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It is not about what you have on offer….
It is about what you can create!
My mailbox is flooded all the time with offers from other people providing stuff that I do not need. Everyone wants my attention for their things. When I enter a discussion on LinkedIn or a blog I find people trying again to sell “their solutions” to “my problems”.
When I was offered space free of charge on the electronic billboard of my home town I actually noticed that we had billboards all together. Don’t ask me what was on it. When someone with over 50.000 twitter followers tweeted my YouTube link on sustainocracy I only got 7 views and I didnot even sell anything. That is in marketing terms a hitrate of 0.00014. Did that bother me? No not at all. The person who retweeted had been sufficiently impressed to share her feelings with the other and even 7 (!) people picked up the curiosity to have a look. In the process we together created something: curiousity, empathy, awareness, thinking, reflection, dialoge…..Every one single individual is important then, not the masses.
We are so used to consuming that we forget that we need to create too. Consuming extracts value from our surroundings. We consume it. If we do not return anything then the value disappears. Delivering money as a payment is not enough. What value does it have? Where does it come from?
Every day we set out to buy things from people who have things on offer. We buy petrol but what do we give back in terms of energy? We buy bread but do we compensate by planting grains? What is your balance today in creating and buying? How much time do you spend offering your services, products or wits? And how much time do you spend in thinking of creating something of value, something new?
How are we going to progress if no one creates? Just consumes?
In a sustainocracy we are not interested in your products, your services or what you have on offer. We are only interested in what you can create, co-create or help create. You may want to use your products in the process but maybe you find that you need to address your creativity and innovative spirit. We are interested in productive value driven talent, not a cost. Only when values are created they can be shared. Existing products can be valuable in such process of course but still need to placed in the context of the entire picture. We normally leave that responsibility to the buyer but in sustainocracy we take the responsibility together.
Solidarity taxes and ethics
In Holland we apply the “law of solidarity” for the national costs of healthcare. This means that everyone has to contribute by law. The exception that confirms the rule are religious people that place their faith in a higher power and do no want to insure themselves for medical care. To cover the solidarity principles and avoid misusages those people are exempted from contributing but agree to pay a higher tax.
Healthcare is one of the largest social costs in Dutch society and it grows tremendously. In 2013 we all have to contribute about 16.500€ per person (babies included) in taxes, of which 5000€ or more are related to healthcare. It takes a lot of solidarity to accept that.
The high costs may have to do with the graying population, the longer life expectancy and the many illnesses we encounter along the way. It also may have to do with the extremely high bureaucracy, inefficiency and hierarchical structure of the caring system. It may also have to do with the fact that the healthcare has been more or less liberated but with just one source of financial support: the seemingly unlimited tax and insurance payer’s money. Business people in health care are smart in tricking and cause over time an exponential curve of costs that have little to do with medical care and very much with a culture of greed over the back of the fearful, aging, lonely and worried and by law committed citizens.
The problem we face now is that we ethically question the type of society we have built. The costs of our healthcare are a direct consequence of our lifestyle. Many people introduce a new lifestyle and want to take a different approach to healthcare. They cannot because of the old lawful imposition of solidarity with the old system. They are not religous enough to turn their back to everything yet do reveal serious opposition against a system that destroys our habitat and with it ourselves. Paying an increased amount of money for an obsolete system gives the feeling of contributing to something that is wrong. When we also see that healthcare is being canabailzed by the system and only very little of the invested money actually gets used for health care the solidarity is rapidly ailing. Solidarity then means that you support a system that you want to disappear.
Alternatives health systems are being proposed and developped but find serious blockage along the way by the current system, supported by law. People who develop such progress do this for themselves and their fellow people. They show the same or more solidarity than those who just pay off their responsibilities through unquestioned taxes and insurances. Ethics should become a new parameter in society that allows changes to be happening with an important degree of progressive freedom. Solidarity should never be be expressed in money, it needs to expressed in terms of humanism, social meaningful interaction and value creation. If people pretend to be able to do better than government why should they not be allowed the chance?
