Nicolette Meeder (The STIR Academy – teaching sustainocracy) asked me to draw and explain the two lines of human complexities so that she could film it. It is generally believed that people tend to understand a verbal and visual explanation better than when just reading about it. We found a nice location nearby in Eindhoven (Holland): the 11th century watermill that was painted in 1884 by Vincent van Gogh and made world famous since then.

For your comfort I recorded the same short message in three languages:

• The TO DO line stands for level of organization, knowledge, structure, group activities, inventions, institutionalization, action, etc. It is refered to as a masculine line (Yang).
• The TO BE line stands for level of spirituality, awareness, consciousness, reflection, morality, cohesion, purpose, etc. It is refered to as a feminine line (Yin).

Both lines interact equally producing sustainable progress as we see in families and need to bring structurally into communities. If we don’t we will face cyclic moments of wealth and chaos.

Dutch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZkQogXzZNE

English: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWgVbDL4Tco

Spanish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRIFol217pc

While sitting there enjoying the beautiful weather, the wind, the trees and the beauty of ancient human ingenuity it is difficult to imagine that we are all capable of destroying it all out of greed and lack of consciousness. It reminded me of my second blog, on november 2nd 2008 (nearly 100 blog items away now and still very relevant) stating that the credit crisis was just the beginning of a huge human challenge but not of nature.

It is equally difficult to understand that we need to take personal responsibility to make a difference and cannot rely on institutions that have developed into blown up, destructive, fragmented human structures that give us money in exchange for our labor to uphold their destructive existence. We call this “work” and need the financial means to “live”. Due to our dependence on “money” we may become aware that this work in institutions is potentially destroying our life but we are forced to continue if we want to survive the short term. This is  a crazy paradox.

I introduced Sustainocracy some time ago to position institutional activities in the field of sustainable human progress. This requires executives to make a choice of responsibility. “What do they take responsibility for?”, their CV as a destructive old paradigm manager or the CV as institutional transformer through personal leadership? Sustainocracy helps them because they cannot take responsibility for the entire human progress from within a fragmented institutional specialization. They need to take responsibility together with other, different, institutional responsibilities in a co-creative, non competitive, purpose drive environment.

When that occurs everything changes. People who are employed will not go to work anymore. They will contribute to the human progress that the company stands for in its sustainocratic ventures. Success is not measured in KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) but in true improvement in human health, stability, safety, etc performed by all participants together and each being rewarded for their specific part in the progression.

Some people ask me why human beings need to progress? My answer is that we need to adapt continuously to our ever changing environment. Every change induces new changes which make us change again. This fundamental and necessary alertness to adaptive to ever changing circumstances can be filled with wisdom, awareness and innovation. We call that progress because we learn over time to do this better. Our mission is not to eliminate change from our lives through control but live with change effectively through awareness and consciousness. Then we will progress in a sustainable manner.

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