Category Archives: Ecology

Choosing restraint

Ecology, Politics, Systems thinking

In this essay I challenge our celebration of freedom of choice and offer a case for choosing restraint, instead. I argue that we need to rediscover appreciation. Because, in the words Abraham Joshua Heschel, “humankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.”

It also contains stories about living in the wild, banning advertisements, being threatened with a gun, pollinating flowers, saying grace, and herding goats.

I spent a long time writing and thinking about it, and I think it has turned pretty well. I hope you will take the time to read it.

It is somewhat longer than my usual blog posts, so I’ve split it up into six parts, which I’ll post here one by one to get people interested. You’ll find the first part below.

You can also read the whole essay in one go in whichever format you prefer:

 

CHOOSING RESTRAINT

 

We celebrate our freedom of choice. But in fact it is our options that control us ― not the other way around. There are so many options available to us all the time, inviting us to choose them.

Go to any convenience store or supermarket. Go down any shopping street. Sit at your computer or take out your smartphone. Watch TV or go to the movies. In all of these places your attention will be guided. You will be reminded of all the options at hand, offering instant gratification:

These ever-present reminders of these options reinforce our use of them. They become habits. And so we indulge ourselves all the time: Why not have a sugar boost? A coffee fix? Check out the latest news or gossip? Or how about a quick look to see if your latest status update has received any likes?

The wealth of options available to us ― choices to consume various products, mostly ― all but paralyse us. For instance, the average American supermarket stocks 30-40 different kinds of breakfast cereal. And almost just as many different kinds of peanut butter: Do you want smooth or chunky? Or extra chunky? Or do you prefer creamy? Or crunchy? Do you want regular, natural or organic? Or perhaps a reduced fat variety? And what if your preferred combination of natural and creamy isn’t available? What is your second preferred option?

As we become unable to analyse all of the options on offer, we come to suffer from what psychologists call “decision fatigue” — as we have more decisions to make, our decisions become progressively worse. We can either agonise over every single choice we make to ensure that we pick the right option (and generally feel less satisfied because we are now acutely aware of all the options we didn’t choose), or we can just pick the options that we have some sort of emotional or habitual connection to.

These are typically the options that address our weaknesses and vices rather than our strengths. These are the options that appeal to us on a habitual, subconscious level. And whenever there is a lapse in our awareness. Whenever the barrage of options overwhelm us and opens a chink in our mental armour, we follow the habitual impulse to give into these small temptations. And so we find ourselves choosing to buy things and do things that we know are bad for us. We pick options that we don’t really want, but which are so alluringly easy to choose.

These options tempt us in ways that are so hard to avoid. They make us smaller and weaker than we really are. Than we can be.

And yet with every choice we make, we are constantly reminded that these are our own choices. And that we only have ourselves to blame when we make choices that are bad for us. It is our fault. Our weakness. Our addiction.

But that is a lie.

When everything we see is highlighting a certain set of options, urging and cajoling us to choose between them, it becomes fiercely difficult to choose something else.

It’s very difficult to avoid having your train of thought hi-jacked by billboards and advertisements when you enter a public space. Most of us are probably so used to it by now that we don’t really consider how ridiculously violating it is to have your personal, mental space flooded with unsolicited messages reminding you of your own weaknesses. The street artist Banksy said it best:

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it.

But it gets even worse if you make a conscious decision to avoid some of the things that talk to your weaknesses. For instance if you choose

That you don’t want to watch TV because it makes you spend your time slouched, entertained and unaltered.

That you don’t want to eat fast food because it makes you tired, fat and lazy.

That you don’t want to use Facebook because it makes you care way too much about imaginary internet points and not enough about meeting people face to face.

No matter what reasons you offer, you will soon find yourself to be considered (and feeling) preachy and holier-than-thou.

Because if you choose to refuse something for reasons like this, then what does it say about the people who haven’t made the same choice? Does it mean that they’re choosing to be slouched, fat and unable to engage with other people face to face?

Of course not.

