We are currently in the middle of the Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction. Although climate change is getting enormous press now, species die off is an even more severe problem – in part because unlike climate change, the nature of the problem is less likely to be solved by market mechanisms in a traditional business sense. Recently an important piece of scientific research was published called the Millenial Ecosystem Assessment (http://www.unfoundation.org/features/millennium_ecosystem_assessment.asp). Commonly known as the MEA, this report was unique because it brought together something like 1300 scientists from around the world to collaborate over a multi-year period. The outcome of their work is sobering if not terrifying, according to the MEA, roughly 60% of the world’s intact ecosystems are degraded, dying, damaged, polluted. According to reports in scientific academic journals, species are dying off at an alarming rate with 25% of the world’s remaining mammals to die off within the next 30 years. In stark terms this is the global collapse of the food web.
The problem is so daunting and total in its implications and still somehow very few people have any idea that this is happening. To that end, an amazing event occurred last week in Berkeley. My housemate and uber networker, Jim Fournier (co-founder of http://www.planetwork.net,) along with several colleagues hosted a 4-day creativity session to specifically address the gap between the size of the problem and the lack of public awareness. The event was structured to bring funders and media consultants together with various teams working on systemic solutions for species extinction. Bay Area attendees included meta cognition smith and neural linguist Dr. George Lakoff http://www.rockridge institute.com exchange.org">www.global exchange.org Jay Golden from Free Range Graphicshttp://www.freerangegraphics.com and Dr. David Ulansey from the California Institute of Integral Studies http://www.ciis.edu Extra-regional participants included nationally reknown political pundit & humorist Thom Hartmann http://www.thomhartmann.commarketing and brand strategists, biologists like award winning Dr. Stuart Pimm from Duke University http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/people/faculty/pimm2.html evolutionary systems thinkers and a range of media creators.
Creativity sessions are excellent tools for groups to generate a field of ideas and vet the viability of a range of solutions to determine those that will have the highest efficacy. Efficacy is defined by the rate of adoption of the innovation against the population of adopters that is necessary to realize the impact of the innovation - in this case buy in from enough people to halt the erosion of biodiversity. Especially as we grapple with increasing complexity, it is more important to shift our thinking away from finding the “right” solution to finding “effective” solutions - this is the “Cradle-to-Cradle” approach. In complexity there is no such thing as a right answer. (Peter Senge discusses this in The Fifth Discipline published by the Society of Organizational Learninghttp://www.solonline.org – a must read for anyone working in sustainability.)
I’m excited by this project for two reasons. First, the complexity and hidden nature of extinction makes it difficult to diffuse solutions since there is no public traction about the issue. This is understandable since the degree of complexity related to extinction precludes most people's ability to grasp how to design effective solutions. Grouping high level business minds to think about messaging and branding along with funders and viable project managers makes it possible to communicate to people exactly what is at stake and what needs to happen to turn the situation around. Often a media campaign is generated but there is no place for people’s attention to go once they get the message. This group has bet on its ability to do both.
Secondly, this group is innovating and modeling a collaborative approach to a systemic problem and in so doing is modeling the conditions that make life thrive on Earth – interdependence and interconnectedness – essentially biomimicry applied to human organization. This is an example of how to build a truly distributed and shared vision using collaborative tools and systems thinking. By bringing together diverse people representing multiple perspectives, solutions become more comprehensive, exciting and tend to have more traction since more people are vested in the success of the outcomes.
