Five Reasons for Enterprises to Aim-to-Flourish

Aiming to flourish means that all parts of human societies, including businesses and other organizations, will 

Strive to sustain the possibility for humans and all other life to flourish on this planet for generations to come, enhancing the integrity, beauty, and regenerative capacity of living communities.

(with thanks to John Ehrenfeld, MIT and Michelle Holiday)

This goal can be summarized as "sustainability-as-flourishing".  This is a radically different idea of sustainability from the more common "sustainable development" that prioritizes the sustaining of (economic) development not of flourishing.  This idea is also radically different from the financial profit-centric definitions currently popular: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Environment Society Governance (ESG).  These both continue to prioritize sustaining financial profit and not flourishing.

Enterprises that aim-to-flourish, that aim to sustain the possibility for flourishing, do not just prioritize financial profit, though they, of course, must be financially viable.  Instead, enterprises aiming-to-flourish attempt to maximize multiple streams of benefits: for society, the environment upon which society is utterly dependent, and the economy created to help members of society better meet their needs.  Enterprises aiming-to-flourish generate social benefits, they regenerate the environment for all their stakeholders and they are sufficiently financially viable to continue to exist.  These enterprises excel because people are thriving and the environment is flourishing.

There is another important aspect of the aiming-to-flourish goal: this goal is an example of what Dr. Russ Ackoff described as an "ideal goal" back in the 1970s.  By ideal, Russ did not mean impossible or utopian.  An ideal goal is highly practical.  It is a goal that can be approached without limit, and, in making this attempt, generates a considerable ongoing stream of benefits.  For example, one might say humanity has an ideal goal of exploring our world and the universe beyond.  Clearly, we will never explore everything everywhere, so there is no limit to our exploration.  But by striving to explore everywhere much of humanity has received, and hopefully, all of humanity will also receive tremendous benefits: increased life expectancy and improving levels of happiness.

So why would entrepreneurs and leaders of established enterprises want to adopt the ideal goal of aiming-to-flourish as a core of their business's purpose? (Sometimes, called a vision statement, or a statement of why).  Why would a business want to adopt sustainability-as-flourishing as their practical definition of sustainability?

There are five reasons leaders are adopting aiming-to-flourish as the core purpose for their enterprise.  I will briefly introduce them here and expand on each in future blog posts.

One: Aiming-to-Flourish is Exciting.  Aiming-to-flourish passes a key marketing test: does it inspire and excite the desired audience to action?  There is no point in adopting an organizational purpose or a  definition of sustainability, individually or organizationally, that is boring, uninspiring, and blah!  This is a major problem with current definitions of sustainability.  Instead flourishing offers people an inspiring and hopeful vision for their personal future and their renewed relationships with organizations.  How powerful would your brand be if it authentically aimed to help stakeholders flourish?

Two: It is Practical. Science is now clear in physics, chemistry,  biology, ecology, and even in the social sciences on two points: (1) There is an understanding that the only constant on this planet is change.  This means it is a practical impossibility to keep things the same, to sustain any thing.  So what can we aim to sustain?  We can strive to sustain a possibility for all – flourishing.  Flourishing, unlike sustainability, is not an event at a point in time.   (2) There is an understanding that the processes of life will result in ecosystems that flourish – they exist at their highest level of potential. So flourishing is an unfolding process that occurs naturally in living systems as the world changes.  These two realities make sustaining flourishing as a possibility highly practical.  How much benefit could be realized for stakeholders by working with the flourishing forces and processes of nature, including human nature?

Three: It is the Right Thing To Do.  Philosophers from Aristotle to, most recently, positive psychologists have described flourishing as the process of attaining and retaining the highest possible level of our inherent potential.  Whether as an individual or an enterprise aiming to flourish is striving to be the best that we can be.  From personal goals of self-knowledge to attaining spiritual enlightenment to honor a deity,  aiming to flourish creates the best possible chance to realize these in practice.   How attractive would your enterprise be to all its stakeholders if it declared an authentic intention to help all of them to flourish?

