THOUGHTS ON SUSTAINABILITY Volume 2: Principles into Practice Essays by: Chris Seeley Sandra White Myrna Roselind Jelman Chris Nichols Editor: Matthew Gitsham

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ISBN No.: 978-0-903542-79-1 © Ashridge 2010 Although every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of the illustrations reproduced in this book, apologies are offered in advance for any unintended omissions. If necessary, an acknowledgement will be gladly inserted in any future edition.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Kai Peters

THE FOOL AND THE GREAT TURNING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Chris Seeley

WHITE LILIES Sacrifice, transformation and renewal in our civilised age . . . . . . . . 17 Sandra White

SUSTAINABILITY AND PURPOSE: Humanity at Work . . . . . . 35 Myrna Roselind Jelman

FIT FOR PURPOSE: Remaking our sense of “Strategy in Business” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Chris Nichols

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INTRODUCTION Kai Peters, Chief Executive, Ashridge Business School

Sustainability can be viewed through a variety of lenses. There is, of course, the scientific lens which concerns climate change detail: temperature change, chemical alteration, biological depletion. Another approach is much softer. This approach originates from a philosophical perspective which one can characterise as “walk softly” where it is the moral responsibility of humanity to act as stewards of the Earth for future generations. Both approaches have their detractors and nay-sayers, but it seems clear that there are enough indications that global resources are not infinite.

Even if one does not buy into the need to act on issues of sustainability from a scientific or moral perspective, there is another reason to take sustainability seriously. That reason is quite simple really – others do. If one uses a marketing, or a trends, lens, it is obvious that large numbers of consumers are concerned about their own footprints. People are buying hybrid cars, products of sustainable agriculture, and solar panels. This will only increase. Sustainability is therefore a strategic imperative for all organisations.

At Ashridge, we engage with issues of sustainability in various ways which address these three perspectives. Fundamentally, we are interested in the space where the domains meet. Science alone is not enough unless people are on board. Having motivated people in an organisation is not enough unless there is a clear and consistent strategy. In

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all cases, traditional business concepts of returns on investment, net present value and market share need to be considered. If not, an organisation can easily go under while having the best intentions in the world.

As a part of our effort at Ashridge, we publish a regular series of thought pieces written by faculty members, organisation development consultants and friends of the house. In this cahier a series of four articles trace a path from thought to action. Chris Seeley’s piece, The Fool and the Great Turning uses the archetypes of the fool and the clown to consider the complexities inherent in our futures. Making a fixed strategy for known contexts is easy. Allowing strategy to emerge and evolve is much harder. Seeley posits that the role of the fool and the clown is to allow broader discussions to take place and to say things that an “official” person could not say.

Sandra White and Roselind Jelman trace more personal paths. White, in her piece White Lilies: Sacrifice, Transformation and Renewal in our Civilised Age, draws on historical philosophical thoughts on the role of sacrifice in enabling something beneficial to others or to society at large. She suggests that we must find a new paradigm which recasts our relationship with the planet, consumption and each other. Jelman, in Sustainability and Purpose: Humanity at Work, traces her own development in her journey towards purpose. She writes about her experience with a co-operative inquiry which opened her eyes to how she

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2 has developed and how she has since helped empower individuals within organisations to get beyond that frustrating situation in which one feels overwhelmed by the scale of the sustainability challenge and one’s own smallness in the grand scheme of things.

The cahier closes with an article from Chris Nichols entitled Fit for Purpose: Remaking our Sense of ‘Strategy in Business’ which takes a hard line and challenges strategists to stop fiddling about and to tackle fantasies of limitless growth, actions without consequences and compartmentalisation seriously. Nichols argues that strategy as a military metaphor is simply wrong. Instead, an organic, cyclic view of creation, reuse and renewal should be adopted. In this view, he cites the sustainable design literature and relates his own experience in working with organisations with this approach in mind.

Overall, these four articles place the challenges ahead in a new context firmly based on historical, philosophical, antecedents. The goal is to allow the reader to step outside of the quotidian language of business as usual. They are meant to be provocative and different because we need new language, new discussions and new ideas to emerge for the benefit of all.

Kai Peters Chief Executive Ashridge Business School

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THE FOOL AND THE GREAT TURNING Dr Chris Seeley Co-director, Ashridge Masters in Sustainability and Responsibility

Jump for Joy, Michael Leunig

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The old world having passed away, no other world will be possible to us; we shall have no world at all, unless we change fundamentally our attitude towards life. Cecil Collins

Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and condition our lives. Joseph Beuys

The Great Turning is a name for the essential adventure of our time: the shift from the self-destructing industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization. It is happening now. Joanna Macy

THE ESSENTIAL ADVENTURE OF OUR TIME We live in and largely uphold an economic system which is based on accelerating growth. Norwegian philosopher, Sigmund Kvaløy, dubbed this the Industrial Growth Society (Kvaløy, 1984). It’s a way of organising our activities which has brought many benefits for some, whilst leaving in its wake for all the devastation of our oneoff endowment of planetary resources. It can be a clumsy, blundering system. Now, we’re starting to see that the industrial growth society is fraying at the edges and starting to unravel. We’re experiencing economic problems, repeated floodings, droughts and associated insurance issues, loss of crops due to seasonal unpredictability, resource wars, high rates of depression, addiction to consumer products and still, billions of people without their basic life needs being met. We can’t fix this from within the existing system rules. The Industrial Growth Society alone isn’t the right tool for the job. Accelerating growth will inevitably stop. Or maybe crash. We face an unknowable future… … and an amazing opportunity to create new, more resilient world and business structures which will bring about the Life Necessities Society (Kvaløy, 1984) we need for us and our planet to flourish together. We simply can’t know in advance if our many efforts to create such a society will be enough for us to step out of one way of being and into another, but we can learn to live and act with good grace

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and creativity along the way. Increasingly, people are calling this life adventure The Great Turning (Korten 2006, Macy 2006). How do we each get used to the idea that we are acting into an unknowable future? How do we still take a lead when we have no idea if our actions will succeed? How do we see our own vulnerability and allow it to be seen at work? How do we learn to respond to the unexpected complexities of ecosystems collapse and regeneration? How do we stay present and alert as our world shifts shape around us and as we shape it through our actions and attitudes? We need to craft ways of acting into the unknowable with resilience, curiosity and playfulness. We must improvise, drawing on all the ways that we come to know our world. This means working in ways that expand each of our ways of knowing – even if we are not “good” at all those different ways of knowing. We need to “hold [our] rational breath” (Rust, 2005) to allow these other (imaginative, right brain, intuitive, unbounded, playful) ways of knowing to flourish and inform us. We need a right brain for a life worth living, and yet, in Western society “we don’t just not engage the skills of the right hemisphere, we mock them” (Taylor, 2006). Artist Cecil Collins agrees when he says: “Only those who believe that work is the be-all and endall of life can be exploited successfully in the

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5 commercial, political, non-religious conception of life of modern society… Thus is poetic imagination more and more outlawed by subtle neglect, or imprisoned by mediocrity into official forms…” (Collins, 2002:97). Author and US Democratic speech writer, Daniel Pink, says that we need a “whole new mind”. Pink claims that intuitive, improvised right brain thinking “will rule the future” and prescribes paying attention to six “senses”: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Not just function but also DESIGN Not just argument but also STORY Not just focus but also SYMPHONY Not just logic but also EMPATHY Not just seriousness but also PLAY Not just accumulation but also MEANING.

(Pink, 2008: 65-66). How do we cultivate these ways of being? A sense of play? Making meaning without consuming? Seeing the big picture… from many perspectives? How do we get radically connected to our processes, acting with attention, with a sense of intent, with questions and no answers, with conviction and uncertainty? We need to be prepared to risk looking (and being) stupid.

“Imagine stepping onto an empty stage, you have no script, you have no idea, nothing. Breathe. Look at us. Let us look at you, something will happen. I have to let go of what people think of me.” The way that the archetypes of the fool and clown1 perceive and act into the world is a

fundamental part of our ability to respond to the complexities and possibilities of The Great Turning. Such complexities are inherently unknowable in advance. We are not in control. We step away from the norms of the Industrial Growth Society. We step together onto the empty stage. We do not know what will happen. We are naïve. This is serious play.

“…let us be serious. Face to face. Heart to heart. Let us be fully present. Strongly present. Deeply serious. The closest we may come to innocence.” Michael Leunig, 2006

“There is no scientific evidence that seriousness leads to greater growth, maturity, or insight into the human condition than playfulness.” John Paul Lederach, 2005

Working with the archetype of the Chaplinesque-clown2 is “a celebration of all the things we’d rather not be” (Gladwell, 20022009). By turn, such fools are embarrassed, enthused, naïve, lost, upset, innocent, knowing, frightened, exuberant, desperate, joyful, angry. They know how to live fully through their emotional responses to the world, amplifying and exaggerating what they feel for all to witness without becoming stuck in those emotions. The clown knows in her body, as Joanna Macy says, that emotional responses are just “dynamic states, a process of flow through” (Macy, 2008). She sees her emotions coming and going and plays with them. The clown acts as a guardian for our relationship to the truth about our feelings.

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Four closely interrelated archetypes are at play in this arena: the clown, the fool, the jester, the trickster (and there’s also the character of the buffoon). This writing relates to a particular tradition of clowning which is emphatically not the painted face gaudy circus clown who has traumatised many people. The highly improvised tradition I have experienced takes the clown out of the circus and owes more to improvisation and to physical theatre, deriving from the French theatre school of Jacques LeCoq, the French clown school Bataclown (www.bataclown.com), the Italian performer Dario Fo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dario_Fo) and the English clown school, Nose to Nose (www.nosetonose.info). It is imbued with the sense of “unconditional positive regard” advocated by humanistic psychotherapist Carl Rogers (1995). American Buddhist, Wes Nisker (2001), makes the following distinctions between the archetypes (according to his definitions, the archetype I am familiar with is like Nisker’s clown shot through with glimpses of the great fool): Clown: the most human of the archetypes, the everyman figure, showing us our vulnerability and our awkward human condition and encouraging us to laugh at ourselves. Charlie Chaplin is one such clown. “The clown has his feet on the ground and his head in the clouds” (Gladwell, 2002-2009). Fool: Nisker mentions two types of fool, the foolish fool and the great fool. Both are innocent. The foolish fool clumsily tries to live by the rules, but is inept, unsophisticated and silly. The great fool, Nisker says, is a rarity. At home anywhere, this manifestation of the archetype lives different values from the rest of us, shows us the impossibility of knowing anything for certain and stands in awe of the ordinary, seeing as if for the first time. Jester: the wit and the critic who works with words and double entendres to expose the Establishment’s lies and makes light of the contemporary social scene. A character whose teeth and tongue are equally sharp. The court jester is the king’s own fool. Trickster: the rascal of folklore, sexy, uncivilised, primal, who does not abide by ordinary codes of behaviour. Sometimes a combination of god and beast, the coyote, raven, crow, hare and fox, who causes chaos in the world of humans. In addition, the buffoon, one of the characterisations in the Italian commedia dell’arte, is a boastful coward.

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In this writing, I am choosing to use the archetypes of the fool and the clown interchangeably. I wish to stress that the archetype of the clown I am referring to is not the disturbing English-style circus clown or any like the frightening spectre of the Ronald McDonald clown figure.

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“Let go of what other people think.” Joanna Macy, 2008 Today, as “everything gets turned upside down by nature” (Rust, 2008), clowns tumble through experience, letting life live through them as it comes. At heart, they are gentle beings, they suspend judgement, they’re open-hearted, transparent, loyal, forgiving, accepting, vulnerable, sensual, loving, imperfect, modest, relational, fragile and resilient creatures (Nose to Nose Facilitators’ Group, 2007). They live ideas and situations fully, and then let go of them, witnessing and remembering the ludicrousness of their situation. Like the Emperor’s New Clothes, this archetype reveals the absurdity of the Industrial Growth Society.

“Feel the magnitude, the hugeness, the importance of what it is to drop the project of making a perfect self. And all the self-righteousness that comes along with that baggage… We become whole, not perfect, not infallible, not pure.” Joanna Macy, 2005

FIRST AND SECOND INNOCENCE The clown breaks the rules of social convention not because she doesn’t see them, but more because she sees right through them. She plays subversively back and forth across the boundaries of what’s “normal”. She’s naïve and knowing at the same time. She is innocent and experienced. She knows and lives by the rules and she transgresses them. The fool is not afraid to “step aside from the obedience and acquiescence of the industrial growth society” (Macy, 2008) – or, if they are afraid, they shows us this, and then act anyway. Clowning “strips away the illusions of the mind and the world we live in”; it is a practice for “inoculating ourselves with lightness, for building up emotional immunity and for creating more neuroplasticity in the brain” (Bryden, 2008). Clowns are flexible. They see the world afresh, with awe, wonder and gratitude, as if for the first time. They are child-like, but they are not children. They have experience in the world, and see things as they are, like direct witnesses, unafraid to confront the absurdities, tragedies and delights of the world. Clowns like to witness their thoughts and responses 3

to the world, and, what’s more, show those around them what’s going on for them by amplifying their emotional responses.

“How can the clown help us to face what is unbearable? In the fool’s expressions, we see our sadness, our horror, our confusion and our shame mirrored back to us.” Clown and educator, Cath Bryden says: “When one meditates, one confronts oneself. When one is clowning, one is confronted with the self as it is mirrored back through play and contact with the other” (Bryden, 2008). This witnessing stance, for both the individual and on behalf of the collective has a quality of wholeness to it – of seeing wholes and systems rather than parts. Ecological thinking requires that we develop this kind of systemic thinking and this ability to “stand outside of where we are” (Gladwell, 2002-2009). The kind of knowing innocence the clown possesses might be called a “second” innocence, one that is learned through the experience of living life, warts and all3.

“What a long detour humanity has to make to arrive as it were at the same spot from which it set out – or more strictly, above the spot from which it set out, for the movement from childhood to art is not a circle but a spiral, a passage from a first innocence, through adversity, to the second innocence of universal forgiveness.” Goddard, 1951: 274-5.

“The ‘second innocence’ should be our goal, our ambition. This innocence has to be earned, whereas the first one has to be lost. At the same time, a system develops between the two until we reach the second innocence, which, contrary to the first, is not innocent of itself… despite not being innocent, the second innocence is not guilty either.” Cixous, 1991: 70. Zen teachings have a similar approach to “comic moves in relation to the sacred” (Hyer, 1970:5) – a first move or mood is pre-rational, like first innocence, represents the “innocence and immediacy of infancy”; a second, middle mood is rational, representing “the tendency

Thank you to clown and theatre director Robert McNeer for alerting me to this concept.

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7 to split up the world into knower and known, subject and object, mind and body, good and evil etc”; and a third mood, which like second innocence is supra-rational, representing “the experience of transcending the dichotomies and estrangements of rationality in a recovery on a higher plane of that freedom and spontaneity and naturalness which is the special virtue of the child” (Hyer, 1970:5). Cultivating this second innocence is essential for the Great Turning because it allows us to step back from the self-destructing madness of the Industrial Growth Society and see it for what it is with equanimity. Second innocence is neither sentimental nor purely naïve. “Apocalyptic streaks” and “brimming with glee” can manifest at the same time in the same person (Macy, 2008).

“‘Amusez-vous, merde!’ says Gaulier to his students. Having fun in this context is not a spectacle or escape, but rather the deadly game of living with loss, living despite failure, living even despite the humiliation of trying endlessly. It is this idea of “amusez-vous, merde” – live and love in the shit – which I understand as Boal’s approach to happiness: a tenacious, nonsentimental insistence on life within loss that is honest, ready to risk failure, and absolutely courageous. As witnesses, we inevitably fail. But how do we live? What are we like to have tea with?” Julie Salverson

“The art of the clown is more profound than we think: it is neither tragic nor comic. It is the comic mirror of tragedy and the tragic mirror of comedy.” André Suarès

HOLDING INTENT IN CLOWNING

The Fool is not interested in saving the world. She is simply being herself, one step at a time. One of the most potent places we have left to reconnect to this place inside ourselves is by spending time outdoors, in wild places. It brings us back to simple pleasures. It’s a place in which we can fall apart and come back together. Mary Jayne Rust

Clowns hold an underlying intention of compassion and goodwill. They do not impose a predetermined desire for “saving the world”. If they act in ways that seem like they might contribute towards the Great Turning, this emerges as a by-product from a desire to live life fully in the present moment, and by showing us what they pay attention to. “What qualities of being emerge in us when we attend to world as fools? How might this be of service to the Great Turning?”

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There is a distinction between our ordinary human intentions of creating space to explore clowning together (and thereby inviting the chance of deeper, ecological knowing to manifest) with the emergent sense of intent held by the clown herself, who innocently responds to what is coming up in the moment, and who is “simply being herself, one step at a time”. The clown does not hold a sense of purpose, but, through her purposelessness, she reveals recognisable truths about the ridiculousness of our situation as a species which destroys the systems on which it depends.

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8 In the spring of 2008, the Hayward Gallery in London held an exhibition called Laughing in a Foreign Language. One of the exhibits, by artist Julian Rosenfeldt, below, is a video of a clown figure stumbling aimlessly and endlessly around a lush rainforest. Julian Rosenfeldt’s video installations give a contemporary twist to the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who is condemned for eternity to roll a huge stone uphill, then when he reaches the top the stone always rolls back down again…. [They] present surreal fantasies in the purposeless existence of Everyman, mirroring the absurdity of life and the vanity of human endeavour… we are given brief glimpses of a tragic-comic character dwarfed by nature. The three-screen video projection transports us into the depths of a tropical rainforest. Nothing seems to happen. A leaf falls. There are muted sounds of invisible jungle creatures. Then, in the far distance, a figure emerges. He slowly stumbles into view, crosses from one video screen to another, and disappears. Again, nothing seems to happen. A leaf falls… Hayward Gallery, 2008:112

The clown’s actions are as futile as our own. Rosenfeldt’s clown gets nowhere, but he acts anyway, he carries on with patience, goodwill and humility. Educator, Bill Torbert, says that we act with a “stumbling gait” in life, struggling again and again to learn from our experience (Torbert, 1991). We stumble, not because we don’t try hard enough, but through the impossibility of the task. He suggests that we cultivate holding a stance of “intentional attention” (Torbert, 2008), which I interpret to be an intense interest in this business of being alive along with a forgiving, reflective witnessing of how we attempt to live life well.

