Living Between World 5.5: Perspective

Welcome everybody. This is Living between Worlds from May 15, 2024. This is the fifth session of the fifth year of this conversation for possibility that I began in the early days of COVID remarking at the congruence of the pandemic crisis and the climate crisis, the similarity of the curves that we were seeing, the trends that we were seeing, and the need and flawed possibility of global response at the speed and scale that these kinds of crises require. Really glad to have you here today. Some of you have seen my mailings of this last week noting a number of anniversaries that have somehow shown up in my life. So I want to talk about a little bit about time and points in time and perspective on where we've come. Not just me individually, but we as a. As a movement in the world. Where we've come, where we are, where we might be going on this quest to learn how to do business and do everything else as though we actually belong to the living world. So um. Let's see how we want to do this. So you know, there's. Ken, why don't you bring up that slide for a moment. I turned 75 early this year. I've been at this work for all my adult life. 50 years. We just, we two weeks ago celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Institute for Local Self Reliance. That's ilsr.org for people who want to take a look at it, which I co founded in Washington DC back then. Remarkable organization has done so much more than we ever imagined over the past 50 years. 25 years ago this last Sunday we started Natural Logic as a. As a strategy boutique focused on transforming how businesses do business in relation to environment in the living world. Twenty years ago in that work I wrote the Declaration of Leadership for Sustainable Business. You'll find that@decLARATIONOFLEADERSHIP.ORG an interesting piece. A client said could you just cut through and not. Not give me all the. All. All of the piled on stuff we have to do, but just give me the heart of the matter. What's what'? Truth. Not hedging at all. Tell me what's so. And it was one of those remarkable occasions where I just sat down and wrote and the whole thing came out in 25 minutes. I looked at it the next day to see if I could edit it. There was nothing to edit. I looked at it last week. There was nothing to edit. So that was 20 years ago. 10 years ago I started what was going to be a two year secundment as the first Chief Sustainability Officer for the City of Palo Alto, five years later, I moved on from that. After we had passed unanimously, was probably the most aggressive climate action plan of any city in the country. And then five years ago, we began these conversations, these conversations of living between the worlds. So I'm kind of sitting there looking back at like, wow, that's a lot of stuff, a lot of momentum and, you know, we've accomplished. I'm going to use we in many senses. Ken Homer tends to bust people on the sloppy use of we, but I'm going to use it in the multiple dimensions. If we us on this call, we in this work, we, humanity, we're so much further along than we ever imagined possible 20, 25 years ago. I mean, it's stunning. You look at the, at the price and performance of renewable technologies, renewable energy, the penetration of solar more recently, the penetration of EVs, the progress in the place of women in society, the problem across racial divides, the progress there, obviously incomplete, but look back to, you know, videos from the 60s or 70s or even 80s, and you'll see stunning cultural differences. Regenerative agriculture, not just on the move around the world, but in the conversations. I was stunned a few months ago to hear the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken talk about soils and soil fertility and soil regeneration. You know, a conversation I never expected out of that person's mouth. And at the same time, you know, so much less than we need. Emissions are rising, seas are rising, soil loss continues, toxic proliferation continues, biodiversity loss continues. Democracy is at risk, not just in the United States. Can you bring up the next one, the next piece of the slide, not just in the United States, but, you know, 40% of the world's population has national elections this year, and democracy is explicitly or implicitly on the ballot and just about off all of them, you know, so here we sit in time, six and a half months to the US election. I hope everybody's hard at work on that, getting people registered and getting, you know, preparing to get the vote out. Lots of talk around climate has been 2030 targets. That's six years away. The good news is that lots of companies, lots of countries, lots of cities have made strong and sometimes bold pledges of emissions reductions by that date. Nobody's on track. Sixteen years to 2050, that's sort of the make or break date the scientists tell us on climate. Nobody's on track. You know, 2100 sounds really far away. It's 76 years away. That might sound really long to you, but for me, that's about as long as I'VE lived. So it's kind of an interesting juxtaposition in the turn of time for me to sit in there and in. There's a remarkable book called 4000 Weeks, which is about how many weeks you have in an about 80 year lifetime. It's a lot and it's finite and it's really interesting from a planning perspective. You might find an exercise I invite you all into is kind of do the count for yourselves and think about that. If you have, you know, 2,000 or 1,000 or 500 or, you know, 350 weeks left actuar actuarially, what are you going to do? Because obviously there's all sorts of stuff you're not going to do. We all have big to do lists and wish lists and aspirations. And part of the art of art, frankly, as well as the art of world changing, is to say no to certain things. Here's something that's important and compelling and I'm not going to do it because I'm going to focus here. Let me. Those are some of the things that I'm observing from this vantage point. Let me say a couple of other things that I'm observing. One is the evolution and the. How shall I say this? The evolution and the weakness of the conversations about sustainability. You know, it's a funny thing where I still tend to say sustainability. The cool kids are saying regeneration as the replacement word. We've seen an evolution of the language from talking about environmental protection to sustainability to regeneration. Sorry, we've got phones going off somewhere. But. You know, it sounds like regeneration is the new kid on the block. But actually that was the conversation even before sustainability. Sustainability came into the lexicon in the early 1980s with the Brundtland Commission. Robert Rodale, Buckminster Fuller and others were talking about regeneration back in the 1970s and 1960s. So we see trends in the words, and I don't want to get caught up in the word, in the fashion, but just to note that we are returning literally to the roots, to the question of how do we preserve and enhance the regenerative capacity of the living systems on earth that undergird everything that we value? And so to the. To the business people and policy people who consider this to be a peripheral matter to be attended to when convenient. That ain't it. It's the foundation of everything. You look at the economic stack all the way down and it comes down to soil and sunlight and biodiversity. So there's that. There's the conversation of the doomers and the doomsters kind of Evolving into a little bit of distinction there. The doomers, folks who think that catastrophe is inevitable and that efforts to avert it are futile. The doomsters, I don't know where this distinction came from are people who are pessimistic, but who are focused on active engagement to provoke action, to hopefully mitigate or turn the ship. I'm participating in lots of conversations these days, online and elsewhere, and I'm struck at the lack of conversation about power. There's lots of talk about should and will and we could and we might, but very little discussion about power and the formation and accumulation and exercise of power. In simple terms, I see this as a progressive movement that is lost in its aversion to the way power has been wielded and not recognizing that power is part of the story. That's why we have power in the subtitle of this series, Growing Conversation About Capitalism, but shallow, superficial. We've seen for decades now a myriad of efforts at reform of capitalism and socially responsible capitalism, conscious capitalism, stakeholder capitalism, so forth. None of these, as far as I can tell, addressing the six or so structural defects that are there in the foundational architecture of what capitalism is and how it works. And without addressing those, we don't get to where we need to get to. I think it's Brad Warren who taught me that prescription without diagnosis is malpractice, and the malpractice is insufficient. And in a lot of conversations people are focusing on, well, like, what do we do next? How do we get from here to next year or to 2030, or make the steps we need to make? And little awareness of the power of backcasting, a concept I learned from both the natural step and from Bucky Fuller 50 years ago. Back casting is not setting a goal for the future and planning how to get there, that's called planning. Backcasting is standing in the imagined successful future and reverse engineering the mission backwards in time, which is a powerful technique when you face impossible changes. When you're in situations where you don't know where to go from here and kind of event a path backwards, you know this if you've ever done mazes in a newspaper. We know this because this is how NASA designed the Apollo mission to land a man on the moon and bring him back alive in the 1960s. So those are some of the things that are on my mind in this moment. Where I'm focusing is in a couple of dimensions. One is to build a new kind of financial institution, a cooperative holding company to advance the employee ownership climate, relevant economy in the United States, that's a big and a slow undertaking. We'll talk about that more another time. I'm especially focusing on asking these kinds of questions, seeing where I can shift the conversation both through my writing and speaking and very directly through executive coaching work, working one on one with world changers, people like you and others, people who are executives or entrepreneurs or investors or creators who are committed to a world that works and finding that I can help, if I can help them individually, one by one, be more successful, more impactful, more sane in the times that we're living in and maybe even more joyful, then that's a place where I have a lot of leverage. So that's what's up for me. I'm interested in what's up for you. But before we hear from you, Ken, I think you're going to want to throw some questions my way.

