#2: The Only Way Out Is Through—Coronavirus, climate crisis, and living in a VUCA world | Call #2

I'd like to welcome you all. This is the second in a series of calls that we're hosting on Coronavirus, Climate Crisis and Living in a VUCA World. We'll talk about VUCA a little bit later on. I'm Gil Friend, I'm CEO of Natural Logic. I'm your host today. My co host is Gene Dunaway coming to us from Arkansas. And just to get a sense of who's here, we're going to throw up a couple of quick polling questions. Can you do that or do I do that? How would you characterize your mood in this moment? If you're on the first call, you know that mood is something that we talked about and we'll be talking about again. In the course of these conversations.

You.

May find yourself in many moods. Choose the one that feels most present or strongest to you.

Thank you everyone. We have about half the people have voted. If anyone else would like to vote, please do so. We'll hold this open for another minute.

If for some reason you can't see the poll, just add in the chat. How would you characterize your current mood? One or two words.

Okay. We've had about 60% of the people vote and it seems to have stop there. So I'm going to end the poll now. And then I'm going to share the results with everyone.

Can you see that on your screen? Yes.

I muted everyone but you. Anyone can unmute yourself.

Some of the comments in the chat. Well, you can see them there. Very hopeful, honored and calm. Calm terror. So we're a reflection of the world around us. We're living in many different moods individually, mind change throughout the day and as a society and culture, many different ones as well. Gene, can we get the next question? Oh, you know what the deal is. It's up at the top. Oh no, that's.

I think people answered all three of them.

They did. Okay, so, ah, there. Okay, so if you scroll down, share.

The results and you should be able to look down the poll and see them all.

So you can scroll that so geographically, mostly us. A little bit from Asia and Africa and Europe. Welcome people from far away. And we asked where do you situate your work or identify yourself? A little bit of large business, a bit of small business, a lot of self employed, a lot of other. We'll find out if you care to say what other is for you. Put that in the chat as well. Okay. All right, so let's move on from the poll. Thank you. Get a sense of who's in the room with us. We're going to try to provide opportunities for you to speak, but obviously with this many people on the call, not everyone's going to get a chance to do that. So, again, by way of introduction, I'm Gil Friend. I'm CEO of Natural Logic, a strategy boutique that works with companies to identify the opportunities that appear when you put sustainability and living systems at the heart of your business to drive innovation and service and the usual business metrics. Formally recently completed a stint of five years as the first Chief Sustainability Officer for the city of Palo Alto. And like all of you, I've been thinking a lot, pondering a lot the remarkable moment that we find ourselves in. So I've invited you all to join me in an experiment, a different kind of conversation in a very different moment that is at the same time both poignant and ironic. The poignancy is clear. We're at enormous risk. There's suffering at a very visible scale around the planet that has appeared very suddenly. This is not a slow moving crisis which is hard for humans to perceive. It's a fascinating crisis. And it's ironic because while we're largely obsessed with the problem, and certainly our news media are, both the circumstance itself, the fear around it, the breakdowns that have brought us to this point, we're also witnessing remarkable moment in the history of human solidarity and cooperation. We are, we are collaborating at scale around the planet with high speed, with enormous effectiveness. Very different in different places. You know, the contrast between the United States and China, between Singapore and New York and Florida for that matter, is vast, but happening in the hands of hundreds of thousands of extremely courageous people. We see that we can get on top of this thing. We see that there are ways to address this crisis with focused, rapid, effective action. And so we're living in both of those worlds at the same time. It's a study of contrasts and it's a study in the profound uncertainty of our lives on this planet. Something that we're very confronted with now but is really there for us all the time. To my eyes, we're in an unprecedented historic moment brought about by both of these, by the risks of a cascading and uncontrolled pandemic and the kind of human suffering that it could bring and the kind of social destabilizing that it can bring. And we're also in a moment where not just through the medical and public health collaboration, but because the game is broken, everything is topsy turvy, trust has shattered across all sorts of institutions. No matter what anyone tells you about what will happen tomorrow or next week or the month after. None of us knows. And that extends beyond the response to the pandemic, to the political and economic and cultural situation we find ourselves in. We're in a planet devoid of leadership. The 50 or so years where the United States was looked at as the global leader, either happily or resentfully, but accepted as a fact is over. China has aspirations, but they're not there yet. Europe is surprisingly quiet in the midst of this crisis. India appears to be a mess. Where do people turn for leadership who has both had the trust and the power and the authority and the capability? Setting an agenda at a planetary scale. We see emergence of what looks like competent and focused leadership at local scale, cities and states and provinces around the world. But it's a very different game than what we've lived most of our lives in all of us. What comes next is not clear. And to me, that's an enormous opportunity to, for each of us in our various ways, to contribute to what is emerging. So we're in a very. Potentially powerful situation because we are. We're doing something we never intended to do. We are stress testing systems at a planetary scale. And those of you who do engineering or do process design or even who do medical work, you know that there is a way to stress a system that discloses how the system is working and discloses its breakdowns, discloses its weak points, discloses its strengths. And so here we are. We have an opportunity to live in a laboratory. We didn't choose this opportunity, but we have the opportunity to live in a laboratory where a stress test is underway. What can we learn from that? What can we discern? What kind of points of opportunity, leverage points, can we identify based on a better diagnosis of what's wrong that can help guide us to the actions we should take in the future? We have, all of us, I suspect, on this call, to varying degrees, have had a sense that something is wrong at many scales in the life we're living on this planet. We know also that we're not alone in that. We see the malaise, the distrust, the gathering force of populist movements in many countries. People smarter than I have observed that these are the rise of populism as we're seeing it now. The right wing populism is a reflection of this discontent. It's a reflection of people who are unhappy with the lives they're living with, the hand that they feel they've been dealt with, the prospects they see before them, and they're reaching for some kind of Answer. Alain Turenne, the French social philosopher, just recently did an interview. I'll see if I can get the link out to you after the call. Profound interview about the current moment. And. He speaks very eloquently in this notion of sense making in the world being broken. Chauncey Bell, I see you there. You were on the call this morning that I was listening in on. Can you briefly summarize what Turin said? You can unmute yourself.

