When is Growth sustainable?

„Sustainable Growth“ is one of those post-crash mantras. You can hear it wherever people discuss ways to move out of the crisis. I heard about “sustainable growth” just last week at an event in Munich were key note speakers from Nokia Siemens Networks, SAP, Nokia and other companies discussed the trends that would move the ICT industry out of the economic crisis. Oh, sustainable growth.

What do we actually mean when we put sustainability next to growth? In the contexts that I heard or read about “sustainable growth” it often meant nothing but “any growth”. These were the desperate contexts. In other contexts “sustainable growth” translated as “stable growth”, i.e. a kind of growth that is safe, reliable and comes without disturbing bumps. There is nothing wrong with that, yet I think the aspect of keeping growth in balance with the larger ecosystem is not fully expressed through stability.

Sustainability and growth are not easy bedfellows. If there is one thing that can be learned from the financial crisis then it is that too much growth is not sustainable. Therefore, the talk of "sustainable growth" is not credible without addressing this intricacy.

It seems important to get the priorities right. Would we limit growth for the sake of sustainability? And where is the tipping point? A question that is hard to answer.

Yvon Chouinard, the founder of outdoor-apparel maker Patagonia has a pretty radical aproach: "I'm kind of like a samurai," he told FastCompany in an interview. "They say if you want to be a samurai, you can't be afraid of dying, and as soon as you flinch, you get your head cut off. I'm not afraid of losing this business." With that he wanted to emphasize that, in case of doubt, his vision for Patagonia ("to use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.")will not be compromised, even if it would mean to make a loss.

In fact, Chouinard experienced that the more he did for the environment (like annually donating one percent of sales to environmental groups), the better it was for his company's financials. He encourages other companies to follow the same path: "I'm saying to other companies that every time we did the right thing for the planet, we made money on it. I'm telling them that not only do we have to change, but also that it will be a good thing economically." ( see interview)

That made me think. Is the economy ready for a samurai approach towards growth and defend sustainable values, even if that might (but does not have to) mean to lose shareholders, profits or clients?

Transformation through Story Telling

While on a rational level, most people agree that a fundamental shift in society and culture is necessary to tackle the problems of today, it seems very hard to make that leap on a personal level, leave alone a community or institutional level.
I was reminded of that when I watched the speech that UK prime minister Gordon Brown recently gave at the TED conference. He states that we are at a unique historic moment where we are more interconnected than ever before and we are also developing a global ethic, both promising preconditions for solving global problems - poverty, climate change, economic crisis - in a global way.The solution he proposed remained vague but he clearly saw a need for a central institution which would have the means to globally enforce agreements or regulations. While this may certainly be part of the solution, I missed concepts of co-creation, empowerment, collaboration and individual responsibility in his vision. Being inside a politician's story maybe did not allow him to see that new forms of governance would be central to such a solution, if it is not just to repeat the patterns of administrative institutions stricken by political power-struggles.

Another example for a solution that repeats past patterns is the idea of a British company to put RFID barcodes on trees so that controlling the sustainability of forests becomes more transparent. They even assume that tagging trees could play a role in fighting deforestation, and therefore, could be seen as a measure to stop global warming. But the underlying concept is still that we can care only for things that we can control and that nature has to be properly put into our warehousing system for us to see its value. An alternative to applying technical control mechanisms could be to bring forests and communities together, something that Roald Gundersen and Amelia Baxter are trying to do with their Community Supported Forests. Members will get a specific part of the forest where they "can camp, hunt and garden on the land. They can forage for mushrooms, garlic mustard and wild ginger. They can get firewood, sustainably milled lumber, landscaping stone or fresh spring water." And in doing that, they will have a chance to get to know the forest as a friend and not just as a distant resource. That's a very different story, right?

Recently I heard of the Dark Mountain Project, a literary movement to rewrite the stories that we base our assumptions on. "We aim to question the stories that underpin our failing civilisation, to craft new ones for the age ahead and to write clearly and honestly about our true place in the world."

Becoming aware of the narratives that we live by and re-inventing them is very much what we need, in my view, to have a new context for transformation - on a personal, community or even institutional level.

Semantic Conflicts and Orthographic Anarchy

After reading about the social grammar of change (see Theory U by Otto Scharmer) I had an encounter with the semantics of social conflict today.

I was hiking with colleagues and the day was a bad choice as the weather was a variation of heavy rain, mist and just a few spells of sun. Finally sitting in the Panoramarestaurant on mount Wallberg, we did not get to see the scenic mountain panorama. But we got something more mystic and enchanting, at least this is how the view of the rising fog, crawling up alongside the mountain and rising into the sky, looked to me.

Was it really fog or should one speak of clouds? This is the question that led to a dispute between two of my colleagues: One insisted that what barred our view was fog, the other was convinced that in reality, the mist outside was a cloud. While the two discussed this, I realized that they actually had slightly different interpretations or semantics behind the same words. For the one, “fog” was what could be around you, while a “cloud” was further away (typically up in the sky, or potentially down in the sky when seen from a plane). For the other, “fog” was what materialized itself above surfaces while a “cloud” always formed in the sky. Down in our office, the two men would not even notice the uneven meaning they attribute to the same sequence of sounds. Up in the mountains, this slight distinctness became apparent (the mist was around us but appeared to have formed in the sky) and hence, a conflict arose.

