Transforming Ourselves to Live in Compression

We live in globally perilous times, for the 21st century is a turning point. Physical economic expansion began 500 years ago with European colonization. It cannot continue. From a global perspective, the earth has finite resources, but our business and economic legacies assume that more resources are always available ? somewhere. These legacies evolved to promote expansion. They still grip us, so transforming ourselves to limit consumption while simultaneously increasing human quality of life for everyone is the supreme human challenge of Compression.

Entrepreneurs seek a magic technical fix to let us preserve our profligate past, but no single countermeasure is likely to suffice because the old system has myriad challenges, in five categories: 1. Limited natural resources. 2. Over-consumption: The system's incentives promote using more and more. 3. A precarious environment: no one can keep up with all the problems in detail; global warming is merely the one most publicized. 4. Pushback: people whose way of life or sense of fairness are injured in the mad rush have resisted the expansionary system for the past 500 years, and those issues have not gone away.

But the key challenge is number 5: transforming ourselves, our systems, and our thinking to deal with all these problems rolled together; here labeled Compression. Taken together, all these challenges make it unlikely that any single technological fix is going to resolve them. We need to devise a different approach, one that recognizes that nature is not a backdrop to the human economy. Our economic activity is a subset of nature, affecting it and affected by it.

Recognizing this changes everything: The purpose of work is to assure human survival with an acceptable quality of life for all ? quality over quantity. It upsets existing economic systems, capitalist and socialist, for both assume unending physical expansion. Arbitrarily quantifying this challenge is a first step toward determining how to take practical action ? things we can do:

Improve industrial society quality of life; extend it to everyone globally while using less than half the energy and less than half the virgin raw materials of today, while reducing toxic releases nearly to zero.

All of our problems are ameliorated by simply consuming less ? even if we were able to tap huge sources of non-fossil, non-solar, clean energy. And cutting global consumption in half implies a much stiffer challenge than that in high-consumption parts of the world. This sounds like doomsday to those living in the comfort of the existing order with no idea how to go about making necessary changes. That's why changing ourselves to learn to change technologies and business models faster than ever before is our core challenge.

Rapid learning requires a work organization (here called a vigorous learning enterprise) in which most people are professionally dedicated to its social mission; and financial solvency, while necessary, is secondary. It's main purpose is peak performance addressing all work critical to human survival and quality of life. Governance must be on behalf of all stakeholders, not just owners, blurring distinctions between public and private funding.

This is not a pipe dream. Real people have actually performed almost in this way. Ideas for it are blended from the best operational organizations today: servant leadership, professional attitudes, lean and quality concepts applied by all, technological proficiency, and flexibility to do what is needed with minimal command and control. A vigorous learning enterprise is really a communication network sized to maximize human learning speed, concentrating on a social mission, not profit maximization.

However, our biggest obstacle is our old legacies that evoke tribal instincts and provoke dysfunctional competition instead of speeding our learning. Many of these are so normal to us that we seldom think about them. Much of the presentation will delve into these ?hidden legacies? in our concepts of work and how to manage it, on the thought that if we are to make big changes, first we have to recognize what needs changing. That is, learning to emphasize quality over quantity is not natural. It's a step up in civil self-discipline. It can be done if we have the will.