The One Planet Equation is immutable, and rules all our futures

 The One Planet Equation is immutable, and rules all our futures, whether we choose to ignore it or not!!!

dd

 

If zero carbon is the answer then just what was the question?

 My friend Martin Brown describes the situation with regard to our predicament excellently on his Blog which contains the posting below.

Through the lens of this Blog, Keeping Ahead of the Oil Curve, the question is clear and unaquivical and is “how do we continually reduce the Resource Intensity of the Build Environment to help balance the one planet equation”

The background to this formulation can be found at http://trailblazerbusinessfutures.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/quality-and-the-one-planet-equation/ and I would like, with Martin’s help, and others if you would like to join in, to explore the avenues this question opens to view in a world driven, immutably, whether we ignore it or not, by the One Planet Equation. 1 = P x C x I

Unfortunately the one planet side of the equation is shrinking as we consume its non-renewable resources and sinks.

dd

July 6, 2009 by fairsnape

If zero carbon is the answer then just what was the question

Is it ‘just because’ I am currently  seeing things from a different perspective as I re-read Cradle to Cradle, (which I feel  has more resonance with where we are now)  but a number of recent issues and events  have left me questioning our approach to zero, and that going to zero is not enough.   Indeed it may even be dangerous ‘just’ going to zero.

Lets consider the built environment in its widest sense, not just from design to FM but from winning raw materials through construction to end users, and consider the opening premise from Cradle to Cradle, and ask who today would allow a sector to :

Put billions of pounds of toxic materials in the air water and ground every year

Produces materials so dangerous they require constant vigilance by future generations

See Complete article at  http://fairsnape.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/if-zero-carbon-is-the-answer-then-just-what-was-the-question/

 

Youth leadership and the resource intensity of society

 The scheme below is another example of failure to understand the need to continually reduce the resource intensity of society and the way to achieve this.

There are at the present time many organisations in the community giving young people the opportunity to be creative, and develop leadership skills, Scouts, Service Cadet organisations, churchs etc.

What is sadly and fatally lacking in our society is the opportunity to exercise those skills. Some form of national service or ’service for the nation’.

Not necessarily military service, but within all sectors, education, health, police etc.

The key criteria are that it should have some element of compulsion and a considerable element that is not local to the individual’s home. These elements will

• show individuals that they have a duty to support and maintain the society they are part of
• break down failure of aspiration within communities as members are faced with other realities and opportunities.

My 2002 comment on the UK Northwest Framework for Employability and Skills Action, FRESA can be downloaded here Comment on the North West Region FRESA290802

dd 

Youth leadership scheme launches £1m third sector fund

By Charlotte Goddard
Children & Young People Now
3 July 2009

A consortium of youth organisations has launched a £1m fund to boost youth leadership opportunities as it unveiled details of leadership body The Youth of Today.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown attended the body’s launch in Wolverhampton today.

The £1m Leadership Fund will be managed by the Young Foundation, part of the consortium which is led by the National Youth Agency. The fund will invest in third sector organisations delivering leadership programmes for 13- to 19-year-olds across England over a two-year period.

Full article at http://www.cypnow.co.uk/news/ByDiscipline/Childcare-and-Early-Years/917997/Youth-leadership-scheme-launches-1m-third-sector-fund/

 

Quality and the One Planet Equation

An article for comment by Derek Deighton 03 July 2009

Introduction

All around us we are bombarded with messages telling us that we need to change, that the Earth is warming, that oil is peaking or we are in an power crisis. The messages are insistent and shrill but diverse and incoherent and all about our symptoms rather than the addiction we suffer, the hugely ineffective use of the resources and sinks that our only planet, the Earth, provides for us.

As a result we are either paralysed into inaction or taking action that is neither systemic nor joined-up, to use a much hackneyed political expression.

A Mind Model

Continued….

Article can be downloaded here for comment

Quality and the One Planet Equation

 

TrailblazerBF’s raison d’etre

Our raison d’etre

 

Trailblazer Business Futures, TrailblazerBF, exists to help people and organisations to ‘navigate’ the journey towards sustainability; by liberating the creativity that will enable integrated continual improvement.

