The Charlie Schultz Philosophy
Last Wednesday, I was seating on a bench at the Portland Amtrak Station, waiting for my train to Seattle, on my way to teaching my Systems Thinking class and completely absorbed in the reading of one chapter of Donella Meadows’ book Thinking in Systems, when a man who was seating on the same bench not too far from me, approached me and asked me if I could watch for his bags for a few minutes. Of course, I accepted.
A few minutes later, the man came back (his name is Dennis), thanked me and asked me what I was reading. My answer drew another question and another and we started a conversation about what I was teaching and where, what I was doing for a living and so on and so forth. When time came to board the train, I gave Dennis my business card and said goodbye. But a while later, as the train was already on his way, Dennis came to find me in my car and asked if we could continue our discussion. We talked about things that matter to me: adaptive work and leadership; transformative work; living systems; sustainability; consulting; personal development. It seemed as if Dennis was drinking my words. He told me that he had been retired for a few years but was looking for something to do. Considering his interest in my “stories” and all the questions he asked, it occurred to me that he was ready to move on to his next challenge and start a new career—one that would truly make a difference in his life and in the life of others. I greatly encouraged him to find his new life purpose.
Meeting Dennis was like one of these serendipitous encounters that leave you with the feeling that you’ve made a difference in someone else life. After we had said goodbye and agreed to stay in touch, I felt a deep sense of joy and connection. Strangely, I also felt that this encounter had not happened purely by chance—that it was meant to have happened.
Yesterday, I received an email from Dennis who sent a little story and cartoon called: The Charlie Schultz Philosophy. I am happy to share it with you. Enjoy!
Let’s Not Jump To Conclusions Too Quickly
Let’s say I am a coffee shop owner. I want you to tell me what is better for the environment: using paper cups, hence increasing deforestation or, using ceramic cups, which I now have to wash using energy and lots of water? (Of course, much energy and water were used to make the paper cups as well.)
Perhaps you know the answer to this question but more likely you are like me and you don’t. Perhaps there are some experts out there who have done a comparative life cycle analysis of both solutions and who know the answer. Perhaps the answer depends on where the coffee shop is located—I would suspect the answer would be different in India or Africa than it is in the U.S. Perhaps ceramic cups are a better choice today while paper cups might be better in 5 or 10 years when we experience a major water shortage. Perhaps in 20 years neither solution will be a good one because we won’t have enough water to make our coffee, anyway. There may not be any coffee growing, by the way.
I may be over-dramatizing but you get the point. We all mean well and we are all trying to do the right thing and we truly care. Yet, driven by our mental models (yes, I know, I have been focusing quite a bit on them lately but they seem to me so critical if one wants to move to the next stage), we love to find easy technical answers to our complex problems and we love jumping to conclusions quickly. We also love to point fingers and blame others for their unsustainable behaviors. We bad-mouth our neighbors for not recycling; we complain about our employees who do not embrace our latest corporate sustainable initiative; we get upset with the grocery store that is raving about its sustainability strategy yet carries Chilean grapes in the winter; and while they may be making their baby steps toward transforming their business operation, we still blame large corporations for their unsustainable business models and for greenwashing.
Listen, I am not saying there is no greenwashing: it’s everywhere. I am not saying there aren’t people who do not care: there are still too many. I am not saying that all businesses getting involved with their Corporate Social Responsibility initiative are doing it for the sake of the environment, their local community and social justice: many are still doing it only for the bottom line and in many cases simply because they are forced to do so by stakeholders’ demand, regulatory constraints, and NGO pressures.
What I am trying to say is that we, the well-meaning people, have to rise above the pack and start asking the right and smart questions. If we want to lead, then we must lead in such a way that the results of our actions are truly making a positive impact on the world. We must acknowledge that problems are complex and that oversimplification is a very risky business. We must be aware of our own filters and mental models and make them explicit and open to the scrutiny of others. We must take a rigorous and scientific approach when investigating our problems and the strategies we are developing to solve them. And, at the same time and in the same way that we are using our rational brains for analysis, we must also open our hearts, use our intuition, and practice love and compassion because the use of soft skills and our ability to connect to emotional intelligence are critical to our ability to adapt, transform ourselves and ultimately impact the world around us.
