Does Money Make You Mean?

Four Horsemen - Feature Documentary - Official Version

The Dawn of System Leadership

This is an excerpt of the article "Dawn of System Leadership" in Stanford Social Innovation Review

"The deep changes necessary to accelerate progress against society's most intractable problems require a unique type of leader—the system leader, a person who catalyzes collective leadership."

"We believe system leadership is critical for the times in which we now live, but the ideas behind it are actually quite old. About 2,500 years ago Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu eloquently expressed the idea of individuals who catalyze collective leadership: 

The wicked leader is he whom the people despise.
The good leader is he whom the people revere.
The great leader is he of whom the people say, “We did it ourselves.”

"The real question today is, Is there any realistic hope that a sufficient number of skilled system leaders will emerge in time to help us face our daunting systemic challenges? We believe there are reasons for optimism. First, as the interconnected nature of core societal challenges becomes more evident, a growing number of people are trying to adopt a systemic orientation. Though we have not yet reached a critical mass of people capable of seeing that a systemic approach and collective leadership are two sides of the same coin, a foundation of practical know-how is being built."

"Second, during the last thirty years there has been an extraordinary expansion in the tools to support system leaders, a few of which we have touched on in this article. We have observed numerous instances where the strategic use of the right tool, at the right time, and with the right spirit of openness, can shift by an order of magnitude the ability of stakeholders to create collective success. With the right shifts in attention, networks of collaboration commensurate with the complexity of the problems being addressed emerge, and previously intractable situations begin to unfreeze."

"Last, there is a broad, though still largely unarticulated, hunger for processes of real change. This is undoubtedly why a person like Mandela strikes such a resonant chord. There is a widespread suspicion that the strategies being used to solve our most difficult problems are too superficial to get at the deeper sources of those problems. This can easily lead to a sense of fatalism—a quiet desperation that our social, biological, economic, and political systems will continue to drift toward chaos and dysfunction. But it can also cause people to be more open to seeking new paths. Compared to even a few years ago, we find that many today are exploring new approaches that move beyond the superficial to ignite and guide deeper change. Organizations and initiatives like those described in this article have succeeded because of a growing awareness that the inner and outer dimensions of change are connected. As our awakening continues, more and more system leaders who catalyze collective leadership will emerge."

The Great Work...

“History is governed by those overarching movements that give shape and meaning to life by relating the human venture to the larger destinies of the universe. Creating such a movement might be called the Great Work of a people…. The Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.”

“The Great Work before us… is not a role that we have chosen. It is a role given to us, beyond any consultation with ourselves. We are, as it were, thrown into existence with a challenge and a role that is beyond any personal choice. We did not choose. We were chosen by some power beyond ourselves for this historical task. The nobility of our lives, however, depends upon the manner in which we come to understand and fulfill our assigned role.” From The Great Work by Thomas Berry

"New Dawn of Financial Capitalism"

Excellent article from Institutional Investor Magazine "New Dawn of Financial Capitalism" frames some new thought to address the weaknesses of the current financial paradigm.

(1) Professionalisation of Asset Owners (2) Reintermediation of finance (3) adoption of the power of information technology for analysis by asset owners (4) development of new models to invest in the real economy.

Transcription of the Interview of me with Planet Experts about Responsible Investing

Here's a recent interview of me on my views from Planet Experts

Socially Responsible Investing: An Interview With Gregory Wendt

Recently, Planet Experts sat down with Gregory Wendt, a veteran wealth advisor, economist and Certified Financial Planner. Greg is considered a thought leader in his field of sustainable and responsible investing and green business. He is the founder of several non-profit community organizations and a leading advocate in improving capital markets for triple bottom line economic development. Greg is a recognized social entrepreneur where he applies a multidisciplinary systems design approach to financial innovation and community economic development.

Planet Experts: Having formerly worked at several of Wall Street’s most prestigious firms, including Smith Barney and Prudential Securities, you are presently a Certified Financial Planner specializing in sustainable and responsible investing. What triggered your professional transition? 

Greg Wendt: Sustainability is actually where I started. When I was at UCLA in 1988 I learned about the new paradigm when the United Nations Brundtland Commission came out with their initial report called “Our Common Future.” That’s where the term “sustainable development” actually was coined: which is to build a more robust framework for emerging “third world” world countries to become advanced economies and to become industrialized by incorporating the gifts of modern culture and leaving the challenges behind.

The challenge is, even at that point in the ’80s we realized that it was virtually impossible to have everyone around the world consuming the same amount on a per capita basis, considering the amount of resources that first-world nations use – we simply wouldn’t have enough planet. So the whole idea is, and was, how do we advance these societies in a sustainable fashion while increasing prosperity for all stakeholders? The key phrase in the definition of sustainable development is ‘meeting the needs of the current generation without compromising the needs of the future generation.’

I started as a Biochemistry undergraduate at UCLA, then I changed to Math Computer Science. And then I changed from Math Computer Science to Economics. Through the multidisciplinary lens that I had developed, it just made sense that we manage our society and economy to meet the needs of both current and future generations.

When I was a child, I’d read about being an oceanographer and watched Carl Sagan, Jacque Cousteau, and was really inspired by these wise visionaries. I grew up in Southern California – surfing and tide pools and studying marine biology, complex mathematics, science and all that. So, that was my framework which brought me into this full spectrum viewpoint, and thus sustainable development just seemed to fit and appeared like the more sophisticated framework for an economic system which would work for 100 percent of humanity, and all life. If we’re managing the economy and the inputs and outputs, then we have to manage in accord with whatever’s going on for the entire the planet.