Our mission is predicated on two tenets

• that our future is resource constrained
• that humans are creative and enterprising

These two tenets will ensure that as we transition into our resource constrained future, some organisations will disappear and be replaced, and others, with exceptional strategic leadership and management, can survive and grow.

The task is simple, if not easy to accomplish, and again can by reduced to two key questions

• Is our business model relevant to such a future?
• Does our leadership and management, enable the liberation of the creativity required to continually reduce the resource intensity of the goods and services we produce, consume and dispose of.

This will be the most massive effort of  ‘quality improvement’ the world has seen and we want to enter into a dialogue with those who see themselves as possible stakeholders and potential partners.

Join us here by commenting on posts, following us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TrailblazerBF or emailing info@trailblazer.co.uk

dd

 

Sustainability and the ‘energy gap’

The article below, echoes my article of 2005, ‘Sustainability and the Energy Gap’ where I predict that a ‘perfect storm’ of factors will ensure that the western economies will end up with with a lower quality of life than an equitable distribution of resources would allow.

This is simply because will will not recognise the immutability of the One Planet Equation.

Read Article sustainability-and-the-energy-gap2005

dd

Green Shoots, an Alternative View

Kurt Cobb

……………..That’s what my green shoots are telling me. Let me repeat it again: We may be nearing the point where the existing capital stock including the public infrastructure has grown so large and our resources, both financial and physical, have become so tight that we can no longer both maintain and expand the capital stock simultaneously. This does not necessarily lead to a dramatic collapse so much as a grinding decline in productive capacity. Over time the economy has more and more difficulty extracting basic resources from the Earth, manufacturing objects from those resources, and transporting those objects to markets, all while maintaining the buildings related to these activities……….

See complete article at http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2009/06/green-shoots-alternative-view.html

 See also

http://trailblazerbusinessfutures.wordpress.com/2008/12/14/sustainability-and-the-energy-gap-2/

http://trailblazerbusinessfutures.wordpress.com/2009/01/30/the-virtuous-circle-and-reductionism/

 

On our failure to understand steady growth

As a species we are blind to the concept of steady growth but it happens all around us. Look in your bank account and you should see that the interest is paid on the balance in your account, which has grown (unless it’s mine) by the interest paid. Watch vegetables growing and nothing seems to happen for ages, then suddenly they take off.

This is steady or ‘exponential’ growth.

Take a chessboard and put a post-it note on the first square, two on the second, four on the third and keep doubling up. If you do it steadily then the time to each doubling is 70 divided by the rate%. at 7% per annum, the doubling time is ten years.

Two mind boggling outcomes arise.

1. We find our pile of post-it notes is around 6mm high on the 7th square(64) and on the 64th square? – well if you climbed to the top and shone a torch down, the light would take 48 minutes to reach the ground, you would be 6 times further from the Earth than the Sun is!

2. If you count the post-it notes on any number of squares, their sum will always be less than those on the next square!

Now, if these were barrels of oil, you will be able to say that you will use more of them in the next doubling period than you have in all the doubling periods that have gone before.

Oil was first commercially exploited in 1859 and we are now about half way round the chessboard, having used a trillion barrels, with around, it is generally agreed, a trillion left.

At the present rate of growth of oil use, we are going to try to use them all in the next doubling period, around thirty years!

There are of course, myriad reasons why this not possible. That’s why we have to keep ahead of the oil curve.

dd

 

A ‘Single Conversation’, GARS or SARG?

The Homes and Communities Agency intend having a single conversation with with all the actors in Housing and renewal, which is fantastic you might say.

However, they are basing that conversation on Growth, Affordability, Renewal and Sustainability GARS, but is this a meaningful conversation?

Any meaningful converstion must be based on SARG, Sustainability etc.

To move forward we must move forward on a journey of continual improvement towards sustainability, only this route is affordable, creates renewal and offers the possibility of growth at reduced resource intensity.

The Learning and Skills Council have already tried the the GARS approach, which has led to a complete shambles as identified on the BBC Radio 4’s File on 4 programme. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00l0z3b/File_on_4_16_06_2009/

 

A Single conversation

By engaging local authorities in a ‘single conversation’ on all aspects of housing and regeneration, we aim to connect local ambition with national targets.