Four: It is the Best Way to Gain and Retain Financial Viability.  Unlike financial profitability, flourishing applies to every facet of human lived experience.  Aiming-to-flourish implies exploring not only traditional sources of financial profit but also exploring opportunities to create benefits socially and environmentally.  And Aiming-to-flourish also implies going beyond traditional sources of risk to become aware of new sources of risk emerging from the social and environmental perspectives.  In today's world, where increasingly opportunities and (financial) risks emerge from the social and environmental perspectives, adopting flourishing brings in the social and environmental with the financial to organizations strategy development and execution processes.  How many new opportunities could your enterprise find, and how much risk could be mitigated, by strategically working with all your stakeholders to flourish socially, environmentally, and financially?

Five: It Maximizes the Possibility for Innovation to Better Face an Uncertain Future.  It is well known that the most innovative innovations come by bringing together highly diverse people, ideas, and situations.  New inspiring ideas are much less likely to emerge from the same people, with the same ideas in the same situations. Further, the potential for significant innovation comes from appreciating current situations and asking how good could we make them, rather than looking for problems to fix.  Since aiming-to-flourish means always striving for the ideal, innovation processes in enterprises that adopt this purpose automatically become more effective.  How many new ideas to enable sustainability-as-flourishing could your enterprise find and bring to market, by innovating with all your stakeholders socially, environmentally, and financially?

To close let's return to the observation of Simon Sinek:  "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it".  People buy based on the alignment of their purpose in the world with yours.  Would could be a better why, a better more exciting, and inspiring purpose, for all your stakeholders than aiming to help all of them flourish?  To help sustain for them the possibility for flourishing. 

More Ideas for Design Principles for Flourishing Organizations

Over the holidays  I was fortunate to have received a copy of Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson (published 1998) - set in the near future and based on the author's experiences visiting the antarctic in the mid 1990s.

Other than the shockingly (to me at least) high level of understanding of climate change that was known 15+ years ago, one of the most interesting elements of the book was the 8 elements of a proposed "Antarctic Protocol".

These protocols, developed by the characters in the book in response to varies crises, have the goal of proposing a set of behaviors that could lead an Antarctic continent where human and other life could flourish.  The first seven elements comprehensively cover the economic, social and environmental choices needed for flourishing to be a possibility.  The 8th of these elements posits "What is true an Antarctica is true everywhere else (on earth)" (a compelling key hypothesis of one of the main characters).

As I read them it struck me that the comprehensive nature of these proposals for the Antarctic continent were highly related, complementary and overlapping with my own proposals for design principles for flourishing organizations - introduced in this blog post "Towards Design Principles for Strongly Sustainable Organizations"  (for the full text of my thinking see my thesis  Chapter 4, sections 4.7.2, pp.398-403 "Towards a Theory for the Conditions Required for Strongly Sustainable Organizations" and Chapter 7, section 7.7, pp.845-856 "Proto-Strongly Sustainable Business Design Principles").

Of course both my proposals and Kim Stanley Robinson's align well with the Goals and KPIs of the Draft version of the Future Fit Business Benchmark.

To allow for comparison, I reproduce below the 8 Points of Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctic Protocols.

I look forward to everyone's reactions;  not least who else is doing similar thinking about the design principles for organizations who choose as a goal to create the possibility for a flourishing environment, society and economy for humans and all other life on our shared finite planet?

____________
“The Antarctic Protocols”
Pages 626-628 Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson 1998, Bantam Books

1. The Antarctic Treaty should be renewed as soon as possible, after whatever renegotiation is necessary to get all parties to agree to terms and sign. Some law needs to be in place. Paraphrasing the original proposal for an Antarctic Treaty, written by people in the American State Department in 1958: "It would appear desirable to reach agreement on a program to assure the continuation of fruitful scientific cooperation in that continent, preventing unnecessary and undesirable political rivalries, the uneconomic expenditure of funds to defend individual interests, and the recurrent possibility of misunderstanding. If harmonious agreement can be reached in regard to friendly cooperation in Antarctica, there would be advantages to all other countries as well."