I began my real dive into this world by speaking at a conference in 1989 called “Globescope Pacific Assembly,” which was in preparation for the first United Nations Earth Summit in 1992. During that conference we conducted working groups sessions with 500 sustainability leaders from all over North America. I played a very small role, but it was a document that gave input to the Earth Summit from North American constituents. It was called ‘A Citizen’s Response to Sustainable Development.’

So, when I got into the work world, I tried various jobs until a friend of mine wanted me to work for him as an apprentice at Smith Barney. And I took the position and learned about the ins-and outs of the investment world, analyzed and traded municipal bonds. At that time I also learned about what we called socially responsible investing and that’s when I set the intention to make responsible investing my profession.

And then after working in the big firms, watching and learning the system over 11 years, I experienced positive and the negatives of the way that Wall Street’s mentality operates. Through that, I determined that I only wanted to serve clients who desired to have their money managed with a lens for responsible investing. So, I went into private practice to exclusively manage the wealth of clients who are committed to investing responsibly. I wanted to spend my days in relationships only with people who are committed to creating a better world with their money. I found it was much more satisfying to me and my clients as an independent advisor rather than being within an organization that prioritizes its own agenda and products over the client’s needs and priorities.

I went into private practice in 2002 and joined a small firm, which became a larger firm and in the last two years moved to another firm that was dedicated solely to responsible investing. Because I really wanted to be surrounded by colleagues who get everything I’m about. Fundamentally, responsible investing is not about a business alone or a money-making strategy alone or a bargaining angle, but a mission to fundamentally change the way we do business on the planet and how we harvest and steward the rewards of our enterprises.

As an ethos, we must transform the way we do business on the planet from a business relationship with nature to a reverence and partnership with nature. And that’s just smart systems thinking to just observe the system around us. One of my mentors, Hazel Henderson, talks about the fact that the way that economics is practiced today is “theory-induced blindness” – and any one of us who’s studied economics with the traditional paradigm knows the concept of externalities. Well, in the real world, externalities don’t really exist. There’s no “out there” when you consider the system of the whole planet. And the idea that the economy is a closed system where everything is separate from everything else is a totally false premise. In reality everything is an open system and everything is connected, it’s just that most of our systems are not sophisticated enough to embrace this straightforward reality.

The mission of responsible investing is to change the way we do business on the planet and moving money, which is the fuel for business, in a way that supports the evolution of our economic paradigm. That’s why I do it and I’m grateful to be in alignment with a number of professionals both in my firm and around the world who have the sense of that core mission. That’s how we live our businesses.

PE: A corporation’s primary responsibility is to generate and maximize wealth for its shareholders. How do you counter the long-held belief shared by many in the for-profit sector that being environmentally responsible cuts against the grain of capitalism — and that the two are mutually exclusive?

GW: I’m going to push back a little bit and challenge that initial assumption that businesses’ sole responsibility is to make money. That is the presumption of many in our world today based on Milton Friedman’s advocating that the only social responsibility in business is to make money – but that was a presumption based on that economic theory and our current modern system has found that one presumption. But when we look at the whole system – we realize that most people are afraid to challenge or question our own assumptions. I think that the root of what we’re dealing with here is that there are many of us making assumptions in this world based on what we believe, but we don’t recognize the assumptions that were adopted earlier were based on fundamentally false premises.

I’ve been asked to give a talk this weekend at business conference on conscious business and conscious capitalism. I intend to raise some very fundamental questions. Regardless of how you define the term “conscious” I’m going to ask: ‘How are you going to have a conscious business if you don’t have conscious people?’ And if you have conscious people in conscious businesses, we must develop conscious relationships within businesses and between businesses. And that’s a way of saying that we cannot separate business from ourselves as human beings and we cannot separate ourselves from each other and the biosphere that we live in. There’s no real separation in reality when we simply observe what is actually going on in the “real world.”

You can’t really say that the economy is separate from everything else like a machine that just spits out money and we spend it. There are so many very tangible, observable consequences when we look at these externalities, yet the whole system is based on the idea that “someone else will deal with those consequences.” “Someone else” is us.

It’s actually impossible to have a business that’s separate from the world. So we have to really challenge that overly simplistic idea in economics 101 that everything outside of what we define as “a business” is as an externality that just evaporates. Now our ability to see how things interact has been significantly improved by big data analysis and new software analytic tools. We now have the ability to actually create better models and better approximations of the way that the world actually works. We can actually begin to understand what has been conceived of as the “butterfly effect” where when a butterfly flaps its wings, there are real results across the globe.

So that’s the way the world works. There’s nothing that’s separate, and then we have to then challenge these assumptions and start from there. I just moderated a panel last week at the Social Capital Markets Conference in San Francisco, and my fellow panelists and I discussed the reality that nature includes society, and society includes business and economy. The three are not separate systems with nothing in between. That’s the way the world is, yet we have this presumption that business is over there, society’s over there and nature’s over there and they’re three different separate systems. And every idea born out of the paradigm of separate systems are false premises based on an illusion, and everything we have in our society is based on that illusion.

Many, if not all, of our institutions and systems and financial models and theories in our economy are based on absolutely false premises – which is probably why they’re not working so well to protect the integrity of the biosphere and why we have significant breakdowns in society emerging across the world.