It just means that they are not willing to give up those options entirely. Either because they genuinely like them, and don’t see them as all that problematic (there is always a balance to strike, it seems. Soul food, for instance, is supposedly good for the soul, but not necessarily good for the body). Or because they don’t want to be seen as preachy and holy. Because they don’t want to be forced to explain why they’ve opted out every time the topic is touched upon. As the carnivore joke goes:

– “How do you know if someone is a vegetarian?”
– “Don’t worry, she’ll make sure to tell you.”

We don’t like anybody else to remind us of our own weaknesses. We all fight that fight every day. And similarly, most of us don’t like to remind others of their weaknesses. It’s their choice, after all. We are all adults. We should be able to make our own decisions. We are all free to choose who we want to be.

But we only have freedom of choice to the extent that we are free to define our options. And we rarely consider all of the options that are available to us. Instead, the options we tend to consider are guided by the norms and expectations of the society of which we are part. For instance, we don’t really consider a life without advertisements — simply because of the vast social consequences that such a choice would entail. We would have to opt out of society altogether to avoid them.

And so, when we celebrate our freedom of choice, we gloss over the fact that this freedom of choice is shaped, to a large extent, by products, services and retailers that invite overindulgence, even addiction. That some options are indeed a lot easier to choose than others.

This raises the question: Which options are being left out? Which options do we come to ignore as our attention is guided towards indulgence?

We don’t see the option that says “None of the above.” We don’t consider that we always have the option to withhold our choice or even pick something not on the list of available options. In this way, what is at stake here is more than the personal freedom to be who you want to be. It is an ideologically driven celebration of choice. And it doesn’t allow us not to choose. Because at its very core is what the farmer and author Wes Jackson calls a refusal to practice restraint.

See, we have never had to worry about restraint before. As hunter-gatherers, we hunted and gathered as much as we could and as much as we needed. It is speculated that the first people in Northern America and Australia killed off all of the megafauna there within a few hundred years of their arrival ― because they couldn’t restrain themselves. It was just too easy pickings.

With the advent of agriculture, we have begun a trajectory of exploitation, where our only restraint has been the technology at our disposal. At present, we have optimised our technological exploitation of the Earth’s resources in a way that seems certain to lead to the brink of depletion.

Simply put, we are running out of the stuff that is necessary to sustain us. It is a tragedy of the commons at a global scale. We cannot sustain infinite growth, infinite options, infinite freedom of choice on a finite planet. And so, it seems certain that the only way that we can prevent collapse is if we can learn restraint. We have to acknowledge the limits of the planet that we all share and depend upon.

We don’t like to acknowledge these limits because that will force us to limit our freedom of choice. It will force us to recognize the fact that we can’t have it all. We don’t want to be told “No”. Because, in the broad scale of history, we have never taken no for an answer.

That is why Wes Jackson sees this moment as the most important moment in human history, including our walk out of Africa: It is the moment where we have to learn restraint. Where we have to start living within our means — hopefully while retaining the knowledge that allowed human civilization and the exploitation of all those resources in first place.

In this way, we are faced with a fundamental challenge to the way we have come to see ourselves: Of all the options available to us, are we able to choose restraint?

 

***

 

This is part one of a six-part essay called Choosing restraint. You can read the whole essay here, or read the next part here.

In praise of octopi

Ecology

Came across this great article on octopi today:

No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange. Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink. But most intriguing of all, recent research indicates that octopuses are remarkably intelligent.

“Octopuses,” writes philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith, “are a separate experiment in the evolution of the mind.”

Just check out this mimic octopus in action:

Also, the article notes that research conducted on the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, show that its skin contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye. In other words, cephalopods—octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid may be able to see with their skin.

Did I mention that evolution is awesome?

Evolution is awesome

Ecology, Humour, Systems thinking

I think we often tend to underestimate the intricate wonder of evolution, and by extension of life in general. It is not only incredible, but it is also scary, bizarre, funny and inspiring.

One of the best examples of this is the Mantis Shrimp, which was featured on the webcomic The Oatmeal recently. But there are many more. In fact, there is a whole blog dedicated to the weird and wondrous creations of evolution. Very appropriately, it’s called, WTF, Evolution?