2. In this renewed Treaty, and by a more general proclamation of the United Nations, Antarctica should be declared to be a world site of special scientific interest. Some may wish to interpret this to mean also that Antarctica is a sacred ritual space, in which human acts take on spiritual significance.


3. Oil, natural gas, methane hydrates, minerals, and fresh water all exist in Antarctica, sometimes in concentrations that make their extraction and use a technical possibility. (Oil in particular, to be specific about the most controversial resource, is located in no supergiant fields but in three or four giant fields and many smaller ones, totalling approximately fifty billion barrels). Given that this is so, and that world supplies of some of these non-renewable resources are being consumed at a rapid rate, the possibility of extraction needs to be explicitly considered by not only the Antarctic Treaty nations, but the United Nations as well.

Non-Treaty nations, in the Southern Hemisphere in particular, think of the possibility of oil extraction from Antarctica as one way of solving energy needs and dealing with ongoing debt crises. At the same time current oil extraction technology presents a small but not negligible risk of environmental contamination as the result of an accident. Technologies are likely to become safer in the future, and world oil supplies are decreasing so sharply that any remaining untapped supplies, left in reserve for future generations who may need oil for purposes, other than fuel, are likely to be extremely valuable. These trends point to the idea of caching or sequestering certain oil fields for future use. Southern Hemisphere nations in need of short-term help could perhaps make arrangements modeled on the debt-fornature exchanges that have already been made; in this case, the World Bank or individual northern countries might buy future rights to Antarctic oil from southern nations, with the payments to start now, but the oil to be sequestered, with extraction to be delayed until the extraction technology's safety and the need for oil warrant it.

At the same time, demonstrably safe methane-hydrate drilling could proceed, providing a less concentrated but still valuable source of fuel and income 'to the drillers, while serving also as a training ground for drilling technologies that could be considered for later use in oil extraction.


4. The Antarctic Treaty suspends all claims of sovereignty on the continent, at the same time that it specifies free access to all, and a ban on military presences for anything but unarmed logistical support. The continent is land without ownership, terra communis; it is not property but commons, in the stewardship of all humanity. It is also the largest remaining wilderness on this planet. As such it exists in an experimental legal state which cannot ban visitors. Therefore if people desire to live in Antarctica, and take that responsibility and that cost on themselves, this is their right, even if all governmental and other official organizations disapprove and withhold all support.

However, because Antarctica is such a delicate environment, individuals like countries should be required to adhere to the principles of the Antarctic Treaty in its current form, and to respect the continent's status as wilderness. This adherence and respect puts severe limits on the number of indigenous animals that can be legally killed under international convention and law; thus the natural carrying capacity of the continent for human beings is very low. People interested enough in Antarctica to consider living there should keep this in mind, and a scientifically established "human carrying capacity" should be ascertained for Antarctica and for its local bioregions, and the human population of the continent and the bioregions should not exceed carrying capacity. Current preliminary calculations of the human carrying capacity of the continent suggest it is on the order of three to six thousand people, but human carrying capacity in general is a notoriously vexed topic, and estimates of capacities both local and global range over many orders of magnitude, depending on the methods used; for instance, for Antarctica figures have been cited ranging from zero to ten million. Possibly work on this issue in Antarctica could refine the concept of human carrying capacity itself.

 5. If people do decide to try to become indigenous to Antarctica, special care will have to be taken to avoid polluting the environment, because the Antarctic serves as a benchmark of cleanliness for studies of the rest of the world, and in the cold arid environment many forms of pollution are very slow to break down. Some would wish to add that as sacred space, cleanliness of treatment is our obligation to this place.

