The solutions are already available

Sure we face big problems and complex global challenges like dwindling natural resources, the end of cheep energy, over population, climate change and global warming, insane debt and financial instability, war and political ineptitude.

But the solution to these problems is already available to us. However it's either not what we want to hear, or the significant mindset shift, shift in values and behaviour, development of relevant skills and the political will required to make it happen pushes us way beyond our levels of comfort.

The truth seems to be that the 150-year old party is over. That the age of exponential economic growth which rode on the back of a seemingly never-ending supply of cheep energy and the American Dream as we have come to know it, is over. In fact the end began about 20-years ago, we just haven't yet gotten around to acknowledging it.

We now face the rather dreary task of cleaning up after the party and getting down to the business of constructing a culture that values and measures growth in new more integrated ways. And not just financial or the bottom line. And of finding ways to live within our ecological means using substantially less energy and with considerably less stuff.

What scares us, I think, are images of post-modern slums and sci-fi movies depicting the barren post apocalyptic landscape. 

But it really doesn't have to be like that, only if we believe the party can go on forever, which is just silly. Yes, life will be different and it is going to mean some dramatic changes in how we think, what we value and how we live. But on the other hand it could, if we cultivate the political will, mean greater equality, connection and human well-being.

A time of unparalleled creativity and innovation, which contrary to what we have been led to believe is not cultivated through pressure, stress, insanely long working hours, meaningless deadlines and fear.

Yip, it's going to mean that we carve out another definition of what it means to be successful, a more relevant and dare I say it... complex and mature one.

Contradictory values aren't trustworthy

It's when we say we believe or value one thing, but our actions communicate something else entirely.

The friend who says he is excited about attending your book-club meetings probably believes he is. As does the company that says it believes in the value of team work, and the importance of client and staff [retention]. And the religious person who talks about 'love thy neighbour' wants to hold that value, but lacks the maturity to do so.

The problem is that how we behave and what we do is often [far more often than we would like to acknowledge] communicating something quite different to want we think or would like to think, we believe.

Contradictory values destroys trust without which there is a breakdown in relationship. This wrecks marriages, clients relationships, friendships and social integration. And forms an invisible barrier to authentic communication, cooperation and innovation.

We tell our partner and family we love them, but miss events and family functions. This communicates, we don't, that they are not a priority. And they see and understand this, even if they pretend they don't.

We go to great lengths to avoid exposing someone's contradictory values, because we won't be thanked for it, and probably more to the point... we don't them to expose ours. It's a silent social agreement designed to keep things functioning, albeit without any significant levels of trust.

Hence the need for regulations, lawyers and a ridiculously complex legal system.

But at a time when creativity, innovation and 'wicked' problems are too big for any one person, group or organisation to solve, trust becomes important.

Values, it's easy to see why they seem unimportant

We tend to marginalise the importance of embracing values. Because everyday we're confronted with examples of people or organisations expressing them, and then acting or behaving in ways which clearly contradict.

So what's the point? Is it just for philosophers and armchair discussion?

You start a book-club and a friend although they continually say how excited they are to attend misses three out of four.

The company you work for claims to value team work and cooperation, but continually rewards individuals. Or claims the client is important, but cuts services to cut costs. Or claims you are important and consistently cuts staff increasing your workload.

A religious acquaintance talks about 'love thy neighbour', but at almost every corner offers either generalised, ignorant or derogatory comments about other groups or nationalities.

(Think adverts and advertising)

And so we conclude that there is little point to developing values. But we are misreading the situation.

It's not that values don't drive our actions, they do. Your friend who misses the book-club has other more valuable priorities. The business values individual talent over team work and profit over client or staff. The religious acquaintance values scorn over love.

Forget what they say. Their actions and behaviours are telling you everything you need to know about what it is that they truly believe. As yours is. 

It's a big leap in maturity when we begin to intentionally align what we really believe with what we're actually doing. Of course we become more authentically impactful and influential.

And don't expect others to thank you for saying... 'Well I can't attend the book-club meeting tonight because I value watching TV over attending, but thanks anyway'. And good luck drawing peoples and organisations attention to their contradictory values, without an invitation. You'll get a slap in the face.

Your most valuable asset may just be your biggest liability

Given how much marketers, politicians, corporations and advertising companies are willing to pay to attract your attention, it must be important. If fact I would comfortably argue that your attention is your most valuable asset.

Well this is not exactly true. Your attention may be valuable to others, but it only becomes valuable (to you) when it's trained and obedient. Until then, if it bounces around like a hyperactive five year old, it's a serious liability.

I call obedient attention, concentration... The skill to place your attention where you want it and effortlessly hold it there for as long as you need to. The effortlessly part comes with lots of practice and begins with hours of grind. Just like starting gym or running.

Concentration can also be understood as exclusive attention on one object, or our ability to stay focused on the task at hand. It's the key to improved thinking, wellbeing and performance, and radically improves the speed with which we acquire new knowledge and skills. 

