CHAPTER 1
MIRACLES ON DEMAND
Making the Impossible Inevitable
âAny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,â science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously concluded. In much the same way, anything that cracks a major economic, social, or environmental challenge that had previously seemed impossible to solve is likely to be loosely described as some form of âmiracle.â And truth lurks in that loose use of language.
Miracles may have gone out of fashion, but they are exactly what we now need in the Anthropoceneâas our species increasingly bangs up against the planetary ceiling. Some of the most interesting thinking about what constitutes a miracle has come from author Charles Eisenstein.1 Here are some things he has said about miracles and the overarching story, or stories, shaping our understanding of the world we live in:2
âąYou could say that [. . .] we are in the business of creating a miracle on Earth.3
âą[A modern miracle is] something that is impossible from an old understanding of reality, but possible from a new one.4
âąStories, like all beings, have a life span. In their youth, their immune system is strong, but as time goes on they become increasingly unable to withstand the contrary evidence and experiences that pile up.5
âąWorking on the level of story has two dimensions. First is to disrupt the old, which says, âWhat you thought was real is just an illusion.â Second is to offer a new [one], which says, âThe possible, and the real, are much grander than you knew.â The first, we experience as crisis and breakdown. The second, we experience as miraculous.6
âąThatâs what a miracle is: Not the intercession of an external divinity in worldly affairs that violates the laws of physics, but something that is impossible from within an old Story of the World and possible from a new one.7
âąA miracle is [. . .] both a glimpse and a promise.8
I have developed antibodies to most forms of religious thinking, but there is something about this definition that attracts me. I am not suggesting that we teeter on the edge of a brave new world, where miracles will be available on demandâsome form of miracles-as-a-service. Instead, the message is that our old âStory of the World,â which Thomas Kuhn would have described as the prevailing paradigm in which our science, our societies, and our economies operate and evolve, is itself being transformed.
What follows is a glimpse into a future where the overarching paradigm is no longer as likely to produce Black or Gray Swan degenerationsâand, in the process, massively increases the chances of Green Swan regenerations. This is not magical, âwith one bound she was freeâ thinking. Instead it draws on a serious inquiry into the sort of psychological, cultural, political, and market conditions that massively enhance our chances of making exponential progress.
For skeptics, and there will be many, it is worth noting that we have been here before, though one current problem is that interest in history seems to be waning in some key societies, raising a real risk to democracy.9 As far as our economies are concerned, some potential Black Swan events through history include the longer-term consequences of the 1929 and 2007â2008 market crashes. Societal Black Swans might include the Holocaust, though some foresaw it, and the profound impact of HIV/AIDS. On the environmental front, there is the catastrophic die-off of insects that some call âInsectageddon,â and the glutting of the world ocean with plastic debris.
Now on to Green Swans. In the economic domain, recent Green Swan breakthroughs have included the rapid spread of cell phone technology and the internet, linking us in new ways and massively boosting the prospects for self-education, and the staggering cost reductions for solar and wind power systems. The accelerating shift to electric vehicles is a linked example, especially when coupled with the rapid evolution of battery technology and the impact of digitalization on autonomous vehicles, the internet of everything, and the sharing economy.
In the social domain, Green Swan trajectories have been followed by universal schooling in many countries, the evolution of vaccine technology (despite recent anti-vaccine rumors and propaganda), and the growth of social movements focusing on environmentalism, social enterprise, and impact investment.
When it comes to the environment, we have seen pollutants like asbestos, DDT, lead, and CFCs largely driven out of the economy, coupled with the emergence of concepts like sustainable development, the circular economy, and biomimicry. Equally impressive on the ground have been such ecosystem restoration projects as the progressive recovery of the Iraqi marsh ecosystems destroyed by Saddam Husseinâs forces, and the progressive re-greening of Chinaâs Loess Plateau, a cradle of early Chinese civilization.10 The scale of the regeneration in such places of past ruination has to be seen to be believedâand is hugely encouraging in terms of the longer-term prospects for our core task of planet-level regeneration. But to ensure we prevent future destruction of such ecosystems, we need a new crime of âecocide,â ranked alongside war crimes.
PLACEBO BUTTONS
Any breakthroughâor breakdownâof significant magnitude will have impacts across all three dimensions of wealth creation and destruction. Swans of whatever color create cascades of effects in our three dimensions and beyond. For a profoundly negative example of such interconnections, recall the European colonization of the Americas, already mentioned, resulting in between 50 and 80 million deaths among indigenous peoples, the collapse of a range of civilizations, and, as farms reverted to nature and the recovering forests drew carbon out of the atmosphere, the onset of the Little Ice Age in Europe.11
A positive example of a Green Swan, which surfaced as a response to Black Swan problems of widespread pollution and disease in cities, would be the spread of clean water, sanitation, sewerage, and related infrastructures. Still only a partial success globally, but nonetheless an extraordinary one. As it happens, our London office is in Somerset House, overlooking the River Thames, and alongside the Embankmentâcreated in a massive project that reclaimed marshland by the river, created expensive new riverside property, and, critically, from the 1860s on included a huge new sewage system. Over time, such projects turned a river into which almost everything was dumped, and in which almost nothing could live, into something in which even environmentally fastidious salmon could, at least potentially, swim.
