IS IT ACTUALLY THE (ONLY) WAY IT IS?
John J. Scherer
In this issue of the Scherer Center e-Newsletter, I want to draw on my experience this past weekend at the World Business Academy’s Global Mind-Change Forum held in Santa Barbara, CA. Two hundred men and women came together from around the world to seek ways to point business leaders at the crucial task of re-shaping our world and contributing to its sustainability. I am a Fellow in The Academy, and many of you reading this might be well-served to become a member yourselves, and attend next year’s conference. See below for details. In this series, I will be sharing the insights from an extraordinary presentation by Elisabet Sahtouris, an internationally-known evolution biologist and thinker, author of Earthdance and hundreds of articles, and a thoroughly delightful human being.
“Nature has been ‘doing business’ for billions of years, if we take a broad definition of business to be the economy of making a living, transforming resources into useful products that are exchanged, distributed, consumed and/or recycled”
Elisabet Sahtouris, Evolutionary Biologist and Forum Presenter
We don’t need much of a reminder these days, do we, about the potential destructive power of Mother Nature?! It’s hard to imagine that she could have anything to teach, us or have anything that could make a potentially life-saving contribution to our quality of life. But read on. . .
This Saturday in Santa Barbara I sat stunned for over an hour as Elisabet took a room full of eager business leaders, scientists and consultants like myself through a crash course on how the biological world could—if we allowed it— teach us to create and lead teams and organizations with true staying power. A lively and animated provocateur, she showed us how two of the most important thinkers in history, whose theories still shape the deep programming of our world, Charles Darwin and Thomas Malthus, led us down a path that is actually ruining businesses, killing people—and working on the destruction of our precious world. However, as you will also see, she holds out great hope for our ultimate survival and even thriving—if we get the message.
As she reminded us, Malthus predicted that the world would inevitably come to an end at some point in the near-term future because population growth was outstripping the food supply. His good friend, Darwin, painted life as an endless, inevitable “dog eat dog” competition for scarce resources where only the fittest survive. Remarkably inventive and useful in their 19th century context, both theories are now seen to be flawed, yet they continue to drive our conscious and unconscious worlds. These two still largely unchallenged belief systems are what led us to create larger and larger organizations—and nations with a mission to a) utilize (read plunder) the earth’s resources and people, b) before the end comes, and/or someone else gets there first.
It was precisely this kind of philosophy, Elisabet concludes, coupled with the understandable concurrent rise of Existentialism, that ends up today with so many people experiencing hopelessness and purposelessness. Is it any wonder that most of our organizations and corporations manifest a scarcity-driven, short-term, bottom-line-oriented mission? “Better get it while you can. . .” All the more ironic when we consider that the words we use for organizations and corporations both come from biological roots. Organizations can be seen as extensions of each “organ” comprising them, and corporations get their name from the Latin “corpus,” the word for body.
Piling on top of Darwin and Malthus’ dire views was Rene Descarte’s stake through the heart. His phrase, “If you can’t see it, touch it, or count it, it doesn’t exist,” elevated the “hard” sciences to the level of religion, and relegated “soft” religion and values and ethics to the scrap pile. If you don’t think these guys won, just look around. You may see that, in life, “hard drives out soft” almost every time. For 30 years I have had to address clients who desperately need things like appreciation, team spirit and commitment, but who fight me tooth and nail to prove to them that these things will benefit the organization.
Elisabet went on with another fascinating factoid: “Malthus’ prediction justified the East India Company’s ‘us or them’ policy of assaying and acquiring all the Earth resources possible for Europeans so that they, at least, could survive. It was Malthus who hired Darwin to continue his Earth Inventory work for the East India Company. When he was at a loss to otherwise explain the driver of evolution for his theory, Darwin simply adopted Malthus’s theory, thus giving us our social vision of scarcity and fierce competition for resources, of humanity doomed permanently to win/lose economics and warfare.”
But, wait. Don’t go off the bridge just yet. Keep reading. There is another perspective, one gathering increasing scientific support. “The full truth— including the other half of a more holistic view in physics and biology, respectively— reveals that Nature is on our side in role-modeling the evolutionary leap that would rapidly bring about an energy efficient and globally beneficial human economy that functions like a truly healthy living system.”
If we want to look for models for how to create and run large systems that can sustain themselves (read corporations), all we need do is look to Nature herself. Contrary to the inevitable doom and gloom of Darwin and Malthus, Nature, like your organization, has been in the business of transforming resources into useful products or services that are exchanged, distributed, consumed and/or recycled. . . It’s just that Nature has been doing it quite successfully for 40 billion years! We’ve got a lot to learn from her.
In the next installment, we will again follow Elisabet in a look at what Nature can teach us about running effective, responsible, long-living teams, organizations and larger systems. There could possibly be no more important task in front of us now in history.