I am indeed. First of all, I'm going to stop the screen share, but let me just say on behalf of, I think everyone in the room, happy birthday. 75 years, that's a milestone, you know, good on you. And so let's start with the Institute for Local Self Reliance. Tell us, what's that about? What was the mission? And, and you've said it's gone way beyond where it started from, but just give us a little backstory on that.

If you would, please. The intuition that started it was that there's an incredible locus of opportunity in cities. I had come fresh out of the World Game Workshop with Bucky and crew looking at the ecological possibilities of the planet. My co founders, David Morris and Neil Seldman came out of a Neil labor activist background. David had just returned from some time in Chile during the Popular Unity government, had written a book on that remarkable democratic revolution stopped in its tracks by a US and UK sponsored coup. And David had been working with Carl Hess, libertarian former speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, of all things, on the notion of local power, community, neighborhood power, what could be done at local level of cities and neighborhoods within cities. I was looking at cities ecologically as places that have resources, flows of energy, cycles of materials, economic flows. And we asked the question of what could be done to make urban communities in the eastern United States relatively self reliant. Local self reliance. We talked about it, not isolated, living on sunlight, growing their own food, cycling their own waste and cycling their economies. One of the pieces of work we did showed that the economic impact of bringing in a chain supermarket into a city was far less than small community owned or cooperatively owned enterprises. That cycled money multiple times locally. So that was the instinct. Could you look at cities as though they were ecosystems? Could you look at cities as though they were underdeveloped countries where underdevelopment is always a verb, not a noun? Negative balance of trade that depresses the economy of a city? And so we did what was probably the first rooftop farm in the United States a mile from the White House. Community composting businesses, lots of work around community solar, community broadband, community ownership, antitrust work. That's how it's evolved from that original instinct. But the instinct was people in place have resources and they can collaborate to make something happen together at a very different scale than we usually think of. And tell you, it was just. It was so inspiring. I was there for the first, I don't know, five years or so to see what people have done with the original seed in the next 45 years. Still true to the vision, but elaborated far beyond we ever imagined.

It's fantastic.

And look, there's a bunch of newsletters. Lots of hundreds of projects around the country. Remarkable organization. And you're. You're welcome to donate.

Gotta get that plug in there.

Yeah.

And sort of the same thing for natural Logic. What was the impetus behind that? And. And what would you consider to be your most successful, the most successful thing about Natural logic?

Oh, golly. Well, the input. I've been doing sustainability consulting for probably 10 years. Eight. Eight or 10 years before we started it. The specific impetus was that we built out of a number of client engagements tools for tracking the metabolism of companies and regions, mapping the flows of energy and materials, and turning those into clear and understandable performance metrics that people could actually engage with to change behavior. And we saw enormous power of simply giving people visual feedback on how well they're doing in relation to what their expectations are. Not training them, not exhorting them, not giving them incentives, but just giving them visual feedback of, you know, your trend is looking like this, or your trend compared to your neighbors or your other facility in your company or your company compared to another company. We found that to be an enormously powerful lever of change. It's just reminding me of the theory of change itself. Reliance. But we can come back to that in a little bit. Well, actually, it's the same thing. Showing people what's possible has a different kind of power than telling people what should be done. Because Ken Boulding said years ago, existence is proof of the possible. If I can show you something that exists, you might tell me you don't want it, you might tell me you don't want to invest in it, but you can't tell me it can't be done. If I can show it to you there on the landscape, and if it's something as concrete as a lead platinum building that you can walk into and feel the difference in your body, that's powerful leverage, change. So we were building these tools. I remember a meeting we had at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory talking about this, and they were, they were blown away by what we had built. And I said, you know, kind of aw shucks moment. I said, well, this is just Excel. And they laughed and said, well, you know, Reagan's Star wars program for the missile defense system was just Excel. So that was, that was an interesting moment. So we decided this was late in the 1990s, as the Internet bubble was racing on, that this was something that could be built as a corporate sustainability app first. It was really the first, as far as I know, the first corporate sustainability dashboard. So we incorporated as natural logic to raise capital at what turned out to be the tail end of the bubble. Problem number one. On problem number two, we were talking about things that nobody had any grasp of. One large corporation bought a license nobody else was ready to play. Today, the world is awash in products like this. We were too early, didn't know how to sell it. So. But I think that that perspective about helping people be really clear on what are the metrics that really matter and how do you measure them in a way that is in context and meaningful and then deploy them in a way that's not a 200 page sustainability report at the end of the year, but a live interactive tool that people can not only manage to, but can sit around together, multiple people looking at the same graph trends together, and then having a conversation about what do you see here? What does that mean to you? What do you think is possible? Kind of like this is newfangled stuff, but it's the oldest human technology, maybe of us sitting around a fire in a circle at the end of the day 50,000 years ago and talking about what happened that day and what we hope to do together the next day. So we were trying to recreate that experience inside the modern corporation.

