Gil Friend: Can the World Work?

Gilfrand grew up comfortably middle class in.

Bayside, New York, the United States of the 1950s. Everything was working just fine, as far as I could tell. There's just like, you know, there was no disturbance in the field.

But by the time he was a teenager in the 1960s, the stability he grew up in started to give way. And he began to notice, oh, maybe the world didn't actually work. Some people, those with lighter skin, had rights. Other people, those with darker skin, did not.

The burning of our churches will not deter us. The bombing of our homes will not dissuade us.

Meanwhile, the Vietnam War seemed like it would never end.

According to Associated Press, communist forces have shelled Hu and four other South Vietnamese towns in efforts to disrupt pacification programs. Eleven South Vietnamese died and 40 were wounded.

A nuclear arms race was underway.

On top of the main studio building in Munich, a cluster of receiving antennas serves as electronic ears on the communist world. Communist broadcasts are monitored 24 hours a day.

I refused to participate in shelter drills because I thought they were stupid.

I was curious how Gil experienced the world emotionally during this period. Now both he and I use the word mood in a similar way. When someone inhabits a mood, they live in a persistent emotional state, one that predisposes them to certain actions and makes other actions less likely. Gil says his main mood was resentment.

Things are shit and it's their fault. Resignation was another. This is, like, impossible. There's nothing we can do about this. I'm going to try, but we're really doomed.

Yeah, but there's an aim at other people.

The resentment is an aim at other people. It's their fault. The resignation is more personally directed. There's nothing I can do. Now they tangle together.

So Gil went off to graduate school at Antioch, and he found himself spending a lot of time in the library.

I was reading scientific journals. I was cooking in a natural foods restaurant in Washington, D.C. i was reading about what was then being called the World Food crisis. The disconnect between the growing population of the planet, the nutritional demands of that growing population, and the amount of food being produced. So there was a world not working. You know, a population of, at the time, 3 billion people, with a billion going to bed hungry every night. So that was the. No.

Gil continued to dive into research around the myriad ways in which the planet couldn't sustain us. Then he discovered the writings of Buckminster Fuller.

I was able to realize that humanity had arrived at some point of transformation, a great threshold crossing. That is in view of the fact that all humans were born naked, absolutely helpless, ignorant.

Bucky, as he was known, was an architect, inventor, writer, polymath and systems thinker. And immediately, Gil was smitten by a world of ideas he had never considered.

Brains are always and only coordinating information input from the touching, the smelling, the hearing, the seeing.

This is how my view grew. The show that dives deep into humanity's challenges by looking at big thinkers who have changed their minds. I'm Amiel Handelsman. Although I only met Gilfrind recently, I've known of him and his work as a sustainability pioneer for years. Let me tell you just a few of his accolades. He was an inaugural member of the Sustainability hall of Fame. He was named by the Guardian as one of the 10 most influential sustainability voices in America. He served as the first Chief Sustainability Officer for Palo Alto, California. And he founded and runs both Natural Logic, Inc. And Critical Path Capital. I find Gil to be an intriguing thinker because he blends two qualities we don't often find in one person. Decades of experience leading sustainability initiatives in business and government, and a deep grounding in a framework that is dear to me. It's sometimes known as language action. It's about how we humans create worlds of possibility through how we speak and how we listen. I invited him on the show to learn about a particular life experience that changed his answer to the question, can the world actually work? So back to Bucky and Guilfriend's fascination with Fuller's refreshing approach.