The Single Conversation is the HCA’s most important business process – it is the way in which we agree and secure delivery at the local level in support of our national objectives. By working in an open and transparent way with local authorities and others we aim to become local government’s best delivery partner, enabling us to secure more and reach better outcomes for each place…………

http://www.homesandcommunities.co.uk/singleconversation.htm

 

Summing the resource intensity of society

The concept of the Resource Intensity of a Society is powerful but lacks the focus to enable the learning that will lead to its continual reduction.

Dividing it up into sectors seems a good idea but could lead to continuation of our reductionist approach to problem solving, but the broad categories appear to be

The Resource Intensity of

• The Built Environment
• Governance
• Security
• Mobility
• Fulfilment
• Knowledge
• Failure Demand

It is clear from this list that they all overlap, which highlights the need to take a systems based view of process learning and improvement.

This adds another question into the equation, is it the resource intensity of knowledge, or the resource intensity of learning that is crucial?

The resource intensity of failure demand also cuts across all sectors and looked at crudely, is the waste we generate carrying out our essential processes and the ones that aren’t essential,

Of  ’not doing the right thing, right, every time’

dd

 

Leadership, Followship and Twitter

I have just been speaking to a friend who is part of an important sustainability initiative in Australia, The Natural Edge Project, about using Twitter to post information – and his comment was that he was ‘too busy’, and he probably is.

But the old adage says “if you want something done, ask someone who is too busy”. The best of the ‘Change Agents’ in the world are always ‘too busy’ but they still need to put their thoughts ‘out there’ on as many platforms as they can, Twitter included.

Another thought arises from this, and that is the issue of ‘Leadership’ and ‘Followship’, and the truth is we are all both as illustrated in the piece below from 1991.

Being of more ‘mature’ years, I might be forgiven for seeing Twitter as a new fangled thing and a passing fad, and it might be, but it has the power to enable both leadership and followship and in the process, hopefully allow the cream of the ideas that will continually reduce the Resource Intensity of Society, RIoS, to rise to the top of the bottle.

Those ideas that will show us how to balance the ‘One Planet Equation’ http://trailblazerbusinessfutures.wordpress.com/the-one-planet-equation/

dd

 

Follow the Leader

Tom Gray, 1st Thorsby Troop, Alta.
The Leader, May 1991

As I strolled past a city intersection, I stopped to watch five men. One was looking at a blueprint, three were leaning on shovels, and one was down in a hole digging. It turned out that the man with the blueprint was a district supervisor. Leaning on the shovels were an area supervisor, a site supervisor, and a job foreman. And the man in the hole? He was “just a laborer”.

A school registration form asked the question: “Is your child a leader or a follower?” A few days after filling out the form, one mother received this note from the teacher:   

“Dear Mrs. Smith;

Congratulations on having the only follower in a class of 28 leaders!” These anecdotes reflect our bureaucratic society, where we have “too many chiefs and not enough Indians”. We all know and understand sayings like this. A bureaucracy is top heavy; it has too many “leaders” and too few workers………

Coming Full Circle

I expect you’ve noticed it already. It is no coincidence that the qualities of a good follower overlap those of a good leader. From the description, it becomes clear that a good follower is able to assume leadership when necessary.

Followship, like leadership, is a role each of us must assume from time to time. There is an ebb and flow. We ale sometimes section or group leaders, but we must still follow the bylaw, policies and procedures of Scouts Canada and the limits set by our conscience or religious beliefs.

By training young people to be effective followers, we are training them to be effective leaders. By training them to accept God’s love, to be self-reliant, to cooperate and trust, to care for themselves, each other, and their world, we are training them to be good followers.

In the final analysis, the only person one can truly lead is oneself. Let us train our young people to follow well.

See post at http://troop485.tripod.com/documents/followleader.htm

 

See also

http://www.naturaledgeproject.net/

http://trailblazerbusinessfutures.wordpress.com/2009/02/14/leadership-and-the-virtuous-circle/

http://trailblazerbusinessfutures.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/ignoring-the-virtuous-circle-ignorance-or-arrogance/

http://www.johnadair.co.uk/

http://developingpeopleuk.blogspot.com/2008/08/leadership-vs-followship-part-1.html