You know, I'm going to say, who's we? Because you keep saying we. And I believe Bill Reed was your partner in this, was he not?

Bill was my partner for several years. Bill led the, led our green building program. Bill and I argued a lot about the value of metrics and, and the place. And the place of analytics in the transformation of humans. That's a conversation we still have to this day. But for me, the we, this was, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm intentionally being messy on the weekend because I'm always working to extend the we or to blur the we or to cross shuffle the different we groupings together to see what emerges from that conversation. Because, you know, bottom line, none of us is as smart as all of us.

Exactly, exactly. So what are you most proud about from natural logic? Is there something that stands out in your mind of this was just the case resistance?

Let me answer in two ways. One is that we were among the earliest people. There were a few others, but we were among the earliest people who talked about sustainability not as a nice thing to do, but as a strategic element of business, a strategic value driver of business, something that actually produces. And this is part of the selling logic of it. You know, we will help you make more money, build, build brand, reduce risk, build employee loyalty, build customer loyalty, etc. By doing good for the planet. And so, you know, I'm not going to take the credit for that individually, but we and a number of others contributed to that becoming part of the mainstream conversation increasingly in business. As we've talked about previously, we had Andrew Winston, one of these other players, as a guest a year and a half ago on this call and both of us talked about how we're tearing out our remaining hair talking to really capable executives at very good companies who still don't seem to get it, who still say, well, you know, sustainability, wonderful, I'd love to do it, we can't afford to. And our response is always, well, which part of this set of data can you not, you know, which part of increased profit, reduced risk, etc. Can you not afford to do so I'm proud of it and I'm not satisfied, frankly. The other thing which bears on this is we had an engagement with a client, a multi billion dollar manufacturing company. I'm not going to say their name for reasons that will become obvious. We, we did a very novel modeling of their entire supply chain asking the question of where does the value leak from your supply chain? Both, you know, upstream suppliers coming to you and downstream as it moves from you to the customers. And obviously there's, you know, there's things like using too much energy in manufacturing. Okay, so you know, waste material that's not turning into product. Okay, great. But we found lots more, including in the operations, in the business structure and in the offers the company was making to the marketplace. We built a map with cross functional team, which is the way we always work. We always, you know, because none of us is smart of all of us. We want people from across the company and laterally in different levels, hierarchically, because different people see different things. The map was kind of stunning. We said we were at the end, that was the end of the engagement. We said, the next step is to calibrate this thing, figure out what these different flows, how big they are and what they're worth. And we offered to do that as the next engagement. They said no. And it was partly they didn't want to spend and partly, I think they wanted to run the numbers themselves because a consultant could have an agenda. I think they wanted to neutralize, which is fair enough. And as we left, we said, would you let us know what you find out? They said yes. We said, we predict it's going to be a very large number. They said, well, we'll see. And they sent us on their way. Two weeks later, I got a call from the global head of strategy for this whatever six or $10 billion global company who said, well, Gil, we got a number. I said, great, Steve, tell me what it is. And he said, you'll be interested to know that it was not a very large number. And I remember the moment, it was like my eyes rolled back in my head. The gears started racing furiously trying to figure out how could that possibly be. There's no way. It couldn't be a large number based on what I knew. So he said it couldn't be a large, it was not a very large number. He weighted the requisite two beats of an impeccable stand up comedian and he said it was a massive number. Okay, okay. And I took a breath and said, how massive? He said, about twice as big as our total global revenue. Wow. So, so I'm proud of that. And that's amazing. Replicated across, you know, you can imagine what that replicates. So.

So I'm curious, you know, based on what you've shared so far and, and what I know of the people on this call, I think we're all, you know, trying to find the leverage points to, to and the place to stand, because you need a, both a lever and a place to stand. What's something you've learned from natural logic that if you're going into a community or an organization that you would bring with you that would, would really help you to get that point across because there's so much of resistance of we can't afford it, we can't afford it. Can't afford it. Where's the. Where's the point that cracks that thinking open into, wow? Is it just the numbers or is there something else?