PE: Well let me ask you about those false premises. You clearly believe that business and the biosphere can work together, that it’s a natural part of the system. Yet how common is that mode of thinking within the business community, and can people be made to come around to your philosophy?

GW: You might be asking Copernicus, how many people around us believe the Earth is the center of the universe? And everyone will say, well, everyone believes that except that one guy – because it’s true. But just because it’s conventional wisdom doesn’t mean it’s wise or accurate [laughs].

The document ‘A Citizen’s Response to Sustainable Development’ I mentioned earlier was created 25 years ago. That document I still have in my files and I look at it occasionally and I see that what we contributed as recommendations to the Earth Summit in 1989 is still applicable now. In a quarter of a century the environmental and social justice and sustainability movement has been ineffective at creating the broad vision we held at that time. We’ve been trying to convince business and government leaders to prioritize the natural environment, our health, and future generations’ well being and all the things that we care about over the limited scope of priorities. And our approach has not resulted in a fraction of the vision our movement held.

We must change our approach from “us and them” to just “us”. And even though some people have tried to use Big Data to generate the awareness and recognize our false premises, there is not enough action taking place. It is necessary to live by example and to operate form a new paradigm. It is extremely hard to start, but if we are successful, others will naturally follow.

If you look at the conversation in our climate centers, it’s irrefutable evidence that climate change is actually happening, but more evidence is not getting certain policymakers to change their point of view. So what is it that we can do? Well we can live by  example, by transmuting mindsets we hold, and through operating from a new paradigm we can create new systems, which could demonstrate better health, well-being, more prosperity – better outcomes. Then, we can actually demonstrate this is working with real living examples.

This is where I’m very moved and encouraged by the progressive business movement and the corporate social responsibility movement. There are living examples that work and it’s just a matter of continuing to build a new world and not trying to tear down the old. There’s lots of examples of this.

PE: Have you observed a meaningful shift in the dedication of corporations to sustainability? 

GW: In the ’60s and ’70s we started with moving money away from major corporations that are doing harm – nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, tobacco, firearms, child labor – saying we don’t want to invest in these bad companies or harmful industries. Then there came engaged discussion with shareholder activism that was helpful in getting money out of South Africa and apartheid in the ’80s. And then there’s been a movement to engage and invest to encourage better behavior and actively moving toward finding companies who are living solutions or living the new model of business and reaping the rewards of being responsible business.

And then, what they call impact investing, includes investing in enterprises where the priority is to regenerate culture, regenerate ecosystems and livelihood. So that’s a progression, and the terminology continues to change, but it fundamentally means that we look at things much more than what is traditionally known as money and profit and look at the whole system – of all the stakeholders in an economic activity and see the longer timeframes and long term effects of our actions.

PE: Have you encountered a lot of pushback from businesses?

GW: I wouldn’t say “pushback,” but a resistance and continuation of irresponsible activity, or rather activity based on the false premises and sending the problems for others to fix. You look at the whole spectrum of corporations and one of the challenges that we face from the publicly traded markets where businesses have to answer to a quarterly profit report, that is the priority of management. From that, people take the story that all business is to prioritize profit, but it’s not about that priority, we know that – it’s about serving society and serving each other. There may be management that cares about some of these things but because of the system that we’ve designed, they are not allowed themselves to prioritize other factors beyond the “single bottom line.”

Corporate managers are not encouraged to prioritize the effects of their business on the entire system, they’re only paying attention to one subset of factors, which are measured by the economic and financial information rather than all the other metrics where the business influences the world. That single metric of money and power being our only measuring stick for success has proven to be an ineffective model and we’re in the middle of that evolution from one measurement to a multitude of measurements and multiple points of view at the same time. There was a phrase that was attributed to a sign in Einstein’s office – to be verified, but I like the phrase nonetheless, “What is often counted does not count, and what counts is often not counted.”

And that perspective applies in a business equation where quarterly reports reflect the business profits, but what about the welfare and the health of the employees? What about how the many pollutants that go into the environment? How many more jobs do they create? The whole tendency of cutting jobs to increase profits and how the stock usually reacts by climbing up is a disincentive for the goals we have set up as a society. If we’re trying to keep people employed by “creating more jobs” in the political arena – which is a priority for many in this society – then in the other part of the system, in the “business arena,” companies are cutting back employment and paying people less who create the wealth and then they’re making “more money” and being rewarded for it. There’s obviously a disconnect in this paradigm.

Many people think we have an economic crisis or an environmental crisis or a cultural/political crisis – we actually have a whole system crisis. The nature of our civilization is impacting our world in a manner that we’ve never seen, and the very system that we have created for ourselves has proven ineffective in creating governance and decision making processes amongst ourselves to actually address the problems we have today.

So we have a systemic crisis, and we must fundamentally look at retooling and reorienting our entire system, which points back again to responsible investing. We’re looking at the roots of money and capital and economics and asking questions like: “What needs to be retooled to incorporate factors that were originally left out of the original equation?”

PE: Why is it so difficult for the U.S.A to craft effective clean energy policies? Is it because fossil fuels have become so entrenched in our political system or is it because that’s the way we’ve always done things?