More than anything else, we should not jump to conclusions too quickly. Is it difficult? Hell, yes! But by rolling up our sleeves and accepting the hard work; by acknowledging that we are both rational and emotional people and by honoring both reason and emotion as valuable human assets; and by learning how to mesh these in our personal and professional lives, all together we will be able to achieve our highest aspirations for a better world.
Emptying Ourselves to Learn
If you have seen the movie Avatar, you may recall a couple of scenes where Neytiri—the indigenous huntress—is telling Jake (or more exactly, Jake’s avatar)—the Marine who was sent to planet Pandora to gain the trust of the Na’vi indigenous people—that in order to learn the Na’vi’s culture and way of living, he must empty his mind. The learning process that Jake has to go through is not a mere accumulation of new knowledge but an adaptive learning process: to learn, Jake must challenge his assumptions and worldviews and develop the same way of “seeing” as the indigenous people. As Jake learns the indigenous way, he must abandon his old values and beliefs. His only option, then, is to join the Na’vi people in the fight against the army of his ex-fellow Marines. (My interpretation, of course.)
It is well known that we only see what we are prepared to see. In the book “The Art of Possibility,” authors Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander recall an experiment with indigenous people of Ethiopia who had never seen a two-dimensional image. When presented for the first time in their lives with a photograph showing people and animals, the indigenous people were unable to actually distinguish the characters represented on the picture. Instead, “they felt the paper, sniffed it, crumpled it, and listened to the crackling noise it made; they nipped off little bits and chewed them to taste it.”*
What I find most amazing about this story is not that the indigenous people could not “read” the photograph. No, what amazes me is the realization that I am just like them—that there is an entire world out there, made of things that I am unable to see because my worldviews are preventing my mind to begin to imagine those things even exist, and even less comprehend their meaning if and whenever my eyes are eventually able to notice them. We might be a very developed specie, yet we must nevertheless admit that we are still very much like the cavemen in Plato’s Parable of the Cave, mistaking the shadows we see on the walls of our “caves” (i.e., our minds) for reality. Albert Eistein was no fool when he exclaimed: “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
The ability to empty our mind to make space for a new reality is a critical capacity in any developmental and transformative process. But how can we develop that skill? Before answering this question, let me present a bit of theory that will shed some light onto the nature of the learning and developmental process.
Living systems theory teaches us that the behavior of a system is less influenced by external forces than by the specific organization of its internal structure. For a human being, the structure consists of the mental models, assumptions, beliefs and values that the particular individual has accumulated overtime through her education and diverse life experiences. A living system learns and adapts over time by changing its internal structure while maintaining its identity. Over time, the history of structural changes in a system defines the system’s development path. Moreover, it is the structure of a living system that selectively determines which perturbations or information in the environment the system will notice or ignore, and which new interactions will be created between the system’s components. One says that a living system is structure-determined. This explains why the indigenous people of Ethiopia—having a completely different life experience than ours and, thus, different mental models—were unable to identify the objects photographed and only saw a shiny paper. The structure of their minds selected what they were able to see and dictated how to interpret what they saw. In other words, the mind constructs its own subjective reality.
The concept of structure-determined systems allows us to reconcile the notions of freedom and determinism within human beings. Indeed, this theory implies that our development path is both determined and free: we are determined by our own structure (i.e., mental models), yet we maintain the freedom to define what in our environment triggers our learning, adaptation and change.
In order to open our mind to a new reality, we must become aware of our own mental models; accept the fact that there isn’t an objective reality of the world and that, consequently, none of us owns the truth; understand that complete freedom is an illusion, yet we have the inner power to choose to challenge our assumptions; and know that our mind can be “unwired” and “rewired” to generate new thought patterns.
