Menu
2023 has been a special one in many ways for me. Just to name some of the challenges, we as humankind faced: It has been the hottest year on record, it has been a year of escalating polarizations and the upcoming of AI has opened more questions than answering them. I can only relate to Otto Scharmer, when he questions why we collectively create results that nobody wants? Sensing into this year, definitely nature destruction, inequalities, anxiety and depression is on the rise.
In my last reflection, I questioned if the concept of sustainability is still a valuable concept to address the situation adequately. Based on my experiences in 2023, I dove into five reasons why this concept is not sufficient anymore. I believe we need to move on and find a new language. At least this was what I aimed at in this year. To speak in a picture: I felt with sustainability I am entering a rigid building rather than a vivid forest. If we want to create lasting change, we need to shift our attention from outside to inside, from silo to system thinking, from mind to heart-driven approaches.
It´s time to listen to the wisdom of nature, that has created us and that holds the wisdom of 3,8 billion years of evolution and learning for us. In 2023, I took part in the course “Regenerative Leadership” powered by Laura Strom. In this course, I found a new language that spoke to my heart. This language is based on nature´s success principles that I want to reflect upon now. For me, this will be my foundation for my 2024´s aspirations.
This is life´s basic principle, that we as humankind violate in many ways. We, so often do exactly the opposite. Let´s for example have a look at our accounting systems. We measure and report on financial indicators, but do not value ecosystem or social system services. Our prices to not reflect the real prices that we all pay for destroying our planet or unhealthy products. True Cost Accounting would be the way forward. This a new type of bookkeeping that does not just look at the usual financial values within a company, but also calculates the impacts on natural and social capital. As such the “hidden costs” of production, which were externalized in the old system, are made visible and internalized in this way. The basic question relating to this life´s principle is how you and your organization support and not destruct the web of life?
Our body is made of 30 billion of cells and more than 30 billion microbes. We are not a fixed entity, but a constantly changing colony of human and non-human cells. In nature, not the strongest, nor the most intelligent organization wins, but the one being able to adapt fastest to new situations. If you look at a colony of ants, one of the most successful species on our planet, their core success element is self-organization. No ant asks for the permission of the queen, they know their task and perform these in perfection to ensure that the whole is greater than it´s parts. One other aspect of this principle is, that change is nothing to resist or being afraid of. This principle suggests to understand change rather as a source of creativity and inspiration. Modern and nature like organizations are starting to play with these aspects. For example, at nextjump, every morning two employees of different areas meet up to discuss private and professional challenges. The basic idea behind it is to support each other to get better. At the end of the week two teams of two meet to discuss the week and once a month a group of 10 reflects their progress. You could even go as far as to evaluate your employee’s performance based on the ability to support other employees in your organization.
The extent to which a living system thrives depends on the extent to which the interconnected relationships thrive, because nature does not function in parts, but in togetherness. Our current economic system is mainly and predominantly focused on numbers. One can say, that it´s all about numbers. In life and nature it´s all about relationships. In any crisis that we navigate through, we realize this principle, because when systems collapse, we are left with each other. We are left with our relationships to the land, to ourselves, to one another. Our small islands of coherence, as mentioned above, are then the laboratories of the future that is trying to emerge. In our organizational world this means that we should nurture and cultivate our network of relationships. This network is basically the network of relationship to ourselves, to our employees and colleagues, to our suppliers, to our clients and to the planet itself. In the light of this nature´s principle, we should redefine the understanding of sustainability: For me it´s not anymore to balance the triple bottom-line but the sum of the positive relationships listed above. Then employees become ambassadors for the future, suppliers are co-creating the future with you and clients want to be part of your tribe.
If you look at nature, biodiversity is highest, where water meets land. At this intersection, the tension is very high and as such the aliveness. If you apply this principle to our organizations, the logic is basically the same: No tension, no aliveness, no learning, no evolution. We can ask ourselves how we support the diversity in our organizations: Do we hire diverse or alike people and how do we treat those that rather increase the tension in our organizations than those that stand for harmony and a consensus spirit. Some companies like CWB are awarding those employees that irritate and question the business-as-usual approach as cultural champions as they know that this supports resilience and successful faster adaptation to new challenges.
In nature, breakdown and breakthrough are closely related to each other. Nature seems to learn out of any breakdown to increase the probability of breakthroughs, while we as humans often have the tendency to as quickly as possible get out of breakdown phases. But especially these phases offer the possibility for deep reflection and renewing. That´s why radical innovation in nature happens between winter and spring and small adaptations between spring and summer. Spring is – in analogy to our organizational phases – a time for renewing and piloting, while summer stands for growth and success. Once we enter into autumn, this time stands for harvest or retreat, depending on your situation. So, where are you in this cyclic seasonal phase, personally and organizational-wise? What kind of radical innovation did you develop when we went through COVID or and any crisis? Personally, it was a very hard time for me, going through such a crisis with my own sustainable consultancy, but my radical innovation was to dive into professional digital offers like interactive online courses.
Like in nature, where nutrients and energy flow constantly, in our organisations information, resources, relational energy, meaning and purpose are flowing constantly. Ecosystem mapping could help us to understand which relationships between internal (for example employees, leadership teams,…) and external stakeholders (like customers, press, competitors or suppliers…) are healthy and vitalizing, which are ok or sometimes stressful, and which are not healthy at all and degenerative. Based on this we can identify the most efficient lever for more liveliness in our organizations. We can also ask ourselves how we can align our forces around a shared purpose and mission, which supports the web of life rather than degenerating it. Like in nature, only those organizations will be vital that have a free positive flowing energy. Unfortunately, to the opposite, this flow is often blocked and that itself is the biggest barrier for many organizations to stay healthy, resilient and successful in the long run.
What Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger described long time ago, is now confirmed by up-to-date quantum physics: Everything is energy, everything is connected. Many indigenous tribes were acting based on this nature principle. To boil it down to one sentence, one can say, that the world we experience is the sum of our thoughts, feelings, and the actions that result from them. Talking about our thoughts and feelings, we can either focus on our area of concern or our sphere of influence. Often it is a mix of both, but as we have only a certain amount of energy available each day, it is decisive, where we focus on. The more we focus on our area of concern, the more we feel like victims of our circumstances and the more we lose the power to act on the things that we can actually influence. This works the other way around as well. Coming back to the theory that small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to lift the entire system to a higher order, it is crucially important in these dynamic times to find likewise people or communities that focus on and share the vision to create a better future.
From future researcher I learned that we only need 10-13% of people to act differently to create a new world that serves as all as well as our planet. The challenge is that normally 1% create these new rules, 9% are the early adopters and 90% are only watching “the game”. As such it is important to be able to inspire our networks to think and act differently. I love the small inspirational book “Together we are better” by Simon Sinek, where I found this quote, that sums it up very well: “Success is when reality catches up to our imagination”. The seven nature´s success principles described above are a perfect basis for inspiring our imagination. The future is very simple for me: We can either learn from these multiple crises we are navigating through and leapfrog forward or fall back and regress. Let´s hope for the former.