It showcases some of the weirdest animals known to creation. Including lizards that can shoot blood from their eyes, frogs that incubate their eggs in their stomach and ridiculously garish caterpillars. All complete with a pithy little caption as to why they might have evolved in such a way.

My favourite so far is the mating practices of the leopard slug:

Yeah, this blog has devolved into slug porn. Who would have thought?

Small, open, local and connected

Ecology, organisational permaculture, Systems thinking

Ezio Manzini, a Italian design professor and expert on social innvoation (whatever that is) argues that we are moving towards a new model of organizing society, production and consumption. He uses the words small, open, local and connected to describe this new model.

He says:

It’s a way to imagine the way in which the social services are delivered in society and the way in which we can imagine economies that are at the same time rooted in a place and partially self-sufficient but connected to the others and open to the others. This is a very interesting relationship between being local, being related to a certain context and at the same time being open and connected, not provincial or one closed community that risks being against the others.

This is an idea that is clear and strong if you talk about the arena where people are dealing with networks, open source and peer to peer. But it can become a very general metaphor, and embed itself in some realities to become a powerful way to organize a sustainable society.

Manzini is applying these notions in practice in Nutrire Milano —  a network that works to redefine the food chain of the city and develop innovative and sustainable urban farming. In a way, it is rather similar to the Copenhagen Food Coop that I’m involved in.

He goes on to describe the challenges that the project faces:

We have to recognize that to promote the small and local perspective can also be very dangerous. In fact, it can bring people to jail themselves in closed communities. To isolate themselves. And moving from here, to create a fake identity of who is inside his/hers “gated community”, against all the others. That is what, unfortunately, today is happening in many places in the world.

Vice versa, what we have to search for is to be local and open, at the same time. To create permeable interfaces between communities and places. To cultivate diversity to permit, at the same time, the free flow of people and ideas.

All this, of course, is very difficult: to blend the local and the open could appear to be a quasi-oxymoron. But maybe, it is exactly from dealing with this kind of quasi-oxymoron that a sustainable society will find the ground to emerge. A society that is based on a multiplicity of interconnected communities and places will appear as a large ecology of people, animals, plants, places and products.

This is exactly the same challenge that we face with the food coop here in Copenhagen: To create and strengthen our local community, and at the same time be open and connect to other projects, share our experiences, learn from theirs, and help new projects get started.

It’s easy to be small and local. It’s easy to be open and connected. It’s even easy to be small, open and local or small, connected and open. But we have to find out how to be small, open, local and connected all at once.

One thing that is small, open, local and connected at the same time is an ecology, as Manzini says. And that is what we’re going to have to create. A fundamental characteristic of an ecology is that we can’t control it. Instead, we have to learn from how other eco-systems work, and adapt accordingly.

That is also what I the core of what I mean by the notion of organisational permaculture.

Anything but ‘business as usual’

Ecology, organisational permaculture, Systems thinking

Talking about something so vaguely defined as “organisational permaculture” can easily become fluffy and buzz-wordy. So I thought it would help to give a very concrete example of an organisation that embodies some of the principles that I think are at the core of organisational permaculture.

It’s called Københavns Fødevarefællesskab, which translates as “Copenhagen Food Coop”. I’ve been very involved in the food coop for the past three years. Here’s a short video of me explaining the basics of what the food coop is all about:

Last year, we were asked by the Danish news site Modkraft to share our experiences and insights in building the food coop as a commmunity. So, I co-wrote an article with my two good friends Mette Hansen and Carsten Lunding. And it was published on the site just before Christmas.

Now I’ve translated the article into English because I think it does a good job of explaining the values and ideas behind the food coop — values that I find align very well with organisational permaculture. I’d love to hear your feedback on this.

Anything but ‘business as usual’

Copenhagen Food Coop is not like most businesses or even voluntary organisations. We want to to challenge the way things usually are done. We want it all: Local, sustainable, seasonal, organic produce at a fair price distributed by a working community in an open and transparent way. And it works. In three years, the coop has grown from 30 to more than 5.000 members.

