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It’s like playing football
Sustainocracy is like playing football. You need four things: a ball, a goal, results through some sense of competition and room to play. This metaphore is surprisingly accurate to get different disciplines of people to work together in a result driven way. Sustainocracy is about results in human based progress, defined by sustainable progress placing the interests of human beings at the kernel of the activities. It requires team work of different disciplines. This can only be achieved if the practicality of the four football needs are respected.
Putting together a successful sustainocratic team requires therefor a bit more than an abstract humankind saving mission. The humanistic overall goal may be clear but what makes a team come together to play and eventually score?
The ball is the clear priority that the team needs to work with, a reason. Throw a ball in a court, a garden or field and people will come to kick it around. In the sustainocratic team of AiREAS the ball is represented by the environmental quality of a city. What is needed to make the city environmentally healthy for human interaction and residence? This defines the game and goal but the ball needs to be something touchable, something that can be passed between the players. In the case of AIREAS this became the highly specialised measurement system of fine dust making the “invisible visible” for all. Certain types of people appeared to play.
The specialised network of high tech hard and sofware is indeed already a mission that excites certain institutional people. But having a ball to play with what will make them win the environmental battle? After all, environmental quality is not just achieved by implementing technology and introducing new regulations. This usually gets people to kick the ball around without ever scoring. Bureaucracy we call that.
It also needs public awareness and behavioral changes. The competition is created by asking the institutional and civilian world to come up with solutions and work together. We have now two teams that interact by playing the same ball, with the same objective but with different talents and tactics. The institutional players with power, products, systems and regulations, the civilian world with awareness, behavior and adaptive creativity. Which will achieve the most goals? And will they compete or play together? Both worlds fear eachother but get excited when challenged to play the environmental game together. In the end everyone wins of course as the game will be never ending while success and bad play will show through the measurement system with me as independent judge.
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Another example is performed by a colleague trainer and friend. He invites parents with their children to workshops and gets them to work together on some design made of wood. They follow the same learning routine as in AiREAS to gain teamspirit by playing the metaphorical game. The hamer represents the ball (instrument) and the object they have to make represents the goal (a table, bird house, chair…..). This is fun to do but gets exciting when father and child try to excell eachother in dispute how to do the work best. Or when they work with other parent/child combinations at the same time. There is no need or desire to create a formal competition because the human spirit does this itself, simply by comparison. “How did you do it?” “Show me yours”, “No dad, if you do it this way you achieve this”…..”Wow, yours is great”.
Admiration, comparison, positive feedback, recognition, celebrating accomplishments are positive triggers of human interaction and teamwork. Using the football metaphore in team building is useful to determine what is needed to get to great accomplishments. And if those goals are value driven for humankind then you play the City of Tomorrow game, the Sustainocratic way, improving the world with every play.
The last issue needed to succeed is “space”. When playing football you indeed need a field or play ground to kick the ball safely with out hurting or damaging anything. In the metaphore space also refers to the freedom to bring people together to play. In AiREAS it is made possible to play but other sustainocratic ventures have failed because of some old financial interest blocking it. In case of the parent/child relationship real life often does not automatically create space for parent and child to interact as a team and become constructive. Parents re often too occupied with work and other worries.
In all cases it is necessary to create or demand the space necessary to allow the team to assemble and play when a ball is there. Once room is created others may join in making the game more fun still.
Remember these four football issues (reason, objective, results and space) when in need of a team to tackle any issue. You may even become a champ by doing so. Then the game becomes even more fun as it will attract an audience. When people get applauded by the surroundings not even the sky becomes the limit.
They can’t tax my salade
The establishment hates living green
The more living green in the surroundings of the human being the less dependent one gets of economics. If we deal wisely with our living green we can even eliminate largely all money from our daily lives. Living green provides us with a great deal of abundance free of charge (but not free of effort and responsibility).
Health
The first thing that comes to mind is that a green environment has multiple health effects on us. We breath better, feel psycologically better, we feel sheltered and cooler, etc etc. Nature has also many ways to trick our psycology and spirituality by presenting us with a large variety of colors and shapes that we inspire us and that we can admire, as well as seasonal differences that help us understand cyclic patterns and universal wisdom.
food
We can eat a lot of the living green that grows automatically under the free sunlight that we enjoy. It produces a variety of fruits and vegetables that keep our daily needs well availaible if we wisely use this green around us. Insects and small animals are attracted to the vegitation, offering also another diversity of posibilities to us at will.
energy
Living green is the equivalent of nature for our solar panels and batteries. Green is the natural conversion and storage of solar energy into usable living and permamently availability of energy. To obtain the energy we can eat it, burn it, fossilize it for concentrated usage, let it rot or ferment, etc.
