Revolution is Where You Find It

by Tony Lamport

As we drive, the full generous sun of late morning lights the mass of golden leaves of autumn in Nova Scotia from the inside, in a way that uplifts and overwhelms the eye. Beside me is my son – rock drummer, video gamer, lifeguard, ecological trainer and generally funny guy – who, for every one of his four years at university has placed near the top of the Dean’s list in spite of reading virtually nothing, much to my frustration, but course-assigned texts.

As we drive happily and silently together into the richly textured day, I am struggling for a way to begin my promised review of Peter Senge’s new book The Necessary Revolution. My son turns to me, out of the blue, and says with uncanny timing, “I’m reading a new book by Peter Senge and enjoying it a lot.” He pauses for awhile and then goes on, “I like the way he thinks and writes, in a way that allows things to connect across disciplines.”

I pop a double eyebrow lift, and he pauses again.

“He seems to use exactly the right words in the right amount to explain what I need to know,” he goes on to describe.

He’s got my full attention now.

“And he doesn’t seem to invest a lot of effort trying to impress or bore me with what’s left over.” (Unlike presumably some others who figure prominently in his life).

I’m smiling inwardly at this synchronicity. I have my beginning in these few essential observations about an important book that covers a great deal of ground, bringing the lessons of environmental and organizational learning together in a readable, page-turning call to action. Now I can dig a little deeper.

Peter Senge has a distinguished career as a writer of landmark books and as a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. His voice has clarity and patience as it harvests the learning about working effectively together at the often muddy edge of organizational learning, making it not just understandable but useful for the rest of us. In fact, he invented the term organizational learning and was one of the founders of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), a hugely powerful presence in thought leadership and business and management thinking in the last decade or so. The Fifth Discipline and its accompanying Fieldbook are standard texts. Presencing, his third book, co-authored with Otto Scharmer and others, is a powerful exploration of complex problems and creativity – possibly just a few units ahead of its time but still with a clear voice that makes it both understandable and readable.

In this new book, The Necessary Revolution, along with his collaborators Bryan Smith, Nina Krushwitz, Joe Laur, and Sara Schley, Senge continues to avoid wasting his and our time trying to impress or bore us. With a thorough, detailed approach, he guides us along the journey into our necessary future, constrained as it is by great social and environmental upheaval but rich with possibilities for those who can adapt and create. Like this one, his books are underpinned by theory, but they are also thick with good examples and lots of opportunities for experiential learning.

Karl Marx became one of the most influential thinkers of the modern world, predicting the necessary downfall of capitalism at the hands of its workers. Senge and his colleagues celebrate capitalism not for the harsh exploitation of working people and the natural world it sometimes has been, but for all it promises to be – an expression of the best intentions and wholesome livelihood of those who want to make good and make sense in their lives. This is an invitation to a capitalist uprising for those who see as possible a new kind of natural or regenerative capitalism that can achieve environmental well-being, equity and abundance for all.

These are high-flying ideas but they are also rooted in a growing reality in many parts of the world, and Senge and his colleagues provide lots of examples of companies and organizations at its leading edge, from famous brands such as Alcoa, BMW and Xerox to many smaller and lesser known such as Seventh Generation. Through a careful exploration that links the eco in ecology and the eco in economy, and serves as a program of action for individuals and teams, The Necessary Revolution takes us into an uncertain but certainly possible future, where local initiatives can add up to global change. By aligning a drive for competitiveness and profit with an end to costly waste and pollution – waste and pollution can be seen as manufactured products for which there are no customers and no profit – and bringing good intentions into our industrial culture through a systems approach, The Necessary Revolution describes an economic culture where participants find fulfillment in material and spiritual ways and in the end do no harm.

However, with the book’s focus being a practical workbook for change, it treats too casually two powerful broad ideas that if widely understood could guide action in the larger field and as a result, were underplayed. The first is the importance of investing in new systems that do good rather than tinkering with bad systems to make them less damaging, and second, the role of design in accomplishing this.

By championing design as a tool for creating a better more sustainable world, Senge echoes the wisdom of Buckminster Fuller, the engineering genius who brought us among other things the geodesic dome. Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Those who own iPods or iPhones, have driven a Smart Car or spent time in a solar house can understand directly the power of design to change things.

Everything made by humans is designed, but not necessarily designed well. Good design is an expression of human aspiration and intentions, and when it’s practiced in a thoughtful way that includes sustainability and context and the users point of view, it can solve problems upstream before they ever occur. It can bring the actual outcomes closer to the intended ones. We in the developed world are an industrial culture of so many unfortunate and deadly unintended consequences.