Copenhagen Food Coop (“Københavns Fødevarefællesskab” in Danish with the acronym KBHFF) started with a simple idea: An organic supermarket where the members are not just customers but also co-workers and co-owners. It was modelled on Park Slope Food Coop in New York: By chipping in with a few hours of work each month, coop members can cut costs and buy organic foods at prices that are remarkably lower compared to ordinary supermarkets. And as co-owners, members take part in decisions on which products the coop should keep in stock.

Since KBHFF started proper in the Nørrebro neighbourhood of Copenhagen in August of 2009, it has grown to be much more than just a grocery store with a funny ownership scheme. It has become a grand experiment. A learning space. Not only do we work together to distribute fresh fruit and vegetables every week — but we are also working together to figure out how to create an organisation that is truly sustainable. Not just economically or environmentally but also socially.

Here are some of the insights that we’ve learned along the way:

Positive thinking makes a difference

In our statement of purpose, we write that KBHFF wants to be part of a sustainable future. And from the beginning it’s been central for us that KBHFF is built on positive rather than negative values. We believe in the power of the good example. It’s too easy to point fingers at all the things that the big supermarket chains and conventional farms are doing wrong. Instead, we want to focus on building an alternative that fits in the future that we want to live in.

Defining our values so clearly in this way focuses our energy and our courage. It gives the coop a purity and a sense of purpose that many find incredibly appealing. But it is also difficult because we refuse to compromise our values. We want it all: Local, sustainable, seasonal, organic produce at a fair price distributed by a working community in an open and transparent way. And then we’l have to figure out how we can make that happen.

Collective action builds community

KBHFF is built on the fundamental truth that communities are created and sustained through the things you do together. Our community is very much focused on the day-to-day — we have bags of veggie to distribute every Wednesday. Meaning we have some very concrete tasks that we have to do together. This is both a strength and a weakness.

It is a strength because we do things together every Wednesday. There are concrete, practical things to do every week, and that keeps us engaged with one another. The pleasant and friendly atmosphere in the shops and the weekly vegetables provide an immediate payoff that makes it easy for all of us to remember why it is great to be part of KBHFF.

It is a weakness because our organisation is still so young, loose and impulsive that a lot of Wednesdays end up as small fires to be put out where only the bare essentials are done, leaving a lot of people frustrated after a unsatisfying shift that they didn’t feel properly prepared for. And this only makes it harder to look ahead and develop our organisation to fix these problems.

We’re building the jumbo jet in mid-flight

Even though we have clear and strong values, we still don’t have a well-defined strategy. We avoid defining grand visions and strategies. We have no idea where we might be ind 5 years time. But we know we’re on the right track as long as we’re making good on our purpose every Wednesday. We want to ensure that there’s room for everyone to get involved and take part in shaping the coop, and let the organisation grow organically from there. We grow in small bursts, like buds on a tree. We make mistakes and correct them as we go along.

This has led to KBHFF having a distributed organisation with a lot of small local shops all over Copenhagen (eleven so far), instead of just one big supermarket. This approach has made us reconsider whether our goal really should be to build a big supermarket, since the way supermarkets work at present are remarkably unsustainable.

Even so, this kind of growth presents a lot of challenges as well: It’s a lot harder to keep track of a lot of small, independent shops than one big one. And it’s equally difficult to ensure that all of the members in all of the shops understand what the food coop is all about. As a result, we’re working hard just to keep the jumbo jet in the air, not worrying too much about where we’re heading.

We can’t avoid making mistakes

We are fully aware that we are making mistakes all the time. There is simply no way for us to avoid them. Particularly so when it comes to matters of opinion. We have no way of knowing in advance what kind of issues people feel strongly about. We have taken the very pragmatic approach of simply trying to take these issues as they arise. Though that may mean that we won’t decide whether to buy avocados from Israel or peas from a prison farm until after we’ve actually bought them. So it goes. We can’t define a policy that will cover all of such issues in advance. If that was the case we would never get anything done. Instead we have to be good at resolving these issues when they arise.

Our differences makes the project as a whole more open and accessible

The members of KBHFF are a very mixed crowd. It is a community that connects people across age, gender, languages, education, social status. We all share an interest in getting better and more sustainable foods. But apart from that there are a wide range of reasons that have brought us to KBHFF. For instance, some members rarely buy any vegetables but enjoy being part of a vibrant local community.

