How to Be an Agent of Sustainability
tldr: Aboriginal wisdom on how to be an Agent of Sustainability. How to diversify, connect, interact, and adapt.
Also, if you are a woman and change has come for you, Tuesday (my wife!) is offering Navigating Transformation again. I’ve been hearing glowing reviews and it starts next week!
I have spent much of my work life supporting networks of leaders. Developing webs of meaningful connection among people with passion and purpose.
My work is to help weave and deepen connection. I do it so that together we can find better ways to adapt to VUCA, the defining condition of our time.
Volatility
Uncertainty
Complexity
Ambiguity
How do we surf the waves of VUCA?
At the heart of my approach is the “Evolutionary Leadership Framework.” A framework defined by:
Intention
Connection
And Relentless Experimentation
The inescapable fact. The fact that you can sense in your body right now. Is the fact that we are violently accelerating towards unfathomable levels of complexity.
Today, our main response to dealing with complexity is acceleration.
We are going faster and faster, trying to do more and more. We are fooling ourselves into believing that maybe, just maybe... If we find the right tool, and the right method... the right system and the right structure… if we go fast and right enough… we will somehow finally manage to do it all.
But we are reaching the upper limit of our capacity to accelerate.
We just can’t go any faster.
So what do we do instead?
What is the adaptive move?
We are animals. We are biological entities. We are part of the web of life. When we aim for a more sustainable human presence on the planet, we must remember that we are nature. We will not get to sustainability by working in unsustainable ways.
If it’s burning you out, it’s not going to get you there.
We’ve heard lots about emergence and complexity. But we are finding it really hard to change our paradigm. We keep trying to “do” emergence. We keep trying to use the same top/down planning structures that we have in place today.
I’ve been considering an aborigene’s perspective. I keep taking this stance of “forward facing remembering.” I keep reminding myself that before the advent of the “great” agrarian civilizations. And the European “enlightenment project of the isolated self.” We humans had a way of being together upon this earth. And it worked for millenia upon millenia.
No! I am not advocating some naive return to an idealized “state of nature.” Nor to the insulting idea of the “noble savage.” I am just aware that we humans know a lot more than what has been written into our books. That the dominant paradigm is also an ideology. That it is “only” about 500 years old. And that we have at least 70,000 years of culture under our collective belt.
The aborigene’s perspective I’ve been revisiting is that of Tyson Yunkaporta. I’ve come back to his book Sand Talk. And I am struck by the clear and straightforward guidelines that he offers.
If we want to be “agents of sustainability” upon this ailing sacred planet. Yunkaporta has something to say.
We are talking about wisdom from a culture that dates back to 65 THOUSAND years. We can safely assume that this is wisdom from a people who have been through some shit! Not one apocalyptic event, but many. It is wisdom from people who have been many times around the cycle.
Pattern Mind (credit: Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk)
Yunkaporta says that: “We need to be brave enough to apply [this wisdom] to our reality of infinitely interconnected, self-organizing, self-renewing systems.” He says that: “We are the custodians of this reality.” And that “the arrow of time is not an appropriate model for a custodial species to operate from.”
Take that last line and sit with it for a minute. Or… for the rest of our lives.
(Yes, I meant to say “lives”)
The arrow of time is not an appropriate model for a custodial species to operate from.
It would be too easy to stay here. To let our souls be provoked. To let it stir something inside us. Only to put our heads down again. And then to just get back to work. Like we do every day. To play the game that we seem to think we are stuck in.
But Yunkaporta goes further. He invites the kind of cultural humility that is useful in understanding your role as an agent of sustainability in a complex system.
He says that:
It is difficult to relinquish the illusions of power and delusions of exceptionalism that come with privilege. But it is strangely liberating to realize your true status as a single node in a cooperative network. There is honor to be found in this role, and a certain dignified agency…
You won’t be swallowed up by a hive mind or lose your individuality—you will retain your autonomy while simultaneously being profoundly interdependent and connected. In fact, sustainable systems cannot function without the full autonomy and unique expression of each independent part of the interdependent whole.
Sustainability agents have a few simple operating guidelines, or network protocols, or rules if you like:
Diversify
Connect
Interact
Adapt
How does your stance change if you decide that this will be your orientation? What happens if you dedicate yourself to learning how to do each of these four things?
Yunkaporta elaborates:
Diversity is not about tolerating difference or treating others equally and without prejudice. The diversification principle compels you to maintain your individual differences, particularly from other agents who are similar to you… You must also seek out and interact with a wide variety of agents who are completely dissimilar to you… you must interact with other systems beyond your own, keeping your system open and therefore sustainable.
Connectedness balances the excesses of individualism in the diversity principle. The first step in connectedness is forming pairs (!!!) with multiple other agents who also pair with others. The next step is creating or expanding networks of these connections. The final step is making sure these networks are interacting with the networks of other agents, both within your system and in others.
Kinship Mind (Credit: Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk)
Interaction is the principle that provides the energy and spirit of communication to power the system. This principle facilitates the flow of living knowledge. For this, you must be transferring knowledge (and energy and resources) with as many other agents as possible, rather than trying to store it individually. If the world ever experiments with an actual free market rather than an oligopoly, this would be the perfect system to facilitate sustainable interactions.
Adaptation is the most important protocol of an agent in a sustainable system. You must allow yourself to be transformed through your interactions with other agents and the knowledge that passes through you from them. This knowledge and energy will flow through the entire system in feedback loops, and you must be prepared to change so that those feedback loops are not blocked.
An agent that is truly adaptive and changing is open to sudden eruptions of transformation, in which the agent may temporarily take on the role of strange attractor and facilitate chain reactions of creative events within the system.
(Back to me, writing)
This is fire. It’s a posture. A way of being. Not only a way of being yourself, but a way of being-with. A way of being-with others, a way of being-with the more than human world. It is a practice. And it is a stance. A stance the reimagines, repatterns, and subverts.
It is wisdom.
I’m glad to be with you, as together we find our way.