GW: You could say ‘someone will not adopt the belief system that’s against their paycheck,’ or ‘those who are in power are reluctant to give up their power.’ Those kind of dimensions of understanding, of the way our psyche and human tendencies and emotional tendencies to resist change and resist mindset shifts are some of the most important things to look at here when it comes to these kind of questions. We might just call it human nature, but human nature is not fundamentally static. Our brains are not rigid, we do have neuroplasticity, we do have thousands of years of evidence of human behavior collectively evolving and to have the maturity and intestinal fortitude to address these challenges and overcome our divisiveness and our ego-driven culture.

I feel this is the primary responsibility for those of us who recognize the problems on the planet. And it’s not only the responsibility for those who are perpetuating the problems but those of us who are holding solutions in our hands and to look at ourselves and ask the hard question: “Is our approach working?” Are we willing to adopt a new mindset and change our approach? And if not, why? And if we’re not willing to, are we willing to simply be honest with ourselves and ask whether our approach has worked in the last 50 to 100 years? And if it hasn’t, why do we continue to do the same old thing?

That’s why this question of designing a more effective cooperative framework amongst progressive, environmental and social justice organizations is necessary.  We must change the very fabric nature of human discourse from divisiveness to integrated cooperation, focusing on shared outcomes from our common goals. Even among the movement that wants to make the world a better place, it’s surprising how much divisiveness there is. We’re going to create so much more in the way of tangible results by operating from the point of view that “we’re in this together” and simply find a way to work better together.  It’s that simple.

PE: On that subject, you founded both the Green Business Networking and Green Economy Think Tank.  Please briefly explain both organizations and the impacts they are having in local communities. 

GW: Both of those organizations were created because of what I just said, the recognition that we really need to work better together in the movement of green, progressive, sustainable economic activity, whatever we want to call it. We’ll be far more effective if we design better systems to collaborate and create shared outcomes together.

Based on my perspective, one of the biggest problems in the economy is that the quality of relationships and the quality of trust has been diminished significantly to prioritize capital. So if we reintroduce trust and quality of relationships into the business and economic equation, we can actually utilize these authentic relationships to create better outcomes through better cooperation.

That mindset, to create better relationships amongst green business owners and economic development policymakers and NGOs was the purpose of these organizations. We’ve had monthly events every month since 2006, and we have about 5,000 people on our email list. After a couple years of events, our team realized that there was an opportunity to create better cooperation among the organizations and agents of change in the greater L.A. region and we created a couple innovative “working session” conferences in Los Angeles and a couple of the same in San Francisco, which has inspired some of our colleagues to continue the work in the L.A. region and the Bay Area in a broad range of initiatives.

Currently our work has evolved from an active contribution of ideas to improving the financial and economic ecosystems in California and advancing the growth of access to capital and impact investing for the state. I’m currently co-chair of Capital Action Team, the California Economic Summit – which is a statewide bipartisan process of public and private leaders to increase prosperity for the state while remaining committed to “advancing the triple bottom line.”

I’d love to share details of what we’re doing in these activities in the future. Meanwhile, I’m so grateful that you have included me in your efforts, I have enjoyed our discussion immensely.

A Citizen's Response To Sustainable Development - a document I was part of creating in 1989

I was a contributor and signatory to the Citizen's Response to Sustainable Development which came out of the first sustainability conference called Globescope Pacific Assembly which I attended and spoke at in 1989. It's noteworthy that many of the recommendations and solutions still apply today!

Social Impact Investment - Turn Your Money Into Real Change

Santa Monica is Creating a Well Being Index

RSA Animate - The Empathic Civilisation

Mindset shift crucial for collective impact.

For changemakers we must look deep into our approach and change our mindsets and retool assumptions continuously.

A recent article in Stanford Social Innovation Review "Essential Mindset Shifts for Collective Impact" 

"The widespread momentum around collective impact is exciting. It demonstrates a vital shift for organizations, away from considering their work in isolation and toward seeing their work in the context of a broader system, paving the way for large-scale change. The five conditions, however, are not by themselves sufficient. Achieving collective impact requires the fundamental mindset shifts we have described here—around who is involved, how they work together, and how progress happens. These shifts have significant implications for how practitioners design and implement their work, how funders incentivize and engage with grantees, and how policymakers bring solutions to a large scale. Without these vital mindset shifts, collective impact initiatives are unlikely to make the progress they set out to accomplish."

Systems Thinking and the Future of Cities

I'm inspired to find articles like this one "Systems Thinking and the Future of Cities" by David Orr as I feel we must shift our paradigm and rewire our brains to recognize the connection of all things in a coherent system.

He writes: "The idea that nothing exists in isolation−but only as part of a system−has long been embedded in folklore, religious scriptures, and common sense. Yet, systems dynamics as a science has yet to transform the way we conduct the public business. This article first briefly explores the question of why advances in systems theory have failed to transform public policy. The second part describes the ways in which our understanding of systems is growing−not so much from theorizing, but from practical applications in agriculture, building design, and medical science. The third part focuses on whether and how that knowledge and systems science can be deployed to improve urban governance in the face of rapid climate destabilization so that sustainability becomes the norm, not the occasional success story."

"Key Concepts"

"Reducing wholes to parts lies at the core of the scientific worldview we inherited from Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and their modern acolytes in the sciences of economics, efficiency, and management."

"The decades between 1950 and 1980 were the grand era for systems theory. However despite a great deal of talk about systems, we continue to administer, organize, analyze, manage, and govern complex ecological systems as if they were a collection of isolated parts and not an indissoluble union of energy, water, soils, land, forests, biota, and air."