Another shared trait might be that we tend to have more time than money (even though it in no way is true for all of us). And that we have made the life style choice of spending some time together in a food coop rather than working more hours at our day job in order to buy our food in a conventional supermarket.
Our differences do spark the occasional conflict as with the avocados or the peas. But most of the time we manage to resolve these conflicts by being as open and inclusive as possible. This helps to ensure that we don’t become self-absorbed and secterian because we’re continually reminded of how different we are.

We don’t have to have an opinion on everything

Thus, it is equally important for us that you can be a member of KBHFF without being forced to subscribe to all sorts of opinions that have nothing to do with the distribution of food. That is why KBHFF is not a traditional political project. We’re not right wing nor left wing. Our purpose and the work we do transcends political boundaries.

Because of this we abstain from supporting political campaigns and legislation — even if it appears to be in line with our values and principles. This makes us pretty difficult to collaborate with. But that is a premise that we have chosen to accept in order to be able to things our own way, and remain open and accessible for as many different kinds of people as possible.

We are part of a bigger community

KBHFF is not just a community of people living in Copenhagen with a penchant for organic foods. We are also part of a bigger community that encompasses the organic farmers that produce the fruits and vegetables that we distribute. We don’t see the farmers as anonymous suppliers to be compelled to lower their prices. They’re just as much a part of the sustainable community that we’re trying to bring to life.

The welfare of the farmers is at least as important to us as the fact the produce that we buy from them has been grown in a sustainable manner. That is why we sell the produce at prices that are fair for the farmers and for the members of the coop both. And that is why we have regular meetings with the farmers to coordinate our purchases in relation to their production schedule.

We see KBHFF as a platform where our suppliers can meet — not as competitors but as colleagues — and work with us to create new solutions for our common good. Put another way, we see relationship with the farmers as a mutually dependent symbiosis rather than as a simple marketplace relation. This approach has also led to our decision to buy produce from farmers who are in the process of converting their farms to organic food production. Partly to help minimise their losses as they convert to a more sustainable way of farming. Partly to inspire and motivate other farmers to convert as well.

It’s a school for all of us

It’s a new, strange and often difficult thing for us to work together in an organisation like KBHFF. We all have the opportunity to be part of building this organisation and no answers are given in advance. We celebrate initiative and believe that is easier to receive forgiveness than permission. We challenge ourselves to create a safe atmosphere where everybody feels comfortable taking the initiative and the responsibility for the things they want to improve.

Our loose, distributed structure offers plenty of opportunities for members and local shops to decide how they want to organise their work. And we work hard to take all of our decisions through a facilitated consensus process where decisions are made by the people they affect.

Making KBHFF sustainable is a big challenge. Especially when you consider that is an organisation that self-assembles every Wednesday solely through the members’ volunteer effort. A lot of people are having a hard time finding their way in such an organisation without a clear hierarchical structure to tell them what to do and who’s in charge. It’s hard to take charge. It’s hard to delegate and share responsibility. It’s hard to help others take charge. It’s hard to develop a form of leadership where no one takes on too much and everybody feels empowered to act.

KBHFF is a school for all of us in that way. It is a shared space for learning to act, to take initiative and for self-determination. All of us learn all the time by being part of it. Yes, it is often difficult. But the only way that we’ll get better at it is to keep doing it.

Nobody’s indispensable

KBHFF has grown a lot over the past three years. And now, our organisation is slowly maturing as well. We can’t keep on going on the eager start-up energy that drove us all in the beginning. Now, KBHFF is a part of everyday life and it’s important that it can function without anybody taking on too much or burning out. Nobody’s indispensable in a sustainable organisation. And that’s how we want it to be in KBHFF.

We are trying to build an organisation where it is just as easy to reduce your involvement as it is to increase it. But that requires us to let others know when we no longer have the time or the energy to remain in the role that we have taken. Doing so will make it easier for others to step up and continue the work we have started. We have now reached a point where none of the people who helped start the first local shop i Nørrebro in 2009 are active in KBHFF’s coordinating body, the collective group. Instead, the group has been energised by new members with fresh ideas and lots of drive. So now, we old “members emeritus” can drop by our local shops on Wednesdays, take our monthly shifts, and take pride in how the seeds that we have helped to plant are sprouting and flourishing.