It's a great question. I don't know. There's not a single simple answer to that. If I knew the simple answer, we'd be way further ahead than where we are now, because I wouldn't keep that a secret. What I've learned, learned a lot of things, not just at natural logic, but in other work around. And since I think probably the most important thing I've learned is to listen really deeply, is to listen not just to what people say, but to what people really care about. Because I'm. In my experience, when we do that, there's the we again. When we listen deeply not just to the words we say to each other, but to the things we really care about, we find an enormous amount of common ground, even across apparent fierce differences. We. And so I'm listening, you know, I'm listening, as we've talked about here, not just at words. I'm listening for people's mood. I'm listening for the assessments that people are making as they stand in the world that are tangled with those moods. I mean, case in point, my friend and colleague Chauncey Bell claims that the most common mood in organizations of any kind in North America is resignation. This is the way things are. There's nothing much I can do about it. You all know this. You've experienced this. It's a common mood. That's an option that we live in. There's a mood of, you know, there could be. There could be a mood of ambition. I see possibilities here, and I like that. And I'm going to engage about that kind of at odds with each other. There's moods of, of, you know, acceptance. This is how things are. It's okay. I'm fine. I'm not. I'm not depressed about it. It's just, you know, realistic about it. There's moods of resentment. Things are crappy and it's their fault. It's all their fault. See how these tie together? The interesting thing about mood is that they're tangled with assessments. If I'm in a mood of resignation, the assessments I'm going to make, the judgments, the opinions I'm going to have about things are going to tend to be negative and no possibility. Why? Because, you know, it's resignation. Flip side, if I'm encountering situations again and again and again where I feel stuck and I don't see possibility My mood may, may in fact be resigned and these things loop together and reinforce each other. And so I'm learning that listening for that and starting to untangle that tangle and help people see it and reflect on it and find small places to shift can have enormous leverage. That level of personal being in the world, at the level of strategy in an organization, and even at the level of the political divide that we are facing in this country. Because call me crazy for saying this, but there's a lot of common ground between people on the left and the right. You couldn't tell it by watching MSNBC and Fox News, but you can tell it if you sit down at a bar with somebody, have a conversation. It's not easy. It's very easy to get hooked for me as well as for them. But when I can listen past that. I've shared a story before with some of you here that one of my dearest friends was a Trump voter in 2016. We were introduced by mutual pal who loved and respected us both. I went into the conversation thinking I was going to change his mind about climate. I realized pretty quickly that that was a non starter and frankly not legitimate unless I was open and willing to have him change my mind about things and, you know, change. We changed each other's minds some. We had a deeply respectful and really fascinating conversation where I heard things that I don't usually hear in the bubbles that I live in. And we became fast friends. We love each other. Would I have predicted that I would, out of one conversation, love a Trump voter? Absolutely not. And yet it happened. And so for me, I'm intrigued by what's the possibility that something like that opens. So it's a long answer to your question about what have I learned? It's something about listening as one of the, rather than saying as one of the key tools of change. Merle Hanson, the great Midwest farm organizer, used to say that the good Lord gave you two ears and one mouth, that you might listen twice as much as you speak. And the first time I heard that, I heard it as the kind of mechanical level. I now hear that at a much deeper level about human being, what it is being human and how we change.

That's a great answer to the question and it brings up a lot for me because I also have learned about listening and listening for different what am I listening for when I come into a conversation? Am I listening for facts that I can argue with? Am I listening for things where you agree with me so I don't think very much? Or am I Listening when you disagree, do I need to prove my point or can I be open to that? These are all really important questions and, and about the moods. I, I find all the time, especially on LinkedIn, which is now my only social media, I'll post something positive. And the people in moods of resignation and resentment are saying that'll never happen. They're defending the fact that they're in this mood of resignation. You know, it's impossible. Why are you bothering? And, you know, I just keep saying, like you say, but if, look around, if you, if you stop watching the news and start getting involved in conversations with people, you'll find something very different is going on. I saw Lawrence Lessig give a talk here at Dominican University a few years ago, and he said, you know, our, our research shows that, that 92% of people agree on the major things that have to happen, and yet Congress can't seem to pass any of it. And then the media says it's, it's polarized.

This has been true for 50 years. The People's Bicentennial Commission in 1976 did polling on major issues. The country fold, 70 to 90% unified, relatively progressive, depending on what you call things, call them by different names, and the unity shifts. So, yeah, absolutely. And the thing about listening, I would. Let me suggest to, I'm going to suggest this to all of you, because I know it to be true about myself, is that we don't listen. Listening is not the same as hearing the sounds, as what somebody says. It's the meaning that you construct, that we construct out of what we hear. And, well, I'm going to say I don't know about you, but I think I do know about you because I know about me and everybody else I've ever spoken with that when we're in conversations, there's a, there's an already listening there, like Ken, as you said, you know, do I agree with what you're saying? What am I going to say in response? I'm preparing my response. I'm classifying. Oh, this is. Ken is saying this kind of thing. It falls into that box. Or, you know, Alistair saying this kind of thing, it falls into that box. Rather than beginner's mind, listening in the mo. In the moment, open to something new happening and something new emerging. And so just starting to notice that, to notice how I'm trapped in the already listening that I bring into a conversation and practicing letting that go and being truly open to a discovery is a big thing.

It is a big thing. We could spend a lot of time talking about listening. Somebody recently asked me if I knew the average time between someone talking and the next person talking in New York. And it's less than half a second. People, boom, right? You know, you go to take a breath and they've jumped in.

Yeah, sometime. Sometimes it's negative half second.

Yeah. In California, it's, it's, it can be as long as 2 seconds. But does anybody have any idea how long it is in among indigenous people? Take a guess. Mitch. 10. 10m. 10 minutes. You say something and people will wait 10 minutes while they're thinking about what I've heard before they reply. And I thought to myself, what an amazing practice that would be to sit in a room of people, people that I know that I talk with regularly and everybody take. It would be a long conversation. But to take 10 minutes and just let it sink in. You know, we're both on a call where occasionally we do sort of a Quaker meeting thing. And in Quaker meeting, they say, if you can't improve the silence, don't speak. So a lot of times I don't speak because I can't improve the silence. But that listening, that allowing things to really sink in and the, the, the, the whole body to catch up with what's going on and then to speak from that place, I think is enormously powerful and something that I certainly was not capable of when I was younger.

I hope I'm.

I'm learning that now. But speaking of being younger and older, as you look back over 75 years, what do you see for the through lines and, and the patterns that connect that, that make you, that assure you that you're on the right path and that you're, you're doing the right work. Because it certainly seems from the outside that, that you're there.

You know, there's, there's a through line in terms of what I've been doing, that's for sure. You know, I encountered Bucky in 1972, ran away from home to join the world game, and all my pals went to the, all my pals ran off to the first Rainbow family gathering to run smoked open, run naked in the Rockies all summer. I went and did research on planetary transcend transitions, and I signed on for that mission. And that's been the work of my adult life. I was talking with a colleague yesterday and said, you know, if I, if I had won the Mega Millions lotto thing last night and never had to work another day in my life, I would do what I'm doing now. So that through line is clearly there. The more I forget the words you used to say it. But, you know, how am I sure I'm not. How could I be? I'm doing as Charles Schwab the Senior said about 100 some odd years ago, I'm doing the best I can where I am with what I have. Right. So, no, I don't think we get to be sure. We get to decide. We get to commit is what we get to do. We get to say, we'll do this. I will commit to this, make this, do everything I can to make this happen. And then, you know, ride that as best we can.