Here are some useful tools that can help in the process:
- The “Ladder of Inference,” developed by Chris Argyris and Donald Schön, is helpful for understanding how our mental models are formed; it helps investigate what data from the world we select and how we interpret it to build meaning and take action.
- The “Eye of the Needle,” developed by Nancy Eubanks Oelklaus, is especially useful within the context of difficult conversations. The tool helps identify the parts of a conversation that remain unspoken and the feelings that underlie those responses so that by integrating our emotional and logical response we can communicate completely and from the heart.
- Causal Loop Diagrams (CLD) is a system modeling technique that provides a language for articulating our understanding of the dynamic, interconnected nature of our world.
- Meditation and other Buddhist mindfulness/awareness practices help free the mind from thoughts. With an empty mind, we can better connect to our Inner Self and Creative Source. (Note that in the Buddhist tradition, “emptiness” (sunyata) relates to the notion that all objects are empty of “inherent existence,” which is another way of saying that the way we perceive and experience the world is fundamentally different than the way things are.)
Finally, emptying ourselves to learn requires us to be very intentional in our learning process and to practice humility.
I wish you the best in your journey.
* The quote is from J.B. Deregowski, “Real Space and Represented Space: Cross-Cultural Perspectives,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (1989), 57, cited by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander, in “The Art of Possibility” (2000), Penguin books.
Intentions and Commitments for 2010
The beginning of the New Year is a time for reflections and for setting up intentions and commitments. I have not always done so, but this year I won’t fail to follow the tradition.
Over the past three months I have deeply reconsidered my professional path and purpose and it has become clear that it is time for me to go on my own and start my business. (Yes! I do believe it is the perfect time for me to do so, even in a time of economic recession.) While the specific wording of my mission statement is still evolving, its direction is already apparent:
To help transform organizations into purposeful and conscious living systems and to facilitate the resolution of adaptive challenges while considering the impact of all organizational activities on the community, the environment and the broader ecosystem.
Keeping a foot into theory and a foot into practice has always been essential to my personal fulfillment. I also believe that the sharing of knowledge with a broad audience has never been so critical at a time when it is urgent for our society to go through a paradigm shift and change our way of thinking. It is imperative for our collective consciousness to arise now or we run the risk of not making it as a civilization. (Note that I am seeing many positive and encouraging signs that a collective consciousness is in the process of emerging. Perhaps I’ll make this the topic of another post.)
Consequently, I see my work revolving around three pillars: consulting, research, and knowledge sharing. These three pillars are of course interdependent and mutually reinforcing: theories inform practice and practice provides the environment to test, validate, or update the theories which then can be shared and applied to resolve real world problems; and the loop keeps on going indefinitely.
While still in development and evolving, I am happy to share with you some of my preliminary business ideas around the three pillars.
Consulting
The essence of my consulting practice is Transformative Work.
Organization/Community Transformative Work
My goal is to work with businesses, non-profit organizations, local governments, and communities who face adaptive (value-based) challenges, chronic problems, and the need to change. I see my clients as organizations and/or communities that seek:
- Greater clarity about—and alignment with—their purpose and identity.
- Higher level of mindfulness and consciousness driving all activities.
- Increased coherence and integration of all activities to achieve their purpose and greater good.
- New competencies, including adaptive learning capabilities and ability to address the root causes of problems.
- New strategic opportunities aligned with the organizational purpose.
- Increased resilience and ability to adapt to change.
Services for the Architectural, Engineering, and Urban Planning Professions
I intend to leverage my architectural training and my interests in collaborative integrated design process and in urban planning projects, combined with my systems thinking skills and knowledge about living systems theory, to serve the architectural and city planning community in two main capacities:
1- Sustainable and Regenerative Urban Design
I am currently investigating consulting opportunities with architects, city planners, and urban developers, and other stakeholders involved in the planning, design, and development of sustainable communities, eco-districts, and eco-cities.