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I would suggest that we need such a stance in order to thrive within the industrial growth society, which can only survive if enough of us take it seriously.

“…to be a success in the mechanical jungle of the contemporary world, the Fool must not exist in men, for the Fool is interested in life, in being alive, and not in power, nor in the accumulation of knowledge, nor in the passing of examinations, nor in being clever.” Collins, 2002:96

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RECEIVING THE WORLD

“A person kneels before a duck to reflect upon the troubles and joys of life, and offers thanksgivings and expressions of hope. The person is praying. The mind is on its knees. This is the yearning of the spirit which leads to love and the creative world.” Michael Leunig, 2006

The clown sees the world as teeming with life. Everything has its own brand of consciousness which can be impersonated or embodied (“Look at me, I’m a purple pencil!”) or conversed with (“Hello, rock, how long have you been there?” - “15 million years. I’m bored now”). The clown has a subjectifying eye which makes all sorts of things come alive, animating them just as a children do with their favourite toys. Ecologist Stephan Harding says that “children pass through an animistic phase in their early years, during which they relate to objects as if they had a character and as if they were alive” (Harding, 2006:21). We could consider this to be a “first animism”, like a first innocence. In Western society, this first animism gets suppressed. Objects become dead, throwaway. But the clown archetype invites us to maintain a vibrant, playful and imaginative animism beyond childhood – a “second animism” born of the sheer wonder and exuberance of being alive in this selfconscious human form at this, or at any time.

Others, like Jungian psychologist James Hillman (1992), suggest that it is not so much that we make the world come alive through our animism, but that which we experience as animism is instead the world speaking through us. Clowns wait for something on stage to “talk to them”. They allow themselves to be called, to have their attention taken by a rug, or a plant, or a mote of dust, or another clown, or a squeaky floorboard. They don’t go looking for trouble, trouble comes to them. Something will happen…

“If we think the world is a dead machine, we’ll kill it and ourselves along with it. If we think the world is animate, we’ll bring it, and ourselves, alive. Animate earth Anima mundi Psyche cosmou The soul of the world.”

The clown perceives the world directly through all their senses; the feel of a blanket, its smell, texture, rustle, colour and even its taste. They suspend judgement about what it is and what it might be for. They wait for an image to reveal itself to them from what they are encountering. Many times, the audience “sees” the same image the clown does (“it’s a baby”, “it’s a dog”). Sometimes the audience see images which are hidden to the clown.

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“We loosen our grip. We open our hand. We are accepting. In our empty hand We feel the shape Of simple eternity. It nestles there. We hold it gently. We are accepting.” Michael Leunig, 2006

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Sooner or later, the clown needs to name the image and stay with that image, play with it, taking themselves and the audience out of a kind of suspended animation and into action. We need the image to be named. “Look at my dog”. And we still know that there is no dog, that it is only a blanket. A dual reality exists. It is a dog and it is just a blanket. Both are true. As soon as the clown admits this – “I know there is no dog, I’m just playing, isn’t he a good dog?” – we feel a wave of empathy at the insight.

Together, through the clown, we celebrate all those things we’d rather not be.

“The clown kisses goodbye to the Industrial Growth Society in one instant, and in the next we see her caught once more in its grasp. Then we see her seeing herself being caught, and in that moment of her selfrecognition, we laugh. Given the space to be touched, people will be moved.”

“We gaze at each other.”

Artist Frederick Franck writes and draws eloquently about the seeing of things. He says: “I have found that in order to SEE I must allow my eye to rest on a commonplace thing – a face, a stone, a weed (of course the category ‘weed’ was invented by the Me, and a dandelion is in no way inferior to an orchid!) – in order to experience with all my senses, with nerve endings bare… I take hold of the thing, until it fills my total capacity for experience. Once I have taken possession of a hill, a body, a face, I let go, let it go free again, as if I were releasing a butterfly. Yet it remains mine forever… From morning till night, my eye draws The Ten Thousand Things” (Franck, 1973:124-5).

The participation of the audience is as active, involved and engaged witnesses, witnesses to the stumbling gait of this being human.

Receiving the world through the archetype of the clown invites a deep appreciation for what is around us. It is all absurd and to be

“The Emperor has no clothes. This brand or that will not make us happy. A better car doesn’t mean I’m a better person. The trappings of success are just a game. The Emperor has no clothes.” The clown also makes direct contact with the audience, looking at them, listening to them, responding to them as a source of information. The audience informs the clown. Together, clown and audience perceive our shared humanity.

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11 fully lived. Our consciousness shifts within the framework of clown. Clowning trains us to experience the world differently, with utter engagement and lightness, beyond our “restless grasping and clinging… the sense of gaiety and festivity that lies on the further side of fear of death and attachment to the forms of life” (Hyers, 1970:18). This work makes us happy. This work makes us alive. We make the world alive.

IT’S JUST NOT FUNNY: UNWINDING THE INDUSTRIAL GROWTH SOCIETY Where did all the time go? The ever-quickening pace and expectations of the industrial growth society strip away our lives in endless rounds of meetings and emails and reports and simply trying to stay on top of things. We live in an acceleration frenzy. We run to stand still. We get driven by a fear of not keeping up. Time fragments. We squeeze more in. Joanna Macy says that we experience “an enormous despair over being so rushed that we can hardly live or enjoy relationship… there’s a real sense of grief about being hurried out of our lives, and not being able to explore life fully” (Macy, 2008). We become possessed by the ticking away of linear time and forget what it is to live in cyclic, resurrection time:

“There is time and time. There’s time that moves in straight lines, That is counted in breath and heartbeats, In cradles and graves and diminishing days. From this time choose a year, any year, 1750 perhaps or 1849 or 1905 or 1938 A year that’s gone and will never reappear. And then there’s time that moves in circles. Time that always is, over and over, That is measured in heat and chill, in light and dark, In seasons of love and hunger. From this time, choose an afternoon, a midwinter’s afternoon. The pale sinking sun has failed to thaw the ground. The ragged hedges and bare trees are rimed with white frost. Water is glass. Earth is stone. Breath is cloud. Night begins to tighten its hold.

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Now, let any one of those lost forgotten years meet this moment Let the time meet the season … It’s always the same. Hugh Lupton, 2007 In life, we are assailed with possibilities, with advertising, with ideas, with “newness”, with “stuff”, with “things to do”, all clamouring for our attention.

“Thoughts and images in endless procession steal our time because they steal our attention.” Needleman, 2003:98 We see this replicated through the clown on stage. The possibilities are endless and we can fall prey to trying to do too much, and then paying nothing the full attention it deserves. Improvisations get manic and panicky, unconnected and disconnected. Things get fragmented and don’t get developed. We are unable to realise the courage of our conviction. Thoughts start to lead as opposed to a more holistic, emotional, embodied response.

“On stage, unchecked, unnoticed, this gets painful to watch. In life, unchecked, unnoticed, this gets painful to live. If my rushed day to day life was an improvisation on stage, it just wouldn’t be funny.” Clowning provides an environment with the permission to stop in the midst of it all. To feel in our bodies how it is to experience one thing at a time, fully. The fool invites us to slow down, and even do nothing at all, just be there on stage, living and breathing and paying attention, ready to receive, ready for action.

“Come onto the stage. Do nothing. Look at us, let us see you. Receive what’s around you. Don’t bring any ideas. Wait until something reveals itself to you. It could be an accident. Yes! Stay with that first thing. Stay with it. Then act, with conviction. Action!”

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THE ROLES WE PLAY

“Let us consider this waiter in the cafe. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes towards the patrons with a step a little too quick… his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer… he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things… the waiter in the cafe plays with his condition in order to realise it.” Sartre, 1943

Saul Leiter, The Waiter, Paris, 1959

Clowns on stage play roles. Like children at play, they might swap roles around – “now it’s your turn to be the waiter, and I’ll be the customer” – “OK, then”. They maintain and show their awareness of “just playing”, and live the double reality of the game or the role they’re playing and the underlying truth of their living their lives as clowns with goodwill and humility.

“We’re playing at being consumers in the Industrial Growth Society. Just for this while, we’re playing this role as humans, just at this juncture.” In ancient Japan, “the convention [was] that the higher classes are merely playing at all they do. The polite form for ‘you arrive in Tokyo’ is, literally, ‘you play arrival in Toyko’; and for ‘I hear that your father is dead’, ‘I hear that your father has played dying’. In other worlds the revered person is imagined as living in a sphere where only pleasure or condescension moves to action” (Huizinga J, 1970: 54)4.

“How do I play facilitator? How do I play consultant? How do my clients play manager, director, officer etc? 4

How do we play consumer? How, with the encouragement (and brainwashing) of brands, do I buy the outfits and props to play the roles of adventurer, traveller, worker etc? What are the old roles to let crumble, to lay down gently? What are the new roles I want to play (at, in, around, with)?” On stage, clowns play roles. One improvisational structure is called Professor and Assistant. The clowns each play the one of the two roles. We invite them to become the professor and the assistant, without knowing what the professor will lecture on. The professor has no idea. It is all a sham. During the impro, we see the professor’s brittle reality unravelling. Eventually, the clown who’s playing the professor can stand it no longer and names the reality of the situation – “I don’t know what I’m doing”. Or the assistant names it – “You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?”. The edifice of the professor’s reality collapses.

“The fool is ‘a hindrance to an ambitious career’” Collins, 2002: 96

Once more I am indebted to Robert McNeer for showing me this.

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13 Once more, we feel relief and recognition in the naming – this is like us in life, if only we could admit that we just don’t know, that it’s all gone wrong, that we’ve made a mistake. Such a naming is a radical act of dissent and resistance. We’re back to the emperor’s new clothes again. What we enjoy and identify with is seeing the clowns working to hold the fiction while acknowledging the reality of struggling to be fully human. This is a manifestation of the stumbling gait. In clowning, we call this le jeu en jeu (the play within the play).

“How does the “play within the play” manifest in life? How is this awareness in service of the creating of the “Life Necessities Society”? How do we allow the clown part of us to name what’s really going on?” The play within the play works well when the clowns don’t get stuck in character. Getting stuck on stage and not naming this kills the impro. Believing our own fiction, taking ourselves too seriously, getting caught by the false promise of lifestyle advertising,

falling for the illusions and socially accepted formulae of the Industrial Growth Society – these take our life force and kill the planet.

“Now people living in a desert of a thousand machines and gadgets show the huge unhappiness of emptiness. What need have they of the magical vocation of the priest and the artist, of the poet and the Fool?” Collins, 2002: 99 What works well is when the underlying reality is allowed to float back up to the surface and be seen. How do we meet or encourage this resurgence? What highlights this dynamic? First, we see the person on stage. Then we cross back and forth over the line between the clown and the fictional role. It is important to keep this movement fluid and hold onto both realities, looking for the sparkle of play in clown’s eyes (from Nose to Nose Facilitators’ Group, 2008).

“Play dead. Play alive. Just play.”

WHAT MAKES US FULLY HUMAN?

© Simon Blakeman, created October 1999 Used with artist’s permission.

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[Improvisation is] the spontaneous response to the unfolding of an unexpected situation… At every moment in our lives, we are having to adjust to whatever happens around us. The more unexpected the happening, the more spontaneous and frank the response is likely to be… If we are open and receptive, we can make discoveries both about ourselves and others from these moments. If we are less receptive, the tendency will be to reproduce what we consider to be socially accepted responses and these become standardised and stereotyped... Society is nearly always unwilling to recognise anything or anyone that seems different. Hodgson and Richards, 1966: 3,19

The highly improvised, transparent and vulnerable nature of the clown archetype offers one way of experiencing and making manifest our grief for the Earth, and our joy at being alive at all. It’s one way of responding to the bittersweet realities of our times; the tragedy and the comedy, the agony and the ecstasy at the same time. Amplified. Exaggerated. Fully lived.

“Just look what we’ve done to our home. What have we done?” Viewing life through the clown’s gaze encourages us to see and to break the rules, to point out the absurdities of the Western project and help the Industrial Growth Society dissolve and the Life Necessities Society emerge.

“Everything we know, everything we believe, and everything we are is destined to evolve or dissolve into something else… given the brevity of our existence and the fact that we don’t know what it means or what we are supposed to be doing here, perhaps our only recourse is to learn how to be in the moment with what is before us. “ Nisker, 2001 At the same time as transgressing “normality”, fools say yes to new ideas. The existential “yes!” of improvisation is a gift to the change in consciousness we need for the Great Turning. It acclimatises us for saying “yes!” to life – in gratitude for being alive at all. If we are to move from the Industrial Growth Society to a Life Necessities Society, we need to cultivate this underlying “yes-ness”.

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“You be the professor now - Yes! Let’s climb the mountain - Yes! But you don’t know what you’re doing -Yes, that’s right!” Clowns are is exuberantly alive and utterly engaged with this process of living – for good and for bad. Clowning offers us safe structured spaces to experience what it is like to radically free ourselves from the mindset of the Industrial Growth Society which drives us off of the land, away from connection and out of our minds. The structure of clowning gives us freedom, rather than the enclosures of the Western project, which take it away. In clowning, we taste liberation. We roam as freely across the stage as we once did over the land. For a while, we become wild again, part of the wilder-ness.

“The Fool who, wearing her fantastic garments of love, makes her wild and painful gestures of tenderness before the suffering of all the living ones in the Universe… the Fool, who in an ecstasy of happiness bows down with her gay garments, down into the dust, with a humility that touches the bottom of the abyss of life.” Collins, 2002:100

“We are almost condemned to be utterly creative” Kurt, 2008

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References Bryden, C. (2008). Exploration of Buddhism, Clowning and the Joyful Freedom of Being [presentation, 2 February, Emerson College, UK]. Cixous, H. (1991). Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector and Tsvetayeva. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Collins, C. (2002). The Vision of the Fool and other writings. Ipswich: Golgonooza Press. Franck, F. (1973). The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation. New York: Vintage. Gladwell, V. (2002-2009). Personal Communication. Goddard, H.C. (1951) The Meaning of Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harding, S. (2006). Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia. Dartington: Green Books. Hayward Gallery (2008). Laughing in a Foreign Language, Exhibition, Hayward Gallery, London. Hillman, J. (1992) Revisioning Psychology. London: Harper Collins. Hodgson, J. and Richards, E. (1966). Improvisation. London: Methuen & Co. Huizinga, J. (1970). Homo Ludens, Paladin. Hyers, M.C. (1970). ‘The Ancient Zen Master as Clown-Figure and Comic Midwife.’ Philosophy East and West, Vol 20, No1 (Jan 1970): pp. 3-18. Korten, D.C. (2006). The Great Turning: from Empire to Earth Community. Bloomfi eld CT: Kumarian Press and San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Kurt, H. (2008). Personal Communication, Oxford. Kvaløy, S. (1984). ‘Complexity and Time: Breaking the Pyramid’s Reign.’ Resurgence, 106 September/October: pp. 12-21. LeCoq, J. (2000). The Moving Body - Teaching creative theatre, in collaboration with Jean-Gabriel Carasso and Jean-Claude Lallias. Translated from “Le Corps Poétique” by Bradby, D. London: Methuen. Lederach, J.P. (2005). The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leunig, M. (2006). When I talk to you: a cartoonist talks to God. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing. Lupton, H. (2007). Christmas Champions, Storytelling performance and BBC Radio 3 programme, UK. Macy, J. (2008). Personal Communication, Great Turning Facilitors’ Event, Southstoke, Bath. Macy, J. (2006). The Work that Reconnects, DVD. Needleman, J. (2003). Time and the Soul. San Francisco, CA: Berrett Koehler. Nisker, W. (2001). The Essential Crazy Wisdom. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press. Nose to Nose Facilitators’ Group (November 2006 - May 2008). Personal Communication, Emerson College UK and La Luna nel Pozzo, Ostuni, Puglia, Italy. Rogers, C.R. (1995). On becoming a person: a therapist’s view of psychotherapy. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Rust, M.J. (2008). Personal Communication, 4 May, London.

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Rust, M.J. (2005). Making the Sea Change: From Chaos and Inertia to Creativity, presentation. Sacks, S. (2008). Personal Communication, Oxford. Salverson, J. (2006). ‘Witnessing Subjects, A Fool’s Help.’ In: Cohen-Cruz, J. and Shutzman, M. (eds). The Boal Reader. Routledge, N.Y. and London, pp.146-157. Sartre, J.P. (1943). Being and Nothingness. Sinclair, I. (2006). Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare’s ‘Journey out of Essex. London: Penguin. Taylor, J.B. (2006). My Stroke of Insight. Found on: www.lulu.com. Torbert, W.R., and Baker, E.H. (2008). ‘Generating and Measuring Practical Differences in Leadership Performance at Postconventional Action-Logics.’ In Coombs, A., Pfaffenberger, A. and Marko, P. (Eds). The Postconventional Personality: Perspectives on Higher Development. Albany, NY: SUNY Academic Press.

Events Gaia’s Playground, May 2006, 3 day experimental course (with Vivian Gladwell), Hawkwood College, Stroud, Gloucestershire. Introduction to Clowning, November 2007, one day course, Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice, School of Management, University of Bath. Clown and Sustainability, 2008, evening talk, Emerson College, UK. Clown and Ecology, 2008, Evening talk (with Vivian Gladwell), Emerson College, UK. The Fool and the Great Turning, October 2008, 1 day exploratory course (with Joanna Macy), Holy Names University, Oakland CA. The Practice of Presence, 2009, Introductory workshop, Ashridge Business School, UK.

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WHITE LILIES – SACRIFICE, TRANSFORMATION

AND RENEWAL IN OUR CIVILISED AGE Sandra White

My own understanding of The Great Work began when I was quite young. At the time I was some 11 years old. My family was moving from a more settled part of a small southern town out to the edge of town where the new house was being built. The house, not yet finished, was situated on a slight incline. Down below was a small creek and there across the creek was a meadow. It was an early afternoon in late May when I first wandered down the incline, crossed the creek, and looked out over the scene. The field was covered with white lilies rising above the thick grass. A magic moment, this experience gave to my life something that seems to explain my thinking at a more profound level than almost any other experience I can remember. It was not only the lilies. It was the singing of the crickets and the woodlands in the distance and the clouds in a clear sky. It was not something conscious that happened just then. I went on about my life as any young person might do. Perhaps it was not simply this moment that made such a deep impression upon me. Perhaps it was a sensitivity that was developed throughout my childhood. Yet as the years pass this moment returns to me, and whenever I think about my basic life attitude and the whole trend of my mind and the causes to which I have given my efforts, I seem to come back to this moment and the impact it has had on my feeling for what is real and worthwhile in life. This early experience, it seems, has become normative for me throughout the entire range of my thinking. Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good; whatever opposes this meadow or negates it is not good. My life orientation is that simple. It is also that pervasive. It applies in economics and political orientation as well as in education and religion. That is good in economics which fosters the natural processes of this meadow. That is not good in economics which diminishes the capacity of this meadow to renew itself each spring and to provide a setting in which crickets can sing and birds can feed. Such meadows, I later learned, are themselves in a continuing process of transformation. Yet these evolving biosystems deserve the opportunity to be themselves and to express their own inner qualities. As in economics, so in jurisprudence and law and political affairs – what is good recognises the rights of this meadow and the creek and the woodlands beyond to exist and flourish in their ever-renewing seasonal expression even while larger processes shape the bioregion in its sequence of transformations.

