Business innovations for global good
We are crossing a divide to a new world where the role of business is changing and must change. While this is no small task, it seems ultimately essential to put us on the path to a thriving, not dying, biosphere.
We have one planet. We will succeed together or fail together.
Encouragingly, evidence is mounting that in many instances leaders, from start-ups to multi-nationals are re-orienting business, becoming B-Corps, prioritizing purpose and contribution. The realization that what regenerates the planet, also generates profit and health for business, is beginning to take hold.
We’ve found that chronicling the BEST, celebrating business innovations for global good, builds confidence and capacity. I’m encouraged by clients who see the value of being locally certified as a Green Business, stretching for B Corp certification, and going beyond that to tell a different story about healthy consumption and re-use.
Eileen Fisher and Patagonia are two companies who continue to inspire me. Every month I see them speak about ways they are taking their accountability to the next level in everything from sourcing to manufacturing to worker health to community to supply chain to shipping to re-use/re-purpose.
This is an entirely different way to do business.
What is driving businesses to become potent agents of change?
Published in 2021, The Business of Building a Better World: The Leadership Revolution that is Changing Everything, edited by David Cooperrider and Audrey Selian, outlines several motivating factors including the realization that we are one interconnected world. We share one immune system.
We need to break with the old models and mindsets that produced and keep producing the many faceted crises we face today. We need new models and mindsets for how we think and operate in a world that has fundamentally changed.
Aim2Flourish, an initiative at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University is changing the story about business from best IN the world to best FOR the world. Celebrating business innovations aligned with the UN Global Goals, students worldwide use a strengths-based Appreciative Inquiry approach to identify, research, and publish stories about positive and profitable business innovations. Take a look at this year’s award winners!
Although business has a lot of potential to make a difference, that promise has not yet been fulfilled. What is missing? Why aren’t more leaders and businesses taking responsibility for the role they play in accelerating the damaging effects of climate change? Rather than inspiring, these stories break our hearts as businesses prioritize greenwashing instead of pivoting to more sustainable practices; continue chemical effluence from outdated manufacturing practices; promote rampant consumerism of non-regenerative product designs.
What is missing? Why do these leaders continue to prioritize short-term return for shareholders? Do they lack the courage to make a change? Or are they missing a shift in perception, an updated mindset, a turn toward paradigms that more fully inform their understanding of the nature of the world and their role in ensuring a flourishing future for generations to come?
Global consciousness is a potential framework for this level of profound change.
As Chris Laszlo said in a recent talk, “Global Consciousness changes leaders at a deep level of self-concept so they choose to pursue flourishing because that is who they are.”
Applying this to business, global consciousness is a paradigm of interconnectedness, a way of thinking and relating that motivates leaders to pursue making a positive impact on the world while running a highly effective business. They are not just pursuing profits in ways that do less harm, but instead creating a wider experience of vital health, seeding prosperity in the communities where they operate, innovating sustainable practices, contributing to a regenerative natural environment, and improving the well-being of all stakeholders.
How do we talk about global consciousness and spread this idea? Many people are working on this. Mary Gelinas and Alan Briskin invite conscious awareness of global fields in Space is Not Empty. In Quantum Leadership, Chris Laszlo and Fred Tsao outline an emerging understanding of a quantum view of reality as composed of vibrational fields of energy that connect us in space and time.
Global consciousness is multi-layered
In my experience, global consciousness is multi-layered. I note 4 levels useful to distinguish for their implications in business and leadership. Intentional practices can be engaged to increase capacity at each level. I’ll explore these more in future blogs.
1. Global thinking – The capacity and disposition to understand and act upon issues of global significance. The awareness of the global, international, and/or cross-cultural sources, interconnections, and/or implications of systems and/or actions.
2. Individual sensing – Individual stage of human development where we sense our oneness with humanity and all life. We attend to the complexity of interrelated systems that surround us in the environment, in our teams, families and communities, from an experience of connectedness rather than an isolated self.
3. Collective acting – Collective capacity to see the whole and purposefully work collaboratively, across traditional divisions, toward broad based system-level solutions to global challenges such as climate change and social justice. We work with the patterns of nature, knowing the intelligence that lies in all parts of the system.
4. Transcendent knowing – A set of assumptions and shared experience that we live in vibrational fields of energy that connect us through space and time. As spirit-filled beings we are consciously participating in an evolutionary progression with all life on earth and beyond.
We engage the first level as we extend awareness beyond a particular organization or community, sense into and account for the interconnected systems encircling the globe. Increasing number of conscious leaders and social change activists think at this level recognizing that no change happens in isolation, that we are an interconnected whole. Any substantial change ripples out to affect, in often unexpected ways, other parts of the system.
I recently reflected on a personal experience on Mt. Tamalpais, the “sleeping lady” coastal mountain where we live. A number of years ago, we circumnavigated the mountain, finding 14 miles of connections on the climbing and descending trails. My perception of the mountain shifted from the parts, the ridges, and valleys I knew so well, to the mountain as a whole. I gained a global perspective and suddenly cared as much about the north side of the mountain as I did the south and west that majestically rise above our home.
In each of these levels, global consciousness helps us see our role as active co-creators, rather than passive observers, creatively influencing and shaping our experiences, (as we are continuously influenced and shaped) and the fields within and around us, in a connected universe.
A powerful Reflect and Affirm Practice
We struggle with the language in a business context. We are still learning how to speak about the interconnectedness, non-locality, and whole-system perspective of global consciousness. Here is one simple, yet powerful, practice that I’ve found shifts global consciousness from an enticing yet broad concept into an embodied knowing and source of conscious action.
Reflect and Affirm Practice – Notice and appreciate moments, both past and current, when you tapped into the wide or deep perspective of global consciousness. In a recent meeting, I asked: remember a time when you experienced what you might consider global consciousness. After a few minutes of reflection, no one hesitated. The stories were rich, diverse, and personally meaningful.
With mindful awareness, we deepen a sense of trust in these different levels. Over time, the flashes of understanding, the insights are embodied until they consistently inform our thinking and our actions, whether in the stillness of meditation or at work designing strategy, managing people, or responding to a crisis. Our sense of awe and respect for the ‘sacred’ naturally becomes part of our work and leadership.
The work of system scientist Donella Meadows points to the way that shifting the mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises is the highest point of leverage for intervening in a complex system.
As we engage in practices of global consciousness, and open to the sacred in everyday life, we develop the consciousness needed to navigate the uncertainty and complexity of the emerging world. The way we see ourselves and our role in the world shifts. We think differently, innovate, and pilot social innovations to inspire and serve a flourishing earth.
We are crossing a divide from an older model of the role of business in society to a new paradigm for how business operates in society. What is your role? What is mine?
Our task is to welcome and cultivate, to engage in practices where we connect with global consciousness in ourselves and with each other, and then bring this forward, with some urgency, to define a new role for business.