"Much of what we have learned about managing real systems began in agriculture. One of the most important lessons being that land is an evolving organism of interrelated parts soils, hydrology, biota, wildlife, plants, animals, and people."

"The challenge is to transition organized urban complexity built on an industrial model and designed for automobiles, sprawl, and economic growth into coherent, civil, and durable places."

"A systems perspective to urban governance is a lens by which we might see more clearly through the fog of change, and potentially better manage the complex cause and effect relationships between social and ecological phenomena. The application of systems offers at least six possibilities to improve urban governance."

The nature of investing: Katherine Collins at TEDxWellesleyCollege

The future of money

The Technological Future of Money from Envisioning

Transforming Finance

Interview at European CleanTech Forum Stockholm 2014

My article  “Communities Co-Evolving Toward Resilience”, posted on Hazel Henderson's Ethical Markets website, outlines a design framework we created in 2013 & 2014 with the lead of the San Francisco Mayor's Office of Environment based on the conferences we produced with them in 2010 & 2011. While some of the the projects and events we had planned never came about due to staffing changes, the inspired vision of weaving a wide range of groups together for bioregional coordination remains a guiding principle to create cities of the future in the present.

In it, the core themes are:

- that bioregions around the world can be an organizing framework to catalyze the next wave of humanity’s evolution rather than nation states

- that we can organize events and actions through a networked approach to iconic cities who’s networks cross pollinate ideas, solutions and inspirations not unlike neurons firing in the brain

- the organizing principle of networks within networks, and multidisciplinary cooperation can be fractally organized at every scale and stage of the process

- the core convening principle to get globally oriented groups to collaborate for place based solutions and then to spread globally through the network of other place based networks to reach a global scale

- the process can be applied to create a “model” or “template” for the pathway of evolution of a bioregional economy which then can be the core organizing principle which can be applied and creatively expressed in as many ways as there are bioregions across the globe thus bringing a co-creative element to the global mind to more rapidly inspire evolution of the global family

From this framework I feel that we can scale and inspire the groups mentioned in the article, already thinking along these lines, to weave together as a cooperative force across the planet. Bioregion by bioregion.

Once the system starts firing, the evolution of the civilization 2.0 emerges within the chrysalis, as imaginal cells do, moving our vision into cultivating butterfly from the chrysalis of old mindsets. 

“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.” ― R. Buckminster Fuller

Here's the whole article as posted on Ethical Markets (above):

COMMUNITIES CO-EVOLVING TOWARD RESILIENCE

Communities Co-Evolving Toward Resilience

By Greg Wendt, CFP, Stakeholders Capital; founder, Green Economy Think Tank

“The road from here to sustainable, resilient cities and regions is hardly a straight one — there’s no one-size-fits-all recipe for success. Infrastructure, politics and finances — not to mention the uniqueness of resources, geography and local institutions — create different obstacles and opportunities for each city.”

The series of Verge Conferences around the globe are among the myriad watering holes for the community of travelers on this road to sustainable, resilient communities. The conference track described above from the recent conference in Fall 2013 included a range of “smart cities” topics: energy, building, production and logistics, urban processes and organization, shared prosperity, information and communication, mobility, transportation and security.

As we know, there are many travelers on this winding road of inquiry who are collectively asking the nature and evolution of our communities where a majority of humanity currently lives.

We are all meeting the myriad effects of a system in crisis: climate change, wealth inequality, crumbling infrastructure, pollution are only a few of the great stresses which humanity is experiencing across our planet.  For example, the current weather patterns of extreme drought in the west and polar vortex in the east of US are two clear forms of an increasingly unpredictable climate. To respond to such challenges, leaders are continuing to gather around the world to address these issues, while at the same time communities are organizing new patterns to define new and innovative pathways to creatively rewrite existing narratives, and redesign the systems in place.

These efforts are enhanced by the recognition that we are infinitely connected to the earth which sustains all life, which can inform every one of the choices we make, the systems we support, money we spend and products we purchase. Our choices are connected to everything else on the planet, and thus have an influence on the biosphere. Further, unless we shift from self-serving, divisive, ego-driven concerns and behaviors to global collaborative ones, we will struggle to successfully deal with the hunger, environmental degradation, nuclear proliferation, terrorism and gross inequality we are presently facing.

As Einstein states:

“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

We are in the midst of a crisis of perception, since more and more are becoming aware of the effects of our choices from the past and are suspecting systemic crisis is based on the very way we perceive reality – and thus relate to it.

Such a crisis and opportunity to shift our culture’s experience of reality is not new in human history.  During transitional periods like today, humans have had to change and respond with new ideas, behavior, and tools in response to changes in weather, environment and resources. Hazel Henderson shares in her 1996 book “Paradigms in Progress” that “one of the key elements in all such transition periods and changing worldviews is the shift in perception of what is important, what is valuable, the goals to be pursued and the ways to measure collective progress toward these goals. The old slogans of economic progress, industrial modernization, and a growing GNP now compete with emerging slogans of the new paradigm: quality of life, human potential and the search for ecological balance, social justice and global citizenship on our small, fragile Planet Earth.”

In her latest book “Mapping The Global Transition to the Solar Age: From ‘Economism’ to Earth System Science,” Hazel outlines the tools, vision and components of this sweeping conceptual evolution.