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I am drawn to the elegant simplicity with which American cultural historian and ecophilosopher Thomas Berry articulates his vision of how we1 could organise our affairs, upon which he expands in detail in The Great Work. He conveys that the underpinning of his life and work is a subtle, heartfelt knowing that everything, including humanity, has its place and time within the much greater world and that safeguarding the future of life on this planet involves honouring this reality. His propositions hold coherence and logic. Yet this coherence, logic and heart-sense seem not to be available to everyone – else we would not be here, worrying about our impacts on the sustainability of the Earth’s systems and the future of our civilisation within them.

We can see that the ‘vision piece’ is challenging. Our society as a whole no longer operates within a framework where sacrifice makes sense. Neo-Darwinist ideas on ‘the survival of the fittest’ have worked their way into our modern expectations of what it means to be successful in such a way that sacrifice seems near heresy. For many, the word ‘sacrifice’ itself carries strong religious associations, which immediately cancels out its validity. Those who embrace it for the sake of sustainability are often seen as misguided and weak, self-denying and killjoys. At best, sacrifice is seen as legitimate either for a minority of people pursuing a vocation or when immediate and extreme danger calls out an exceptional act.

Berry’s perception is radically different from that of most of us today. When I read these paragraphs, I feel at once both uplifted and uneasy. That we can consider the needs of the ecological systems in which we are embedded as a guiding principle for how we govern ourselves and conduct business, addressing those needs practically alongside, even as a way of meeting our own, is a vision of the future I find inspiring. I am struck that he expresses no corresponding sense of loss, impoverishment or sacrifice when he prioritises upholding the rest of life. I genuinely and wholeheartedly share his desires and yet notice that often, as I take steps towards them and imagine myself living more completely by them, I also experience pangs of discomfort and loss. It seems that they involve giving up aspects of my sense of myself: I ‘get’ his propositions and still I find myself thinking and behaving in small and large ways which counteract them.

In recent times, however, we have witnessed the attraction of images of sacrifice in books and films, with young and old, Christian, Muslim, Jew, pagan and atheist alike, flocking to see The Lord of the Rings, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, and the Harry Potter series. I suggest their popularity reveals the relevance of sacrifice to us all. For, according to the Swiss founder of analytical psychology Carl Jung, sacrifice is an archetype, an innate pattern embedded as a potential in the deeper layers of the collective psyche which can become active when circumstances demand it and the conditions are right.

How much more difficult is it, then, for the vast majority of people, including political and business leaders, who don’t ‘get’ them to accept current widespread exhortations to change behaviours at work and home in ways they perceive mean giving up what they love and reducing their material way of life to prevent worsening planetary warming – to ‘make sacrifices for the greater good’? It is clear that, if these exhortations continue to be responded to by relatively few, the endeavours of those few will not resolve our predicament.

1

So I offer this as an exploration of sacrifice. I want to delve into its nature and understand the conditions in which it becomes necessary and psychologically valid. Might it ever be necessary but psychologically invalid? In the context of sustainability, what is to be sacrificed? What is to be transformed and renewed? These are the central questions I bring. The path I take will spiral through domains of folklore, religious symbolism, story, dream and poetry, in order to unearth something more about a topic which provokes such strong feelings. For one of my central metaphors I will draw upon the Bible, which underpins the evolution of Western civilisation, in line with Jung’s recognition “that the enormous domain of the history of religions provides an inexhaustible supply of terms of comparison with the behaviour of the collective psyche” (Eliade).

The Great Work provides an analysis of the USA rather than the UK. I refer to ‘we’ and ‘our’ in this paragraph as an acknowledgement that our society faces the same need to rethink radically how we conduct ourselves and also that much of our thinking is influenced conceptually and materially by the USA.

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THE LORE OF THE LILY Many will remember young Prince Harry’s wreath of white lilies lying atop his mother’s coffin at her state funeral, attesting to the role and status of this flower in our culture. Wanting, too, to glean more about the enormity of Berry’s experience when he crossed the creek and entered that meadow, I have looked up Lilium for its folklore (Lehner). Native to the Near East, the lily is an ancient plant with symbolic value in the mythologies of Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt, Crete and Greece. Its central imagery is of the feminine territories of fruitfulness, childbirth, motherhood and the moon. This is echoed in the name of Eve, the first woman in Judeo-Christian belief, which means “mother of all living”, and a reference to ancient Semitic legend adds that “the lily sprang from the tears of Eve, when … she found she was approaching motherhood” just as she was expelled from Eden. Just as she was expelled from Eden . . . I can imagine her standing there with Adam outside the gates wondering where to go next. For me, too, there are a number of directions in which I can proceed now. To help me choose, I want to play with their situation as a metaphor for a while, amplifying the spark of empathy evoked by the image of her tears at her banishment, no doubt fearful for the fate of her unborn child as she faced the unknown. I call upon the imagination to discover if there are other connections to be made.

LIFE-CHANGING THRESHOLDS

Lilium candidum L.

Though not religious in an orthodox sense, I find parallels between we generations who are alive at this moment in history and the first human couple of the Judeo-Christian creation story. Small wonder that Eve’s tears were falling in the aftermath of crossing the largest threshold they were ever likely to meet and losing everything but each other, as it must have seemed. Leaving aside completely any notions of good, evil and punishment, we are told that they were in their predicament because they had recently acquired new, albeit forbidden, knowledge, and this precipitated their expulsion from the “paradise” of Eden, as the Hebrew expresses it2. In the Garden, they had been in a state of innocence which, in a certain sense, equated to an ignorance which we might call blissful. The image of Eden too is embedded deep within the Western psyche, inspiring great literature and shaping our aspirations in a range of ways. Even while contemporary culture expresses

“Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden” by Wenzel Peter. Courtesy of the Vatican Museum. 2

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_Eden

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20 a pronounced disconnection from nature3, the desire to return to the Garden remains immense and may underpin at a profound level the collective popular concepts of what it means to be successful: rich, having a number of homes in all parts of the globe, able to take the best the world has to offer and living a life of comfort and ease. Alongside appreciating their real material benefits, these can be thought about as symbolic representations of living in the infinite abundance of the Garden of Eden. For Adam and Eve, the impact of its loss was immeasurable. Respecting the limits of this analogy, I suggest that there are ways in which we4 now are in a similar position. For we stand at the other side of a threshold. We too have just crossed out of a state of what we may think of as ‘blissful ignorance’. Our ignorance, as a society, has been of the incredible inter-connectedness of the Earth’s systems and their quality of self-regulation which has been operating for billions of years. I say “incredible” because one of our guiding myths for centuries has been that, left to its own devices, nature is wild and chaotic and it has taken – even needed – humanity to introduce order to the world. Through the accomplishments of science we in the modern, secular age have observed what ancient tribal people, mystics and medieval alchemists intuited: there is order to life on Earth which originates outside the human realm and contains us inside it. For some people today this holds spiritual significance and for others the scientists are describing the purely physical functioning of the biosphere and its interplay with geology over aeons as, in different eras, the conditions for life at increasing levels of complexity have evolved. Either way, we also are like Adam and Eve in the sense that there is no going back. No one can un-know what they come to know. I think that one of the huge questions facing us is: “As we go forward from here, how can we make the most of this new knowledge and interpret our ambitions for civilisation in its light?” It seems to me that this is the kind of guidance Berry was proffering with: “Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good; whatever opposes this meadow or negates it is not good.” He indicates that, in our own ways, we must instate mutually enhancing links between our operations and those of the

rest of nature if we are to conduct our affairs better than we do now. The implications for our civilisation are so great that they cannot be overstated. As I imagine them standing outside Eden, Adam and Eve were wrestling with realisations similar in kind, if smaller in scale. In their efforts to survive as they made their way into foreign territory, I see them struggling to come to terms with their huge losses, of not only the Garden but also that state of ignorance. How did it change them, this sudden acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil? Perhaps like the first moment a young child discovers that actions have consequences, the change rendered them also alien to themselves. Their whole way of functioning, not only the landscape, was new. Have we been rendered alien to ourselves? Is our whole way of functioning new? When we consider how most people and organisations, local and global, are conducting ‘business as usual’, it appears not. I wonder if this is partly because we do not collectively grasp that we are on the other side of a threshold. It seems to me relevant and important that we have been catapulted without our consent across this knowledge threshold. Unlike Adam and Eve, we did not choose to pick and bite into the fruit of this particular tree. Most of us were not requesting information regarding the Earth’s highly developed, interdependent and sensitive self-regulating systems because we did not realise we needed to know. The vast majority have not yet assimilated this threshold’s implications and are far from asking questions about how to go forward from here in the light of these discoveries. There is also resistance. This arises partly from the cultural importance of the idea that humanity is the most sophisticated aspect of life on Earth. As American Jungian analyst Richard Tarnas has explored, successive revelations in centuries past about the material realities of life have already been profoundly wounding to our collective sense of value as a species. As British management consultant Alexandra Stubbings has summarised more fully in Volume 1 of this series, such revelations include that our planet is not at the centre of the universe and human beings are not separate from or above the animal kingdom. Thus, the latest, equally paradigm-changing realisation is most unwelcome. Alongside all the information about the need to lead

When referring to “nature” and “the natural world”, the limits of language make it difficult to convey that I consider the human species as integral to it, rather than as separate from or outside it. Occasionally, to illustrate a specific point, it may be useful temporarily for nature to be thought about as outside us. 4 From here onwards, I will be describing collective, cultural ideas and norms of behaviour which constitute the prevailing industrial growth paradigm and often I will use the words “we”, “our” and “us”. This is in no way intended to deny the extraordinary diversity of human experience and behaviour, or the many people who embrace and live by entirely different ideas and norms. 3

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21 life differently on the material plane, I think we have grasped at some level that there are many ways in which our intangible but powerful sense of ourselves as homo sapiens sapiens, our core identity, is also challenged by this new information about Earth. Whilst we cannot un-know what we know, the field of psychoanalysis has revealed how the human mind has the valid and vital ability to protect itself from what it cannot cope with knowing. Indeed, British environmental campaigner Tom Crompton and American researcher Tim Kasser have recently made a thorough examination of widespread psychological defences relating to climate change. To me, this state of carrying unassimilated and defended-against knowledge is akin to being in an ersatz Eden, in a condition of assumed innocence, to which there has been a retreat in a psychologically valid attempt to preserve safety. As Crompton and Kasser articulate and I have described elsewhere, the enormous challenge is the direct clash of opposites created between what is psychologically safe and what is physically safe. Within the Eden metaphor, it is as if we now face a collective decision as to whether to hold out our hands to receive the fruit which we know has been picked for us and eat it, thereby conducting ourselves across the knowledge threshold ‘for the first time’. A vital challenge facing change agents throughout our society is how to foster the conditions of psychological safety which would allow the reaching out, the receiving, the eating and digesting, and then the crossing. There, on the other side, we would take ownership of the new propositions, which I imagine would change our relationship with the whole subject of sustainability and sacrifice within it.

THE NATURE OF SACRIFICE To understand what these conditions might be, we need to know more about sacrifice. The Oxford English Dictionary I consulted contains seven pages of entries regarding sacrifice. The first two entries relevant to this discussion are as a verb: “To surrender or give up (something) for the attainment of some higher advantage or dearer object”; and as a noun: “The destruction or surrender of something valued or desired for the sake of something having, or regarded as having, a higher or a more pressing claim; the loss entailed by devotion to some other interest; also, the thing so devoted or surrendered.” The element of conscious choice involved

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is clear and underlines the propositions above. A recent dream of mine elaborates on this, so I include it here:

In the first part of the dream, which largely took place in the remarkably Eden-like, beautiful, sun-filled and abundant gardens of a huge, rambling old house, the resident community were preparing a communal ritual to which I had been invited as witness. This community had been together for a long time and there was a strong foundation of love for each other and for the place where they lived. They regularly performed rituals as a way of expressing this love and solidarity and when they needed to take important, evolutionary steps forward; indeed the headman and headwoman of this community were renowned for the high quality of their ritual-making. Even though I did not know what I could add, I love ritualmaking and felt proud and glad to lend my presence. As this ritual was about to start, a local government officer in a dark suit arrived and declared that the whole estate was to be taken on immediately by an elderly woman in the nearby town who had enough money to look after it properly, which the community, it was true, did not. Therefore the community would have to leave. The headwoman of the community summarily sent him packing. The ritual took place but was not shown in the dream and afterwards the scene shifted to the modern post office of the local town. I and the headwoman were standing together in the queue on an open spiral staircase leading up to the counters and a very close friend of mine arrived. She was sent away and soon returned with the same local government officer dressed in the same suit. Before he could speak, the headwoman gave her consent for the town’s elderly woman to assume ownership of the estate and the end of the dream showed that this had transpired, the community had dispersed and its erstwhile members were happily and fruitfully pursuing their lives wherever they were.

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22 Whilst a dream is itself and never fully transparent, there are aspects I see in it which hold relevance to my themes and I will expand on them gradually. First, let us consider when the decision to relinquish the estate to the new caretaker could and could not be made. When imposed by external authorities, it could not. That the dismissal of the officer was made by the community headwoman (rather than by, say, a disgruntled community member) indicates that there was order in this act. After the ritual, the headwoman came to her own resolution, the dream location moved to a communication centre within the modern world and the official arrived. He had no need to speak, for the outcome he had sought to impose earlier was volunteered. At the end, the dream revealed that the sense of order signalled in the earlier scene was upheld by the unfolding events, as the dispersed community members were thriving rather than wounded. It seems to me that the community, led by its headwoman, yielded its right to live in what had been its home for the sake of the future wellbeing of that place only once the conditions were right. Among these was that the decision became theirs to make. The headwoman, by originally sending the official away, was righting a false premise, namely that the decision could be made elsewhere and imposed. I suggest that there are close parallels with our collective situation. There is no sense among most people that the decision to embrace sustainability is theirs to make; it is being made elsewhere and imposed. As change consultants know, these are the conditions which ordinarily generate resistance and it is especially important to recognise this tendency in the context of sacrifice. The dream reflects a microcosm of our macro-situation in two ways: First, the general condition of the estate, while run down, did not appear to be on the brink of collapse. When we look around at our world today, whilst there are some unsettling changes in weather patterns, most lay people do not see evidence of imminent disaster, which adds to the difficulties of quickly engaging a mass response. Secondly, the dream’s central proposition was that the estate’s future needed to assume the greater importance and this brings me back to the definitions. Currently, the aspect which is most explicitly and implicitly relied upon by those making the exhortations for sacrifice is “higher advantage” or “higher or more pressing claim”. Environmentalists assume that the “higher [and] more pressing claim” is self-evident, namely safeguarding our larger ecological systems so that the well-being of people

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living in other parts of the world now and everywhere in the future can be protected. This assumption is in part allied to a faith in the human capacity for logic and rationality and, as we are discovering, there is so much to being human that this is not enough. The word “higher” is interesting in this regard. In older, more religious times, it would have been readily associated with God, which would have strengthened people’s ability and willingness to make the sacrifices within their frame of reference. Today our industrialised world is not only secular, it is also fragmented and there is not such a strong, shared sense of being part of something bigger and overarching. When families are spread around the country and the globe, when local community bonds are not robust, when jobs, and the corresponding relationships with employers, are no longer ‘for life’ and when, for most of us, the surrounding landscape is travelled through at great speed, it is difficult to gain a sense of anything “higher” that is large, compelling and inspiring enough to elicit the desire to make the envisaged scale of sacrifice. Perhaps this lack is part of why contemporary branding strategies have been successful; some people subliminally gain that missing sense of identity and belonging by being a loyal customer of a high street name. Thus the difficulty in making the kinds of sacrifices involved in creating a less consumerist society and altering our economic system are compounded.

LOVE: THE VITAL CONDITION Also interesting are the words “dearer” and “devotion” which I think point to something which has not been sufficiently taken into account: For sacrifice to be possible, there needs to be the presence of love. I think of this as assuming two forms. First, the thing for which one is making the sacrifice needs to be so loved or highly desired that the transaction becomes worthwhile. Secondly, love needs to be experienced as available and present to those making the sacrifice. This second manifests in a range of ways: someone loving may be nearby and witnessing and supporting the sacrificial act as it is made; and perhaps the sacrifice is being made in a strongly bonded communal context where not only the belief in the necessity for the transaction but also the commitment by the whole community to uphold what the sacrifice represents are shared. This is vital to ensure that the sacrifice is not made in vain and pertains whether the sacrifice is being made by an individual on the community’s behalf, or by the community as a whole.

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23 These qualities of love were present in the dream. Although the theme of sacrifice was not manifest at its start, I was invited to act as witness, to lend my presence, and my love of ritualmaking made me an appropriate person to fulfil this role. The community itself was bonded, loving and trusting of each other and their head-couple. We can consider that another reason for the local government officer being so summarily dismissed was that he delivered the edict without any expression of love, compassion or empathy. Finally, the dream signals the importance of love being present in the moment when a sacrifice is being made by including the “very close friend of mine” who escorted the local government officer back to the headwoman in the post office, for this friend regularly appears in my dreams representing unconditional love.

challenges they face, depicting once more the need for the accompaniment of unconditional love when undertaking a sacrificial task. When considering the presence of love in these ways, a precondition is that sufficient love of oneself must be available for, without this, an act of sacrifice can be a mask for an act of masochism. When, as now, there is not a collective shared valuing of the purpose and form of the sacrifice and where there is ample appropriate and necessary self love I suggest that two possibilities present themselves. For some, self love will manifest in their capacity to make the kind of conceptual and material sacrifices required by sustainability without feeling diminished or impoverished, as Berry models. For others, making material sacrifices feels like a self-inflicted impoverishment. Then it comes too close to touching pockets of poverty that we all have within us in different forms, and I contend it is psychologically valid to protect ourselves from activating those pockets. Once again a clash arises, this time in the arena of self love: a valid position of loving oneself enough not to perpetrate against one’s own being a masochist act is working against the physical realities of needing to consume less in order to safeguard the future of ourselves and other people whom we love.