As technology evolves, the nature, pace, and reach of Green Swans evolve in surprising ways, as in the case of the so-called Blue Planet Effect. When the BBC screened Sir David Attenboroughâs TV series The Blue Planet, with its hard-hitting footage of wildlife caught in drifting plastic waste, the response was almost instantaneousâand hugely damaging for the international plastics industry.
But these are exceptions in a storyline that more typically sees change operating on the basis of too little, too late. Indeed, one key reason why I decided to announce that product recall for the triple bottom line was that I concluded that, at least in the context of the so-called wicked and super wicked problems haunting todayâs world, the concept was suffering from what we might call the Placebo Effect. Let me explain.
Every now and then you see or hear something that crystallizes a thought that has been nagging at your brain. That was my experience when I downloaded a CNN article that asked a simple question: Have you ever pressed the pedestrian button at a crosswalk and wondered if it really worked?12 Many times, as it happens, not least because I worked on pedestrianization schemes way back when. And I have often suspected, as the article concluded, that âthe world is full of buttons that donât actually do anything.â It went on to say the following:
Theyâre sometimes called âplacebo buttonsââbuttons that are mechanically sound and can be pushed, but provide no functionality. Like placebo pills, however, these buttons may still serve a purpose, according to Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who pioneered a concept known as the âillusion of control.â
Langer pointed out that âdoing something typically feels better than doing nothing.â But what, I wondered, if many of the things we have been encouraging business leaders to do to create a better world are little more than market versions of the placebo button? What if their main effect is to make us all feel a bit better, while the real problems remain out of sight, out of mind, and, as a result, out of control?
Having worked closely with business since the late 1970s, helping CEOs and other corporate leaders to change their priorities and even their mind-sets, I saw this as a chilling possibility. People in the change industry increasingly discuss the impact they have in the wider worldâbut are we simply equipping cabinets, government departments, boardrooms, and C-suites with a plethora of handy placebo buttons? The answer, I believe, is an unstable mix of âyes,â âitâs too early to tell,â and âno.â
Yes, because the impact of all the effort invested by business has so far had a limited effect on the systemic challenges the world now faces. As CDC Group CEO Nick OâDonohoe put it, âToday over 90 percent of major businesses have specific programs dedicated to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Most CEOs talk about their organizationâs commitment to a wide range of philanthropic, employee engagement, and other benevolent activities at almost every possible opportunity.â13
All well and good, but OâDonohoe, an investor who has advised the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, concluded, âAs long as CSR stays fundamentally altruistic in its motivation it is unlikely ever to be considered as being core to business and is unlikely ever to scale or to provide lasting solutions to critical social challenges.â
So, yes, we see placebo effects at work. But, on the other hand, and to the same original question, noâat least in the sense that momentous progress has been made since I began work in this space. Back then it was almost impossible to get companies to talk to outsiders about ethical, social, and environmental issues. When we set up Environmental Data Services (ENDS) in 1978, it took us nine months to get inside the first companyâeven though our parent company was highly respected in the world of industrial relations. Now access to the boardrooms and C-suites of major companies is pretty much taken for granted by serious change agents.
But, finally, what about that middle option, âitâs too early to tellâ? Well, the penny is beginning to drop. Leaders in the private, public, and citizen sectors increasingly see long-predicted problems becoming everyday realities. As a result, even some laggard leaders now talk about disruptive change driven by social and environmental factors. Growing numbers have committed their organizations to one or more of the expanding spectrum of business-to-business platforms launched to help companies address such issues at scale. But who is keeping a close eye on ourâand theirâprogress overall?
As already mentioned, too often it seems as if we busy ourselves cleaning up corporate fish, only to release them back into murky market waters. We should ask the following questions: Have we picked the wrong unit, or units, of analysis? If so, how do we begin to think about changing the wider market environments within which businesses operate? Or, to use a rather different angle of attack: Have we been focusing too much on people like CEOs and other leaders, and spending too little time thinking about the market operating codes that drive corporate thinking, priorities, and behavior? The answer, I believe, is yesâeven if business leadership remains crucial in all of this.
CORPORATIONS ON THE COUCH
In that context, how do todayâs business leaders really think? Where is the leading edge of their knowledge taking them? And what is it that they do not currently see that they need to be made aware of? In a moment we will look at prevailing business mind-sets through ten lenses provided by business terms that have been in common use for ages, but are now mutating and evolving as new change agendas surface.
In effect, it is time to psychoanalyze business. When asked what I did late in the last century, I would often reply, half seriously, that I was some sort of corporate psychiatrist, putting corporations on the couch. At a time when many business leaders were wondering if the wider world was going mad, with its calls for everything from human rights for future generations to apparently impossible cuts in greenhouse gases, I saw it as my job to ...