More and more are becoming aware that a deeper paradigm shift is not only needed in the manner in which we function, yet also the very perception through which we navigate this evolution.

As the renowned environmentalist James Speth said: “I used to think the top environmental problems facing the world were global warming, environmental degradation and eco-system collapse, but I was wrong.  The real problem is not those three items, but greed, selfishness and apathy.  And for that we need a spiritual transformation.”

We are required to behave differently in order for humanity to survive and thrive on this planet.  Unless we collectively shift from our self-serving, divisive, ego-driven concerns and behaviors to global collaborative ones, we will not be able to successfully deal with the hunger, environmental degradation, nuclear proliferation, terrorism and gross inequality we are presently facing.

An evolution in how we perceive value, and measure it goes hand in hand with the deeper conceptual shift.  Once we recognize the shift that is needed, then we may ask where to begin?

There are many groups and organizations beginning to address these challenges.

In his book “Prosperity without Growth – Economics for a Finite Planet” Tim Jackson shares the view from the standpoint of economics, business and finance:

“There is an interesting overlap between components of prosperity and the factors that are known to influence subjective well being or ‘happiness’. Indeed to the extent that we are happy when things go well, and unhappy when they don’t, there is an obvious connection between prosperity and happiness. This doesn’t necessarily mean that prosperity is the same thing as happiness. But the connection between the two provides a useful link into recent policy debates about happiness and subjective well being.”

Ethical Markets Quality of Life Indicators, co-developed with the Calvert Group in 2000, provide a broader view.  Some of the components of true “quality of life” are our real wealth, which include loving relationships, supportive and vibrant community, good health, cultural and creative stimulation, healthy and vibrant natural environment, contributing to society in a meaningful way, and spiritual fulfillment.

Given most nations define standard of living by a financial measure of economic activity, “Gross National Product” or GNP, we must reexamine outmoded ways of measuring the “product” of our economy and develop means to define the non-financial dimensions of the well being.

For example, the California Human Development Index was designed to measure a more comprehensive view of the progress of our state. The index  “goes beyond the state’s fiscal and budgetary woes to examine the well-being of its people using the American Human Development Index, a measure based on official government data in health, education, and living standards. This timely report introduces the ‘Five California’s’ to highlight the varied opportunities open to differing segments of the population, and provides close-up snapshots of major metro areas. The report also ranks native-born and foreign-born residents for each major ethnic group, as well as all 233 Census neighborhoods in the state. The report concludes with recommendations aligned with current fiscal realities for protecting and building upon human development successes already in place.”

Applied regionally, there’s much talk about enhancing the coordination between human activity and the living bioregions we call home. The vision is emerging of the city as an actual living system, a living organism, not unlike the “gaia” hypothesis of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis which is the vision that earth is a living being which has inspired much of the environmental movement in the last 50 years. These insights are an emerging a breakthrough in perception, a new paradigm emerged, and growing. The human mind is recognizing it’s collective interconnectivity with all life. This emerging paradigm is an evolutionary step for the collective perception of reality, as if we are all cells in the bodies of the systems within which we live.

The think tank Tomorrows Company in London has a similar perspective – on their regional efforts called “Tomorrow’s London” they share:

“Tomorrow’s London is a vision of the city as a literal, living organism. A city which will enable millions to live, prosper and be fully human – enjoying and contributing to the rich biodiversity which sustains and nourishes life, a ‘city of cities’ pioneering how we all might live together on our shared planet…. Tomorrow’s London is a long-term collective vision and one that is codesigned by communities, businesses, government and our ecology – enabled by forms of governance and leadership that can inspire action and participation across stakeholders and generations.”

If we are recognize that cities are analogous to organisms, then how do successful organisms interact with evolving and changing conditions? As in nature, for humans resilience is facing unknown challenges with new and creative approaches, to maintain the coherency, and continuation, of our well being. Resilience is generally being used in the context of individuals “bouncing back” yet there’s a growing community of groups around the world evolving a new paradigm toward humanity’s relationship with the biosphere.  The Stockholm Resilience Centre states that it’s mission is to “advance the understanding of complex social-ecological systems and generate new insights and development to improve ecosystem management practices and long-term sustainability.”

More and more groups are gathering together in places and working to apply the insights from this pursuit to the management and evolution of managing complex metropolises. In ancient Greece, the term “agoras” referred to town meeting places to develop new guiding principles for the community. These agoras, which means “gathering place” or “assembly” was the center of athletic, artistic, spiritual and political life in the city.  If we are to evolve the emerging global village, we must provide and democratic and deliberative spaces “agoras” where people can engage in meaningful dialogue.

In a similar fashion, the broad range of initiatives, think tanks, convenings, and conferences being held across the globe are just these kinds of spaces.   In nearly every board room, conference center, community center, church there are conversations to address the myriad manifestations of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – VUCA” Addressing VUCA will require far more evolved perspectives than the paradigms which created our society – it will require of us developing increasing capacity for resilience.

There are many organizations with this similar recognition:

ICLEI, the leading group of local governments around the world focusing on sustainability, Clinton Global Initiative’s C40 effort, Rockefeller Foundation, San Francisco Department of the Environment, Fraunhofer Institute and Green Economy Think Tank, were just a few of the many groups at Verge in 2013 who are working to light up the network of cities around the globe.

During the conference, a group of participants met and agreed to co-produce a series of convenings and integrated processes for the Bay Area by coordinating aligned organizations to building more resilience for the region’s economic, social and environmental priorities.