Given the role of concentration or trained attention to our success, it's important that we intentionally create a deliberate practice to develop and deepen it. Ahemmm!

It requires no muscle memory, no physical skill at all. So in this way it's a purely mental activity. That of course does not make it any less demanding, in fact in many ways it's more so.

There are two forms of concentration, one useful and the other very damaging. 

a/ Hard, focussed and exclusive concentration works on the principal of domination or denial. And although it may keep your attention focussed it destroys your quality of life. This is the easier of the two. Control always is.

b/ Soft, open, aware and yet focussed attention - both expansively aware + narrowly focussed. It's aware of everything but firmly holds only one thing as a point of interest, without denying anything else. This is much more difficult, but has much better all round results. And makes you a much nicer, healthier, happier person. Which weirdly enough contributes to success.

It helps to get guidance or a mentor at the beginning.

If it's not better, why replace it?

Our patterns of behaviour be they personal or relationship and our systems be the commercial, political or economic are not real systems in that they're made from iron, steel or concrete. They are psychological, the intellectual product of our fears and aspirations of our thinking, assumptions, values, knowledge and beliefs.

I.e. money and money systems are not a real things. They are ideas supported by processes and systems... simply the product of more thinking.

It stands to reason that in working to change the status quo without first or at least simultaneously having transformed, evolved and developed the thinking that designed them, then the effort is destined to fail. Or in political terms the leader may change but the regime stays the same.

If our systems are creating more problems than they solve, which they are. If they're unsustainable, which they are and if they're inequitable, which they are. We can change them. 

But it's unreasonable to expect that those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo be the agents of that change. In much the same way that would be unreasonable to expect a monarch to be the instrument of his own reform, even demise.

This is neither good nor bad and in it I see no judgement. I'm not sure how interested I would be to change a behaviour or system within which I prosper, especially if I believed that I had worked hard to achieve my success and influence.

I guess I may be tempted to say, 'stop being a bad loser'.

But that's not the end game. What's better that we can offer. What are we bringing to the table. Just opposing something because we don't like it, even if it's defunct, is not the same as replacing it with something more intelligent that works even better.

Actions speak louder (and truer) than words

"I love you unconditionally and I want nothing in return, no gifts, no goods or demonstrations of love... Just knowing that you love me too".

Wow, what a loaded sentence, given that communication is roughly 7% words, 28% intonation and 65% visual (give or take depending on the model you use). This means the bulk of what we are communicating to others is through our actions and behaviour, what they can see, and not through our words.

It's the movie Stardust and Yvaine is declaring her love to Tristan, who at that moment is a mouse. But before that tragic turn of events was on a mission to demonstrate his love to the girl he mistakenly believed he loved, Victoria.

"What I'm trying to say Tristan is that I think I love you. 

My heart feels like my chest can barely contain it, like it doesn't belong to me anymore,  it belongs to you. And if you wanted it I would want nothing in exchange, no gifts, no goods, no demonstrations of devotion. Nothing but knowing that you love me too. Just your heart in exchange for mine".

The tricky part however lies in the phrase "knowing that you love me too". That deep sense of knowing is build up over months, years and decades of consistent behaviour communicating a very simple and clear message... In this case, 'I love you!'

I'll leave it to you to translate and apply this to your marketing message, relationships and beliefs in sustainability and change.

It's not important for now to know what that behaviour may look like--you can't consistently fake it and neither is it an automation--although there are some common patterns and themes. But it is important to contemplate that when it comes to communicating what we feel and believe (our business vision and mission), there is simply no place to hide.

If your have eyes to see and ears to hear, which although we may not consciously be aware of, we do. We've been communicating a lot longer through behaviour than we have been thinking or stringing pretty words together... Think advertising!

Victoria on the other hand desired only a trinket, a symbol of love, not love itself. Much easier to deliver on... Think what we expect from government, corporations and other people in general!

Grab a beer, pull up a chair... Join the conversation, why don't you?

We talk about patterns of behaviour [and of changing them] for individuals and systems for collectives, or groups. But the systems we have chosen to create, be they political, economic, business or those we have developed to provide the energy which sustains our activities, are in essence mental frameworks providing for and rationalising collective behaviour.

But we didn't really choose them. They kinda haphazzardly evolved around us. The big difference between now and then, is that now for the first time in the history of humanity there are enough people who have enough connected and collective influence, know enough about intentionally designing systems or are prepared to experiment... To intentionally design better ones, which serve more people, in a more equitable way.

And of course acknowledge the real limitations of our natural non-renewable resources.

This group of people who are now working to develop new or emergent systems [for the benefit of eveyone] are not some secret privileged hi-powered group. But rather people like you and I who have chose to be part of the conversation.