I was blown away by the clarity and lucidity of his work, was blown away by his declaration of purpose, which was a world that works for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone. And I thought, okay, sign me up. Read everything I could. Tracked him down at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois, where he was scholar in residence. I called up to get some. Get some publications I couldn't find anywhere else. And they said, well, having a world game workshop this summer, you should come out. And so, while my pals from the natural foods restaurant ran off for what was for the first rainbow family gathering, a kind of prototypical Burning man to, you know, smoked open, run naked through the Rockies all summer, I went to Southern Illinois University, where 80 of us spent 80 hour weeks for a month diving deep, living in the library and looking at the question of could that happen? And how could that happen? After a week of whole systems brainwashing, we divided up into 10 groups, each focused on a particular area. Food and agriculture, where I was working Energy, housing, transportation, education, communications, and a number of others. And for each group, the task was to first of all specify as clearly and explicitly as we could, the present state of humanity around that concern. So in the case of food and agriculture, how many people? What's the caloric requirement? Protein requirements per day for a healthy person? How much is that altogether? What are we producing now? What would it take to produce more of that? Step number two was to define as specifically as possible the preferred state at some point in the future. What is the population likely to be? What will be the requirements then in terms of food production, nutrition production and so forth. And the numbers are staggering, as you might imagine. You know, think of that was 3 billion people. Today we're at 8 billion plus. So you're at least multiplying things by almost 3, not to mention rising nutritional requirements and so forth. The third step was fascinating. The obvious question is, well, how do we get from here to there? How do we get from the present state to the preferred state sometime in the future? But we flipped the game, or they flipped the game on us. Bill Perk, one of the professors at siu, said, we're going to do something called normative planning. We're going to plan backwards from the future. We're going to stand in the successful future, imagine that it has happened, and then ask the question of how did we get there? And not to say, how do we get there? Starting from the present state in 1973, it's like, how did we get there? What did we do in the last five years? What had to happen the five years before that to enable the last five years to happen? What had to happen in the five years before that? And we reverse engineered the mission. This is like what NASA did with the moon launch under the Apollo project in the 1960s. But we did the reverse engineering. And what we determined was that it's possible for this planet to feed everybody on it, even with a larger population, that people were not hungry because there wasn't enough food. People were not hungry for other reasons, access to food, affordability of food, food waste, etc. And we determined that there was no necessary physical barrier to human success on the planet in the realm of food and agriculture, where my group was focused. But this was the conclusion of every one of the ten groups. No necessary physical, technical laws of the universe, barriers to success. The barriers are in human will and human action. So that was the opening. That was the big aha. This could be the commitment to a world working for 100% of humanity. No Longer felt like a naive and fanciful dream, but like a real possibility. The other striking thing about it was that, and again, every one of these 10 groups that were working independently, The other realization was that the solutions for planetary success were not planetary. They were local. They were small scale, adapted to place, you know, aggregating across the billions of us. But not massive single minded global geoengineering projects, but things that evolve in place based on local ecological conditions and the participation of the people involved in each place. So that was the opening. I came out of that experience, went back to Washington D.C. where I was living at the time, and co founded with David Morris and Neil Seldman, an organization called the Institute for Local Self Reliance, still operating to this day.

How much time elapsed, roughly speaking, between when you discovered Bucky's article or articles and when you started the Institute for Local Self Reliance? We're talking months, years.

Discovering the articles was in the early part of 1972. The workshop was in July. I was back from the workshop into Washington D.C. in August, September. The conversations began immediately. When the institute was actually incorporated, might have been early the next year. I'm not sure the exact date of it, but it was. Yeah, it's on the order of months, not years.

Okay, thank.

Thank you, Amiel. I was in motion. I was on fire. I saw possibilities not just as ideas, but felt them in my bones. I was still the science geek kid. It wasn't like, this is a nice idea. It was, let's dive deep into the data, let's cross check the data, let's validate these, let's run the models, let's test the assumptions. And everything as far as Ike was concerned, checked out that again, there's no necessary barrier to human and ecological well being on this planet. It's a question of what we want to do, what we decide to do, and how we organize ourselves to do that. And that's been at the core of my work ever since.

You made some choices. One was a choice to read the article. Maybe you could say it wasn't actually a conscious choice, but somewhere in there you, you read the article, you learned about the opportunity at Southern Illinois University and at some point had to make a choice to go there. You remember that?

I sure do. It was a very clear choice. My friends thought I was crazy. They felt like, we're gonna go to the Rockies to have fun. You're gonna go to the library all summer. What are you doing? And it was, you know, it was the reading his stuff. I don't Know if that was a choice, it was kind of stumbled on it opened up, you know, saw, you know, saw a blurb in the whole Earth catalog, got the book read. The book was knocked over by the lucidity of. The first thing I read was operating manual for Spaceship Earth. Bucky was the guy who coined that metaphor. I remember handling the book to my roommate Jesse and saying, this is a.m. you got to read this. And he opened it up and he started to read it and he said, I can't make any sense out of this at all. You know, this is a book that has. That has sentences that go on for several pages. For him it was incomprehensible. For me, it was just like a shining jewel. So that was not so much a choice. Calling him up, calling up SIU for more information. I don't know if that was a choice. That was just kind of me following intuition and being curious. Them saying, come on out for the summer. That was a choice. That was a life changing choice. In addition to all the professional impact I described to you, I also met my wife there. So another life changing choice and then the decision to do something with it or to do with it what I did. Hard to say that those are choices or emergence.

Okay. When I say choice, I'm using the term broadly.

Sure.

And the other thing that's interesting to me is that you had friends who couldn't understand the book or article.