This agreement recognizes the promise, and challenge of creating a new form of collaborative process for the region, with all of the groups who are working to evolve smart regions and that many of said groups could work more effectively TOGETHER to evolve the Bay Area’s approach by coordinating their myriad efforts, conferences research efforts, and the like. Currently, there are thousands of events every year in the bay area covering every aspect of what is needed to help the region thrive.

For example, there’s a vast community connected to the Hub in the Bay Area and Social Capital Markets. Hub SOMA (South of Market) in San Francisco hosted over 550 events in 2013 alone, and the same group has been producing the Social Capital Markets Conferences for 6 years. These two efforts alone have produced thousands of panel discussions, events, conversations, keynotes, whitepapers, software platforms, etch which are literally the very fabric and ingredients of the bubbling soup of social, capital, commerce, societal innovation for the region.

The group also recognized while meeting at the Verge Summit that we don’t need yet ANOTHER symposium, or ANOTHER panel discussion, or ANOTHER group rehashing the same exact issues, etc.. The group aims to BUILD on the efforts in progress, and advance the edge of coherent organizational collaboration.

Naturally, new initiatives which come out of projects like this , will inevitably require significant resources – ie money and people – to manifest them into useful solutions. It is the intention behind all of our work to ensure that capital providers, investors, financial institutions across the spectrum are actively involved at every stage of every event so that money can move quickly to support emerging solutions.

Discussions are now well under way with with a number of these groups who are aligned to convene a set of roundtables and conferences to align cross sector initiatives into action towards enhancing the resilience in the region and developing a new framework to optimize the region’s efforts and weave a new patter for coordinated action. Thus far, key partners identified in the conversation include: the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, Social Capital Markets and Hub Bay Area, City of San Francisco, California Economic Summit, Bay Area Impact Investing Initiative, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, California Financial Opportunities Roundtable, Fraunhof Institute, Urban Innovation Exchange, and another dozen or so organizations engaged in the conversation.

A series of events and coordinated activity is being planned through 2015 to convene leaders and discuss new pathways to build on past success. Through this process a region by region template is emerging which can be coevolved around the world and thus rapidly ignite new neural networks globally. The goal is to, as part of this initiative, create a new set of offline processes and connections which will inform the evolution of online marketplaces and venues for exchange. The heart of the matter is not what we do – or where the solutions are – yet how we do it and how we coordinate the network of similar efforts across the globe.

The initiative to build a framework to advance economic development and financing to meet regional needs more effectively in California has already inspired partnerships with a number of regions around the world. Partners in Scandinavia, New York and London are actively involved now in the journey, and our partners intend to build on the California initiative to replicate similar processes in their regions. Furthermore partners in Sweden are working currently to build on the Bay Area initiative and explore this work in a conference being held in May 2014 in Gothenberg.

Our core intention is to improve the quality of life, and to optimize the outcomes from the myriad conversations along the road to resilient communities. We are in service to advance the quality of relationships on every level, for a better life for all children of all species.

by Gregory Wendt, CFP with appreciation to Lina Constantinovici for editorial and research support

Gregory Wendt, Senior Wealth Advisor – StakeHolders Capital; Founder – Green Economy Think Tank; Co-Founder – Green Business Networking

www.gregwendt.com, www.stakeholderscapital.com, www.greeneconomy.org, www.greenbusinessnetworking.org, www.sustainablewealth.blogspot.com, www.linkedin.com/in/gregorywendt and Twitter @gregorywendt

For further reading:

World Economic Forum: Shared Norms for the New Reality, The Nordic Way http://www.globalutmaning.se/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Davos-The-nordic-way-final.pdf

100 Urban Trends http://cdn.guggenheim.org/BMW/100_Urban_Trends_1106_3MB.pdf

Adaptive Comanagement for Building Resilience in Social–Ecological Systems https://seaducks.org/sites/default/files/Adaptive%20Comanagement%20for%20Building%20Resilience%20in%20Social-Ecological%20Systems.pdf

Social and ecological resilience are they related? https://groups.nceas.ucsb.edu/sustainability-science/2010%20weekly-sessions/session-102013-11.01.2010-emergent-properties-of-coupled-human-environment-systems/supplemental-readings-from-cambridge-students/Adger_2000_Social_ecological_resilience.pdf

Rockefeller Foundation 100 Resilient Cities Initiative: http://100resilientcities.rockefellerfoundation.org/blog/entry/mayors-from-dakar-medellin-new-orleans-oakland-talk-resilience-challenges

Sweden’s conferences on Social Capital and Urban Development http://www.social-capital.net/docs/Conference+documentation+-+Social+Capital+and+Urban+Development+Lidk%C3%B6ping.pdf

Bay Area Council Economic Institute Global Green Cities Archive http://www.bayareacouncil.org/tag/global-green-cities/ and http://globalgreencities.com/

“Making Conservation Finance Investable” http://www.ssireview.org/up_for_debate/article/making_conservation_finance_investable

“Thoughts on Reintegrating Urban Ecology” http://www.biohabitats.com/newsletters/reintegrating-urban-ecology/

Ethical Markets Wealth of Networks, Community Development Solutions

“The Green Economy – A Wide Shot” – Ethical Markets Transforming Finance video series

Jeremy Rifkin: The Empathic Civilization - getting us to "biosphere consciousness"

Hazel Henderson's newest book "Mapping the Transition to the Solar Age - from Economism to Earth Systems Science"

An Excerpt from Hazel's latest book which is available as a PDF.