Business schools such as Rotman and others are beginning to focus not just on design, but also design thinking. This approach takes the wisdom and creativity of design as a specialized field of professional practice and applies it to the work the rest of us do. As a result, we learn to research and nurture new kinds of insight, to think and work together in the round, and incorporate sustainability principles into our innovation process. As visionary architect William McDonough put it, “Designers must become leaders and leaders must become designers.”

Biomimetics is the discipline of applying design innovations from the natural world. Lotus leaves are so smooth nothing will stick to their surface – a perfect design for waterless toilets. Underwater shark skins accomplish the same result – a wholesome design replacement for highly toxic underwater antifouling paint. Mollusks create the strongest and most versatile adhesive on the planet – perfect for any number of industrial uses. Gekkos hang upside down effortlessly through microscopic fibres – just the thing for cat burglars and climbers of all kinds. Naturally occurring nanospikes destroy bacteria by rupturing their protective surfaces – a huge step forward for hospitals when added to paints. Trees, plants and animals use the most sophisticated antibiotics anywhere – in fact most antibiotics come from this source. Termite hives maintain cool temperatures in the extreme African heat by the way they are designed – a natural inspiration for high rise buildings in hot climates. A spider’s web is three times stronger than steel by weight – with any number of industrial safety and military uses. Animals draw with great success on solar and geothermal heat in wintertime to stay warm.

Nature has had eight billion years or more of lab research and real-world testing to solve most of the problems we currently face in ways that are sustainable, by their very nature - no regulations required. Our arrogant approach to science is a brief and unfortunate experiment compared to this. Some scientists and designers are beginning to now take a more humble approach to innovation and discovery and, inspired by the abundance of natural technology that surrounds us in the form of endless variations and combinations of molecules and structures, create great new sustainable things. To adopt a biomimetic approach to technological development is to re-establish a natural and self-regulating relationship with the natural world and ourselves that doesn’t require vast, expensive, and unproductive regulatory bureaucracies to police them.

No one in their right mind would deny that climate change is a problem. But climate change is a symptom of more complex, interrelated problems that will not end with the disappearance of the toxic bloom of CO₂ that plagues our upper atmosphere. How will we know how much carbon dioxide is the right amount? At what speed can we safely reduce emissions? Will the War On Carbon, like the War on Drugs and the War On Poverty create unintended consequences equally as serious?

Failing to act to save ourselves and other forms of life would be tragic beyond imagining, but just setting targets for the control of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a reproduction of the simplistic thinking-in-isolation that led to the creation of the problem in the first place. If we are to avoid the constant plague of unintended consequences our best intentions give rise to, we need a convergence of mutually supportive solutions.

The Necessary Revolution is a thorough piece of work but could be stronger if it were to more comprehensively explore the complexity of the problems we face together. This complexity has changed how we must engage the world and work together. The methods of the previous Industrial Revolution will not help us in an era of technological and socio-political diversity, where the fragmentation of interests and power wreak havoc on our customary command and control methods. Rather, we must understand that solutions will only grow slowly out of co-emergence, reciprocity and collaborative learning on a manageable scale.

As Alex Steffen of the now famous Worldchanging book and website put it:

To have any hope of staving off collapse, we need to move forward with measures that address many interrelated problems at once. We don’t need a War on Carbon. We need a new prosperity that can be shared by all while still respecting a multitude of real ecological limits — not just atmospheric gas concentrations, but topsoil depth, water supplies, toxic chemical concentrations, and the health of ecosystems, including the diversity of life they depend upon. We can build a future in which technology, design, smart incentives, and wise policies make it possible to deliver a high quality of life at lower ecological cost. But that brighter, greener future is attainable only if we embrace the problems we face in all their complexity. To do otherwise is tantamount to clear-cutting the very future we’re trying to secure.

Can we transform capitalism’s restless need for growth into something spiritual and sustainable where a sense of compassionate reciprocity replaces hand-outs from the wealthy, where nature is welcome as an ally and a teacher, and where the value of money is grounded in genuine wealth? Within its 400-odd pages, The Necessary Revolution provides an uplifting glimpse of what this might look like and identifies a starting point close enough that there really is no reason for us all not to begin. This is not just a matter of we can – we must.

One day, I asked my six-year-old daughter whether she thought it would be possible for us to make things in a way that would end this great avalanche of garbage, pollution and wasted resources we hurt ourselves with every day, and allow things to be recycled or returned to the natural world as food.

”You mean they don’t do it that way now?” she said. “I don’t understand.”

And then, because the wonderful thing about six-year-olds is they have no mercy for adults, she said, “Dad, please ask them to stop.”

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Tony Lamport is a sociologist, environmental designer, applied economist and sustainability strategist who lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His preoccupation is with understanding natural intelligence, in time.

To read a Business Week interview with Peter Senge about The Necessary Revolution, click here.