Were.

Going to the mountains, couldn't understand why you weren't going with them, and yet you still left. And I just wondered what that was like to depart from your friends.

I felt called Amiel. I felt like tapped on the shoulder saying, go this way. I don't remember agonizing over those decisions at all. It was clear how. Why? I couldn't tell you, but it was a clear calling.

You followed it without a lot of agitation.

Yeah.

You were in motion. Once you got into motion, you were in motion.

Once I got into motion, I was in motion. And there were two layers to that. One was to go to this workshop. That was a big one. It was a diversion from where all my pals were going, which was going to be fun. No question about it. This, I didn't know this was going to be fun. Turned out to be incredible fun. The other was as we, you know, got through this research process and the conclusion started to gel and I was clear that, oh, this stuff can really work. At that point was, at that point I said, okay, I'm in. This is what I'm going to do. This is my work. I'm committed to this and I will live my life bringing this future into being.

Now, Bucky is the person that you mentioned first and you read his work and then you also mentioned Bill. Was it Perk?

Bill Perk was one of the professors there, one of the faculty for the workshop.

I'd like to just get a sense of the people, because the people are such a big part of the story, the people who were there in the workshop and what that was like.

The workshop was actually produced by two guys, Medard Gable and Howard Brown, operating under the rubric of Earth MD Earth Metabolic Design. And they designed and produced the whole process. They and Bill and a couple of others were faculty. Lucky was in and out. We had guest speakers and we had. The participants were 80 or so people, mostly young, 20s and maybe early 30s, scientists, some computer scientists, some video artists, some just folks, all deeply curious, all transformed by this experience. I mean, the 70s were a very interesting time. According to Time magazine. Nothing was happening, but in fact, there was a time of remarkable grassroots ferment all over the country and the seminal work of what became the ecological movement and the sustainability movement. So it was a thrilling time.

Yeah, I'm struck by your description of everyone who showed up to this as being curious. But you and I like to use a term called mood to describe something, a sustained emotional state. And there was a mood present there that if it wasn't, things might have turned out differently. So what was say a little bit more about that mood and how you were infected by it, as Chauncey Bell and Fernando Flores would say. Fernando Flores is a leader in the field of business process design and innovation. He's behind the concept of moods. Chauncey Bell is a longtime collaborator with Flores.

Well, let's unpack a bit what we mean by mood, because we're using it in a way a little bit different, I think, than most people might. We're talking about mood. Well, you said an ongoing emotional orientation. Fernando might call it an orientation to a future, a disposition for a future, an already existing interpretation about what lies ahead. And so curiosity might be a kind of mood. Ambition might be a kind of mood, a sense that there are possibilities that I like available in the future. Resignation is a common mood. You know, things suck and there's nothing I can do about it. Everybody knows that one. Chauncey Bell says that's the fundamental persuasive mood in every organization in North America, which is very interesting perspective when you think about the challenge of change. If people have like, already Giving up by the time they wake up in the morning, that's something that you're living in. The mood at the World Game Workshop was absolutely curious and it was ambitious. It was a sense of possibility. There's interesting stuff to do here, and I want to be a part of it, and I can make a contribution to that. I think that pervaded that was maybe the signal frequency that gathered this group together, the resonant frequency. And this is an important thing about mood because, look, it becomes very interesting once we start to observe mood, to listen for it, to notice it in myself. Where am I? Characteristically, Bob Dunham talks about mood as being the state you're in when you wake up in the morning before your feet hit the ground, getting out of bed. Something already there. Ambition, resignation, resentment, acceptance, serenity, frustration. What? You know, people may notice that there's a kind of characteristic place you hang out more often than not, or a kind of characteristic place the people you are with or the organization you're in hangs out. So being attentive to that is one layer of the possibility here in oneself. Being attentive to it in others is another. Then what opens up is the possibility of cultivating mood. Of what are the things that I can do that may shift the mood or unlock a mood that's stuck or open a possibility of a different mood. And the image of cultivation, well, we know it from gardening. You cultivate the soil, right? You're not growing the plants. You're creating the conditions in which the plants can grow successfully. You know, a musician does this. A musician practices scales. I didn't as a kid in early music classes. It was too boring to me. I didn't get. I didn't understand that practicing scales and developing capacity would get me to the point where I could do jazz, improv. An athlete does this, a martial artist does this. They do routines over and over and over again which eventually become innate and open new possibilities of movement that weren't there before. Same with mood. We can cultivate mood and we can potentially cultivate or orchestrate mood in others in the groups and communities that we work in. Where I think this becomes critically important is that moods are not this thing that exists by themselves. Moods are entangled with assessments. If I'm in a mood of resignation, the assessments that I make about a project that someone brings to me, or the work that they've done for me, or the agreements that we're making together are likely to be colored by that mood. I might be more likely to say, ah, this Isn't any good. And no, that'll never work. Conversely, if those are the kind of assessments that I'm making, that might be the mood that keeps showing up for me. If my mood is one of ambition, and let me clarify, I don't mean ambition in the sense of greedhead, conquer the world ambition, but ambition in the sense of the future holds possibilities and I like them. I'm interested in moving into those possibilities. In that mood, I might be making different assessments. I might be saying, amiel, that's really cool what you just brought me. Or I might say, that's pretty good. I see ways we could make it better. Shall we work on that together? Or I might be prepared to make an offer of a new possibility to somebody that I would not have made if I didn't have, if I wasn't in that mood. So that opening the distinction of mood, the recognition of mood as an orientation, already existing orientation to a future mood as something that filters or colors or shapes the assessments that I make about what I'm engaging in, encountering in the world, and the assessments as something that in turn affects the mood, opens up a whole domain, a whole realm of possibility of living with myself and with other people.