The motif of love is also comprehensively built into the Harry Potter series, where Harry is alive only because his mother sacrificed her life in order to protect his and, further, her love lives on in his very skin, protecting him from being killed by Voldermort’s touch. Although he lived largely in ignorance of this in his early years, the implication is that his mother’s The presence of love to enable an act of love contributes to his rather innocent sacrifice is so critical that I have turned to strength of character, fortitude and lack of the English poet Shakespeare and also to the malevolence, despite being raised among apostle Paul’s lyrical New Testament prose to relatives who do not love him and for amplify some of its qualities. The first conveys years closed him away in an understair something more about constancy, while the cupboard. Love is often depicted as second expresses directly that sacrifice means being of the highest order. In The Lord nothing without love and then articulates some of the Rings, when Frodo undertakes characteristics of love which render it the to sacrifice everything, including the necessary accompaniment I am proposing: seductive power of the ring, and leaves the comfort of his home to make the “Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks arduous journey to return it Within his bending sickle’s compass come; to its source to destroy it, a Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, ‘Fellowship of the Ring’ is But bears it out even to the edge of doom: constructed around him of If this be error and upon me proved, people possessing diverse, I never writ, nor no man ever loved”. valuable characteristics. Shakespeare, Sonnet 116 This recognises the dangers involved and “If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be ensures he has support burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. when he needs it. Sam, Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it the simplest but most is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own loyally devoted to Frodo of them all, holds close to way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at him when the Fellowship wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, is scattered by the various believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” 1 Corinthians, 13.3-7

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24 Like Crompton and Kasser, who suggest that empathy be deliberately introduced into discussions regarding climate change, I think it important that this quality of love has been missing from environmental communication, even if it has been present as an underlying value. The apostle Paul actually addressed something akin to this in his preceding sentence: “If I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I gain nothing.”5 Yet, as we know, one-sided love is not fulfilling. Irish poet and scholar John O’Donohue draws from the Buddhist tradition to paint a picture of:

“a lovely concept of friendship. This is the notion of the ‘Kalyana-mitra’, the ‘noble friend’. Your Kalyanamitra, your noble friend, will not accept pretension, but will gently and very firmly confront you with your own blindness. No-one can see their life totally. As there is a blind spot in the retina of the human eye, there is also in the soul a blind side where you are not able to see. Therefore, you must depend on the one you love to see for you, where you cannot see for yourself. Your Kalyana-mitra complements your vision in a kind and critical way. Such friendship is creative and critical; it is willing to negotiate awkward and uneven territories of contradiction and woundedness. … It is beautiful to have such a presence in your life.”

If we closely take note of the sentence in which the word “love” first appears here, we can understand love’s absence as a cultural failure. Although we can clearly see this operating in our lives with close friends, to me the power of this passage is that it describes a set of valuable expectations which could be active if we were all willing to participate at a collective level. In order to be able to listen to and heed the perspective of our Kalyana-mitra, we must, first, recognise the likelihood that s/he will perceive something unavailable to us and then have the humility to give our permission to such commentary on our conduct. This is not currently a cultural norm for the majority of us. Politicians and business leaders most often model immediate, staunch defence of

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and upholding of their actions and decisions, accompanied by refutation and denigration of criticisms. Although we may often wish for humility in our leaders after it is clear that a mistake has been made, I am describing something more than contrition. Greater compassion for our human frailties could herald a culture in which a deeper listening to the voices around us may lead to better decisionmaking. We prize, instead, individuality and lone heroism which sets out to conquer all frailty and holds failure in contempt. The Kalyna-mitra reminds us that this is a false enterprise, destined to fail. As we nevertheless continue to pursue it, to what extent do we notice the corresponding erosion of much of the fabric of communal life and our loss of a kind of wisdom rooted in more humbly and painstakingly building mutual trust? Perhaps this is why we are told that the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was an apple: like few other fruits, when an apple is cut in half, its quality starts to deteriorate visibly and almost immediately. As American poet, painter and writer E.E. Cummings helps us to see: “One’s not half two. It’s two are halves of one”. We forget we need each other’s love, and consequently allow the bonds between us to fail, at our peril.

RITUAL: HONOURING THE DANGERS It seems peril is close at every turn. The definition of sacrifice as a noun contains the word “destruction” – there is much danger, death and destruction in the archetypal stories, old and new to which I have referred, and Shakespeare conjures up “the edge of doom” as the measure of Love’s fidelity. Sacrifice is no small undertaking. In the dream, this is why the decision to make the sacrifice could only be arrived at through a ritual. A wellcrafted ritual provides an ark to enable safe crossing of a life-changing threshold, with all its inherent investment and jeopardy, when it is crucial to secure oneself on the other side and move forward creatively from there. To underline some of what I explored near the beginning, such thresholds involve entering the unknown, and a ritual helps us prepare for its attendant risks. This is shown to us in nature, where a container is provided for every important threshold in the life cycle. Seeds, chrysalises, eggs, wombs . . .

1 Corinthians, 13.2, from the New Testament Holy Bible, William Collins, 1971

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The chrysalis of the Peacock butterfly

they each protect their delicate contents while great, invisible transformation takes place. Similarly, the dream revealed nothing of the content of the ritual. In this light, it is important that those of us with secular minds don’t consign rituals to the history books as an outdated method to make contact with the divine. The threshold, as both an aspect of sacrifice and an archetype itself, holds transformative potential. Its associated rituals provide the necessary space and process in which to honour that potential and bring more consciousness to the endeavour. It is a matter of honouring fragility, for letting go of what no longer serves us well can be painful and what is new may well be delicate and in need of protection until it can establish itself. Ritual provides that quality of honouring and, in so doing, enables an exquisite quality of attunement to what is required at moments of both subtlety and sensibility. The container of ritual defends against and shields us from unrealistic expectations that can pressurise and shatter what is being transformed.

The Peacock butterfly at every stage of its development Katherine Plymley: Papilio Io, Peacock Butterfly, male and female, catapiller feeds on nettle. Reproduced with kind permission of the Darwin Country Museum: www.darwincountry.org

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26 When we realise that a threshold is before us, we face two questions: What to take across? What to leave behind? In taking things across, we have to know, or at least intuit, how they will serve the purpose for which we are making the crossing. In leaving things behind, we recognise their lack of utility for the impending task. At the same time, we make room for something new and unknowable. The nature of transformation is that, while we will have ideas and desires, the ultimate outcome is beyond our control. We must only be willing to cross over and hold ourselves open to mystery. Perhaps this is why the heart of so many fairy stories can be so dark: The dangers are real and there are no guarantees. For me, this makes the Semitic legend of the lily especially poignant. How wonderful that, with all its promise of fruitfulness, it is the lily which accompanies pregnant Eve as the gates of Eden close behind her and her tears fall to the ground. And yet, hidden within a promise is the paradox that it is only a promise if it can be broken. The flower affords hope without assurance.

Such an image is typical of nature’s stages, where death and rebirth are intimately connected. This makes sense of Jung’s assertion that a sacrifice “only becomes a sacrifice if I give up the implied intention of receiving something in return. If it is to be a true sacrifice, the gift must be given as if it were being destroyed”. I find parallels here with the caterpillar’s sacrifice; albeit driven by instinct, I hope that the beauty of its metamorphosis can be valuable to us as we struggle with the choices before us. This struggle is intrinsic to humanity, wrestling with the complexity and vulnerability of our own minds in a way which caterpillars and butterflies do not. An image closer to our reality may be that of the two faces of Janus, gazing in opposite directions.

Another meaning of the references to “destruction” in all this is to do with how to leave something behind in a way which opens the door to transformation and secures us on the far side of the threshold – as the caterpillar is dead to the butterfly.

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27 increasingly projected on to it7, indicating our ambivalence towards our necessary progress out of innocence. Self-consciousness is a heavy burden. Environmentalists who have long been holding out the apple know this, for they, too, have been cast into the shadows, (called “hair-shirt merchants”), out of our reluctance to bear the burden of consciousness about the relationship between the only two named trees in the Garden; remaining in ersatz Eden spares us from weighing up the consequences of our actions on the tree of life. Those consequences are indeed very difficult to face and, in this territory, ignorance really is bliss.

Roman bust of Janus

Perhaps this Roman god of gates, doorways, beginnings and endings, after whom the first month of the Roman calendar year is named, captures more than any other our inbuilt drive to evolve and our corresponding longing to return to Eden. Must we destroy this longing? For the intensity of these conflicting desires gives rise to battles within, sometimes on an epic scale, and can hold us back from embracing the necessary new. This is writ large in Biblical imagery where the closing of the gates of Eden was reinforced by cherubim and a flaming sword to bar Adam and Eve’s re-entry6. It is also worth noting that the required evolutionary step into consciousness and conscience was brought about by the intervention of the serpent, a creature which seems to lend itself to the shadows that Western mythology and folklore has

If the battle were confined to within us, the huge and urgent matter we face might be slightly less complicated than it is. Jung provided some insight into the interplay between our ego8 identity and the things we find, buy and make in our environment, which Crompton and Kasser have also explored. We can only make a sacrifice of what is ours to give. The gift, therefore, “bears the stamp of ‘mineness’, that is, it has a subtle identity with my ego”. This “is an irrational, unconscious identity, arising from the fact that anything which comes into contact with me is not only itself, but also a symbol”. Thus “several layers of meaning” become invested in what we see as ours – people, places, animals and other creatures, plants, inanimate objects and work projects. His elaboration makes the scale of the issue clear: “In reality, our psyche spreads far beyond the confines of the conscious mind” so that, when a man sacrifices anything he identifies as his, “he is giving himself up in giving the gift” (his emphasis). Hence, in a culture inhospitable to sacrifice, ‘business as usual’ is all that is available until conditions enable a more widespread emergence of our collective capacity to engage consciously with the archetypes I am exploring here.

IN SERVICE TO THE WHOLE I say “until” rather than “unless” because it is not only that the caterpillar sacrifices itself; the ‘determination’ of the butterfly to emerge also kills the caterpillar. At some level of its being, the butterfly ‘knows’ what riches await! Not only its gorgeous beauty, but also its capacities to flutter and fly, to roam far and wide, to view the beauty around it at height, to feast on nectar, to pollinate its food plant species and to mate – all these are attributes undreamt

Genesis, 3.24, from the Old Testament, Holy Bible, William Collins, 1952. See Baring, A. and Cashford, J. Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (Arkana Penguin) for an account of how symbolic representations of the relationship between humanity and divinity have changed since earliest history and into the present day 8 The word “ego” is used here to denote our conscious sense of ourselves as “I”. 6 7

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28 of by the caterpillar which has more simply just been eating away at its food plant species to secure its life. For the butterfly to come into being and fulfil the whole life purpose of this particular organism, the life of the caterpillar must come to its end. What is as yet undreamt of by us? With the caterpillar, butterfly and Janus all in mind, I return to Jung:

“Just as a man still is what he always was, so he already is what he will become. The conscious mind does not embrace the totality of a man, for this totality consists only partly of his conscious contents, and for the other and far greater part, of his unconscious, which is of indefinite extent with no assignable limits. In this totality the conscious mind is contained like a smaller circle within a larger one. Hence it is quite possible for … a more compendious personality to emerge in the course of development and take the ego into its service.”

A little further on he clarified that this process does not result in the ego becoming enslaved but, rather, of an ongoing dialogue between it and the larger ‘self’ so that the proposition of free will is lived out as a reality. Individuation is developed as the ego becomes increasingly capable of making its own choices in the context of a larger vision of what it means to be human. Then, the ego is rooted in expanding self-knowledge gained by exploration of the unconscious, much less driven by hidden fears and desires, and free to take sufficient account of the authentic and legitimate demands of the whole, of which it experiences itself as a valid and valuable part. This whole is constituted by diverse aspects of mind within the individual person as much as family, friends, community, and wider society and beyond. Along the individuation path, more of the person’s innate attributes and qualities, including those which have been suppressed due to family and cultural pressures, become available, and are increasingly expressed and practised until eventually they evolve enough for the whole personality to expand and live out more of its potential. The sacrifice involved is of the smaller but all-consuming concerns of earlier

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levels of ego-consciousness which believes its own proposition that it (the conscious “I”) is the only thing of value in the psyche and appropriates to itself all credit for everything worthwhile that happens in a person’s mind. This is where Jung’s propositions become even more important and relevant to our time. His vision was that the collective and the individual psyche together comprise something essentially unknowable, unified and with a larger wisdom than that available to the ego alone. It contains the ego alongside all we have suppressed and repressed and is also something more than all that. This “something more” is the matrix for each person’s evolution and, equally, the evolutionary potential of our species. It contains both our history and our future. In this sense, the Janus head also provides an image for his first sentence above: “Just as a man still is what he always was, so he already is what he will become” and this relates equally to the species and to the individual. For me, this “larger vision of what it means to be human” is the crux. In pursuing the dangerous road that has brought us to the brink we are, at least, fast approaching, there is much we have allowed to fall by the wayside. Greatest among what we have called ‘the necessary costs of progress’ has been far earlier understandings that we are intrinsically part of life on Earth. Now, in an echo of those ancient perspectives, Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess has coined the phrase “the ecological self” to describe human beings’ potential for a heightened sensibility towards and love for the whole Earth community of life in which we are immersed. He challenges the modern paradigm with: “To identify self realisation with the ego indicates a vast underestimation of the human self”. The ecological self is motivated by identification with other species in addition to human beings and the resulting empathy facilitates our desire to take care of them and their habitats, which, we forget, also are ours. In this way, our sense of ourselves is enlarged and nourished, not reduced and deprived, by relating with and nurturing the diversity of life around us. British ecological educator, counsellor and psychotherapist Paul Maiteny pushes this further, proposing that we, like every other species, have our niche in the eco-system. For us it is a matter of discovering what it is, because of our uniquely human attributes of choice and self-awareness. He highlights Sir Julian Huxley’s proposition that, as these are the product of the evolutionary processes of

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29 Earth and, therefore, of the universe, these human faculties enable the universe to know itself, through “bearing witness to its wonder, beauty and interest.” We could say that, for Huxley, humanity is to the universe what the apple was to Adam and Eve … a necessary step into self-consciousness. Huxley was careful to acknowledge that such attributes might also be present elsewhere in the universe and I think that we are too quick to assume that some elements of them could not be present in some way in other species here. Nevertheless, if such a vision of humanity’s niche, firmly rooted in frames of reference familiar to modern generations, were to catch fire in our collective imagination, then we might consider it essential to the larger scheme of things that we do not destroy the abundance and complexity of life on our planet, jewel in the cosmos that it is. Just as with the apple, we have to choose to embrace it and, if we do, new paths and choices open up by which humanity can simultaneously participate in its own, the Earth’s and the universe’s progress. For Naess and Maiteny, an expanded sense of self which includes all of evolution in feelings of awe, respect and loving responsibility effectively eclipses the matter of sacrifice. From this perspective, our contemporary, real and valid struggles with making the necessary material sacrifices for sustainability reveal how relatively small our concerns and motivations have become. Isn’t this the opposite of the greatness that our myths of progress have promised us? How has this happened?

UNWITTINGLY CULTIVATING IMPOVERISHMENT To offer my piece of that puzzle, I think that one factor is a remarkable contradiction in our contemporary stories of what it means to be human. On the one hand we tell ourselves that we are the superior species on the planet because we have the gift of being able to make conscious choices and, on the other, we invest hugely in influencing those conscious choices with incessant marketing aimed at seducing the most basic aspects of our instinctual drives. Because they are constantly called out, the need to gratify them becomes more and more powerful. We do this because the economic system we have created requires us to make an increasingly large volume of purchasing choices to keep it growing. We have, effectively, turned our most consciously prized asset – choice – into a commodity to serve little more than the economic machine … little wonder that this is, too, what we have done with the Earth.

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It seems to me that our economic system is functioning like a gigantic tree, sucking into itself all the nutrients, everything of value, from the surrounding ecology to benefit mainly the minority who inhabit its top branches. Although it does drop its leaves and fruit to provide replenishment, we have not constructed the system well enough to ensure that this dynamic of taking and reciprocating is balanced and so the surrounding ecology is degrading. In not realising the relationship between the only two named trees in the Garden, we have created the antithesis of the tree of life – indeed, its nemesis. This is what environmentalists have been showing us for decades and, increasingly, the deterioration can also be seen in the high levels of physical and mental illness among human populations. It is striking that there is such a high level of compliance with this situation, such a willingness to tolerate its costs. It is as if not enough of us are alive to them, and British management consultant Nicolas Ceasar has explored some of the reasons for this in Volume 1 of this series, including the theory of “rational ignorance” which enables us to cut ourselves off from what we feel we can do little about. The roots of our need to cut ourselves off go back a long way and are, I suggest, intrinsic to the path we have taken towards rationalism. Today, scientists increasingly acknowledge that the inspiration for their guiding theories arise first from the imagination. Very often, when I listen to them being interviewed, this acknowledgement seems almost to be offered and received as a kind of confession. Our contemporary view of what it means to be ‘scientific’ has bred an endemic suspicion of imagination outside of the realm of art and commercial design and I hope that this is beginning to change. It is true that the irrational aspects of our minds function in radically different ways from the rational, yet too often an assumption is made that the irrational holds nothing of value for everyday life. This is a huge mistake, in my view. When time is taken to study the irrational aspects of mind, a paradoxical quality which one might call ‘its own order’ can be detected. Were this not the case, the workings of the unconscious could never have been interpreted and, whilst such interpretation is always an extremely tentative and delicate endeavour, psychoanalysis and the talking therapies have shown that enough can be understood to enable healing and greater wholeness of personality.