I'm just, I'm remembering, I forget the guy's name. He was Joseph Campbell's mentor. And he said, you know, the thing is, you work your whole life and you really don't know what you've done until the end. And when you look back, and I'm not suggesting that you're at the end, but I'm just wondering if as you look back at your life, you're seeing certain things that stand out and say, yep, that was, that was. I'm so glad I did that. And that really nourished me. And that really makes me feel like I'm on my path.

Yeah.

Might not be the right path, but it's right for you.

Yeah, it feels right for me mostly. You know, there are times where I think, oh, I should have, you know, could have, why didn't I do that? And they're, you know, and I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm not summarizing with you the breakdowns and the failures. I was in Vienna for this city conference some years ago, and they had a remarkable evening event they called Fuck up nights. It's a thing where people get together and get on stage and talk about their fuck ups. And this was not just entrepreneurs and activists. It's like the mayor of Vienna under a big banner said, fuck up. Nice. You wouldn't see that in the United States quite that way. But being frank about what didn't work and what we learned from. Jeffrey Hollander, the founder of 7th Generation, did this at a Co Op America conference some years ago. He got up on stage for his keynote and he recounted his 10 biggest founders and then invited everybody at the breakout tables to everybody to talk about their 10 biggest failures. And we had permission from him to do something we wouldn't have done otherwise, like emotional permission to do that. And it was deeply enriching, rewarding, both on the face of it. There's like you know, substantive learnings from the failures, but also recognizing these people who you might have held in very high esteem as being, you know, gods of business, had many, many, many bumps on the road along the way. So that's another.

That's a great segue because that was gonna be. My next question is now tell us about something that you did that really taught you a painful lesson.

I. I will. And I also want to. I'm aware of the top clock ticking, and I want to hear from other folks who are here with us today because I'm sure there's a lot to be said at the. Yeah. God, there are so many. Well, two. Two that come most to mind. One is that when we were building Business Metabolics, the corporate sustainability dashboard in the late 1990s, early aughts, the word from the investment community was that you have to do it this way. You have to use this technology, stack, structure your business in this way and proceed according to the plan of Everybody knows. Well, everybody knows was out of fashion to 18 months later. We should, you know, we should have said, no, not going to do it that way. We're going to do it the way we want. It may be a slower ramp, but it would have been a ramp rather than a crash and burn. That would be one. Second, actually, to the theme of listening. When I started as CSO of Palo Alto, my friend Danny o' Neill came out of Boston Ward politics, said, you know, the thing you need to do is you need to spend every day just walking the streets, knocking on doors, walking into every storefront in the city, introducing yourself and listening to what people are up to. And I didn't do that. I didn't have time. All these responsibilities and things to do, including building programs, it was true. Inside organization in inside the organization as well. I need to do a lot more talking and listening with everybody, the thousand people who work for the city. I did it some. It wasn't only my failure. There were barriers to doing that. There were gates and institutional hierarchy barriers that made it difficult to do that. But that process of engagement by listening, not by preaching. I haven't done well enough in those instances. I think I'm doing it better now. It's a constant learning. Those are the two things that come most to mind right now.

Thanks. It reminds me. Any New Yorkers on the call? Remember Abe Beam used to walk around, say to people on the street, how am I doing?

Ed Cox. Ed Cox.

Edge Koch.

Ed Koch. Right. So I knew it was one of those New York mayors, and it wasn't Lindsey. All right, so before we open it up for everybody else, somebody asked a question early on here, so I can find it in the chat. They wanted to hear more about the five or six structural issues with capitalism. You up for talking about that right now?

I'm up for not going into it in detail right now. We've got. If you go back into the Living Between Worlds archives, you'll find a couple of sessions on that. I'm writing a book on that in my, in my occasional spare time, but very quickly, see if I can remember them all. Accumulation without. Without limit. Extraction without reciprocity. Help me out here. Somebody. Somebody look it up. Alienation without solidarity. I should. I. Sorry, I should have these memorized.

I'll.

I'll find them if you give me a minute.

All right, well, while you're thinking about that, folks, you've been listening to, to guilt reflect on, on his 75 years and some of his accomplishments. What's this stirring for you? Who's. Who's got a question for Gil or, or something that he's stirred in your mind you like to share? Please raise your hand, let us know. Stuart?

Yeah. So, Gil, I want to thank you.

For.

Touching on the milestones in a positive way. I was on a call earlier today with a 20 something who's a whistleblower for Pfizer, and it was just beautiful to see the activism of someone young. So, and I'm sure this is true of so many of us on the call, we worry that all our work has been in vain, that we have been pushing the envelope and pushing the envelope and pushing the envelope. And I just have a sense that that percolation is starting to happen. I mean, I'm actually enthused right now about, you know, the possibility of going back into the, quote, corporate world and seeing what kind of mud I might stir up in that context. Perhaps more important, when you talked about Mood and Chauncey, Alan Briskin and Mary Jolinas are writing a book about fields, which I think is really essentially the same thing. And I'm very, very excited about this book about how we are impacted by the fields around us. And so I guess what I take away from you and the milestones and the good work is that keep the faith. Okay? And I appreciate, and I, and I greatly appreciate that. So thank you.

Thanks, Stuart. I'll just say that, you know, one of the things I've learned, I. I've been. I've been kind of tongue in cheek describing myself lately as a futurist who's given up predicting the future. I think predicting the future is a fool's game. And thinking that we know what will result from our actions is a fool's game. And the thing to do is to do the best we can and see what happens. And you know, if, you know, if you doubt that, go find that wonderful Japanese story about the old man and the white horse. Or if you doubt that, go find some Winston Churchill speeches from Britain during the bombardment.

I did, yeah, I did want to push back on one thing as I, as I'm a month away from my 78th birthday. The idea of an 80 year life, I'm gonna, I'm gonna push back.

Okay, 80, that's just the number that guy ran. I said actuarially so 201 stuart.

201.