That's enormously powerful and present in your story. An example being the men, Medard and Howard, who made an offer.

Yes.

That was somehow connected to a mood they were in.

Absolutely.

So if they had been in a different mood, they might not have made that offer. They might have made a different offer. And of course, I have had an experience, and I imagine you, and many listeners have, of being invited into a space where there's resignation and resentment about the world's problems. And then you go there, and if you don't already have that disposition to the future, by the time you leave, you're walking out with it.

Yeah. I mean, you talked before about choice. You have the choice, you know, put that in quotes, of being infected by the mood and the room that you're walking into, or by making offers and other moves that shift the mood of the room, that shift the mood of the team, of the company, of the client, of the community, of the family member. My inclination is that, you know, I don't think we know how to predict the future. We can sketch odds, we can prepare ourselves for different eventualities. But, you know, my sense is that the world is full of surprises. And you just look at the last few years. You look at the last five years, last 10 years. Look, you know, you and I are old enough to go back to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, no one was anticipating that three months before it happened. You know, world changing, surprise out of the blue. So I, this is maybe a little bit of a lifeline that I cling to. I'm open to that possibility. I think we're in a heap of trouble in terms of the vital signs of the planet. We're also in the midst of incredible progress in many dimensions. You know, renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels everywhere in the world today, or just about everywhere in the world. And so I go back to an old line of Buckminster Fuller's who said that it's completely touch and go. The future could go either way. Any one of us could make a difference. That, he said, is why I do what I do. That's why I do what I do.

If resentment is pointing the blame outward at others, where was that pointing? How did Bucky relate to that phenomenon of pointing towards others? What was his alternative?

Bucky's alternative to pointing the blame at others was design. Innovation was fundamentally to build better mousetraps on a theory that that is the kind of attractor that will shift behavior more than speechifying and preaching. Although he did plenty of speechifying in his day. He said, let's just, let's make better stuff and let it out compete. And to some extent that's what we're seeing in the sustainability revol.

In other words, Bucky thought that yes, the world can work and here's how to do it. Gill came to share this assessment. His mood shifted from resignation and resentment to ambition. The we can do this mood. This in turn opened the way to a very different interpretation of the climate challenge.

We still have corporate power focused where it is. We still have the Saudis making a billion dollars a day drilling oil, even though they know that the age of oil will end this century. But you know, I can jump up and down about that as much as I want. I'm going to be much more effective delivering better, better technology and energy sources and services to meet the needs of humans on the planet than what they can deliver and actually out compete them on the ground. Now the challenge, of course, is out compete in the market is easy to say, but the markets are skewed. Fossil fuels are subsidized to the tune of, according to the World Bank, $7 trillion a year. It's not a level playing field. Even so, the penetration of renewables is growing and growing quickly. If we can also supplement the political moves, which is not where Bucky was oriented, but where I am the political moves of pulling the subsidies out from the fossil fuel industry. Everybody talks about the market and capitalism. Let's try that. Let's try capitalism. Let's try actual competition between different technologies on a level playing field.