***

In the past three years, KBHFF has grown from 30 to 5000 members. It has been an unexpected success in a lot of ways. Not the least because we started out by challenging what a food distribution business could be. We have made a lot of mistakes along the way. But we have always been very conscious of the fact that all of our work would make it easier for those to come. We have always had an open source approach to the food coop, sharing our knowledge as openly as possible so that others don’t have to start from scratch if they want to start a similar project.

We want to continue doing so. And we hope that KBHFF can be an inspiration to other, new, exciting, alternative forms of organisation. Not just in the foodstuff sector, but also in other completely different sectors such as telecommunications services, restaurants, childcare, transportation or something else that we haven’t even thought of yet. And we want to share what we know, so please just ask.

Organisational permaculture

Ecology, organisational permaculture, Systems thinking

I recently joined a new group on Facebook called Organizational Permaculture. Dan Mezick, who started the group, defines organisational permaculture as

… a permaculture approach to elevating levels of team and group learning in organisations. It’s taking advantage of what is already there, and using it. It leverages the often ignored, underutilized, undervalued, abandoned, or otherwise unleveraged human cognition that is readily available to power a task at the group level.

So far, the Facebook group has been in a state of incubation, bringing together a lot of interesting people but with no active discussion. So, I thought I’d get the ball rolling by sharing my thoughts on what organisational permaculture promises to be.

I first came across the term permaculture on the blog of Euan Semple, a consultant specialising in the social web. In a post he linked to a documentary called “A farm for the future” by the British filmmaker Rebecca Hosking. The film introduces some of the environmental challenges that modern farming faces, and permaculture as an approach to solve these challenges:

Linking to the film, Semple remarked:

What struck me watching this wonderful film was the degree to which arrogance and fixation for imposed order was what got us into trouble in the first place and how much humility and willingness to learn from apparent chaos is what will get us out of it. Any parallels you may draw with organisational life are totally intended.

Those words stayed with me: How can the ideas of permaculture be applied to our organisations?

I’ve been ruminating on that question on and off since then. And I am excited to find that others are struggling with the same question.

See, the thing is, just as modern farming is proving to be unsustainable, so are our organisations. They aren’t helping to solve the problems we face. Instead, they allow these problems to grow bigger and more difficult to solve. Governments, banks, schools, NGOs, corporations. All of these organisations are as much part of the problem as they are part of the solution when it comes to the global challenges we face such as climate change, financial crisis, education reform, poverty and inequality, healthcare and security.

But this is not because these organisations are broken. As the American organisational researchers Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky have observed, “the reality is that any social system (including an organisation or a country or a family) is the way it is because the people in that system (at least those individuals and factions with the most leverage) want it that way.” Or as their colleague Jeff Lawrence puts it, “There is no such thing as a dysfunctional organisation, because every organisation is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it gets.”

This is amply obvious if we draw the parallels between our organisations and modern agriculture as Semple suggests:

1. Both focus on measurable short-term gains
Just as our farmers only tend to consider this year’s harvest, most organisations don’t plan more than a few years ahead. Companies are expected to deliver profits every quarter. Public sector organisations are expected to show increased efficiency. In all cases, the focus are on short-term metrics that can be measured easily, while disregarding intangible factors (as organisational expert W. E. Deming said, “You can only measure 3% of what matters”).

2. Both disregard long-term sustainability
This focus on the short term means that both farmers and organisations ignore the stock of the resources on which they depend. Farmers don’t recycle nutrients in the soil, ignoring the fact that gradually this will make the it poorer and poorer. Similarly, organisations tend to consider their employees as “human resources” that can be expended, ignoring the mental and physical illnesses that such exhaustion leads to.

