Can you manage knowledge or emote intelligence if you don't know which way The System is leading?
14-Jun-05
I’ve made the business case for sustainability over and over and over, as I have with you in terms of survival, the macro case, risk management, markets, people, processes, products, profits, purpose, shareholder value,
all based on focusing proper attention to place.
There’s no question in my mind, based on our experience at Interface that it’s a clear, compelling and refutable case, yet the sceptics remain.
So given the sceptics’ reluctance, even disdain and unwillingness to accept my case, I wish to challenge the sceptics to make their case. More precisely, I’d like to hear the business case for double glazing the planet with
greenhouse gases and while talking about the cost of preventing global warming, please address the cost of not preventing it.
I’d like to hear the business case for destroying habitat for countless species, about whose connection to human kind in many or most cases we have not a clue. Ecological ignorance abounds in our culture. Paul Hawken says an average American can name a thousand commercial brands and only about ten trees. Maybe with you it’s 500 commercial brands and 20 trees.
I’d like to hear the business case for poisoning air, water and land. I’d like to hear the business case for disrupting pollination and photosynthesis - that ought to be a really interesting one.
Primary refences to System Thinking at KB include:
ASK YOURSELF
What system do you:
invest your most money on
OR
spend you most time employed in or learning with
OR
care most about in term's of its consequences for humanity
If you will name the system, my circles of friends via wcbn007@easynet.co.uk can open up questions which offer a trust-flow status check which begins by ensuring transparency relating to any conflicts that may be lurking around the system. Highly productive value exchanges are full of purposeful tensions and emotional energies. But unless these are cultivated, a first pattern rule of relationship systems is : connections will snap or non-transparent conflicts will take over. In service economies, such vicious events are where a healthy and valuable system turns against the people related to it- where onve value was growing on all sides, the opposite spin compounds destruction for all who are most loyally involved with the system. To know or to manage whole systems -let alone networks where systems interface - it is vital to map whether the gravity of any living whole is sustaining or destroying, how steep and far along the exponential curve it is, and what sorts of intervention can turn the system spin around if its destroying value for most parties.
I am spending a lot of time at the moment both showing people how this can work on MyWorldAtlas, and collaborating in writing letters to influential sources who might be able to reconcile major systems if they knew what the problem was. I would love to help construct a letter for people who you feel can influence urgent transformation of a system that is destroying trust and value fast. Managerially and strategically, it's worth noting that no leadership decsion can truly or wholly be made without knowing where on the exponential of growth or decay a system or network of systems is at. 
Since 2000, research by Unseen Welath System school uniting knowledge of Sustainability Investment, Intangibles Valutaion, Inttelctual and other Policy Capitals (eg Human Capital) has clarified that the vast majority of wealth and health that a globally and locally networked age is capable of compounding depends on widepread understanding of systems consequences that few people have as yet. A missing learning curriculum if the 21st C is to get better for most people!
CONCLUSION
It seems to us that seeing the future curve that any system is leading you on is a human right and a fundamental conversation that any open democracy needs to integrate
Details
Attachments: 1
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globalwarning (117 Kb)Global Warning16-Jun-05
- Author:
- Chris Macrae
- Publisher:
- KnowledgeBoard
- Date:
- 14-Jun-05
- Categories:
- Emotional Intelligence
- Sections:
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global warning
A grave university professor sent me global warning to attach here. http://www.knowledgeboard.com/download/5887/Global-Warning.doc
If you read it, I guess you may:
a) disagree, why not say so
b) agree, if so please do not lurk
If by nature you feel that you will leave taking action for the long-term to others, and that performing on the short-term measures others control you by is good enough, then I would ask you to consider this exercise that was recommended last month at the London conference on principled leadership
Imagine on the last day of your life, what you did about global warning is judged by a jury comprising your parents and your children..
very natural
At first sight OODA looks like a very natural method, probably how children and people have always learnt through experience when free to do so
However there is a but in my view, if we are in an organsiation where folk are making measurements then their system will overtrump freedoms to use OODA, or to naturally practice community (instead of contrive it) or to network in new explorative ways etc
Because the meaurement systemise, I would argue that we need a universal curriculum for every age of 8 up to see when they are free to OODA, when they are in system that will not reward OODA and perhaps most important of all as we grow up to find ways in which we can renegotiate with those who are managing a system in one way such as command and control until the measures make the best of OODA and control instead of the worst. It is possible for a system to integrate two or more modes of producing and learning, but only if the visualisation of measuremnt is transparent to all involved and through time.
One of the discussion networks I have been spending a lot of time in this month is called opensevens. Its purpose is to list moments in life when a person gets on a 7 year learning curve of experiemce whose quality of performance is actually ruined if measured are made in terms of only what did you achieve in the last 90 days. Compound learning curves repay investment over time but lose by measuring each 90 days as no more than a linear stage to behave on.
I hold the view (probaly a minority one) that KM can only live up to being an inclusive meta-discipline that makes organsiations better for people if it is prepared to renegotiate with command and control management so that organsiations go beyond one-way systemisation. No true learing organsiation can be sustained by one-way control. No self-organising sysem or network web of systems*systems can be sustained through one-way control. So what we measure and how transparently we govern could be how KM reconciles the gap between industrial organsiations whose accounting assumptions are to make the least of investing in people and the higher order age of multiplying value by making the most of purposeful people at work and through learning. Which is KM visioned in Europe or worldwide aiming to offer?
Flowing?
Say I joined in and did not take a system perspective, but adopted an OODA take?
http://www.mindsim.com/MindSim/Corporate/OODA.html
The strategy is to go with the flow, hang if things look comfortable / ethical, advantageous....prod, observe, decide and react? That way you may have the best of both worlds adaptability and agility, reach and connection?
under construction
Your favoutrite system bookmarks would be great so I can catalogue them at the top of this emrging thread and ensure that they informs as many MyWorldAtlases as possible. chris wcbn007@easynet.co.uk
G8 Omens
John Snow is a favourite at Journalists for Humanity
Tonight he reports:G8 Climate Change leak
=======================
Tonight an extraordinary insight into the latest thinking of the G8 - A draft communiqué on energy use and climate change has been leaked. We have a copy.
As it stands they cannot even agree on the statement - "Our world is warming." Seriously.
So what's afoot - will the G8 simply be full of platitudes, yet more hot air the world doesn't appear to need? And all this just to get the Americans to sign up to something, anything, no matter how meaningless?
We've studied it - look for hard targets in vain, for definite targets, timetables and commitments. It's only a draft so there's still time to decide to actually to do something - but the omens are not good.
Guess the people are really goling top have to learn how to network sustainability investment in spite of governments and all their wasted resources