recreation
Living green is one of the most satisfying recreational facilities we have directly at hand if we want to. It keeps us busy with numerous hobbyist activities. We walk, jogg, sit, enjoy it by looking at it, tasting and feeling it. We use it to make works of art and utilities. Children run, dig, limb, jump, hide in it as a huge funfare.
water household
Living green attracts, manages, purifies, captures, etc our clean water household in our neighboorhood. It is key for our daily needs as well as the regional and global climatological situation for our wellbeing.
shelter
Living green provides us with direct shelter from rain and dangerous radiations. It supplies us with free building materials for housing.
Uninteresting
With all these benefits of living green why is it not all around us, supported by people and institutions in all the cities and regions of the world?
Because it grows and is used free of financial charges! It cannot be industrialized, manufactured, distributed, taxed and manipulated if we have it at directly at hand. Hence it cannot be economized when available, only when not.
The only way human systems can economize themselves is by keeping the benefits of living green away from us, to eliminate nature from our reality and replace it with money based artificial systems (supermarkets, solar panels, funfares, kiddy gardins, health systems, cooling devices, etc) that try to provide the same yet against a financial cost. Institutions hate green as it acts against their potential profitability. Cities are large money based human concentrations working along the laws of finance, not based on universal laws of nature in which abundance and progress is real, without money.
In current economic systems, whatever cannot be taxed (government tax, profit of business) should not exist. You cannot tax my own salade so it is eliminated from our lives to make it taxable through local scarcety. The world wide human crises have hence to do with the question: how far are you away from living green? Or can you afford that distance?
The solution for sustainable progress is hence: how fast can I get living green again back into my life?
Economics is in a crisis because they cannot tax my salade, and those who have no salade cannot afford it anymore.
The biggest entrepreneurial challenge ever
Entrepreneurship got a special status about 300 years ago when industrialization took over from specialized individual craftmanship. We can distinguish four phases since then:
1. Product manufacturing and sales
2. International growth and cost optimization
3. Marketing on sentiments
4. Speculation on shortages
The first three phases brought us consumer wellness and a transfer from global agricultural to industrial and logistic processes around retail. They all built up towards the fourth phase (making money without doing anything other than keeping wealth away from others) which brought us finally the crisis situation today. The fourth phase could not exist without the preceeding three.
For 300 years morality has followed the industrial era through the development of a care taking government (education and health regulation) to counter the greed and self interest of industrial kingdoms. Wars have been faught and political systems developped with left and right wing challenging each other through argumentation. Constitutions were written for human rights and governance while economic systems grew causing concentration of humankind in urban megastructures.
The phase of speculation finally unified greed up to a clear break up of human balans. The ecological and social consequences were so large that a fifth entrepreneurial phase announces itself. It is an entrepreneurial phase that does not just affect business but also governance, education and the individul awareness. behavior and mentality. In fact, the fifth phase is not a linear continuation of the former four, it is the very first post industrial and post economic phase announcing the global transformation.
Entrepreneurial phase 5 is dedicated to save humankind within its natural habitat.
This phase I refer to as sustainocracy, the compulsory focus on the sustainable preservation and continuation of the species.
It is a complicated phase because it ends a periode of perceived global luxury to replaced it with the indvidual and collective need to take responsibility. It puts the world upside down for most people and institutions. The phase is therefor preceded with a large period of overall political, executive and public negation which will cause death and disaster beyond any historic precedence. Those who are to blame will still be alive when all this happens and judgment day will surely confront them publicly in due time.
This entrepreneurial spirit of the fifth phase is however already building up throughout society, as my AiREAS venture (air quality, human health and city design) shows. It is not just individual anymore but also affecting the motivation of the large powerblocks of current humankind. These many people who use their personal motivation also in their institutional jobs to make a difference, have reached the point already of enlightenment and personal commitment to a new future. Sustainocratic processes lead the way, even if they are still small, fragile and extremely localized. Step by step these purpose driven ventures based on phase five of global entrepreneurship will build up enough power to break through the lethal dominance of the speculants of phase 4.
No institution can start a new world unless they are invited and willing to change
Important for everyone is to recognize and understand phase 4 and the transformative phase 5. Then the process will only speed up reducing the potential human suffering of phase 4 to an absolute minimum. Anyone can become a phase 5 entrepreneur. And when you do you’ll become aware that there is a lot of entreprenerial work to be done as simply everything made and organized by human beings needs to be changed. It will keep us passionately occupied for centuries to come.