Again the entire continent must be considered a site of special scientific interest, in this case becoming an ongoing experiment in clean technologies and practices, including sufficiency minima, recycling, waste reduction and processing, etc. The goal should be a zero-impact lifestyle, and the reality cannot stray very far from that goal.

The Treaty's ban on the importation of exotic plants, animals, and soils means that any local agriculture attempted by inhabitants will have to be conducted hydroponically or aquaculturally, in hermetically sealed greenhouses and terraria or in well-controlled aquaculture pens containing only indigenous sealife. This constraint will be one aspect of the carrying capacity calculations, and suggests also that self sufficiency for any indigenous Antarctic society or societies would be impractical and risky for the environment, and should not be considered a goal of such societies. The reliance on outside help should be acknowledged as a given.

Anthropogenic reintroduction of species that used to exist in Antarctica is an issue that we leave to further discussions elsewhere.

 6. The achievement of clean appropriate zero-impact lifestyles in Antarctica is not merely a matter of the technologies employed, but of the social structures which both use these technologies and call successor technologies into being, as a function of the society's desires for itself. This being the case, all inhabitants of Antarctica should abide by the various human rights documents generated by the United Nations, and special attention should be given to cooperative, non exploitative economic models, which emphasize sustainable permaculture in a healthy biophysical context, abandoning growth models and inequitable hierarchies which in Antarctica not only degrade human existence but also very quickly impact the fragile environment.

 7. In such a harsh environment all attacks against person or equipment constitute a threat to life and cannot be allowed. All those interested enough in Antarctica to come here must forswear violence against humanity or its works, and interact in peaceable ways.

 8. What is true in Antarctica is true everywhere else.

A Story about Strongly Sustainable Business Models and You

A wonderful new visual story from Patricia Kambitsch at PlayThink, one of the 12 members of the Core Development Team for the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Canvas, giving the background to what we're helping businesses to do... understand and adopt strongly sustainable business models. 

I need a strongly sustainable business model... from patkambitsch

Towards Business Design Principles for Strongly Sustainable Organizations

I'm busy writing up my thesis right now: "Towards an Ontology and Canvas for Strongly Sustainable Business Models: A Systemic Design Science Exploration".

Based on my considerable progress over the past 2 months I've just added my third post to the blog of the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group (SSBMG), an applied research group within OCADU’s Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) that I helped to co-found. 

This new blog post is about one aspect on my thesis:

• The Strongly Sustainable Business Model Ontology (SSBMO) and the canvas it “powers” (the SSBMC) asks the right questions of business model designers who are trying to create strongly sustainable business model designs…
• But what, based on the same natural and social science literature of strong sustainability used to identify the questions asked by the SSBMC, are good answers to those questions?

In short: if you design your business model using the SSBMC, while adhering to the design principles for strongly sustainable organizations, when you measure your business using the Gold Standard for Sustainable Business (now known as the Future Fit Business Benchmark), you should find you meet that standard!

I look forward to responding to your comments on the SSBMG blog... now back to writing!

Towards a Definition of Organizational Strong Sustainability - A Review of the Literature

I'm busy writing up my thesis right now: "Towards an Ontology and Canvas for Strongly Sustainable Business Models: A Systemic Design Science Exploration".
 

Based on my considerable progress over the past 3 months I've just added my second post to the blog of the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group (SSBMG), an applied research group within OCADU’s Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) that I helped to co-found.

This new blog post is about one part of the thesis: the literature review I’ve just completed that I hope will

• Provide a definition of organizational strong sustainability
• Identify design principles for the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Ontology and the Canvas it powers
• Contribute to the work to define a "gold standard" for organizational strong sustainability

In this blog post I explore how this literature review relates to:

• my Strongly Sustainable Business Model Ontology and the Canvas it "powers"
• the "Gold Standard" for organizational strong sustainability, and
• the SSBMToolkit which integrates these together to achieve the goal of the SSBMG

If you'd like a copy of this literature review please contact me.

I look forward to responding to your comments on the SSBMG blog... now back to writing!