I can unmute myself. But briefly summarize what he said. No, I can't.

Okay, it's.

If you want, Gil, I can put it on the screen, but that's kind of lengthy.

It's too long. Well, maybe. I think the first page, though, is striking, isn't it?

Well, I'll tell you what, I'll put it on the screen in one second here and you can see it.

I need to. The question is, how do we make sense of this moment when all of our usual handholds, the ground we're used to standing on, is shifted or gone, when the stories are gone or confused, when people speak with stunning certainty about what they think is going to happen next, as if it's true, when we know it's just a possibility among many other possibilities. So the challenge that I find myself living in is twofold. One is how do I live at some kind of peace in the middle of this instability? Because if I'm stressed all the time, I'm of no use to anybody, at least to all myself. But how do we find calm in the face of this uncertainty? And second is how do we learn to observe effectively, anticipate? We're in a time we're not going to be able to predict anything? How do we anticipate the possibilities that are before us and start to navigate this landscape of uncertainty that I tell you, I assert will be a feature of our lives for our whole lives? This is, you know, this is. The rest of our lives is going to be like this. Not necessarily Covid, but some kind of mess and disorder and instability and groping for what the new story is. Chauncey having luck with that or not?

Yeah, no, I can't put it up. I can probably send it to put it into the chat box. The text, it's quite short, two and a half pages kind of thing. But that's the best I can do right now.

Let me share something with you on screen. Okay. What do you see? Just raise your hand if you want to comment in, Jean. Actually, for this it'd probably be easier. Just turn your Turn your mute off, say a couple of words and go back on mute. What do you see? What is this a picture of? Well, this is Shel Horowitz in Hadley, Mass. I see an exponential curve, a flattening.

Curve and a slightly less flattening curve.

Okay, somebody else, Let's use hand raising. And Gene, just work fast to unmute people, otherwise we're going to have a bit of chaos here.

Can you hear me?

Yes, go ahead.

Yeah, I mean, we've lived with S curves which have an exponential function since the dawn of evolution.

So.

The problem is that the exponential curve itself is a function of so many underlying forces and factors that people get obsessed with the numbers without understanding the dynamics behind it. I think we're seeing a lot of that today. It's good that people are getting to know what an exponential curve is, but there's a whole history of that curve that that's missing right now. And I think that's a really important learning point for.

That's where we're going. Robin. Anybody else identify this? Have you seen this chart? Where? Have you seen. Any. Hands up, Gene.

Yes, I'm going to call on Ian.

Who's next?

Yeah, can you hear me?

Go ahead.

I see just simple maths. So the physics and biology, the way the world actually works, just simplified, really down to the essence. And as I say, it covers biological.

And physical systems and economic systems. Yeah, yeah. I would say the way the worlds work, not the way the world works. One world here. There's a couple of different things going on. One more, please. Who's next?

Gene Eckhart.

Eckhart, where have you seen this chart?

Hi, Gil. I think it reminds me of a book that I read maybe a decade and a half ago by Donnella Meadows and was looking at scenario analysis for future, future futures, what we could conceivably get at. And I think the lower of the extremes is taking corrective action in the most conservative and yet doable manner. Well, not necessarily the easiest, but doable. And then the red is a little bit less than ideal and then the black is the inevitable. If we just continue to go off the cliff, which I don't like to think about with respect to climate or any other metric you want to use.

So no one has said. But where I've seen this is in the COVID and the COVID mortality rates. I've seen this chart again and again. The degree of turning down of the red or the green has to do with the actions taken by a particular jurisdiction, how much they've done to lock down how quickly they've done it. The green is what happens when you lock down sooner than the red. The black is what happens when you and delay about taking action. We've seen this, okay, and we've seen the same chart around greenhouse gas and temperature rise on the planet Earth. It's exactly the same chart. You see a runaway option and you see an option to bring those that growth down within some sensitive to what measures you take and how quickly you take them. And you see there's a flexion point right down the middle of the bottom of the chart where these three curves diverge. Think of that as the point of intervention. When shelter in place, orders are instantly, when lockdown is. If it's sooner, the curves flatten sooner. If it's later, the curves flatten later. And we've seen it in other realms as well. The funny thing about this is that I said there's different worlds at play here. A couple of you said. Well, Robin said that the S curve, or called the sigmoid, is the standard population biology curve. It's what we see throughout living systems. An organism gets started, it eats, it grows, it reproduces. Reproduction is exponential because it's a percentage of the prior quantity. Each unit of time, the prior quantity is bigger. And so it's a percentage quantity. And it flattens out because of natural limits and constraints that are there in the environment. Running out of food, population growing so large that predators can easily pick it off. The growth is never in the physical capacity of living. The respiratory friction in the lungs of the insects mean that you can never see ants as big as they were in the 1950s Sci fi music movies. The physics just don't allow it. So there are some living systems that produce a sigmoid, an S curve that grows very fast and then flattens out. The black curve is the compound interest curve, isn't it? It's the economic growth curve. It's the growth without constraints. Just, you know, you put your money in the bank and you get interest and you keep it there and you get more interest and more interest. And it looks like that if you're willing to ride out the market ups and downs and.