Let's pause for a moment and appreciate what Gil just did. There he was describing how the deck is stacked toward the fossil fuel industry. I would call this a grounded assessment. There's lots of evidence to support it, but it's also something a lot of us would get stuck in. It would be the only assessment we make, the one we make over and over again. Look at all the ways things are screwed up. Look at how hard it is to get any traction. That's what our brains are often wired to do. And it leads to moods of resignation and resentment. But Gil did something very different. He didn't get stuck there. Instead he used a short but powerful even so. Even so, he said renewables are growing. Even so, there are political moves to make. And then he uses another wonderful phrase. Let's try that. Let's try capitalism. Notice the impact of this on your mood. And Gil continues.

Let's have fossil fuels and other technology pay the real costs of their action in the world, which is not just the cost of drilling and refining and moving oil, but the cost of climate deterioration, pollution and impacts on health, deterioration of soil fertility, ocean acidification and so forth. If those costs were built into the prices that we pay at the pump and at the market, the competition in the market would move much more quickly.

On a personal level, just the quality of your life as a person through the day and how you experience yourself. Call it happiness, call it meaning engagement. What impact has this assessment of Bucky's and this related mood had on you?

My response to the calling that I heard 52 years ago, where I said sign me up to this mission has been. I don't know what the adjectives are. Has been a deeply rich and rewarding and generative force in my life. Call it organizing principle, call it an orientation. It gave me an orientation to possibility, to looking to. And maybe I don't know if that's a mood Amiel, but it's kind of orientation I bring to things to my. My curiosity says and I. I got the phrase for this from the assistant City manager at City of Palo Alto where I served as their first chief Sustainability officer. And she would characteristically, in meetings where people were stuck, she would say what might be possible here. Now, she wasn't trying to convince people, she wasn't arguing, she wasn't Making a case. She just invited people to think about what. What might be possible. Not like, what you know you can do, not what you're prepared to commit to, but what do you imagine as a future possibility? And that gave a name to an orientation that I have had at least since the World Game Workshop with Bucky and crew. You know, it gave me a place to stand. It gave me a methodology of design and innovation. It gave me an orientation to where to look to find the possibility of different answers. And it gave me a mood to stand in and a style of assessments to make that could continue to open up doors for me and for my clients and the people that I live and work with.

Reflections. Let's talk for a second about what we can learn from Gil and the story he tells. First, the key pivot point in Gil's journey was hanging out with a whole different group of people. When he got on that plane and headed to Southern Illinois University, he walked into a community of people with a dramatically different orientation to the world than he was accustomed to. He did not just encounter refreshing ideas. He spent time with women and men equally excited about these ideas. And together, they built a very special kind of environment. Second, that group of people that Gil spent time with in Southern Illinois didn't just have a freeform conversation. They followed a process, a very particular type of process where you start by getting a really clear view of current reality. You know, the brutal facts, whatever they are, and the assets you have at your disposal. Then. And here's the part I really like, you don't say, here's the problem. How do we solve it? Nope, because this is not problem solving. It's creating a future. So you look out into the future and imagine success, and then, and only then, work back from there. That's very cool. Third, Gil got to that group of people in Southern Illinois because he answered a call he says he felt tapped on the shoulder and told, go this way. That's a really powerful moment. And what it reminds me of is the hero's journey. The hero's journey always starts with answering the call. And the thing about this that's easy to forget is that there's no guarantee that the hero is going to answer the call, no guarantee that we're going to even hear the call. Gil sure didn't have to answer the call. He could have just gone to the mountains with his friends and, as he said, probably would have had a great time. But instead, he made a choice to answer a call, and his life was never the same. Finally, is this piece around moods and assessments. Moods as sustained emotional states connected to particular assessments. Gil spent a lot of time early in life caught in resignation and resentment. Then, through his experience, he shifted into curiosity and ambition. We might say that his view grew when his mood shifted. These things happen at the same time, and the lesson for us is that the mood we are in has a massive impact on what actions we take. Gil talks about this in terms of feeding the world, business and climate change, but it's relevant to every situation you and I are in and every challenge that humanity faces. So as we move forward with this podcast, let's keep this in mind as we branch out and explore other issues like democracy, political polarization, the Middle east and Ukraine. Let's take Gil's message and run with it. As we approach these other topics, which are really complex and which, frankly, a lot of us feel resignation or resentment or even guilt around, what if we were to pay attention to our moods? What if we were to say, you know what? I can walk around mopey or angry, but it doesn't have to be that way. Let's try curiosity. Let's try ambition. Not because the facts tell us to, the facts are there for our interpretation, but because that's how we want to live. As Gil says, this can give us a deeply rich and rewarding and generative force in our lives. Why not? Thanks for listening. If you believe in this show, like what you're hearing, or simply don't know what to do with yourself for the next 60 seconds, please leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This show is produced in Detroit by Zach Rosenberg.