Ethics is an inner commitent of people towards a universe and our human evolution. When this is questioned or blocked by a government or any other organization then people claim their universal rights. Solidarity should be with ethics, not money, hierarchies or politics. Time hence for change.
Effective keeping of human beings
Now that Sustainocracy is positioned and put into practice as new paradigm of societal complexity, affecting everything, it becomes interesting to reflect openly on the different ways of reasoning from the different worldviews. This may be a critical view because paradigms are based on totally different values. Someone who has lived both (money driven economics and value driven sustainocracy) can distinguish by experience and choice. Yet someone active without point of comparison inside the old paradigm will consider his or her views as the only truth.
Let us take this article for instance, that has been tweeted around the world today by many people, published by Forbes on Nov. 21st, 2012, written by a SAP specialist, Ray Rivera. It is titled: 5 Myths Of Human Resource Management (even though the link to the article refers to Human Capital Management) http://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2012/11/21/5-myths-of-human-capital-management/
The article is a valid reflection about general practices in traditional business hierarchies. Seen through my old eyes of chief executive officer in a multinational I would most certainly review our internal policies with my HRM after reading the article. I remember our internal global policy back then to provide 10 training days per year to all our personnel. It was a hell of a job to find those days and get people motivated to do something with it. From a performance point of view it was useless, cost a bucket full of money and created constant absence in departments that needed to be filled up with people doing overwork.
All other remarks in the article are also valid. Take those of the financial incentives as perceived motivators. I remember sales people that tried to trick the system by submitting fake orders at the end of the year to collect their bonus. The fake orders were cancelled early the next year. In times of a crisis taking away any of the incentives becomes a burden. People leave a company simply because another one offers a nicer car. There is no commitment nor loyalty, just self interest. In fact, that is exactly what such hierarchies and policies attract: people with an individualistic, opportunistic, selfish attitude, equivalent to that of the company itself.
In a previous lifetime these issues were indeed of my concern. That was 20 years ago and they are still being published as novel and tweeted around as of general interest. Now, after crossing over to a new paradigm, the entire article becomes a reflection on what a Dutch author called “effective keeping of human beings” in a similar way as keeping chickens, pigs or cows. A particular sentence in the article struck me especially:
“How human capital becomes transformed into business value is still a black box”
When we look at the current world of business entities, performing around financial goals, we can easily recognize the “human farming” attitude. In the traditional paradigm this is normal and even worshipped by media, trading floors and governments. Human resources is a modern way of slavery where the business value of a human being is expressed by turnover per person or something equivalent. Such organization does not get the best out of people but the worst. Surrounded by short term financials, greed and more greed one becomes greedy and selfish automatically.
In the new paradigm there are no financial goals but purpose driven objectives. It is not the workforce that is asked to take responsibility, the company does, providing some kind of true added value to society. People do not come to work, they contribute. They do not need training because they train themselves. They do not need an incentives because the work itself and the achievements are a driving force already. People do not work in a hierarchical structure, they have a functional responsibility in a result driven team. The goals of the company are measurable through external progress. New people in the group assume responsibilities but change when the balance of the group requires the repositioning of the members, even when dealing with functional leadership. Leaders step back into the pack when they are done or when the group takes another direction for the benefit of the company and the purpose in persuit. There is equality and trust, no judging departments just connecting values among professionals for effective teamwork. People correct eachother.
Now that I know that such different types of organizations exist it is my choice to decide where I feel safest. Even if a sustainocratic organization is not yet functional in my neighborhood I can still behave accordingly and become the change that I want. I can also decide that I prefer such culture of hierarchical demand on me. Important is that one has a reflective choice when one knows.
Just like the other tweet today of someone claiming that it is nice to know that he didnot know certain things. One only knows that it would be nice not to know when one knows. This phylosophical reflection in reality states that when you do not know you cannot be held responsible for your actions seen from another paradigm. When you do know you may wish you didn’t, just to avoid responsibility. Now you know that different paradigms exist. What do you do? What responsibility to you take?
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 