So, so this the six structural defects of capitalism. And thank you Marshall for finding it on my, on my AI. Accumulation without limit, extraction without reciprocity, alienation without care, abstraction without ground, generation without regeneration and privatization without solidarity. That may not be the complete set. It's close. I think I'm working on what else and there's a story behind each of those, but I'm saying that unless we address each of those, we don't get better world that we want. I was on a call yesterday with Marjorie Kelly, brilliant woman, democracy collaborative book out called Wealth Supremacy which I commend you to read. And she was saying look, it's not that there are bad people running these organizations, these organizations are doing what they're designed to do, so we have to change the design. Jan, you may have something to say about that.

Yeah, a little bit. I, I, I, I just, I think we met at the office of Appropriate Technology with back in what, 77 or something like that?

And then 78. Yeah.

Been at Farallon's Institute and so forth and I, I just wanted to say that there's another impact that you've had that you didn't mention and I'm sure there are many of them and I really like Ken. I just really appreciate the way you've drawn out the story of our, you know, one of my heroes and dear friends. Thank you so much for that sensitivity, how you've done that. But the, the book that I did in 2017 called Mastering Leadership Alignment, Linking value creation to cash flow features the notion of a chart of activities as the missing piece in creating measurements that everyone can participate in creating. And the case study is a CPA society that was bankrupt in its 100th year. You and I co developed the first value cycle map that I ever did. I've done many dozens of them. Now the one in the book is going to end up changing the way accounting functions. The guy that wrote the forward is about to take over the aicpa. So you know, working with you as a client at Natural Logic, you're you know, doing stuff with the scoreboard, you know, getting you on your accounting side, getting you thinking about measurement around activity, transforming to transaction. You know, you're playing with me in that domain. God, however long ago that was back in the. When you were looking at scaling Natural Logic has had a profound impact and that, that value cycle map I've replicated over and over and it does a lot of the things that you're saying don't happen anywhere else. So I just wanted to acknowledge that. I also just keep thinking about. If anybody has not seen this book, I encourage you. It's called Impossible Solving for the Impossible by Scott Span and, and Scott, Masterful facilitator.

Yeah.

Who's currently working for the Pachamama alliance doing a 70 person response. The 70 smartest people in Pachamama are responding to the Koji letter in Asheville. By the, by the middle of June there will be a response from humanity. Pachamama speaking for the people of the earth responding to the Koji letter. If people aren't familiar with that, that's, that's out around on the. It's a Colombian tribe that sent a letter last November and Scott has offered a free course starting this Friday at, at 2:00pm in regenerative.

You want to put the link in the chat please for that?

Yeah. And basically people can show up and say why they might want to be a part of it. And he's offering to do it on, on a by donation basis. He wants to train 15,000 people in large scale regenerative systems design problem solving. So I, I feel like, you know, you have held a line that I've held with you and there are a bunch of us that have done that and our time is coming pretty rapidly. The world is actually waking up to that. They need all this stuff I think now. So thank you for your leadership and your friendship and for just being, you know, creating. I mean ILSR is a miracle if people don't know about it and what it's doing today. Just everything you've done was worth. Thank you.

Thanks so much for that. It's very generous of you to say that. It's funny, you know, when we were doing that value mapping thing, I thought I was learning from you, Isn't this how it sometimes is? I mean, what strikes me, yes. What strikes me about this is so, you know, and can, to some of your questions, I have no idea what the effect, what most of the effect of what I've done is. You know, each of us has had thousands of conversations with hundreds or thousands of people in our lives. You don't know what the cause and effect is on that. Sri Nasir Gadata is fond of saying. Chauncey is fond of quoting him. He's saying causes are numberless. The causes of all things are all things. It's not like, you know, we're not billiard balls where you can set up a shot and have that thing happen. I remember, Ken, another moment to what you asked me about before. I remember I was speaking at a conference and a gentleman came up after the speech, had a dog eared copy of the Truth About Green Business in his hands, said, I've been carrying this with me every day for eight years. I use it every day in my work. Would you please sign it? I was floored. I had no idea. And so I think all of us have stories like that, some of which we will never know. And all there is is to do the best you can in each moment about the things that you really care about. Heather, welcome.

Thank you. I want to join the chorus of voices in gratitude to, to you, Gil, and to you, Ken. I think I met Gill and I don't know, 1976, 77. You know, your presence in this world has had a huge impact on my presence in this world. And I, I, I want to, I just want to say the four letter, I want to say the four letter word love out loud in this moment because here, where I live, I'm, I'm in the trenches around land use policy and the design there was to protect white wealth and, and the intention was to do that and it's done a great job. So to change the design for me is where I've been trying to work and doing that by bringing Donella Meadows systems change interventions into the conversations that, you know, I'm not interested in leverage points 2 through 12. I'm interested in leverage point 1, which is the narrative, which is the design. And last week I was in a room with two architects and the vice president and chief strategy officer of an architecture firm here, where I live. And we were talking about the lack of leadership in land use policy and what the hell are we going to do? Not this cycle, because this cycle is already too late, but the next 10 year, cycle, if we were going to, if, if the private sector was going to show up with some leadership to address the vacuum of leadership in the public sector, what would that look like? And so part of the meeting was me telling my life story. You know, why am I in the room today at age 75 with people who are more like 40? And towards the end, one of the younger architects who's in the Urban League leadership here where I live, just looked at me and he said, how is it that you keep on going after all these years?

What'd you say?

Well, I had to think about that for a minute because I wasn't sure because, you know, part sometimes I'm in the mood of resignation, but I didn't want to be in that mood that day. So I looked at this young person and what came to mind was, you know, what keeps me going is the love I have for my family, my children and my grandchildren and their well being and the love I have for this beautiful planet that we live on. And that's, it's love that keeps me going. I, I got a little leaky. This young man started to tear up and I could see his whole body change with the notion that what we're all here for is to bring love into the world for well being, for all the people. It's not about can I make a profit here or how much profit can I make it. All that stuff's important, but the design is from the love for the people in the planet and, and if we can. So I'm in the mood for love these days and I want to, I just, you know, it's always perfect these, these monthly meetings with you. They somehow always meet me right where I am in the most magical, supportive, regenerating way. So thank you, Gil, for your life and just the joy you've brought to me and, and you too, Ken Homer through World Cafe and that approach to what does a conversation, what can a conversation really look like that brings out the best in people? So I'm in love with the two of you. Just so you know.

