Sustainability ‘N+1′.0
October 30th, 2009 | Published in Sustainability
Sustainability has progressed through different iterations. In retrospect these iterations have been like gentle waves, the 1.0, the 2.0, the 3.0, beckoning us into the future. Some organizations have heeded these calls and ridden the assisting currents to begin to some degree to re-conceptualize themselves.
We believe, however, that the context of sustainability is not about compliance (1.0), not even about integration of CSR and sustainability into business models (2.0), and not even about product innovation (3.0). These waves are the calm before the storm. We believe that the context of sustainability is nothing less than a radical call from the future, that breakpoint wave plus one (‘N+1’.0), insisting on wave after wave until businesses have redefined themselves such that their very bases of operation is commitment to the deepest drivers of progress possible to human-kind.
These drivers will provide an inner freedom from the biases prevalent in today’s rendering of business reality to allow development to proceed along the most sustainable lines possible. Prior to that point, all the way up to the Nth wave, the context of development is continually being missed and wave will follow wave creating a veritable storm of epidemic proportions, until the true nature of the call is heeded. After that point, the Nth + 1 wave, sustainability takes on a different meaning, and itself becomes sustainable. The Nth + 1 wave, hence, alters the equilibrium of development. The Nth + 1 wave signals a tipping awareness toward a reality marked by a progressive, conscious, fully-integrated world-system.
The beginning of the storm is already evident in the confluence of forces we are experiencing now. At the visible macro-end our very playing-field is itself in increasing danger as evident through such phenomena as Climate Change. For in reality Climate Change seems to be nothing less than a rebellion by matter to the way of being of the evolving constructs of matter. A reset, way beyond management of GHG emissions, is required to truly set this aright. At the visible micro-end these debilitating forces are manifest in such phenomena as the flow of deeply compromising products, whether of processed foods, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, electronics, energy, or financial products, that many of us have become slaves to. This compromising flow is in fact an outcome of our power as human-beings in that what we desire and seek for is what we inevitably create at the end of the day. In that many of us have hungered for the quick and cheap product easily available at our very doorstep, that is precisely what we have created, even in the face of exorbitant costs to deeper ideals and more sustainable possibilities.
With the visible macro and micro ends of our progressive, conscious, fully-integrated world-system out of balance, economies, financial markets, and corporations have to fail. This is an in-built defense mechanism of a conscious and living world-system. There is nothing surprising about this.
In the face of these growing symptoms we see the only path forward as recognition of the truer nature of our world-system, of our central place in it, and a truer cause-effect relationship evident in various fractal models that link players and parts of the world-system together in more accurate ways thereby accelerating the adoption of principles inherent in the Nth + 1 wave, and the movement toward the crucial tipping point. Change at the policy level, at the market level, at the level of the corporation is all well and good, but unless there is deep change that facilitates shifts in perceptions at the individual level so that the reality of our fractal world-system and the right relationship to it results, and so that these and other demands implicit in the Nth + 1 wave are embraced now, these other changes will at best function as stop-gap measures only.
Organizations must begin a redefinition on many different fronts based on a more enlightened understanding of the reality of our world-system. Shocks of the nature of Climate Change and the failure of financial markets will continue until this redefinition and the reality of Sustainability ‘N+1’.0, that inescapable demand from a living world-system, manifests.
The most robust approach to creating a sustainable world is to manage the fractals that are responsible for chaos on a global scale at their very roots. Of necessity this implies facilitating shifts in perception at the individual level so that our learned and often myopic habits and ways of being can flower out into an altogether different way of being and the consequent fractals responsible for negative organizational activity and impact on the global levels be positively shifted forever. This truth is captured in the book Connecting Inner Power with Global Change, and forms the basis of Aurosoorya’s program on Sustainability N+1 eLearning.