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30 One significant consequence of our mistake is the difficulty we have now in trusting in the ‘both-and’, a primary characteristic of the imagination where completely contradictory elements happily co-exist. As practised as we are in ‘either/or’ thinking, too often we castigate ‘both-and’ thinking for hypocrisy, rather than appreciating the capacity to bear contradiction and hold paradox. It may be that an unintended consequence of our ambitions towards pure rationality and its apparent certainties is the hindering of a more subtle and expansive condition which facilitates inclusion. In broad terms, behaving rationally requires us first to separate ourselves from the matter at hand so that we can make an objective, dispassionate decision. Once we have made what we believe to be the right or best choice, we then identify with its superiority to carry it forward. Constant repetition of this process inculcates in us a sense of separateness and superiority (the same characteristics which have come to define our cultural sense of humanity’s place in the natural world). This not only renders humility more difficult when mistakes are made, this systematic practice of severing our links also fuels our more ruthless abilities to exploit and disregard non-financial costs to ourselves and the rest of life. For centuries, such ambitions for rationality and objectivity have led us to denigrate those human attributes which we think risk undermining the scientific and reasoned endeavours of our age, namely embodied sensations, instincts, intuition and emotions, alongside imagination – the very attributes that our marketing agencies work to seduce. Perhaps it is because they remind us so powerfully of what we might think of as our ‘creatureness’ that we tolerate this exploitation; out of our desire to see ourselves as superior to the animal kingdom, we treat as inferior anything that associates us to it. Were we rather to prize our animal nature, to respect and develop the assortment of experiences we are endowed with when born and which link us with the rest of life on Earth, we would be attuned differently to the needs of both ourselves and other species. As David Bohm described, “we are able to perceive an actual fact through our senses … whether it be our eyes or ears or sense of touch and … in this way we get information that thought cannot possibly supply”. He went on to elaborate how our over-privileging of thought while not accurately understanding its nature contributes to our global problems. In over-valuing rationality, we deny how our other human powers serve us: Through the combination of

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imagination and the sensations in our bodies we feel love and empathy; our bodily systems let us know when we are sated or when we are out of balance; instincts ensure that our survival needs are met and also underpin our evolutionary drives towards consciousness; and instinct, intuition and emotion engage our connectedness with others and, thereby, our conscience. This is to identify only a few of the faculties we need at work as greatly as at home. They become more available through the interplay between body, imagination and, of course, reason which also plays its necessary part. It is dialogue between these various qualities which facilitates inner checks and balances, mediation and then decisions upon how to act. For such self-regulating dialogue to yield the best outcomes, all participating elements must be equal in strength. As far back as the 13th century, Persian philosopher, poet and founder of the Whirling Dervishes Rumi captured the essence of the matter: “Love opens my chest, and thought returns to its confines”. Those wider aspects of being human often remain unconscious and immature because we undervalue and, for the purposes of economics, often override them. It is this immaturity that allows them to be exploited by marketing and undermines our ability to deal appropriately with the complicated state of affairs we have created in the world which exacerbates inequalities. Were we to foster their maturity, different desires and other, inclusive means of achieving them would emerge. For by undermining our birthright of innate inner diversity, by not valuing it unless we can exploit it, we are impoverishing ourselves to such an extent that, collectively, we are no longer able to desire the inexpressable beauty and diversity of the rest of life on Earth to flourish in its own right. African American civil rights campaigner and author Alice Walker draws our attention to the role of the imagination as she also asserts those rights: “We must begin to develop the idea that everything has equal rights because existence itself is equal. In other words, we are all here: trees, people, snakes, alike”. Remembering a teeming rainforest scene, American nature writer and conservationist John Hay asserts that living with a sense of connection between our inner being and outer nature is our heritage from more elemental times, a heritage which relies upon the innate inner diversity I am highlighting, and he elaborates how it could serve us well:

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“The quetzal is a shining facet of the great civilization of nature, where the spirit of human life was once inextricable from birds and flowers and tall trees rising from buttressed trunks with branches smothered in bromeliads and epiphytes, a context of growth and sacrifice reaching through intricate shadows toward the sun. In an open clearing at the edge of the forest where the quetzal and his less extravagantly adorned mate were nesting, a wattled bell bird called with a loud, single “bong”, which sounded less like a bell than a metal pipe being hit by a hammer. Inside the forest, nightingale thrushes hauntingly sang, like fine instruments being tuned to some ineffable scale; and the last I saw of the quetzal was a shimmering waterfall of color plunging down off a branch to disappear in the darkness made by endless leaves. To think of the dark and tenacious rainforests in terms of the diversity we say is necessary to natural systems is useful to the conservationist, but it is not enough. We who spend our lives guided only by terms and categories, endless facts and numbers, have not yet recognized the depths that would, if they could, help us out of our simplicity, the lack of diversity in ourselves. The great tropical message is inclusion. The forests, with their endlessly varied functions and differences in form, are statements as to the total involvement of life. They are the original grounds of life’s inventions, a great drawing in of all kinds of possibilities, over endless time. Without them, we lose not only their incomparable species but the foundation of shared existence.” This is much more than romanticism: What the new knowledge about the self-regulatory nature of Earth reveals is that allowing the rest of life to live in its own diverse ways for its own sake is what will feed and safeguard the larger interconnected systems which support our lives. There is ultimately no ‘either/or’ here, it is completely about ‘both-and’: both ‘them’ and ‘us’ … both altruistic idealism and selfinterested pragmatism. As we were building our modern civilisation founded on logic and competitiveness, we did not realise that the corresponding diminution of our inner diversity would leave us with perceptions that are too shallow and rigid and also insensitive to our surroundings and, indeed, to our own deepest

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needs. As a result, we seem genuinely not to know that, in a finite system, the sustained flourishing of the individual requires the sustained flourishing of the whole. Perhaps this is why the tree of the tree of life is named alongside the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the bible. Self-consciousness is the aspect of the human condition which seems to make it most difficult to retain our understanding of our embeddedness in a greater whole. By naming the two trees together, it seems to me that our creation story offers us a reminder that immortality – the future of life – depends upon us always remembering our interconnectedness and weighing our actions in its light. Alas, our modern, short-term perspectives allow us to fool ourselves that, because material standards of living have risen relatively quickly in industrialised countries, this is the flourishing that matters because it is the fruit of humanity’s labour over centuries, through the evolution of our technical prowess. Of course this is valid. The difficulty we have is that our models are built on partiality, not wholeness, and so our quick flourishing is at the expense of the rest. The results of this systemic flaw are increasingly being felt. Thus we face the immense challenges ahead poorly equipped in some vital ways – and, in a certain sense, are right to hold ourselves in ersatz Eden until we can enrich ourselves with other essential ingredients.

CONSCIOUSLY CULTIVATING EXPANSION, SACRIFICE, TRANSFORMATION AND RENEWAL It may well be that to invite in qualities which we have long feared as the enemies of our civilisation feels unreliable and hazardous. As unreliable and hazardous as our climate is becoming? Were we to cultivate those qualities, the following three extracts offer visions of what may become available: Lebanese poet, artist and mystic of the late 19th century, Kahlil Gibran expressed a perspective on the magnitude of life radically divergent from our mundane thinking:

“Everything in creation exists within you, and everything in you exists in creation. You are in borderless touch with the closest things, and, what is more, distance is not sufficient to separate you from things far away. All things from the lowest to the loftiest, from the smallest to the greatest, exist within

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you as equal things. In one atom are found all the elements of the earth. One drop of water contains all the secrets of the oceans. In one motion of the mind are found all the laws of existence.” Following the Australian rainforests’ campaigner John Seed’s moment of epiphany described below, he went on to found and develop the Rainforest Information Centre which has radically augmented our global understanding of the role played by these primordial habitats:

“Our planet is in danger. … [The facts and figures] are so real as to test all our capacities of denial, almost impossible to integrate into the reality of the humdrum of our daily lives. They took on reality for me when I first participated in actions to protect some of the remaining rainforests near my home in New South Wales, Australia. Then I was able to embody, to bring to life, my intellectual knowings in interaction with other beings – protesters, loggers, police and with the trees and other inhabitants of these forests. There and then I was gripped with an intense, profound realization of the depth of the bonds that connect us to the Earth, how deep are our feelings for these connections. I knew then that I was no longer acting on behalf of myself or my human ideas, but on behalf of the Earth . . . on behalf of my larger self, that I was literally part of the rainforest defending herself.” Jung, too, had moments of similar expansion which underpinned and nourished the unfolding of his ideas:

“At Bollingen I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself. … At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons.” Such expansive depictions, rooted in imagination and perhaps extraordinary experience, may be hard for many, probably most of us to comprehend. Yet they paint the kinds of perspectives we vitally need at

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this critical juncture in order to play our part in the progression of all life on Earth. Unless we invest in creating the conditions which will call out more from us than the desire for technological fixes, we will continue to cut ourselves off from ourselves and, thereby, continue to place all of life as we know it in extreme jeopardy. Then, American poet Stanley Kunitz rightly asks: “How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?” If instead, as I believe, we are capable of matching the butterfly’s evolutionary strength, we can bend the valuable aspects of rationality and the technologies it has spawned in a different direction, guided by our awareness of connectedness and interconnectedness rather than our impressions of separateness, as Bohm discusses them. That which is to be sacrificed as we reach towards the ecological self is the home we have made of our belief in partiality which has brought us thus far but which now is proving to be a house of cards. Must we also destroy our longing for Eden? No, actually. For me, the archetype of Eden expresses our struggle to move from innocence into paradoxical awareness of our separateness and interconnectedness in a way which enables us to uphold rather than devour the whole of life, while still feeding from it to maintain our individual lives. Seeds’ and Jung’s descriptions articulate conscious and powerful experiences of the aspect which seems most difficult for us to access – interconnection, of being “linked in” – and I think that this is what we long for, evidenced by our creating myriad virtual methods of achieving it because we have so little access to embodied ways. Now is not the moment in history to destroy it. Maiteny proposes that we are trying to meet immaterial needs through material consumption and that this mismatch is what renders our desires insatiable. I, with colleagues, have also explored how the addictive aspects of consumerism may be rooted in attempts to compensate for “our culture’s loss of contact with the unified whole”. All these ideas suggest that our economic system is unconsciously based on matters to which we have not been giving our attention for centuries and I propose that we must now give our attention to reversing that trend. I see this as central to enabling us to review and redesign the conduct of our affairs throughout the globe on the basis of wider perceptions.

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33 “Where there is the greatest risk is the greatest potential.” So said Anglican priest and Jungian analyst Michael Anderton when discussing the ecological crisis at a lecture in 2004. Another Jungian analyst has a piece of slate on her mantelpiece bearing the Latin words “Festine Lente”. How is it possible to “Hurry Slowly”? Why would we want to? For Stubbings, the capacity to “integrate paradoxical notions” is a critical aspect of the first of her five characteristics of an “ecological mindset”. Like her, I suggest that this potential lies within us waiting to be rediscovered. Potential holds both the unused and the unknown. If we can take Anderton seriously, it may come to us that tweaking what we know and building towering new machines cannot be our only answer. Alongside developing some technical responses, now may be the time to work together to create new, loving and threshold-honouring conditions, safe spaces which will act like chrysalises where some of us can choose to take time and turn to inner landscapes and embark on genuine voyages of discovery that may help to lead us out of our state of crisis

towards genuinely new visions. If enough of us embark on this search inside, cultivating vital and latent human qualities, sensibilities and perspectives, listening and responding more attentively to underlying needs and desires, and visiting the natural world more frequently and in new ways, the inspiration might emerge to conduct our material affairs differently enough to make the difference we need. By expanding our perspectives of who we are and what it means to be human, and by bringing into consciousness our hidden desires to remain in the Garden in a state of innocence and freely fed by eternal abundance, we may transform our relationships with ourselves, with the Earth and with the teeming life around us from destructiveness to love. If all this comes to pass and we find our place in Berry’s “one great Earth community”, I think we will be amazed at what kind of renewal becomes possible for human civilisation and the ecological systems within which we are embedded. I end with the dedication with which The Great Work begins:

“To the children To all the children To the children who swim beneath The waves of the sea, to those who live in The soils of the Earth, to the children of the flowers In the meadows and the trees in the forest, to All those children who roam over the land And the winged ones who fly with the winds, To the human children too, that all the children May go together into the future in the full Diversity of their regional communities.”

Sandra White works as an ecopsychologist and has a background in cultural change within government and business. She also prepares and conducts bespoke rituals as a ceremony maker and offers bereavement counselling. Contact: [email protected]

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References Berry, T. (1999). The Great Work. New York: Bell Tower. Bohm, D. and Edwards, M. (1989) Changing Consciousness: Exploring the Hidden Source of the Social, Political and Environmental Crises Facing our World. San Francisco: Harper. Ceasar, N. (2009). ‘The Art of Happiness in the Pursuit of Sustainability,’ in: Faruk, A. (ed.) Thoughts on Sustainability. Berkhamsted: Ashridge Business School. Crompton, T. and Kasser, T. (2009). Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity. WWF-UK report. Dartington: Green Books. Cummings, E. E. (2009) ‘One’s not half two. It’s two are halves of one,’ in Kirschbaum, A. (ed.) My Life in Verse. London: Penguin. Eliade, M. (1961). Images and Symbols, trans. by Mairet, P. New York: Sheed and Ward. Gibran, K. (2001). Extract from Spiritual Sayings, in Bushrui, S. (ed.), Kahlil Gibran: A Spiritual Treasury. London: One World. Hay, J. (1998). Extract from ‘The Immortal Wilderness,’ in Gardner, J. (ed.) The Sacred Earth, Writers on Nature and Spirit. Novato, CA: New World Library. Jung, C. G. (1954). Psychology and Religion: West and East. Oxford: Routledge. Jung, C. G. (1993). Memories, Dreams and Reflections. Fontana Press; also Sabini, M. 2005). The Earth has a Soul, the Nature Writings of C G Jung. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Kunitz, S. (2007) poem in Spring, C., and Manousos, A, (eds.) Earth Light, Spiritual Wisdom for an Ecological Age. Oakland, CA: Earthlight. Lehner, E. and J. (2003). Folklore and Symbolism of Flowers, Plants and Trees. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications Inc. Maiteny, P. (2009). ‘Finding Meaning Without Consuming,’ in Stibbe, A. (ed) The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy. Dartington: Green Books. Naess, A. (1988) ‘Self Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World,’ in Seed, J., Macy, J., Fleming, P., and Naess, A. (eds.) Thinking Like a Mountain. Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers. O’Donohue, J. (1999). Anam Cara, Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World. New York: Bantam Books. Oxford English Dictionary: www.oed.com. Rumi, (1995). Extract from Granite and Wineglass. Rumi Selected Poems. London: Penguin. Seed, J. (1988). ‘To hear Within Ourselves the Sound of the Earth Crying,’ in Seed, J., Macy, J., Fleming, P., and Naess, A. (eds.) Thinking Like a Mountain. Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers. Stubbings, A. (2009). ‘An Ecological Mindset: Developing a New Level of Consciousness,’ in Faruk, A. (ed.) Thoughts on Sustainability. Berkhamsted: Ashridge Business School. Tarnas, R. (1996). Cosmos and Psyche. London: Penguin Books. Walker, A. (1988). ‘Everything Is A Human Being.’ Living By the Word: Selected Writings 1973-87. Boston: Harcourt. White, S. (2010). ‘Denial, Stories and Visions.’ Greenpeace Business, Issue 8. White, S., Clarke, C., and Hills, D. (2010). ‘Ecopsychology,’ in Van Eyk McCain, M. (ed.) GreenSpirit: Path to a New Consciousness. Berkley, CA: O Books.

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SUSTAINABILITY AND PURPOSE: HUMANITY AT WORK Myrna Roselind Jelman, Ashridge Consulting “The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy – I mean that if you are happy you will be good.” Bertrand Russell

Asking oneself “What can I contribute?” is in my mind an inevitable consequence of an honest engagement with the big issues of the day: widening inequalities, depletion of natural resources, social disintegration, corruption, war, etc. With the overwhelming need for change ‘out there’ we can find it difficult to know what our contribution might be ‘from here’ and can easily fall prey to denial, confusion, paralysis and guilt. Ponder the following: The French queen Marie Antoinette, while the French people starved, found it hard to entertain herself in Versailles. To ward off boredom, she built herself a replica French hamlet within the grounds of her private castle Le Petit Trianon and played at being a peasant. She lived her life dimly aware of the social problems around her, protected or so she thought by the gate of her palace and the vertiginous difference in status and power between her and her people. How ironic that the outcome of such disconnection between her and her context resulted in an altogether more painful disconnection of head and body. In my view, anyone currently aware of but not involved in transforming business, society, science, culture, politics, etc. is behaving like Marie Antoinette, and I count myself in this group. Can we really continue to respond to the turmoil out there like she did the French famine? But what, you might ask, is the alternative? In this thought-piece, I intend to share with you the insights I gained from a Co-operative Inquiry on Purpose that I led in 2003 and the model that has helped me to make sense of

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the experiences I had then, which I have called the Cycle of Becoming. Living this model ever since has given me resilience when asking the deep questions, patience in co-operating with the process of growth and development in my life. It has made me experience profound purposefulness as well as helping me make unique and hopefully welcomed contributions to the world. These experiences have now confirmed my then belief that the more we are ourselves, the more we contribute to something larger than ourselves. We can lead what I call a ‘twice-good life’, one that makes us happy and does good at the same time. I will recount how living the model in practice has shaped my life over the last few years, helping me to become a film-maker, an entrepreneur and very recently one of the trustees of a charity on top of my identity as a consultant and coach at Ashridge Consulting. In the second part of my thought-piece, I will explore how we can support people to experience this commitment to living a twicegood life using personal, leadership and team development. I will then move on to the unique opportunities currently facing us. I personally consider the sustainability crisis and its little sister the economic crisis to be a gift to us, giving us an opportunity to reevaluate, choose and design how we want to live with each other and in relation to our planet and its inhabitants. This re-evaluation requires us to scrutinise all aspects of our lives including of course work and its natural habitat: organisations. I see a potential for us to invest in ‘Leaderhood development’ in order to move towards increasingly democratic organisational

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36 forms which can release the potential of human beings to self-organise in support of a meaningful purpose in a sustainable way. I also see an opportunity and a need for organisations to co-operate across sectors in service of urgent human needs. I will balance my natural optimism with a few hypotheses on the habits of mind that form obstacles to this vision but which also point a finger to the choices we now have at this important juncture. I will share my model and insights in a style that I know can sometimes come across as over-certain in my wish to communicate concepts close to my heart. I hope that you will receive my offerings as insights to compare against your own experiences, as a stimulus for conversation and perhaps as an invitation to ask the question that will nudge you into the wondrous unknown.

