungart released their book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way we Make Things in 2002, few could predict their ideas would have such a wide-reaching impact on the world of business. However, the Cradle to Cradle principle provided a much-needed blueprint for companies to incorporate the principles of sustainability into their business models and paved the way for a new certification system based on a products entire life cycle. The book has since been translated into 12 languages and become required reading for numerous college courses based on sustainability.

Nearly ten years after the publication of Cradle to Cradle, McDonough and Braungart have released yet another landmark book called The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability – Designing for Abundance. Instead of simply rehashing the same ideas presented in the original book, they have taken…

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