Not a serious conflict, of course, but it brought home the familiar wisdom that much of the disputes and quarrels in our everyday life are actually about different uses of words and unnoticed misunderstandings. If we are able to go from dispute to dialogue (e.g. by applying the rules of nonviolent communication), we could probably more often than not uncover the deeper reason for conflict: Diverse meanings are associated to words or whole texts and we are not very conscious of this, we make vague assumptions about the intentions or interpretaitons of the other without asking for verification. Once these deeper layers of communication can be identified and laid open, finding “a common language” would be a lot easier.

Language and also how we use and understand it is fuzzy by nature and constantly evolving. It is only the dictionaries and grammar rules that make language look like something fixed. At school, pupils are trained to believe in these rules, they are taught that a sentence or a word can be used and written either correctly or incorrectly. Different contexts or different learning paths behind the word that an individual uses, play next to no role.

Which makes me wonder if Civilization 2.0, if we make it to this advanced level, would have a need to write down language rules. For the future society, it would be more important to foster communication “rules” or rather communication practices which allow people to lay open their semantics and interpretations as soon as they notice signs of misunderstanding. Probably there would be less mindless talk and more appreciation of diversity, as a result. Orthography might become an indicator of the historical context of a text. And individual orthography may be just as acceptable as the individual message of an author - any author, starting with the pupil in elementary school. (Written words may not even be as vital as we believe them to be today. Who knows, writing may be totally optional to learn...)

Come to think of it, signs for the end of orthographic rules can be found easily already today:

• Many authors have developed an individual way of expressing their thoughts also through an individual orthography. That makes their texts harder to read. That also means a reader will automatically pay much more attention to every single word and its contextual meaning.
• We hear that orthography of young people is getting worse because of texting. Txtng forcs U 2 rite n reed creatively. No rules, just be short.
• I have read and heard time and again that more pupils leave school and more students leave university without proper basic reading and writing skills. Maybe this lack of internalized rules can translate into freemindedness or creativity? A radical thought, but hey...
• Already today, keyboards are being replaced by touch screens. And when futurists say that we will stop typing or writing as everything can be controlled or communicated with spoken language or directly with thoughts, they may be talking of a very near future. Sensors and software that can comprehend language is already in use today, and also tools that can read the mind or respond to emotions already exist.
  

When written language becomes less important, so will grammar and orthography. This has implications basically for the way we learn foreign languages, but not for learning the mother tongue. (Sigh of relief ... no collective aphasia!).

On the other hand, semantics – the study of meaning - will become a lot more important, but not as a set of semantic rules, but rather as an awareness for context-based semantics and personal semantics.

The semantics of social conflict is replaced by a semantics of dialogue and awareness.

Magic Words

Dealing with new developments and the need to change brings me ever closer to a topic that has been dear to me since my childhood: The fascination with language.

Language can define the borders of what we allow ourselves to see and think. But language can also open a door to new understanding and a wider awareness. When I decided to study linguistics - and not something that would have seemed more practical - it was because I hoped to uncover the mystery of language.

I was reminded of the power of words several times last week.

The first instance was in a in a workshop about the future of education. In the course of the project, participating companies would dive into emerging opportunities in education for them as individual companies but also as a network. But at this early stage, the point was to get a common understanding for all relevant developments that affect education. It was our belief that these developments were visible in all forms of learning, be it at school, university or in company trainings. Yet, time and again a debate started whether we should make a distinction between primary education and further education already now. It became clear that the words we used and our belief that developments affect learning in general were out of sync. We dominantly spoke of "students" and "teachers", thus evoking a primary education setting. A colleague had the clarity to suggest that we start using more general terms - "learner" and "educator". Language evokes scenarios and sometimes we are simply not aware of this.

On my flight back I picked up an issue of US Today and browsing through the pages, I got stuck at the headline "Fighting Age and Illness with all natural products" that turned out to be an advertising slogan for American Rena. Fighting? Was it really appropriate to use metaphors of struggle and aggression in this context? Age and Illness? Since I don't belief that growing old is similar to having a disease I found the conjunction of the two words manipulative. The scenarios that Reno was trying to evoke through language felt totally wrong and my interest in Rena was gone.

The heavy book that I am currently carrying around with me adds still another angle: In Theory U. Leading from the Future as It Emerges, Otto Scharmer uses grammar as a metaphor to describe shifts in social systems. Social grammar is described as "the hidden rules, structures, and inflection points that enable certain types of evolution and emergence to happen." By understanding and using this grammar, change can come into being. The question how to make the leap from observed developments to structural change is exactly, what is often puzzling and challenging for me today. So here I am again with applied linguistics and my choice of study makes more sense than ever :-)