THE BACKGROUND TO THIS STORY My interest in purpose started when, aged 26, I achieved my goal of becoming an organisation development consultant like my father before me. I quickly entered what is now called a quarter-life crisis where I saw myself as a healthy, capable, willing individual privileged to live in a democracy and yet unable to find a sense of my own unique contribution to the world. After several years of searching, I finally got my revelation, and what a logical one! I would start a retreat centre for professionals to find their sense of purpose in life. I moved to Portugal in 2002 to set this project up and instead of flow and fulfilment, I encountered difficulty, failure and confusion. This surprising turn of events gave me a very strong need to know more about the notion of purpose in order to understand what had happened to me.

I invited like-minded individuals (consultants, coaches, personal development enthusiasts) to join me in a Co-operative Inquiry into the journey towards purpose. Co-operative Inquiry is an Action Research method developed by John Heron and Peter Reason providing a broad structure for groups to venture into the unknown around a topic of interest, through an iteration of cycles of action and reflection. The inquiry was held over a year and followed by several months of personal reflection and avid reading to deliver me to a place where I finally discovered a model that quenched my thirst for answers and by which I have lived my life ever since.

INSIGHTS FROM THE COOPERATIVE INQUIRY INTO THE JOURNEY TOWARDS PURPOSE I will share here the main insights from the Co-operative Inquiry first before sharing my own unifying model. The first insight emerged from our attempt to describe the state of purposefulness, as we had experienced it in our lives. We concluded that for all co-researchers, it had been experienced as a state of equal balance between feeling powerful, alive and loving and in such was also a balanced interaction between self, others and soul.

Self

Powerful

Soul

Others

Alive

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Loving

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37 Our second main insight was the realisation that paradoxes are at play in the search for purpose. From analysing our own stories, we discovered that the more we seek purpose the more we might feel purposeless and the reverse is also true: the more we accept purposelessness, the more we might find purposefulness. As one coresearcher said: “On the journey, the first thing to remember is that you are looking for purpose. The second thing to remember is you may not find it if you look too hard”.

At the end of the Co-operative Inquiry, although I experienced completion on some level, I felt that my journey was not complete and that I needed more understanding and clarity. I allowed myself the luxury of reading widely and reflecting on my experiences. After several months, I got a flash of insight and elaborated the Cycle of Becoming model that seemed to capture everything I had lived in a simple form.

THE CYCLE OF BECOMING Our third main insight was that all our experiences of purpose were times when we were most ourselves, thus ‘letting ourselves be ourselves and letting others be themselves’ became a shared rule in our group from then on. I have since found the following quote which has become a favourite and a good reminder to commit to being nothing more or less than being ourselves: “In the coming world they will not ask me: Why were you not Moses? They will ask me: Why were you not Zusya?” Rabbi Zusya of Hannipol. Our next insight was once again a paradox. Spending some time in relatively passive enjoyment of a community of people all allowing themselves to be themselves seemed to be part and parcel of the process of being purposeful. I was astounded to discover later in my research process that Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs is misrepresented as it is known to us now. In the model, the hierarchy of needs is represented – but Maslow specified that two forces or human characteristics are crucial in helping individuals to move up the hierarchy of needs, yet these do not appear in the versions of the model handed down to us. These forces are the human need for inquiry (curiosity, having an inquisitive mind, the quest for answers) and the human need for contemplation (appreciation of life, of beauty, enjoyment, contemplation, rest). Our final insight was the realisation that facing our deepest fears, despair, letting go and confusion also seemed part of the journey. We concluded our inquiry in the autumn, after holding a meeting at every season that year and we suspected that the experience of the seasons could also somehow relate to the journey towards purpose. As you will see below, all these insights are represented in some way in the unifying model I created for myself.

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I will present the model by alternating between the description of the stages of the model itself and how these stages manifested in my own life. It seems that people start engaging in a search for purpose out of some form of crisis of meaning, dullness or emptiness, a waning of the sparkle and enjoyment in one’s work or life. “I don’t know what I want any more” is a typical utterance at this stage. For some, this existential crisis might be caused by having reached mid-life, for others it can be the result of having achieved a cherished life goal to their satisfaction. In other cases, a search for greater meaning emerges after a trauma or crisis in what is known in psychology as posttraumatic growth. In all cases it consists, in my view, of feeling a sincere wish for something better and an inability to grasp quite what that something is or how to make it happen. The Buddhists talk of Dukkha or disquietude (also defined in Wikipedia as suffering, pain, sorrow, affliction, anxiety, dissatisfaction, discomfort, anguish, stress, misery, and frustration) which they believe to be an integral part of life. They warn against falling prey to Dukkha Dukkha, a state of disquietude at our own disquietude. Indeed, without reassurance that this frustrating disquietude is the start of a wider process, people can add to their emptiness a layer of unnecessary anxiety about the state of their life.

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In my model, I called this stage of the cycle ‘Ask’, a stage of inquiry which I compared to the experience of Autumn, a time when we have to accept that darker days are approaching, we need to prune branches and accept that the leaves will fall. In my experience of this stage, it helps to accept the discomfort and uncertainty, the fact that we are ‘unknowing’ that we cannot find the answers yet. This is the stage that I think we sometimes resist most ferociously because to truly connect with the questions that matters is a transformation in itself and once hooked into a quest, we cannot turn back.

In my own story, the completion of the Co-operative Inquiry marked the start of a brand new Cycle of Becoming. My personal insight at the end of the inquiry was a quiet intuitive sense that ‘working in the media’ would be the next big development in my life. Once my dissertation was completed in 2004, I started seeking to create this future for myself but everything I attempted seemed to fail (except client work, thankfully). I was in ‘Ask’ where I wanted to know how my life would be and was rather impatient about it. I tried getting a job at the BBC, I started writing a film script, all without success. I eventually accepted that I couldn’t control my future in this way, accepted to continue being a consultant. I found my current job at Ashridge Consulting which happened to be the gift at the end of a long earlier quest for finding a human organisation. I soon became very busy with client work. Without thinking, it seems, I started reading film-making books during my free time until I eventually booked myself on a film-making workshop in the summer of 2006.

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Returning to the model, after surrendering to the questions that present themselves to us, we eventually connect with a revelation of our next purpose which for me has often manifested as a joyous realisation that can seem both obvious and new, a marvellous fit between who I am now and who I had always dreamt of being in future. I called this stage ‘Know’ or Revelation, and I liken it to Winter when everything is clear and sharp. We can now perceive our destination on the horizon, we can see the mountain summit we are about to climb without the confusion of the undergrowth and forests. Just like in winter, the outside conditions are not always favourable for the progress of our endeavour and many obstacles might slow us down. When I have lived this stage of the cycle it was as if as my goal increased in ambition, so did my fears and the obstacles that came my way, perhaps as a test of my courage and my trust in the source of the vision of my path. Through this experience, I believe that our ‘little self’ is grown in preparation for action and once again, commitment, patience, surrender and acceptance help smooth the journey.

To continue my story, I booked myself on a film-making workshop with an undeniable fear. What I hoped might become a new passion might actually reveal itself to be a disappointment and the workshop would be the end of the illusion. After an intense week making a short fiction film in beautiful Florence and while the technicians were creating my first DVD, I took a moment for myself and while I gazed upon the golden light hitting the rooftops of Florence, I wept. I knew that my life was going to change irrevocably because I had unveiled a new side of my identity that had been waiting for so long to be given life. The magnitude of this certainty overwhelmed me with joy, gratitude and fear… I returned to work after this life-changing holiday to find that my work would leave me absolutely no time to do anything about my new love affair with film-making for a long, long while. I had to wait nine very frustrating months before I could connect with my passion again. Doing nothing about starting my filmmaking life and having to accept this state of affairs required more courage than any challenge asked of me later on in my story.

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Back to the model, after getting a revelation of our next purpose and after we surmount various obstacles and fears eventually, and just like spring, we start seeing unmistakeable signs of new developments. Like new green shoots, they emerge fast and furious from the ground and we are exhilarated at the progress we are now making. Suddenly outside conditions seem supportive of our work and life brings us unexpected sources of support. In this phase, which I called ‘Do’ or Manifestation, I have often experienced working hard to keep up with the activity laid out in front of me. I found that once this phase had started in earnest, I often made much faster progress than I could ever have hoped for. What emerged was often a finer reality than I could have imagined in my wildest dreams. In the metaphor of the seasons, new forms take shape and the bulbs we planted in autumn start showing their true form. Things change and progress very fast and in a most beautiful and organic way. During that stage, I have often been immersed in tasks with not much time for reflection, simply following what needed to be done next without thinking ahead, like a dance partner to life. This stage is, I think, most people’s idea of excitement and happiness, a thrilling time where everything is possible, where we are at our best and therefore probably a state most of us would like to hang on to as long as possible.

In my story, after awaiting nine months at first very impatiently, I once again reached a time when seemingly naturally I could finally reconnect with film-making. A few weeks before I was due to take a week’s holiday after a very busy time, I realised that instead of spending my money on a week’s relaxation abroad, I could try to make my first documentary film instead. It seemed so obvious and simple… I had three weeks to find an idea, organise contributors, plan a shooting schedule and get equipment and crew. The idea presented itself to my mind quite spontaneously. Several months beforehand, I had spoken with a friend who accompanies people in their dying process and a sentence she had said then still rang in my head: “There are so many things people need to know about death and no one talks about it”. I had done pro bono work in a retirement home in the past as well as supporting a friend when she lost her mother in the 2004 tsunami and so I decided that I would make a film on ‘Dying Well’. I completed the planning by lining up a selection of contributors. The week’s filming was as exhausting as it was exhilarating. It then took me a year to edit the 20 hours of footage shot that week. I had to learn many new skills and balance the engrossing film editing with my busy life at Ashridge but it all seemed to flow because my project was meaningful to me. I never seemed to run out of energy to work on my film. David Whyte, the inspirational organisational poet and philosopher, suggests that the antidote to stress is indeed not rest but wholeheartedness and I certainly experienced this during this period of my life.

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If we go back to the model, soon enough our pace slows down or we come to a natural completion of our work and we need to accept the end of action. Summer has arrived, a time when we realise the true nature of the work we have accomplished which is now starting to bear fruit. I called this stage ‘Be’ or Appreciation. In my experience of this stage, I have felt calmer, less busy. I naturally looked back to the path I had travelled. I became aware of my new expanded self, of having grown into a new, better version of myself, making me happy and grateful about the whole journey. I have often felt quite amazed at what had actually become possible and how my normal wilful little self could never have achieved such an outcome on its own. During this quiet, more reflective stage, I also recognise that the cycle eventually starts again with a new quest, a nagging question or a new feeling of emptiness.

In my personal story, I finished editing ‘Happy Endings’ in June 2008 and at the premiere I organised to mark the birth of my first documentary film, I knew that I had now undoubtedly become a filmmaker. I had a whole new identity. Another full cycle has occurred since and I have created a film production company and accompanying website to market the film which has already been used in cancer patient support groups, shown to hospice care professionals and might be used in training doctors. I have also become the trustee of a charity set up by one of the main contributors in the film, aiming to train and provide a network of professionals to support the dying in a more holistic way. I see these outcomes as the rich fruits of trusting my own journey and they are incomparably more impressive in my view than anything I have ever dared to hope for myself at the start of that particular cycle, when all I knew was that ‘working for the media’ would be a part of my future.

© Rachel Piper 2010 Ashridge Business School

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42 Of course I contributed to creating this life for myself, but I also consciously co-operated with a force larger than my ego. This force can be called the collective unconscious (Jung), the implicate order (David Bohm) or the unfolding process (Claus Otto Scharmer). Regardless, I am astounded at the fact that so far in my life, by choosing to co-operate with a very intuitive process manifesting as a whispering inner voice, I have obtained everything I have truly wanted from my working life. It always brings to my mind the saying: “Seek and ye shall find”.

Ask

Revelation Courage Commitment Willingness to change

Appreciation Aliveness Gratitude Humility

Manifestation Resilience Action Trust

The diagram, right, summarises the model.

Be

My reading of humanistic and transpersonal psychology texts tells me that my offering is nothing new, just a new metaphor for a wellknown human process of human development (e.g. Maslow’s self-actualisation, Rowan’s phenomenology of the Centaur, Gestalt’s cycle of functioning, Jaworski’s account of synchronicity, Claus Otto Scharmer’s U model, Campbell’s Hero’s Journey). I hope that you recognise some of your own experiences in the pattern of the cycle.

‘Positive’ states: Inquiry Curiosity Enthusiasm Awareness of need Engagement ‘Negative’ states: Impatience Wanting certainty Existential emptiness Feeling empty, void Fear

Autumn

Withdrawal Letting go Sawing Pruning Dying

‘Positive’ states: Joy Being Valuing Aliveness Presence Completion ‘Negative’ states: Complacency Narcissism Arrogance Belief that one has ‘arrived’

Do

The comprehensive diagram, below, summarises the whole model and the various states and attitudes I believe to be useful in order to move as smoothly as possible through the cycle. I have labelled them positive and negative states, but I assume that the cycle is a learning journey in which we often need to live some of the negative states before being able to surrender once more and start embodying the positive ones…

Winter

‘Positive’ states: Trust Faith Vulnerability Realism Willingness to plan action

Frozen, Before anything happens Underneath the soil, No movement

Inquiry

Revelation

Surrender

Courage

Unknowing Willingness to serve

Know

Inquiry Surrender Unknowing Willingness to serve

‘Negative’ states: Paralysis Exaltation Narcissism Procrastination Denial

Commitment

Ask Know Be

Willingness to change

Do

Appreciation

Manifestation

Aliveness

Resilience

Gratitude

Action

Humility

Trust

Accomplishment, Savouring Stillness, Knowledge of what has been harvested

Summer

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Emergence Movement Creation Action Renewal

Spring

‘Positive’ states: Motivation Inspiration Flow Adaptability Fluidity

‘Negative’ states: Inflexibility Fanaticism Hyperactivity Control Taking too much responsibility

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THE SUSTAINABILITY CRISIS AND THE CYCLE OF BECOMING: A PERFECT FIT So why might it be useful for us to consider this model? I sincerely believe that we now have no other way of knowing how to be and how to act in response to the world events around us than to commit to this cycle or journey. The facts are too complex to analyse, our worlds too interconnected to know what will have a positive or negative effect on connected stakeholders. Instead of scrambling our brain with analyses of what ought to happen ‘out there’, we can engage with what is happening ‘in here’ and nurture the connection with that small voice of certainty guiding us through the cycle.

“Sometimes the greatest acts of commitment involve doing nothing but sitting and waiting until I know just what to do next… It is in this state of being that we alter our relationship to the future and become part of the unfolding universe” (Jaworski, 1996). The journey paradoxically requires of us to both trust our deepest dreams, to follow our enthusiasm, to accept ourselves as we are and to sacrifice and surrender our own will to the larger process at play, including having patience when obstacles block our path, being faced with our deepest fears and facing the emptiness of the unknown. We are required to start travelling without fully knowing the destination, to make a leap of faith in following what makes us happy or what we know to be our truth, to develop an attitude of patience and surrender once the obstacles come. The result is reaching a place in our life where we are both more ourselves and we have contributed something good and unique to our community. As we continuously live and complete new cycles, we are able to sustain deeper periods of doubt, engage in increasingly courageous acts and find we are serving more and more meaningful purposes. And so this commitment to living an authentic life, to becoming ourselves, to self-actualisation is not after all a selfish one. By committing to becoming increasingly ourselves, we end up living a twice-good life: one that makes us happy and that does good to the world around us. If the Cycle of Becoming and other similar

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models of self-actualisation are how human beings discover their unique contribution to something larger than themselves, then surely we should be hoping for more people to engage in those journeys. The sum of all the human endeavours that will result from these journeys will surely help shepherd the transformation we need to create a sustainable world. In which case, we need to place our efforts in creating environments to support these journeys.

SUPPORTING INDIVIDUALS IN THEIR PERSONAL JOURNEY: PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT I notice more clients than ever starting to address the sort of questions that characterise the ‘Ask’ stage of my model: unexplainable deflation, a loss of meaning but also a commitment to contributing something good to the world. Some are already striving for more meaning and have started changing their life by negotiating for part-time work or refusing promotions in order to have time to find something more meaningful to contribute to the world. These are very successful Babyboomers who until recently would amaze and worry me in equal measure by their capacity for hard work and devotion to their organisation. I also know from research and personal experience that some (not all) Generation Y need their work to be meaningful and that they are ready to sacrifice some of their income and future career prospect to serve meaningful causes. These individuals have all entered ‘Ask’. The first time people enter such a journey, they sometimes need to leave their current life to learn the lessons of living in the unknown, just like I did by moving to Portugal to start a retreat centre. Typically and hopefully they will, like me, eventually reintegrate their community or profession. People engaged in such a personal journey can find support in reading books, getting a coach, entering therapy, starting a spiritual practice, joining a group of like-minded people, travelling, going on retreats or personal development workshops, etc... There are many sources of support at this level and seeking the right option is probably part and parcel of the journey for each individual although there is arguably a case for offering a specialised coaching service for supporting such a transformation. It is important to recognise that we may well recognise the cycle but we can never control or predict it, so finding a place that

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44 supports all the states of the cycle over time will be most important. In my own life and for the past seven years, I have belonged to a self-facilitated action learning set formed of like-minded professionals in the field of learning and development. We have seen each other through the ups and downs of many cycles and helped each other become who we are. I would wish for anyone to find a place where they can receive the quality of support, challenge and acceptance I have received over the years in that group and will gladly welcome inquiries from individuals wishing to belong to such a group.

SUPPORTING INDIVIDUALS IN THEIR ORGANISATIONAL CONTEXT: LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT Individuals who wish to serve a higher purpose sometimes find that they need to leave their organisation (however good it is) in order in order to fulfil the call of their emerging purpose. This is what I imagine happened to Shai Agassi from SAP. During my consulting work there, he was widely regarded by people I came across as a visionary leader, a youthful, dynamic presence on the board. He was a figure I have never met but about whom I kept hearing good things. I have recently discovered that he has started his own company to deliver a fleet of electric cars and infrastructure network to Israel, with the purpose of freeing his country from its dependency on oil for domestic transport. When it comes to supporting individuals to move towards purposeful work and purposeful business from within their organisation, leadership development is of course crucial in accompanying individuals on their personal journey of discovery. It provides a reflective space, a mirror, a special time when new insights can emerge, new relationships can flourish and courage for action builds up. This is typically currently achieved through creating learning communities, providing coaching support and opportunities for taking initiative through action learning. There are also more unusual ways to develop leadership as we have discovered when Judith Gunneweg and colleagues from Ernst & Young invited Martyn Brown, Hugh Pidgeon, Rory Hendrickz and myself to come up with a programme that would be out of the ordinary for their experienced partners, one that would beg the question: Who am I and what is my contribution to the firm and the world? The

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result is the New Frontiers programme which we have been running for nearly five years and uses contributions from the arts, psychology, mythology and the wonderful Ashridge grounds to encourage personal transformation towards stewardship, resilience and building a legacy.

