Our Approach
Our Approach unites the principles and practices of Sustainability and Learning Organizations for improving the quality of our lives…an integration of Nature and Humankind into a caring and productive partnership.
SUSTAINABlE development
Why Sustainability?
Sustainability provides the most compelling and proven set of values, principals, practices and policies for improving the quality of our lives – where we live and where we work. It’s initial global definition is that Sustainable Development decisions and actions are:
“Meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”
- from the Brundtland Report-1987 at the World Commission on Environment and Development, does not go far enough.
The definition of the government of the United Kingdom states:
“Sustainable development is about ensuring a better quality of life for everyone, now and for generations to come.”
This focus of Sustainable Development on improving quality of life is becoming more widely accepted by government, businesses, civic and environmental groups, and various others concerned with their communities’ total well being.
The quality of life focus makes this concept more aspirational. It changes the tone and content of the sustainable development debate so that the emphasis is more on solutions than problems. Herein lies AForrest & Associates approach in working with community development and the organizations that govern them and the businesses that build them.
Taiichi Ohno, the founder of Toyota, emphasized that all human activity that absorb any resources, human or material, should create VALUE.
The idea of value as a principle and couple with quality of life can guide any action. Thus, the term sustainability is not limited to one precise definition or practice. It can be applied to local and regional communities for improving the quality of life in all aspects of managing of businesses and the organizations engaged in community development and change.
Sustainable development is a holistic concept, a strategy that requires the integration of economic growth, social equity, business practices and management, and environmental protection. Sustainable development, as stated by the New Zealand Business Council for Sustainable Development, aims to make our communities not just better off, but better altogether.
Sustainable Development in Action
At it core the values of Sustainability honor all aspects for human endeavors and challenges us to spend the time and effort necessary to ensure the present generation will improve its quality of life, AND ensure that future generations will benefit from these actions.
In land use Sustainability Development is practiced using the principles of Livable Communities and New Urbanism for community design. Within organizations Sustainable Development is applied using the principles in Learning Organizations management practices, systems structure, and human resource development.
In Monterey County
Two competing development and land use advocacy groups, Common Ground and Land Watch have found common ground in the concept of Sustainable Development. Another corollary is the Fort Ord Reuse Agency plan for military base reuse that uses three concepts for guiding its development: Education, Environment, and Economics. AForrest & Associates continues to be an active participant in FORA planning and implementation effort, assisting in it Sustainable Development Institute.
Monterey County and its individual communities are addressing three major inter-dependent issues: transportation, housing, and employment. These will require the full application of Sustainable Development practices to ensure a healthy future.
The current debate in July 2003 over the General plan Update is a test of how a community can agree on quality, values, and the future.
A Business and Community Case
From the New Zealand Business Council for Sustainable Development
Sustainable development rests on the three pillars of economic growth, social progress and ecological balance. The business case for sustainable development includes the belief that operating within a well-defined framework of sustainable development helps companies:
* Be more efficient and competitive
* Engage in responsible entrepreneurship
* Increase their financial return and reduce risk for shareholders
* Attract and retain employees
* Improve customer sales and loyalty
* Grow supplier commitment
* Strengthen community relations
* Contribute to environmental sustainability
And from the City of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Vision 2020 – Commitment to a Sustainable Community
Sustainable Development is positive change, which does not undermine the environment or social systems on which we depend. It requires a coordinated approach to planning and policy making that involves public participation. Its success depends upon widespread understanding of the critical relationship between people and their environment and the will to make to necessary changes. Principles of sustainable development encompass the following:
* fulfillment of human needs for peace, clean air and water, food, shelter, education, and useful and satisfying employment;
* maintenance of ecological integrity through careful stewardship, rehabilitation, reduction in wastes and protection of diverse and important natural species and systems;
* provision for self-determination through public involvement in the definition and development of local solutions to environmental and development problems; and,
* achievement of equity with the fairest possible sharing of limited resources among contemporaries and between our generation and that of our descendants.
These basic values underlie VISION 2020. The vision expresses ideas contributed by citizens through several phases of community participation. It is the beginning of an ongoing process leading to a sustainable region.
www.vision2020.hamilton-went.on.ca
LEARNING ORGANIZATIONS
Why Learning Organizations?
Learning Organizations are “a group of people continually enhancing their capacity to create what they want to create.”
Peter Senge from MIT and author of the Fifth Discipline, coined this simple and elegant definition. He further explains that learning organizations are just really about what happens when a group of people really work at their best or how a group of people collectively enhance their capacities to produce the outcome they really wanted to produce. This can be a work team, family, social dance group, or a group of students.
Senge states, “What fundamentally will distinguish learning organizations (the people in them) from traditional authoritarian “controlling organizations” will be the mastery of certain basic disciplines”.
Senge, and the group at the Society for Learning Organizations, www.solonline.org, are promoting five key dynamics or “disciplines” for individuals and teams to “learn” and imbed within their families, work teams, and community structures.
Systems Thinking – is a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools to make the full patterns clearer, and to help us see how to change them effectively. The essence of the discipline of systems thinking lies in a shift of mind: to seeing interrelationships rather than linear cause-effect chains, and to seeing processes of change rather than snapshots.
Personal Mastery – is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. If we have a personal vision and we also see current reality objectively, then the difference between the two causes “creative tension”. That tension can be used to draw us from where we are - in current reality - to the vision.
Commitment to the truth is the other part of the process. Understanding of current reality as well as a vision are necessary for creative tension to begin to work.
Mental Models – are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. The discipline of working with mental models starts with turning the mirror inward; learning to unearth our internal pictures of the world, to bring them to the surface and hold them rigorously to scrutiny. It also about carrying on “learningful” conversations that balance inquiry and advocacy, where people expose their own thinking effectively and make that thinking open to the influence of others.
Shared Vision – The practice of shared vision involves the skills of unearthing a team or family system common “pictures of the future” that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance. Openness to share and commit are key elements.
Team Learning (or family/social group) – The discipline of team learning starts with “dialogue,” the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine “thinking together”. In dialogue, there is the free and creative exploration of complex and subtle issues, a deep “listening” to one another and suspending of one’s own views. In team learning all participants must “suspend” their assumptions, and must regard one another as colleagues, or shall we say fellow travelers and partners.
Learning Organizations and Sustainable Development
SYNERGY
In today’s world, organizations need to ingrain a philosophy for anticipating, reacting and responding to change, complexity and uncertainty in organizations, in the environment and in our social fabric.
So the “why” of Learning Organizations is about people improving the quality of their work lives, which is the purpose of Sustainable Development. One way that we can better respond to this complexity and improve life and work, is to create Learning Organizations that look to the natural world, which is the foundation of Sustainability.
To take our organizations, as well as family and social systems, to this important “next level” we need new ways of thinking.
One of the foremost thinkers in this area is Margaret Wheatley. She is author of Leadership and the New Science. And she utilizes the study of quantum physics as a way for us to develop new organizations that can be creative and effective in the midst of chaos.
Speaking of chaos, the image here is a fractal, a chaotic strange attractor, at that! It is a shape that reveals order inherent in chaos. Order is revealed in chaotic movements plotted in multiple dimensions over time.
Ms. Wheatley contents that organizations (as well as family and social systems), like the new understanding of the universe, are challenging our old ways of thinking because they do not work any more in solving the complex, chaotic, and changing reality of everyday life and work. She gives us pathways for using chaos as a positive force for breakthrough in teamwork, creativity, and productivity by creating flexible and adaptive teams that can tap into people’s inherent desire for connection to each other and to their work.