We don't have that music queued up for. I'm in the mood for love. Maybe we'll find that. Thank you, Heather. Thank you so much. Really, really moved by what you're saying. And back at you for all this. We, you know, it's, it's, it's not just love for all the people, but as the, as the indigenous cultures say, all our relations, you know, the whole living web of all of us that we are all of us A part of. So, yeah, absolutely. I just. Let me. Let me make a request of all of you. I'm just. I'm so moved by what Heather just said and by the story I mentioned before about the guy who'd been carrying around my book for every day for eight years. There may be people in your life that you want to thank for something. Do it, please do it. Don't wait to do it. Don't think about doing it someday. Gratitude has enormous generative power in human affairs. Notice what you're grateful for yourself. Take note of that every day. Share what you're grateful with with others, both the ones who you're sure know that you feel that way and the ones that don't. And Heather, again, thank you, Helen. Welcome.

On you. Oh, Gil, my friend. Average friend. So we are friends from. Yeah, from the beginning and my reflection in many of these conversations. So you're just 75 in the next 12 years, when you get to be 87 where I am.

Yeah.

I think you will engage more with the unhappy fact that besides the human tendency to cooperate, to help one another, to care and share and recognize our commonality, to regenerate all this, there's also the system of domination, ultimately the system of war. And that is what is undermining the cooperative impulse. Because even as the dominator sees well, I can do better if I also do some cooperation, they're still reinforcing and accepting their way into this model of hierarchy, authority, command, and ultimately deceit, greed, violence and war. And that is what we have to deal with as well as how do we maintain a cooperative economy.

And Alan, are you resigned?

No, I'm not resigned. I've been working at this for the last 12 years. After I passed 75 and saw there was more than the cooperation that that is essential. But we are in a war system and there are 140 armed struggles going on around the world now. And somehow the. The civil society, the consciousness that is shared in this group beautifully so many times over these five years and over all your years has yet to see how do we focus in a way on this dominating system of full spectrum that the Pentagon is funding with 700 billion plus dollars.

Alan, could you. Could you reflect on one experience you've had where you've seen people shift from domination frame to cooperative frame at any scale. Can you give me one? I bet you I just.

I just got a little food from. Odile greets you also.

Oh dear. And I don't ask that to put you.

When I began I be. I became A woodworker back in 1969. And I, I thought that we needed some kind of cooperative shop, the splinter group. And people initially came in with their own sense of individual location. But as we developed, we actually became a cooperative shop where people shared work and shared knowledge.

And.

We transformed that original knowledge that everybody is their own entrepreneur and became a, a collab, a cooperative, a collaborative working with wood, a co creative process which lasted a while and then other factual knowledge that everybody is their own entrepreneur and became a, a collab cooperative, a collaborative working with wood, a co creative process which lasted a while and then other factors intervene.

And that's a great, great example. And I, and I ask you that because, you know, while I talked before about the importance of diagnosis, understanding the war system, understanding the economic drivers, paying real attention to that is really critical, as is noticing that humans have done other things and have the capacity to.

Do other things and so there's intervene.

And that's a great example. And I ask you that because I talked before about the importance of diagnosis, understanding the war system, understanding the economic drivers, paying real attention to that is really critical, as is noticing that humans have done other things and have the capacity to do other things. And so somehow we need to be able to look with two eyes, binocular vision, see depth to be able to see both of those. So Alan, thank you. I'll let you return to your. Somehow we need to be able to look with, you know, with two eyes, binocular vision, see depth to be able to see both of those. So Alan, thank you. I'll let you return to your, to your meal and see who else has something. Thanks very much.

Well, this turn of heart, this change of consciousness is just a flip of.

Awareness to your meal and see who else has something. Thanks very much.

Well, this turn of the way, and that's, that's what is so engaging because people really can shift from being in it to being a spectator that they want to be from another place. And that's the beauty of this moment, that the tension is just building in people because it's not as a conscious way that for humanity to live, it is the whole life system and rebellion.

I just want to comment on this. I'm watching the chat and there's a lot going on in the chat about gratitude practice. And as a coach, I've been assigning gratitude practice for people to people for ages. But it wasn't until the pandemic hit that I discovered it for myself. Because two months into the pandemic, my wife and I were sitting every night, oh, we can't go out to eat, we can't see our friends, we can't go, we can't do this. And I said, if we don't stop with the I can't, I'm gonna go crazy. And so every night we sat down and we talked about five things we were grateful for. Number one on the list was Netflix because it kept us going, right?

And.

And after, after a few weeks, I went, you know, I've really felt my mood shift. It's like it lightened the load of the pandemic to actually every night talk about we're grateful for in the middle of great deprivation. So I have to say, it is an enormously powerful practice. And don't just give it lip service, really try it, because it will shift your mood dramatically.

It's actually at the core of many spiritual traditions world around. I had a singing teacher years ago, a woman named Felicia Sloan. Ruby throated voice, just remarkable singer and teacher. And at the end of every practice session about, about 10 of us, she would bring out a beautiful polished wood bowl. And in the bowl, the bowl was filled with polished wood, polished stones, and she talked about a gratitude practice of everybody would take a stone from the bowl and say something they were grateful for, for and lay it to the side in another bowl. And we each did that. And she said, okay, now do it again. And we went around again. We're 100 stones in the bowl. There were 10 of us. So each of us had 10 gratitudes to raise. And the initial thought, I know for me, and certainly for some other people was, I can't think of 10 things I'm grateful for, but it was like exercising a muscle and learning how to be quiet and notice and find it. And week after week, it got easier and easier, and there was more to say. Felicia did the whole bowl every night by herself. Wow. 100 things she was grateful for every day. And that may sound impossible, but think about what happens to your orientation in the world when you pay attention to that.

So I want to say something related here, which is that there's something called appreciative inquiry was originated by a fellow by the name of David Cooper Rider at Case Customer Reserve University. And it's the antidote to problem solving. And when we're facing the kind of messes that we're facing, problem solving is not going to work anyway. So what you do in appreciation inquiry is you define what it is you want to talk about and then you say, what's already working? What's the best that's already going on, what's supporting this going forward. And then you dream about what could be, what can we actually bring forward, what can we create that will complement that? And so the whole thing is, it's not Pollyanna.