SUPPORTING LEADERSHIP TEAMS TO DEFINE THEIR ORGANISATIONAL PURPOSE: TOP TEAM AND STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT The people who are touched by a revelation of purpose thankfully do not always leave their organisation, they sometimes transform them. This is of course what Ray Anderson did with InterfaceFLOR. After his ‘spear in the chest’ moment in which he realised that his actions as CEO of an oil-based carpet manufacturer was contributing to depriving his grandchildren of their right to a secure future, he decided to turn his organisation into the first restorative organisation. His intention and subsequent leadership has made InterfaceFLOR revolutionise the carpet-tile industry and become globally regarded as the most advanced private sector company in the field of sustainability. Our global context desperately needs small groups of committed individuals within government, public and private sector organisations to engage in the same process of questioning that Ray Anderson has experienced. The people who have the power to change their organisation need to find the space to ask themselves the sorts of questions that will launch their journey, hoping that it safely delivers them to the shores of a new mindset where their organisations can contribute to our world’s most pressing needs and still deliver on their commitments to shareholders, governments and donors. A meaningful purpose can be a powerful driver for performance but also for change in organisations. It catalyses commitment, loyalty and motivation both inside and outside our organisations. This is the power of purpose. It makes work and business become an aspiration to meet humanity’s needs. In my view this power does not manifest itself for a purpose other than one that strives of a better world. It is the result of asking ourselves “How can we contribute?” not “What can we gain?” or “What’s the business case?” We can after all decide that a business case is simply the proof of our ingenuity to find profitable solutions to pressing human needs. The growing social

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45 enterprise movement is already thriving on this basic principle. How much longer until the concept of ‘doing well by doing good’ reaches the mainstream of corporate life? Top team and strategy development are all standard offerings of Organisational Development consultants and can support committed leaders willing to enter the unknown.

SUPPORTING ORGANISATIONS TO BECOME ENVIRONMENTS WHERE LEADERSHIP FLOURISHES: LEADERHOOD DEVELOPMENT Most will agree that leadership development has been the organisational learning solution of choice for the past few years. I believe that investing in the leadership development process alone is too slow for our current global context and that we now need to invest in ‘leaderhood development’. On my darkest days, I believe that my leadership development work helps to make the inhuman prison of what we currently call a job a little bit more padded for their poor inhabitants. During those days, I feel I am returning renewed, inspired, responsible, trustworthy individuals to toxic environments where they are not trusted, responsible or inspired. Why develop leadership for environments that actively protect themselves against it? It can be like nurturing plants back to life only to return them to their careless owners who will not provide the water, nutrients and light needed to let the plant do what it would naturally do: grow. I believe it is time we addressed the fundamental principles by which we organise people and work to achieve results. We can choose to transform our organisations into ‘Leaderhoods’, i.e. environments in which leadership flourishes. Such organisations support the process of human development so that people at all hierarchical levels would feel they can be themselves, engage in the Cycle of Becoming and as a result create new services, new ways of working or new relationships that contribute to the organisation’s continuous adaptation to changing circumstances, customer needs and stakeholder expectations. It gives me hope that some organisations have already turned our familiar practices upside down and now afford extreme levels of freedom and accountability to their employees. The most famous example is probably SEMCO, the Brazilian heavy engineering company and the subject of Ricardo Semler’s book Maverick in which he tells the story of how

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he transformed a traditional organisation into the first democratic organisation. In his 1993 account, he describes an organisation that employs several thousand people in clusters never bigger than several hundred so that everyone can know each other well enough. Employees can be at one of three hierarchical levels. There are no job descriptions because employees make sense together of what is needed in their ever-changing - indeed sometimes downright turbulent - environment and do the work that needs doing. Employees select their bosses and everyone sets their own salaries, openly displayed for all to see. This results in a sense of motivation and meaning at the personal level, deep accountability at all hierarchical levels and agility at the organisational level. Semler explains:

“at Semco, 20 years of success has taught us that ignoring growth, avoiding long-range business plans (we don’t have one), and downplaying profits (I’m not sure of the actual figure) are why we thrive. We focus instead on whether the people who work for us are able to balance their aspirations with Semco’s purpose. Once balance is achieved and self-interest kicks in, new business, growth and profit inevitably follow”. Of course, we don’t all need to be as radical as Ricardo Semler. We can choose to only dip a toe in the water of leaderhood. Nokia has been experimenting with developing a culture that values collective intelligent action in its customer care department, affording a larger than usual level of autonomy and trust to employees in order to enable creative, emergent action in service of the customer experience. This strategy has yielded impressive cost savings and huge internal recognition for the department in question. Others have introduced the principles of employee democracy in their Corporate Social Responsibility work. Since 2005, the Mahindra and Mahindra brothers, owners of the Indian multinational of the same name, have committed 1% of annual profits after tax to social projects. These projects are set up and managed by employees themselves based on their knowledge of the needs of their local communities. This CSR commitment not only does good in itself but also serves to develop a culture of accountability and trust.

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UNDER THE HOOD OF LEADERHOOD The idea of working in Leaderhoods might seem unrealistic to some who have never experienced it and it is indeed a very different way to work as I have discovered by working for Ashridge Consulting for the past five years. It is perhaps helpful for me to describe my belief about the guiding principles or pillars of Leaderhood and the behaviours they engender.

Guiding principle

Engendering the following behaviour

Democracy: Members of the organisation shape its form, function, internal processes and can participate in decisions about its future.

Ownership and engagement in the organisation and commitment to its continuing improvement.

Transparency: Information is shared (including salary levels, grades, promotions, financial results).

Honesty including openness on performance problems, risks and mistakes.

Autonomy: People are trusted and allowed to choose how they work, when they work, where they work, who they work with and what they work on.

Personal leadership and self-management. Ownership of one’s motivation levels at work.

Accountability: People work to clearly understood, meaningful and realistic targets.

Focus on results and on performance.

Simplicity: Minimal levels of hierarchy and organisational structure mean that energy is focused on the work itself and the organisation can change quickly.

Organisational adaptability and agility.

Alignment: Members of the organisation share common purpose and values. The organisation’s form (strategy, processes, culture) and its purpose are congruent.

Love of the work and commitment to the community in which it is delivered.

Humanity: People are recognised to be human being with desires, emotions and changing needs. Individuals are supported in managing both their day to day well-being and their continuing development. They are encouraged to participate to and contribute to a healthy community life within the organisation.

People develop their human potential and creativity and build relationships within the organisation that can sustain increasing level of strain without losing harmony and enjoyment.

Commitment: Employment terms and conditions are fair and can sustain long-term employment (e.g. flexible attitude to part-time work, good maternity and paternity leave, sabbaticals, etc.).

A balance of financial safety and flexibility enabling individuals to change contracts and level of commitment as life changes.

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47 The leaders of organisations taken by the idea can be supported in their endeavour by OD consultants, HR specialists and Internal Communications experts who can accompany the organisation’s leaders and its people through the probably painful transformation process.

beings motivates them to continually find and deliver products and services that will sustain that community – while at the same time, the freedom to engage in meaningful work grows their experience of community by helping them to work on something larger than themselves.

In her book The Democratic Enterprise, Lynda Gratton has created a useful map for the early stages of the journey. Hers is a very pragmatic method for commencing the journey to democratisation and one that should appeal to many corporate environments. For her the building blocks are: • individual autonomy (letting people choose how they build and nurture their intellectual, emotional and social capital)

SUPPORTING ORGANISATIONS TO WORK TOGETHER TO SERVE A MEANINGFUL PURPOSE: PARTNERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

• organisational variety (promoting diversity, learning, work variety and variety in employment contracts and rewards) and • shared purpose (clear organisational goals, obligations and responsibilities). Beyond first steps, it is likely that many organisational processes and assumptions will need to be reviewed in organisations committed to the process of becoming Leaderhoods. In highly democratic structures, hierarchies can probably be further flattened with a great reduction in the number of management roles but an equivalent increase in project work and coaching and facilitation roles. Pay differentials between very senior and very junior people will likely need to be reduced too in what might be the most painful element of the transformation. The reason for working hard might not then be career progression anymore but fulfilling a meaningful purpose and developing new skills in one’s portfolio career and thereby becoming a unique resource to others in the organisation. The outcome would be an organisation where people find meaning in its statement of purpose and have enough autonomy to decide how to fulfil that purpose in a way that suits their personal style and motivation. In such organisations, if they are trusted and given enough accountability, people would voluntarily spot anything that does not serve the organisational purpose and adapt it accordingly, whether they are the actual products and services the organisation provides, its internal processes or even its culture and norms. And so, after a certain point, the organisation becomes self-transforming and sustainable. Its people are engaged in a virtuous cycle where their attachment to a community that lets them thrive as human

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Increasingly, organisations and their leaders are called upon to be connected to a wider range of stakeholder groups than ever in order to simply fulfil their current organisational objectives (as highlighted in the Global Leader of Tomorrow project). Some organisations have gone one step further and have decided to become the conveners of cross-organisational co-operation in service of meaningful goals. One such example is WWF, who explain on their website:

“WWF have come together with the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, Reos Partners and the Said Business School to launch a programme called the Finance Lab… a collaborative initiative that aims to re-think the financial system and take practical action to stimulate transformational change, so that finance serves the interests of society and the environment. WWF believe change will come through people from finance and business, government, academia and civil society working together in creative new ways”. Similarly, the British Council is currently designing a programme for senior leaders of public, private and charitable organisations in Africa to support each other in shaping and implementing breakthrough initiatives as home-bred solutions to pressing problems. Leaders who wish to engage in or lead such initiatives can get support in consulting, event design and facilitation for convening such forums, whether these are face to face or virtual.

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CONCLUSION Let us recap. The sustainability crisis is posing an inescapable question that everyone of us is probably called to address as some stage: “what can I do?” This question, if we let it, quickly leads us into the territory of the search for purpose which demands of us to travel well through the stages of a cyclical process where we constantly seek, find and manifest meaningful purposes as they arise (‘Ask, Know, Do, Be’). In so doing, individuals who engage in this journey find that they experience a new level of both suffering and happiness, and that they can contribute very unique gifts to society in a way that perfectly matches real and pressing human needs. The current sustainability and economic crises seem to be creating a motivation for more and more people to want to live a life of service. We can support these individuals at many levels: in their personal development, in their leadership development, in their team and strategy development, in transforming their organisations and in helping networks of organisations work together better to serve a meaningful human purpose. So what’s still stopping us? One change theory suggest that we can only change if we understand ‘what is’, i.e. the reasons why current reality exists. I will try here to identify the habits of mind which I hypothesise to be in the way of committing our working lives to serve human needs. I believe that we still follow the irrational seduction of feeding our desires instead of paying attention to meeting our actual needs. We refuse to surrender to the questions that matter and instead continue functioning according to a conventional and parallel cycle of ‘Want’, ‘Plan’, ‘Achieve’, ‘Enjoy’, a cycle that is reinforced by every bit of advertising we are subject to. It is the great illusion of consumerism that getting what we want will make us happy. We should according to this logic be happier we have ever been, which sadly is not the case. Perhaps we need to remember to distinguish what is a desire from what is a genuine need. A related set of obstacles lies in the fact that the journey I have described above requires a certain level of emotional development. As Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs indicates, the Cycle of Becoming is a journey for individuals who have satisfactorily met their belonging and self-esteem needs. Our consumerist, youth and beauty obsessed

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culture is currently nurturing a chronic dissatisfaction with self which might be putting a brake on the human development process towards self-actualisation and meaning seeking. In organisational life, the stellar hierarchies of most global organisations make their employees believe that there is and should always be a higher place to reach out for, thereby unconsciously encouraging people to continuously need to prove themselves. How do we recognise when we are successful or rich enough and that it is now time to ‘serve’? By far the largest obstacle to my mind is our lack of habit at exercising our freedom. By that I mean that we have lost the habit of making choices for our life and therefore do not feel at ease with taking the responsibility that comes with freedom. Most people’s biggest choices are their profession, life partner(s) and lifestyle. The most demanding choices in our lives take place when we need to change any of those things and only then might we be faced with the eternal challenge of choosing to listen either to the voice of habit, internalised family patterns and common opinion on the one hand, or to the internal voice that subtly communicates our own unique truth if we only dare to trust it. Certainly, our current organisational structures are built to minimise choice and freedom through job descriptions, key performance indicators, quality standards, brand attributes, service level agreements, competencies, annual strategic planning and personal targets, reducing human beings to mere human resources. This has, over the years, made countless individuals feel powerless at work. How can we take full responsibility for our lives and in so doing become choiceful and therefore powerful and accountable once again? Finally, the last major obstacle I perceive is our embarrassment at idealism, as if idealism was ridiculous and a belief system best kept under wraps. It transpires throughout our culture. As a budding filmmaker, I have been warned that the films that will typically win awards will not be the life-affirming films but those that delve into the darkest areas of our human tendencies and that feed our fears. Perhaps this truly is the root of everything, how can we make it admirable again to wish for a better world? Has the 20th century been so painful for us that we have not only stopped believing in God, but we have also stopped believing in good? Even some of our laws protect us from the embarrassment of idealism. As Bakan explains in The Corporation, the sole purpose of a corporation by law is to maximise shareholder

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49 profit. We seem to have stopped believing that the purpose of our work is to ‘do good’ and instead, over many years, we have created a parallel universe where money drives most of what we do. We can of course sustain ourselves in this parallel universe, but only if we disconnect ourselves from our internal reality constantly pointing the way to the illusion of it all. We work when we are tired, accept tasks we hate, function according to a daily, monthly, annual timetable set by others, we have to work with people we don’t like, and don’t find it strange for someone else to rate how good we are thereby shaping our future and our self-image. We don’t think it is our job to think of the ethics of what we do because surely it is the job of someone better paid somewhere else, making the decisions for us. We might from time to time get inspired by the stories of those who have followed their calling, but we choose not to take risks in our own life. We compromise our sincere wishes whispering their invitation in the quiet moments and instead we do what society expects of us. We call this being responsible adults. To manage our resulting unhappiness, we give ourselves treats, go shopping, plan a holiday, watch a movie or redecorate the house.

We don’t follow what makes us happy or hopeful and instead we live a reasonable life. We are disconnected from our bodies, our instincts, our needs and live our lives as if ruled by a disconnected head, shouting orders to a subservient being. Our body attempts to reconnect with us through illness, depression, eating disorders, allergies, panic attacks, etc. Humanistic psychologists have named the selfactualisation stage of development the stage of the centaur. The mythical being was half-man, half-horse and represents the integration of our head and body, the container for our feelings, energy levels and intuition. Let us not remain the disconnected Marie Antoinette for too much longer. Let us instead trust our instincts and enter the journey towards purpose when it next calls us. Let us discover how, by following what makes us truly happy, we can also do good and thus live a twice-good life. Let us create the conditions where humanity can serve its own very pressing needs by supporting the natural process of human beings becoming themselves. Let us amplify people’s wish to contribute to something larger than themselves. The future has to be towards greater humanity, sustainability, peace, justice, prosperity, health, education, development.

References Bakan, J. (2004). The Corporation. London: Constable & Robinson. Campbell, J. (1968). The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gitsham, M. et al (2009). Developing the Global Leader of Tomorrow. Ashridge and EABIS. www.ashridge.org.uk/globalleaders Gratton, L. (2004). The Democratic Organisation. London: Pearson Education Ltd. Jaworski, J. (1996). Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Maslow, A. H. (1954). Motivation and Personality, 3rd ed. New York: Harper & Row Publishers. Reason, P. (ed.) (1988). Human Inquiry in Action: Developments in New Paradigm Research. London: Sage Publications. Semler, R. (1993). Maverick! London: Random House. Senge, P., Scharmer, C.O., Jaworski, J and Flowers, B.S. (2005). Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People. Organizations and Society, London: Nicholas Brealy Publishing.

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FIT FOR PURPOSE: REMAKING OUR SENSE OF “STRATEGY IN BUSINESS” Chris Nichols, Ashridge Consulting INTRODUCTION We need a new way of thinking about business strategy and we need it soon. Deep in the financial turmoil of 2008 and 2009, the governments of the world were keen to get back to business as usual as soon as it could be arranged. Underlying this is an assumption that “normal” is where we want to get back to: that we will all be relieved when we return to our old familiar ways. This relief is misplaced. We cannot afford any more business as usual. A reading of the environmental, rather than the financial, pages makes terrifying reading. As David Orr reminds us, business, as we know it, is a disaster for the species with which we share the earth. A current IUCN report shows that 17,291 species are at serious risk of extinction. For all our current focus on climate change, our real crises are wider and deeper. We face threats in the areas of food supply, energy provision and species eradication, and this list is not complete. Humanity, we – and more pointedly our children and grandchildren – cannot afford many more days of normality like this. The time has come to think differently about the purpose and practice of business. The traditional way of doing strategy, beloved of business schools and major consulting firms alike, is no longer fit for purpose.

“The traditional way of making strategy is no longer fit for purpose”

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SEEING PAST THREE DOMINANT FANTASIES So what is wrong with strategy? Global business thinker, the late Sumantra Ghoshal, wrote of his fears that bad business thinking was destroying good business practice. He was so right: but neither his diagnosis nor reasoning was radical enough. There are at least three deeply held fantasies that underlie almost all day to day business thinking and which make the current way of doing strategy unfit in almost all organisations. These are: • The fantasy of limitless growth • The fantasy of actions without consequences • The fantasy of separateness (and the crisis of fragmentation). First, there is a pervasive belief that our society is only successful if its economy is growing. Governments routinely measure the health of nations by pointing to economic “progress”. We all know that come election time “it’s the economy, stupid” that makes the difference. In the boardroom, when discussing strategy, it will be assumed that growth is a requirement. It is rare to find a company that has been content with stability, or has sought to become smaller. And this is reflected in the national media, where everything from rising house prices to rising sales of cars is seen as “good news”. It takes a brave manager to ask: ”Why do we have this attachment to growth?” It appears almost sacrilegious in our business discourse to ask questions about “growth”. Without growth, the fundamental pillar of competitive consumerism would have to be rebuilt on a different foundation, and this seems too much to face up to in boardroom conversations.