"Towards the Green Economy: Clearly the transition to the green economy is already underway but will be highly disruptive to the industrial sectors and massive global apparatus of the fossil fuel and nuclear era. Many companies based on nineteenth and twentieth century technologies will go under and jobs will be lost. Bridging strategies using natural gas are already highly contested due to their huge water-use, polluted residues, methane release and other problems."

"A study by Cornell and Stanford University scientists outlines a plan for ‘A Fossil Fuel-Free New York State by 2050’ which omits shale gas due to its much higher than advertised methane emissions.24 The consensus reached at Rio+20, G-20 in Mexico and other summits in 2012 included the OECD Global Green Growth Institute, the Knowledge Platform, and 68 global financial institutions. NGOs and governments affirmed commitments to using natural resources in their capital accounting.25 In addition, the $5.2tn of private investments since 2007 tracked in Ethical Markets’ Green Transition Scoreboard® attest to the huge shifts now in the pipeline."

"While renewable energy stocks suffered from their opposition’s media attacks, contrarians saw opportunities. US investor Warren Buffet’s MidAmerica Renewables investments reached $13.5bn, and the US Department of Defense is now the single most important driver of the cleantech revolution in the USA.26 In 2012 and 2013, nature provided ample evidence of the massive CO2 emissions’ effect in ocean warming and driving unprecedented weather conditions worldwide: floods, droughts, fires, tornadoes, heat waves, all causing huge losses and insurance costs." "This paper is an attempt to contextualise all these phenomena and explore the future: the new planetary awareness driving these paradigm shifts as we humans ‘connect the dots’. This knowledge explosion is now challenging our cultural beliefs about money, wealth, scarcity, abundance and transcending financial models derived from obsolete economics, led in many countries by younger generations connected by social media. The new multi-disciplinary models and metrics reassure us that in moving beyond economics and GDP we will not be flying blind but moving to the many earth systems science models (including those from NASA28) and data from many scientific fields which this paper explores."

Bill Moyers and Bill Lofgren on the "Deep State" the core system of how the country is really working.

Downshifting civilization to meet the realities of the biosphere

“The future, to be viable at all, must be one of drawing back, easing down, healing… It requires more than productivity and more than technology; it also requires maturity, compassion and wisdom. These conclusions constitute a conditional warning, not a dire prediction. They offer a living choice, not a death sentence… The idea of limits, sustainability, sufficiency, equity and efficiency are not barriers, not obstacles, not threats. They are guides to a new world… We see ‘easing down’ from unsustainability not as a sacrifice, but as an opportunity to stop battering against the earth’s limits and to start transcending self-imposed and unnecessary limits in human institutions, mindsets, beliefs, and ethics.” - Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future

Discussing the access to capital equation at the Innovate! SoCal conference.

Should be an engaging conversation tomorrow on our panel at the Innovate!Socal Conference
"Our panel takes up the challenge of improving performance of pre-seed and venture capital funding and looks at how entrepreneurs can be better prepared for investment. The group addresses the critical need for shortening deal decision times, improving deal quality by better preparing entrepreneurs, and reducing capital access barriers to under-represented demographic and geographic groups."

Panel moderator Paul J. Corson, Executive Director of Innovation Fund America, drives the discussion. 

Panelist 1 – Richard Koffler, CEO, Greenwings Biomedical
Panelist 2 – Greg Wendt, Senior Wealth Advisor, Stakeholder Capital, Co-Chair, Capital Action Team for CA Forward
Panelist 3 – Victoria Sassine, Mutual Fund Trustee, Managers Investment Group Panelist
4 – David Carter, CEO, Upside LA

We must evolve to a complex systemic view to address the world's challenges.

From the article: "Complexity Rising from Human Beings to Human Civilization, a Complexity Profile"

The caption for image on the left shares: 

"A schematic history of human civilization reflects a growing complexity of the collective behavior of human organizations. The internal structure of organizations changed from the large branching ratio hierarchies of ancient civilizations, through decreasing branching ratios of massive hierarchical bureaucracies, to hybrid systems where lateral connections appear to be more important than the hierarchy. As the importance of lateral interactions increases, the boundaries between subsystems become porous. The increasing collective complexity also is manifest in the increaseing specialization and diversity of professions. Among the possible future organizational structures are fully networked systems where hierarchical structures are unimportant. "

and the conclusion of the article sums it up:

"There are two natural conclusions to be drawn from recognizing that human beings are part of a global organism. First, one can recognize that human civilization has a remarkable capacity for responding to external and internal challenges. The existence of such a capacity for response does not mean that human civilization will survive external challenges any more than the complexity of any organism guarantees its survival. However, one can hope that the recent reduction in the incidence of military conflicts will continue and the ability to prevent or address local disasters will increase. The difficulties in overcoming other systematic ills of society, such as poverty, may also be challenged successfully as the origins of these problems become better understood."

"Second, the complexity of our individual lives must be understood in the context of a system that must enable its components (us) to contribute effectively to the collective system. Thus, we are being, and will continue to be shielded from the true complexity of society. In part this is achieved by progressive specialization that enables individuals to encounter only a very limited subset of the possible professional and social environments. This specialization will have dramatic consequences for our children, and their educational and social environments are likely to become increasingly specialized as well."