It's not.

We're going to just look at good stuff because we have to look at the stuff that's not working or design what will work. And I've tried to design all the questions I asked Gil today from an appreciative standpoint. And I'm not trying to fix anything. I'm trying to strengthen what's already working. And I have a great quote from Vandana Shiva. Those of you who know Vandana is a. An amazing woman in India. And when asked why she hasn't burned out, she said, well, it's always a mystery because you don't know why you get depleted or why you get recharged. But this much I know, I don't allow myself to be overcome by hopelessness, no matter how tough the situation. I believe that if you just do your little bit without thinking about the bigness of what you stand against, if you turn the enlargement of your own capacities, it just creates new potential. And I've learned from the Bhagavad Gita and other teachings of our culture to detach myself from the results of what I do, because that's not in my hands. The context is not my. In my control. But my commitment is. I can make the deepest commitment possible and it will take me places if I want to leave. I need a better world, and I shape my actions, take responsibility of them, then I detach from the outcome. And I think that's really something that's very important and shows up a lot in this call and others of we've got to work as hard as we can, do what we can with what we have, celebrate our successes, mourn our losses, and no matter how bad things look, keep putting one foot in front of the other and bring that love that Heather was talking about forward. Because that is where we're going to actually end up in the long run. Making the difference that makes a difference.

And what does this have to do with climate strategy and climate finance and carbon emissions and corporate net zero pledges and community. Community economic development and racial justice and all of that. Everything. Yeah.

Yeah. So, Gil, I'm gonna let you turn it around. I've been asking you a question. You've been asking you questions. Do you have questions for people here today that you'd like to pose and get some responses to.

Thanks, Ken. Since there's no hands up, it's. No. It's my usual two questions. You know, what does this provoke for you? I have. I know there's a lot in the chat. I can't. I can't read the whole chat while I'm also paying attention to you on screen. But if one or two of you care to say what. What has this conversation provoked for you? What's generated for you? And the. And the parallel question about. Okay, now what, you know, what. How. How are you going to take this conversation into your life and your relationships and your work? Those are, you know, those are always my two questions. George, you're up first. And then Shell.

I raised my hand earlier because I wanted to say something about love. When I was in high school, I read an. An essay by E.M. foster that he wrote at. In World War II, just at the beginning, I think, when things were really bad. And it's called On Tolerance. And it's informed my life since then because what he talked about was, you have, Michelle. I raised my hand earlier because I wanted to say something about love. When I was in high school, I read an. An essay by E.M. foster that he wrote it. To know somebody in order to love them. And for him, as the movie title says, there's a thin line between love and hate. So he was suggesting tolerance and respect as probably a more useful term.

Than.

Getting everybody to love each other. If we can tolerate each other, that's a major step forward. If we can respect each other, that's a major step forward. To expect us to love everyone maybe a little bit too much. And I. I don't want to criticize Heather or anybody else for having that feeling, for having that open heart, but I would just. In World War II, just at the beginning, I think when things were really bad, and it's called On Tolerance, and it's informed my life since then, because what expect as probably a more useful.

Term.

Than getting everybody to love each other. If we can tolerate each other, that's a major step forward. If we can respect each other, that's a major step forward. To expect us to love everything, like to maybe dial it down a little bit so that those of us whose hearts are not so completely open can still participate so that we can find a ground on which we can stand and then maybe build toward. He talked about was, you have to know somebody in order to love them. And for him, as the movie title says, there's a thin line between love and hate. Now Whether that's a mood of resignation or a mood of exaltation, I don't know. But I am very happy that the idea of gratitude has come out so, so strongly today because as I put in the chat, I've been doing migrate one maybe a little bit too much. And I, I don't want to criticize Heather or anybody else for having that feeling, for having that open heart, but I would just. So he was suggesting tolerance and was like to maybe dial it down a little bit. Gratitude meditation, which is deepened and deepened over time for probably 15 years now. And it's, it's, it really has done a lot for me. So thanks to you all with gratitude, respect and tolerance, but not love, because. So that those of us whose hearts are not so completely open can still participate so that we can find a ground. Respect as probably a more useful term than getting everybody to love each other. If we can tolerate each other on which we can stand and then maybe build toward. They don't know you all that well.

In order to love you get to know us, man. So, yeah, look, dial it, dial it to wherever it works for you. You know, I, I forget who I heard this from, but somebody talked about when you're, you know, when you're stuck in a terrible mood that you don't like and you can't see how to get to the mood you want to be in, what's the next.

That's a major step forward. If we can respect each other, that's a major step forward. To expect us to love every step. Now, whether that's a mood of resignation.

Or best available mood, what's like the little inch of progress you can make, you know, you're. You may not be going from resignation to ambition and enthusiasm might go from resignation to acceptance. The other thing, what you say provokes me, George. Is there lesson I learned from Rabbi Ference Roy?

Maybe a little bit too much or a mood of exaltation, I don't know.

But.

And I, I don't want to criticize Heather or anybody else for having. Very happy that the idea of gratitude has come out so, so strongly today because as, as I put in the chat, I've been doing migraine, having that feeling for having that open heart, but.

I would just that the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference. And that may be another way to move through this landscape of stuff. Thank you, George Shell Horowitz.

Okay. This has been a really rich conversation. I feel very validated in a lot of things, not just my gratitude.

I'd like to maybe dial it down a little bit. Gratitude meditation, which is deepened and deepened over time so that those of us whose hearts are not so completely open can for probably 15 years now. And it's, it's, it really has done a lot for me. So thanks to you all with Grass still participate so that we can find a ground. Attitude, respect and tolerance, but not love.

Because practice and also kind of in awe of how much you've accomplished. I think I first heard about Institute for Local Self Reliance. I certainly think I knew about it when I lived in D.C. in 1975 and maybe even earlier. Earlier I think I may have come across it in Wind magazine, like, yeah.

On which we can stand and then maybe build toward. I don't know you all that well.

In order to love you get to know us, man. So yes.

Now whether.