3. Both believe that control is prerequisite for efficiency
The central task of farmers and managers is to achieve compliance. Farmers seek to dominate their fields and crops through plowing, artificial fertilisers, pesticides. Managers seek to control the work of their employees through various tools such as Management by Objectives, quotas and incentive pay. The fundamental notion is that all desired actions are the results of such control. And that control is the only way to achieve the predictability and efficiency necessary to secure production and profits despite varying circumstances.

4. Both prefer a single way of doing things
In order to make it easier to obtain and maintain such control, both farmers and organisation opt for simple one-size-fits-all solutions. Diversity is considered a problem to be solved. Farmers prefer huge fields of a single crop such as wheat and corn in order to make it easier to manage, no matter what the local landscape or environmental context might look like. Organisations prefer to use the same processes throughout in order to make it easier to optimize, no matter what the local culture and customs might dictate. Such optimization for one-size-fits-all not only tends to be a bad fit, it also leaves the whole much more vulnerable to disruption.

5. Both believe that all problems can be solved by adding more energy
Farmers and managers emphasize technical or mechanical problem solving, as if their farms and organisations were machines to be fixed. The simpler the machine is, the easier it is to fix. And fixing it usually means adding more external energy. Energy usually means more money. For farms, this would be money for buying bigger machines and using more fertilizer. For organisations, it would be more funds for new employees, new projects and new technology. Unfortunately, just as adding more artificial fertilizer just exacerbates the problem of under-nourished soil, adding more money to an organisation rarely solves the problem but often just reinforces the structures that created the problem in the first place.

I find that organisational permaculture promises a different approach. A way to build organisations that enable people learn, develop and flourish together. Organisations that allow people to be autonomous, purposeful and self-assured. Organisations that make people healthier and happier by their being part of it. Organizations that are resilient and which will be able to help solve rather than exacerbate the challenges that we face.

I hope that this group will provide a fertile space to share ideas on how to develop such an approach.

The web as ecosystem

Ecology, Technology

I recently finished reading Steven Johnson’s book Future Perfect. Being in the know as one of the “peer progressives” he lauds in the book, I found many of his points to be familiar. And all in all, I didn’t enjoy the book that much.

But there was one part that stuck with me. It was Johnson’s description of the web as a productive and interconnected ecosystem:

Ecologists talk about the “productivity” of an ecosystem, which is a measure of how effectively the ecosystem converts the energy and nutrients coming into the system into biological growth.

A productive ecosystem, such as a rain forest, sustains more life per unit of energy than an unproductive ecosystem, such as a desert. We need a comparable yardstick for information systems, a measure of a system’s ability to extract value from a given unit of information.

(..)

The overall increase in information productivity may be the single most important fact about the Web’s growth over the past fifteen years.

Think about it this way:

Let’s say it’s 1995, and you are cultivating a page of “hot links,” as we used to call them, to interesting discoveries on the Web. You find an article about a journalism lecture at Columbia University and you write up a description with a link to the Columbia website that promotes the talk.

The information value you have created is useful exclusively to two groups: people interested in journalism who happen to visit your page, and the people maintaining the Columbia page, who benefit from the increased traffic.

Fast-forward to the present: You arrive at the lecture and check in at Foursquare, and tweet a link to a description of the talk.

Set aside the fact that it is now much easier to make those updates via your smartphone, compared with the cumbersome process of updating your website circa 1995. What happens to the information you send out?

It’s the same number of characters, with the same message: I’m going to this lecture tonight. But the ultimate trajectory of that information is radically more complex than it would have been fifteen years before.

For starters, it goes out to friends of yours, and into your Twitter feed, and into Google’s index. The geo-data embedded in the link alerts local businesses who can offer your promotions through Foursquare; the link to the talk helps Google build its index of the Web, which then attracts advertisers or the topic of journalism itself.

Because that tiny little snippet of information flows through a more dense and diverse network, by checking in at the lecture you are helping your friends figure out what to do tonight; you’re helping Columbia promote its event; you’re helping a nearby bar attract more customers; you’re helping Google organize the Web; you’re helping people searching for information about journalism; you’re helping journalism schools advertising on Google to attract new students.

When text is free to flow and recombine, new forms of value are created, and the overall productivity of the system increases.

That is as good an argument for a free and open internet as you’re bound to find, I think.