2- Innovative Business Models in the Architectural/Engineering/Construction (AEC) Industry
I am also looking at providing my expertise to AEC firms with an interest in transforming their business models and developing innovative services that deliver higher values to their clients.
Theoretical Framework
I take a holistic approach to organizational transformation and change that is grounded in the application of the following theoretical frameworks: systems thinking; complexity sciences; living systems principles; evolutionary theories; adaptive leadership; consciousness; and collaborative/integrated design process.
Knowledge Sharing
I believe there is a need to accelerate learning and bring new theories into the mainstream. So, beyond blogging, research papers, workshops and conferences I am currently exploring ways by which to amplify critical ideas and reach out to a larger audience. Social media plays a key role in this area.
This year will be my fourth-year as instructor with Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI), a distance learning MBA and Certificate program in sustainable business where I team-teach a Strategy & Implementation course and a Systems Thinking in Action course. BGI’s mission is to “Change Business for Good” and the entire community is actively engaged in co-creating a just and sustainable future. The BGI experience has been very rewarding to me and I look forward to continuing being involved with the Institute.
Of course, I am committed to writing this blog. It gives me the opportunity to stand back and reflect every week on diverse topics and ideas that are at the basis of my work. With a few exceptions, it has so far been a one-way communication. I hope that over the next few months you will engage in the conversation and share your comments and suggestions.
Personal Values
I will bring integrity, trust, excellence, openness, love and compassion in all that I do.
I believe that everything is connected and that solutions to our messiest problems can emerge out of our collective wisdom. Collaboration and dialogue are critical.
I see my adaptive leader role to be one of service.
Collaborations
I have recently joined other “citizens” at Designs for Sustainable World Collective, LLC (DSWCollective), a consulting firm that “bring(s) together a wide range of experts with complementary backgrounds to focus on the development and implementation of practical yet aggressive sustainable design strategies.” I very much look forward to collaborating with DSWCollective’s founder Darcy Winslow and her team in the near future. I am especially grateful to Darcy for having kindly accepted to put me under her wings and to mentor me over the next few months.
Over the holiday, I also reconnected with my friend Jeff Klein of Working for Good Collaborative. Jeff and his team are helping companies become more socially and environmentally conscious. I’ll be happy to offer my skills and expertise and be of service whenever and however it makes sense.
I have recently become a member of the Collective Wisdom Initiative, a website and network created in 2002 by the Fetzer Institute, whose purpose is to “help make visible an emerging field of collective wisdom, its study and practice.” It is my deeper desire to be able to help organizations and communities connect to their field of collective consciousness through dialogue, deep listening, and the power of love as the energy that reconnects that which has been separated.
I look forward to 2010 and all that it holds for me and for all of us!
With gratitude,
Beatrice
Inspirations
For this last post of the year, I thought I would share with you 10 quotes that inspired me this year or that spoke to things that have been happening in my life. If you were so inclined, I would love it if you would share with me quotes that inspired you (please use the comment section).
Enjoy!
1- Work is love made visible.
—Kahlil Gibran
2- The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become.
—Russel Ackoff
3- Some people come into our lives, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never ever the same.
—Eleanor Roosevelt
4- The truly free man has no choice, he simply does what must be done.
—Dane Rudyar, French author, composer, and astrologer
5- The only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with what is. When the mind is perfectly clear, what is is what we want.
—Byron Katie, Loving What Is.
6- Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate,
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous –
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us.
It is not just in some of us: it is in everyone,
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
—Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love.
7- Rule Number 6: “Don’t take yourself so g—damn seriously.”
—Rosamund and Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility
8- Need to decide between two options? Don’t choose. Instead create a better option.
—Roger Martin, The Opposable Mind
9- I surrender to the larger design that I am co-creating.
—Beatrice’s mantra
10- The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to venture beyond them into the impossible.
—Arthur C. Clarke’s second Law
beatrice benne 