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Lessons from Kivalina
Kivalina is one of four Alaskan seacoast native villages eroding so quickly that they need to relocate within 10 years or less. Ice in the Bering Sea keeps diminishing; ice that until the last 20 years or so diminished the waves pounding the coast for much of the...
Review of Half-Earth by E.O. Wilson
E.O. Wilson is first of all, a naturalist. That differentiates him from specialized biologists studying little slices of the field. Naturalists observe a total ecology. Wilson became well known for studying ant societies, but he had to do it by immersing himself in...
Total Corporate Responsibility
By Frank Dixon A Whole System Approach to Corporate Responsibility and Socially Responsible Investing A large opportunity exists to substantially improve the effectiveness of the corporate responsibility (CR) and socially responsible investing (SRI) movements. Over...
Bottom Up Economics
What would a system based on increasing not quantity, but quality of all life look like? All projections are speculative, but any will differ substantially from the current tech-based, growth-oriented system. But as long as “establishment” business leaders are in the...
Blowback
As they say, there is no free lunch. However, our illusions easily deceive us that there is. Illusions may stem from the structure of modern systems (don't worry; we have insurance), or simply from our ignorance of how a system works. If systems work poorly,...
Complexity and “Truth”
How do we know is something is “true?” We usually assume that observations supporting an explanation verify truth. Often this is basic. Who needs a formal proof of gravity to realize that a dropped brick may hit a toe? But when cause and effect become murky, proving...
The Parable of the Doomsday Clock
A nearly forgotten old risk assessment is the Doomsday Clock from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. As nuclear scientists’ bullhorn, the Bulletin’s editors obviously draw on information dark to most of us. In 1947 the Bulletin began its annual announcement of the...
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Deep Ecology and Human Behavior
By Carol Grojean (originally on her blog) Deep ecology, according to Wikipedia, “is a contemporary ecological and environmental philosophy characterized by its advocacy of the inherent worth of living beings regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs…"...
Transformative Process Disciplines
The post “Getting Real” is an introduction to the shift in beliefs (paradigm) from an economic-man paradigm to one dubbed, for want of a better term, a realist paradigm. The economic man paradigm and a kernel of a realist paradigm were introduced in another post,...
Getting Real
What’s reality? Low-low tech indigenous peoples don’t talk much. It interferes with their acute abilities to directly tune in the reality of nature around them. By contrast, modern humans drenched in media 24/7 must usually determine reality through abstractions like...
Learning Circles for Vigorous Learning Organizations
We have been advocating Vigorous Learning Organizations (VLO) for some time. “Vigorous” denotes learning by doing, which is done using systems for learning by experience, developing emotional control, not just skills. Vigorous learning is the essence of a well-honed...
Why Vigorous Learning Organizations: The time has come.
Why Vigorous Learning Organizations? The late Yogi Berra put it well, “We’re completely lost, but we’re making great time.” Organizations can no longer ignore serious consequences from single-mindedly pursuing an objective, whether it is to make money or something...
Being Grounded
Being grounded is a phrase having several connotations; grounded planes or pilots, grounded electrical circuits, and grounded children restricted for disciplinary reasons. But being grounded also refers to a person’s ability to sense reality a connection to what is...
Quality of Life While Consuming Less
We say we want to maintain quality of life while using far fewer natural resources. That has huge ramifications. How can it be done? A sub-question is what quality of life might mean in this new context. Recently a session of the Compression dialog group explored that...
The Compression Thinking Challenge
The philosophy practiced in managing human institutions follows in the wake of scientific paradigm shifts. The table below illustrates some key points of these shifts, but it needs explanation of both the scientific shifts, and the changes in managerial philosophy...
Getting Serious About Compression
The Compression Institute is embarking on a series of dialogs seeking how to break through the lethargy that prevents us from taking action on “Compression.” We have made many wonderful advances, but they do not begin to address Compression, which refers to human...
Toward a Quality Learning Market
This episode is intended to illustrate one of the principles of Compression Thinking, economy of learning over economy of scale. This principle helps us escape the trap of Industrial Age thinking, which we have to do for two reasons. One is that technology may nudge...
Sekisui Housing Company Case
Routinely Builds 80% of a House in Three Days Twenty years ago, a Target article featuring Tokyo Sekisui grabbed attention because Sekisui routinely completed 80 percent of the work on a new house in three days. A second article appeared in Target in 2008. Tokyo...
Quality as a Process Guiding Principle
Quality over quantity is one of six “principles” of Compression Thinking. In that context, quality is capability for all stakeholders in a process to live well using a minimum of resources over an indefinite future – a definition broader than that in general use. From...