They do what they do in spite of the fact that they too have families, mortgages and work obligations. But regardless they have chosen to study and learn what they can about sustainability, leadership, personal growth and spirituality. And have stepped forward to answer the call... If not you, then who?

Join the conversation, why don't you?

Momentum is a hell of a thing.

As parents why do we spend so much of our time and precious resources in educating, teaching, training and explaining concepts to our children... Because we want them to have a better, happier life and future.

Why as parents do we try to protect our children, especially the younger ones... Because as parents we can see that the consequences of their actions are going to come back and bite them in the ass. They can't, we can.

As awake, aware and intelligent adults we can see further into the future. We can connect the dots. We can predict with better accuracy, the future. Because of this we make sometimes small and sometime larger course corrections. The point is that we don't have to actually meet the consequences to learn, we can simply predict, learn and adapt. This is the evolution of intelligence.

And so it is with the sustainability or social movement, not all of it, in fact just the leading edge. They can see and predict, they have connected the dots. And they can see that the consequences of our behaviour, now, are going to cause us progressively more pain and suffering, tomorrow. And they wish with all their heart to help us adapt.

They see this because they have rigorously investigated, they have done the math. And they get that exponential economic growth, production and consumption compounded by an exponentially growing population, exponentially rising debt and exponentially dwindling resources including the mother of all resources, cheep energy... Are all leading us to a very inevitable and absolutely predictable conclusion.

That life, our life, life on planet earth earth is going to fundamentally change.

But tomorrow is tomorrow, the next moment is ages away says the small boy hurtling toward a very predictable and inevitable collision with a plate glass window.

Momentum carriers us forward even when we stop doing whatever it is that we are doing. Ask the captain of any super-cargo ship. Momentum is a hell of a thing. When we take into account momentum, tomorrow is already here, it came yesterday.

Maybe we should start paying more attention to what those weird sustainability dudes are saying. Forget the right and wrong line of reasoning, rather look at the coherency and data supporting the arguments. It might just be that they care about us more than the industrial-financial complex. Which seems reasonable given that we know for a fact, it doesn't.

But hey, we have time... How much is gas now?

It's not that we need to freak out. Impending crisis or not, freaking out won't help. Rather study, learn, educate, empower ourselves and join the conversation. This is a relevant, intelligent and appropriate response.

And has delightful and unexpected rewards that benefit us now.

Old man's philosophy... Let's get real.

So imagine you're teaching your children the value of sharing or of being polite and they respond. 'All this philosophy is nice, but let's talk about reality'... But this IS reality you answer.

Whenever we learn new values which shape and influence our behaviour  it initially sounds philosophical, but not to the person teaching. To them it is a reality. It is part of their DNA and informs their thinking, behaviour and the systems they develop. 

Of course with children we can't work directly on the level of values. So instead we model the behaviour the values shape, thus training the values indirectly. This of course is slow and time-consuming and invariably meets with loads of resistance. But with adults, because our thinking is more developed, because we are more mature and subtle, we can work directly on the values themselves. 

It's subtle, but a much faster and more sustainable way of aligning [and changing] behaviour. 

That's why organisations and businesses, at a certain point in their development if they committed to sticking around, start taking their mission and vision seriously. But to the young and uninformed, it just sounds like old man's philosophy.

Hope is not the future

Hope is passive and a way to avoid dealing with the pains, trials and tribulations of the present [and the demands of getting there, wherever it is we're headed]. Rather it's vision and the creative process - the consistent effort to create especially when circumstances get difficult - that designs the future.

But the future emerges from the constraints of the present and not in spite of them. The future builds on what already is, less of course the extraneous or unnecessary. Knowing what physical and psychological realities to develop and what to abandon are always skills worth developing.

Vision is more than an intuitive peek into the future. It's your intention to create, forge or make a path from here to there.

Imagination, dream and hope don't rely on understanding the constraints of the present, which there always are. Whereas vision embraces and uses them to energise and guide the creative process.

But vision is demanding and requires skill - knowledge and the consistent application and experimentation of that knowledge. Mostly it's just easier to hope and leave it to someone else to fix.

Innovation happens when creativity is constrained, as it always is.

We tend to think of creativity as a blank sheet, filled with unlimited potential, with the capacity to become anything. And this is true, however the artist's work is constrained by her skills as an artist, her courage to produce, the colors available, the size of the canvas, the amount of sleep she's had, her health, patience and prior emotional trauma and current maturity (plus an almost infinite array of other factors).

The painting we see, the creative act of making something from nothing ended up as the emergent result of pure potential filtered through the real, and in this case mostly unacknowledged, constraints and limitations. Not all limitations are the product of scarcity thinking.

And so it is with all innovation. Many constraints are personal, some cultural and others resources. But all shape and influence the final creative product, be it a report, book, painting, product or strategy.

Innovation depends on acknowledging and honoring the real, dissolving the artificial and transcending the relative. And wisdom I guess lies in working out which is which.