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52 Yet we live in a finite biosphere. As Jonathan Porritt convincingly argues, if we accept that the economy is a subset of society, and that society exists within a finite biological and physical context (we have just this one planet and it isn’t growing), how can we logically expect one subsystem, the economy, to grow infinitely?

The benefits of the action flow to the individual, their company and their customers. The costs are borne elsewhere and go unaccounted for. Strategic conversations rarely touch on them.

Some observers cling to a belief that technology will find the answer and allow infinite economic growth for all time. But unless such technology is “zero resource input, zero waste output” the argument logically doesn’t run. Fitting infinite growth into a finite space is a sleight of hand we can’t afford any more.

This fantasy allows we humans to believe that we are somehow separate from, and “other than”, the rest of the environment in which we live our lives. Even more bizarrely, that “we” at work are separate from the self who goes home and is concerned for the future of our children.

“Fitting infinite growth into a finite space is a sleight of hand we can’t afford any more”

Strategy as a discipline is mostly silent on the question. Strategy tools, models and methodologies deal with the analysis of how one organisation, business unit or product, can emerge ahead of the competition and secure lasting advantage, thus creating value. What constitutes real “value” or how such value arises and at what real cost, is not considered. Growth is assumed, or if absent it is sought. Secondly we have the fantasy of “actions without consequences”, the idea that we can act in this way and that it will not have consequences that we need to consider or be responsible for. For example, this allows one to claim as “a good day’s work” any of the following: • Developing a marketing campaign that attracts more customers to buy air conditioning and cooling equipment • Devising an oil drilling and extraction technology that allows previously depleted oil reserves to produce additional output • Finding new ways to finance the sale of more consumables to more households. Each of these may indeed by examples of human ingenuity, each capable of winning a bonus, promotion and an industry award for excellence. But in none of these cases is the executive or corporation required to account for the deeper consequences and costs of the action.

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This is because of the third fantasy. This is the fantasy of separateness, and its associated crisis, the crisis of fragmentation.

Most of we humans engaged in corporate life (as both executives and consumers), a growing and influential subset of the species, live most of our lives heavily insulated from the biological reality of our being. As Gregory Bateson noted, this is a tenuous position to take: “If you … see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration, the environment will seem to be yours to exploit… If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell.”

“… your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell”

Until “strategy” starts to be framed and formed from a position of oneness with the biosphere, rather than from a position of “other than”, the dire consequences of the three fantasies will continue to unfold. The rest of this article is about how a reframed and reformed sense of strategy, one that is fit for purpose, might be possible.

A BETTER CHOICE OF METAPHOR As a starting point, it is necessary to acknowledge that the very language and imagery of “strategy as usual” can have unfortunate consequences. Words make worlds: we need to take great care with the words and imagery we find in the strategic conversations we initiate and join.

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53 Strategy itself is generally held to owe its linguistic roots to military thinking, the Greek art and practice of strategic statecraft. Certainly much of the early planning approaches to business strategy had its origins in military planning. Much of the language of the military finds its way into everyday business conversation. It is commonplace to find ourselves joining conversations about the “battle for capital”, the “fight for markets”, the “war for talent”, and so on. There is also often talk of “arming the troops”, taking the “strategic high ground”, “digging in” and more. Several major business strategy books have staked their claim on the basis of this military analogy. The consequences of this language and imagery are stark. What occurs is that the focus of strategic thinking comes to be on bettering the competition, on preparing for and winning battles or wars, and occasionally on forming alliances for advantage. One consequence is that the secrecy of the war-room arises, strategy becomes something that the elites do and the “troops” implement. The “troops” are absolved from any part in shaping the strategy, still less from taking personal responsibility for the consequences of the actions they take. The problems of metaphor and imagery go further. In my experience of strategic facilitation, I have found that linear and mechanical (mechanistic and deterministic) mental models of strategy commonly hold sway in many organisations. What this means put simply is that managers often use language and images that treat the world as a machine with predictable outcomes. Strategy is often seen as an “it” – an analytical means of allocating and aligning resources to deliver wanted outcomes. This is seductive, but simplistic. Companies and markets are not machines and the attempt to treat them as such by using deterministic models simply results in both ineffective strategic work and in the perpetuation of the fallacy of separateness (as if the market and the organisation is a machine and we, being separate, can act on it). Not all business uses this mechanical, deterministic mental map at all times. We often find other maps in play: organics, political, warlike, sporting and more. (For a comprehensive survey of metaphors and their consequences, see Morgan).

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We do not want to argue here that there is no place for one or other of these metaphors. In fact we have no other way of talking, almost everything is metaphorical. What I am proposing is the paying of attention to language, imagery and to the consequences of language and imagery. Words, images and gestures make worlds and we should take them seriously in this work. The following section considers how changing the metaphor from competition and warfare to one of relationship might result in different ways of working with strategy.

A FRESH WINDOW: STRATEGY AS RELATIONSHIP What would be different in our companies if business people of an ecological mind experimented a little. What if we thought about business as a relationship? The central relationships might include: • Money: what is the relationship between the business and money? • Customers: what does the company do that meets genuine needs? • People: what is quality of engagement between the business decision-makers and the business being done? • Ecology: what is the relationship between the business and the ecological context in which it exists? I have often worked with senior executives who feel powerless in their decision-making because of the interests of their investors; leaders who are driven to take business actions they feel to be wrong out of “economic necessity”. A business based on anonymous finance from the equity market is going to have different imperatives than one backed by patient and ethical funding. The time is right for all of us in business to undertake a deeper inquiry into our financing and its consequences. Relationships with customers are vital in any business, but we know that it is easy to get hooked into the game of ‘defeating the competition’. Is it possible instead to focus on building a unique relationship with customers: to build something of real value to people and link to them in ways that meet real human needs? If such a genuine partnership between business activity and customers’ deep aspirations were

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54 commonplace it would open the possibility of more sustainable products, in every sense. As for the role of the people within the organisation, with a ‘military-machine’ business model, it is likely that there will be an organisational culture of troops and cogs. Could it be that a more human and relational purpose for business would allow people to be more fully engaged in their work? Without the need for “the generals on the hill”, it may become easier to let go of the myth that top management knows best. Perhaps then more people could bring their creative energy into their work. Real engagement about purpose and priority is possible, even at the corporate scale of activity. Customers may well love this change in focus because an ‘engaged’ business is likely to feel very different to one under ‘command and control’. Involving the energy and minds of the people and customers of the business seems much more likely to create a business with an ethical perspective and a lighter environmental impact. The relationship between any business and its environment is at the heart of everything. Without ecosystem services, there can be no life. It is frequently the case that businesses express an unquestioned desire for growth, measuring success by constantly doing more and being bigger, yet this is the assumption has terrible consequences. Redefining progress is vital and the companies discussed in this article show that change is possible. Placing the relationship between organisations, people and the Earth at the heart of businesses has the potential to fundamentally change the way businesses work. Exactly what this means in practice will require the creative work of all the human energy we can muster.

“Paying attention to the relationship between business and the natural world is at the heart of everything”

thinking to suggest a possible ethical basis and some resulting design principles that might be helpful in strategic working.

ETHICS FOR A BIOSPHERE INTELLIGENT BUSINESS: EMBRACING PERMACULTURE DESIGN Permaculture was developed in Australia in the 1970s by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren1. Permaculture started out as a reaction to the limitations of “industrial farming”, with its dependence on petrochemicals and its inevitable erosion of natural systems of biodiversity and fertility. Over the years permaculture design has been applied to all aspects of human organisation. The design principles are universal and in recent years mainstream designers, scientists and policy makers have embraced natural systems as inspirations for thinking and design: see for example the pioneering work Biomimicry – Innovation Inspired by Nature by Janine Benyus which has inspired much mainstream interest. The ethics of permaculture are simple to say, profound to act on: the most basic principle is that we are all responsible for our actions. The ethics can be stated simply: • People care: this is not about sacrificing people to protect other species. People really matter as people (this is different from people mattering as “human resources”). • Earth care: neither is this about putting people above all else. It is about recognising that we humans are just part of a web of life to which we are fundamentally and intricately enmeshed. We cannot harm the Earth without harming people. We cannot harm people without harming the Earth.

This section does not imply that this “relational” way of seeing strategy is complete or “better”. It asks simply what will happen if we allow ourselves to look at strategic questions from another perspective.

• Fair share: all parts of the living biosphere have a right to share in the product of our activities. This has implications for fair sharing of effort and reward among human communities, but it also has wider implications for the sharing of costs and outcomes in respect of the nonhuman elements of our ecosystem.

One thing is clear, if we are to work towards a better definition of strategy and strategic thinking for the future, we will need to develop a more ethically grounded basis for strategic working. In the following section I draw on the influence of permaculture

So in short permaculture design is based on noticing the implications and impacts of what we do. “Acting responsibly” means looking after people and the planet equally, and not consuming resources or products irresponsibly or inequitably.

1

Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, co-originators of Permaculture. See http://permacultureprinciples.com

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55 A conception of business founded on these principles would be very different indeed from today’s commonplace conception and would immediately require us to ask profound questions about resource usage, purposeful consumption and production and equity in resource and reward distribution.

since Amory and Hunter Lovins wrote Natural Capitalism, which showed how almost all industrial processes and design can be more energy intelligent by huge multiples. Let’s take energy seriously in our strategy. Energy negligent strategy is not strategy at all.

The use of familiar strategy tools and practices would result in different outcomes when guided by such a set of ethical principles. But it would be possible to go further by being rigorous in strategic thinking by the use of some of the core principles of permaculture design.

“Energy negligent strategy is not strategy at all”

Permaculture pioneer David Holmgren developed this ethical stance into a series of design principles. The design principles are founded on the use of systems and process thinking to provide an organising framework for thinking, designing and acting in a way that responds to the ethics.

Another design principle is to favour appropriate technology and minimal solutions. Doing a small experiment and then observing, using a simple technology rather than an expensive and elaborate one. Again, some industrial design thinking is already working in this direction and as strategic leaders need to be actively aware and bring it into our thinking and action. There is a bias in innovation towards the fancy and the technically “advanced”, the new “new thing”. This has only ever been 50% of all innovation. We need to pay much more attention to the 50% of innovation that has always been based on doing less (reducing the complication of things, offering a simpler service) and eliminating unnecessary energies, components and processes. Real differences of value that are deeply appreciated by customers can very often come from doing something simple and well.

The 12 design principles are readily available and documented in detail elsewhere2. This article is not the right place to develop a complete course in permaculture strategy design for business. But some of the essentials can be stated briefly. The design principles recognise the importance of observation, and counsel doing nothing until the designer has a sense of what is already happening. This is design based on paying attention to what is already happening, what is already working and what is currently presenting obstacles to health and wellbeing. An approach to strategy based on this principle would be less harried, less driven. Much of the urge for speed comes from the desire to be ahead of the competition. There is a deep attachment to first mover advantage in the machine-military model that does not serve us well. Slower, more observant strategy may be a better course.

At the heart of this is much more rigour about how we treat “resources”, both the human and natural factors which contribute to enterprise. Much “resource” is considered as transitional and disposable, whether it is workers, or polystyrene or water. To have any claim to bio-intelligent strategy making, we need a much more intelligent view of “resource” use. Of course, using less and making less go further is a vital contributor. But something deeper is also needed. We need to differentiate between “resources” that diminish with use (or worse, through use, denude other sources of natural capital) and those which are genuinely renewable over the period of usage.

One of the vital phenomena to observe is the energy flow and cycles present and which could be used well. Much of business life involves a never ending pushing of water uphill. Something like 90% of all inputs to industrial systems become as waste within three months of entering the system. That is shockingly poor strategic thinking. Instead of this “take, make, waste” (source) urge to produce at all costs, we need strategy that pays close attention to what energy is already in play and how it can be used. This includes the recognition that all “wastes” should be the foodstuff of another process. Nature has no landfill. It is a decade 2

If, in our strategising we privilege the use of “resources” which increase through use (such as human imagination, the capacity of relationships, community enterprise, collective wisdom, fitness and wellbeing, etc) we will benefit all living systems by our activities. By also privileging the use of “resources” that are

David Holmgren. See http://permacultureprinciples.com/principles.php.

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56 unimpaired by use (such as wind or sunlight energy, carefully managed woodlands, etc) we leave the world no worse off as a result of our activities of living. We also need to be more rigorously critical in our use of “resources” that diminish in use (mineral deposits) or which do harm through their use (anything used inappropriately, all waste sent to landfill, all nonrecycled goods). Again, strategy that does not recognise the finite nature of some “resources”, or does not deal intelligently with “resource” sourcing and usage, is not strategy at all.

PRACTICE OF STRATEGY AND THE NEW STRATEGIC LEADER

The final design principle we would want to focus on is the value of “edge” and diversity. As Gregory Bateson said, roughly paraphrased, when you want to find interesting developments, look in the margins. And so it is in strategy. Far too much strategy and strategising occurs in secret, as a top down activity, excluding many or most people in an organisation. So often we hear leaders complain that they “have trouble getting buy-in”. Little wonder, when they are often peddling strategic intentions unconnected to the lives and experiences of the people (staff and customers) most closely involved in their realisation. Still more significant, the more exclusive the strategising group, the less diverse the strategising tends to be. The resulting loss in vision, insight and genuine diversity of thinking can be terrible. In my view, genuinely sustainable strategy is not only top down and is not a “make and sell” proposition. Diversity and participation are the lifeblood of understanding and creative response to the conundrums we now face.

Fortunately we do not need to “invent” strategic good practice: we simply have to use well what already exists. In facing up to the deep challenges of our time, we need to make the most of all the intelligence and energy available to us.

A form of strategic thinking is available that is very different from the machine-military metaphor. This relational-permaculture framework offers every bit as much rigour (and more genuinely holistic rigour), and places ethics centrally. The following section develops this idea further, since this new approach to strategy involves learning for us all in the practice and leadership of strategic processes.

“A form of strategic thinking that is very different from the machine military metaphor … with more genuine rigour and placing ethics centrally”

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The practice of this new way of working with strategy will need us to be more open to uncertainly, to acknowledge the wisdom of others and to be more participative in our strategy working. Sustainable strategy will require fewer “experts” with the “ready-made” answers, less heroic leadership and more genuine exploring of the genuine unknowns we face.

Among the most important issues to pay attention to are these: Knowing the difference between what is known and what isn’t. This may sound obvious, but we notice in our work how management teams often treat the known and the unknown using the same techniques. In our strategic thinking we need to be clear about what is known (and where an expert, technical answer is feasible) and what is genuinely unknown (where rigorous exploring is needed drawing on the collective intelligence of many). This takes a real act of leadership for the CEO or senior team to acknowledge that they do not have all the answers: that they lack the answers to the very survival of the business. It is very tempting for senior leaders to jump onto their “white horse” at this point and offer visionary solutions. This urge (which is a powerful and natural urge to provide comfort and security) needs to be acknowledged but resisted, since heroism of this kind closes down the possibility of real exploring. Good strategic leadership at the cusp of the unknown instead involves the skilful invitation of whole teams (and whole communities) to join in a shared exploration bringing to the shared creative act all the energies and intelligence available. This is how in practice we can make the most of real diversity and “edge”: bringing in the dissident voices that might be harder to hear but which bring valuable difference and new insight. Along with colleagues, I have written elsewhere about cases and practices of successful large group participative process. The practices of good leadership of large group processes are not always familiar to senior leaders, who may have to learn some new skills

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57 to lead well. Techniques and approaches such as collective exploration, grounded creativity3, appreciative inquiry (Vanstone) and working with dialogue (Pidgeon) all have their place in framing and leading good collective strategic thinking and learning. And at the heart of it all are some simple acts of awareness and care. What we need is the kind of leadership wise enough to know what is known and what is still to be explored, and humble enough to acknowledge that they do not know and skilled enough to invite others to join in the exploration and learning with them. It is a strategic leadership willing to be less certain, willing to ask rigorous questions about the commonplace and to face the unknowns of what we do next. Above all it is a strategic leadership guided by ethics, in the awareness that humans are not “other than” the Earth. In being this kind of strategic leader, the very human skills of storytelling, coaching and listening are part of the essence, to support others through fearful times and to guide our searching purposefully.

“It is the leadership of real strategic learning that is needed now like never before”

As Ghosal said, the “pretence of knowing” is more harmful that the genuine acknowledgment of not knowing. With the genuine acknowledgement of the unknown comes the possibility of real learning. It is the leadership of real strategic learning that is needed now like never before.

3

See www.groundedcreativity.com for further information.

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References Bateson, G. 1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Benyus, J. (2002). Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. New York: William Morrow and Company. Ghoshal, S. (2005). ‘Bad Management Theories are Destroying Good Management Practices.’ Academy of Management Learning and Education, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 75-91. Hardman, P. and Nichols, C. (2009). ‘Stepping Lightly into Strategic Collaboration.’ Converse, Issue 6, pp 31-33. (available from www.ashridge.org.uk) Hawken, P., Lovins, A. and Lovins, L.H. (1999). Natural Capitalism. London: Little Brown and Company. Holmgren, D. (2002). Permaculture Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability. Hepburn, AU: Design Services. IUCN (2009). The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2009.2. From http://www.iucnredlist.org. Morgan, G. (1997). Images of Organisation. London: Sage. Nichols, C. and Hardman, P. (2009). ‘Surviving Turbulence: The Creative Brilliance of Crowds.’ Converse, Issue 6, pp12-13. (available from www.ashridge.org.uk) Orr, D. (2004). Earth in Mind. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. Pidgeon, H. (2006). ‘Consulting from a Dialogic Orientation,’ in Critchley B. and Higgins J. (eds.), Field research into the Practice of Relational Consulting. Berkhamsted: Ashridge. Porritt, J. (2005). Capitalism as if the World Matters. London: Earthscan. Vanstone, C. (2007). ‘Essential Techniques for Employee Engagement,’ in Appreciative Inquiry, pp. 27-56. London: Melcrum Publishing. (available from www.ashridge.org.uk)

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