I spent much of my professional career developing and implementing Strategic Plans. The hardest part of this was that most people didn’t (and still don’t) know what ‘strategy’ is: the choice among alternative courses of action, not the determination of goals and objectives. It’s about how, not about what.

Most of the ‘strategic’ plans I was given (by bosses, and by clients I was advising) were not plans at all, but rather targets. I began to realize that my bosses and clients didn’t have the foggiest idea how to achieve these targets, which is why they just set them and left it up to me to achieve them. Indeed, for the most part they didn’t care how they were achieved, so I got rewarded and applauded when the targets were achieved (even if it was not my doing) and chastised and rated poorly when they were not (even if the failure was not my doing). In part this is because in most organizations today the bosses do not now how to do the work of their subordinates, so they can offer nothing of value in setting strategy (i.e. in intelligently suggesting how to achieve objectives and targets).

This failure of understanding and setting strategy seems endemic in all kinds of organizations today. Executives’ compensation is wildly disproportionate to the value they provide (they are mostly overpaid number crunchers), and the amount of control managers have over an organization’s activities, and success or failure, is absurdly overestimated.

The middle column of the chart above shows how strategic planning should work, but in most organizations it does not work at all. Instead of strategies being developed collaboratively and intelligently, they are either left up to individuals (who are given only objectives and targets), or imposed without consultation; in the latter case, the worker must figure out how to work around the (inappropriate) strategies to achieve the targets and objectives, while still helping the boss save face by making it appear s/he at least tried to implement the strategies. It’s a farcical game that goes on everywhere, and, especially in organizations that have grown too large to manage, it’s one of the reasons most organizations are so dysfunctional. The energy of the organization comes from control and authority, but the control is a myth, and the authority is consistently misapplied.

As I began to work with and study what I now call Natural Enterprises, and later Natural Communities, I began to realize that, rather than trying to make strategic planning actually work, these organizations had actually given up on strategic planning entirely, and instead operated improvisationally, with an entirely different modus operandi that is illustrated in the third column above.

Instead of being driven by a Mission and Vision (which are inherently and perpetually dissatisfied with the current state, such that any happiness in those organizations that goes beyond transitory success is highly suspect), these organizations are driven by a Purpose — a shared “Why are we here?” statement that, for the most part, needn’t and doesn’t change. Instead of getting “stretch targets” that can never be achieved, they aspire to sustainable happiness of their members (workers, customers, community). They worry not about how to ‘grow’ to get somewhere else, but how to continue what they do well now.

Since they have no objectives and targets to become what they are not now, they are free to focus on assessing the risks and threats to sustaining what they have already become. And they have no illusions of being in control: instead of trying to change their environment, they seek to prevent (in a few cases), mitigate (more often) and adapt to (most often) the changes, risks and threats that they envision. It is an essentially conservationist organizational philosophy, instead of the ‘grow or die’ philosophy that prevails in most organizations today.

And instead of authoritarian coercion and leaving the ‘how to’ up to the people on the front line by default, these organizations empower and trust those people to decide not only the ‘how’ but the ‘what’ of their actions, drawing on their personal passion and sense of responsibility, and their experienced, improvisational skill to know what to do, and how to do it, in the moment.

The cynicism, distrust and alienation that prevails in most large and traditional organizations preclude such an approach, which is why the economy and culture that has created such organizations is unsustainable and crumbling. Once this economy and culture collapse, I expect to see such an approach, which worked in pre- and non-civilization cultures, become once again the way most human organizations operate — though of course at a much smaller scale than today’s civilization.

We would be wise, I think, to emulate these Natural Organizations now, to the extent we can do so. Giving up on the folly of top-down strategic planning in today’s volatile and hugely unpredictable world only makes sense. We can and should learn to co-operate Natural Enterprises and Natural Communities improvisationally, replacing Strategic Planning with Resilience Planning.

But old habits die hard. Consultants and ‘expert’ advisors to all types of organizations have been steeped in the Strategic Planning ideology, and continue to push this dysfunctional approach on their clients. Even the Transition Movement, for example, often tries to create Future State Visions and Descent Plans that are more about what can be implemented (now) than about scenarios of what might need to be adapted to in the future, more about trying to control the community’s destiny than giving its members the capacity to adapt resiliently to the unforeseeable. It is no wonder that many Transition communities’ efforts are stalling.

Resilience planning is about growing better, not bigger. It’s about sufficiency, and sustainability, and responsibility, and trust, and adaptability and giving with the faith that our gifts will come back to us. It’s more about learning and being than doing. It’s about taking joy in what we are doing well, and how we are being of use to the world here, now.

It’s time we tried it.

A lot of reading, this month, and not a lot to show for it. I get some comfort from the belief that more people are talking seriously about the probability of civilization’s collapse, and doing some serious catching up. There seems to be a growing realization that our civilization culture cannot be saved, that the sixth great extinction has such momentum that no amount of technical wizardry or magical thinking can prevent it, that there is no elite currently conspiring to destroy the world that will suddenly realize their error and pull together to reverse course, that no one is doing this to us, that no one is in control, that despite the great hardships ahead life is still astonishing and beautiful, and that the seven steps* I am now taking, after a decade of study of how the world really works and what is possible, are the best, and the least, we can do.

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S END

The Great Regression and the Return of the Robber Barons: great infographic from the NYT; click here to see the whole thing (thanks to Bill Tozier for the link)

This is All We Can Do Now: Some astonishing writing by Canadian novelist Jeff Wells explains how our society has begun to desensitize us to prepare for the passive, obedient, unaware reptilian existence that mindless consumerism in an age of collapse requires. As full human beings, he argues, we’re just not needed anymore. Thanks to Michael Wiik for the link. Two citations in this epic-length essay just to whet your appetite:

“Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear – they are merely masks…. Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.” — Schopenhauer

“I don’t want to be overly dramatic about it, but I think people more and more wonder, is this living, or are we just going through the motions? What’s happening? Is everything being leached out of life? Is the whole texture and values and everything kind of draining away?” — John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

Dmitry Orlov Deconstructs the US Economy and the Transition Movement: Unlike the Soviet Union before its collapse, he says, Americans are still in delusion and total denial that their economy is unsustainable and teetering, and they are dependent on the system’s continuation and therefore in no position to revolt. Meanwhile, Transition is a great idea in principle, he says, but… Thanks to Tree for the link. Excerpts:

Orlov: Democracy is really for people who are capable of self-governance. Now Americans at large are not capable of self-governance. They expect to be protected from each other. They expect to be provided for. They expect for things to remain the same even when this doesn’t make any more sense. And those are their expectations. So they expect to be lied to. If you stop lying to Americans they would kill you…

Interviewer: Anyway, so what do you think of the Transition movement as a possible solution for communities or individuals?

Orlov: Well it presupposes the idea that you can get there from here.

Is China Ready to Pull the Plug?: New research suggests that China has freed itself from dependence on exports to the US and EU, and can now afford to sell off its massive US financial assets as expeditiously as possible, potentially letting the hugely overpriced US dollar collapse. Thanks to Melinda Fleming for the link.

Taking Direct Action: The documentary on the Earth Liberation Front “If a Tree Falls” has been shown on PBS and is now available for free online viewing until October 13. The film explains the rationale for ELF’s organizational structure and tactics (arson gets extensive media attention and often dissuades risk-averse megapolluters from resuming or continuing their more egregious activities), and describes the outrageous US laws (life without parole in one of the infamous American black-hole CMU prisons with no judicial discretion to reduce the term) for any destructive action against property carried out as an environmental protest. Scary stuff from the nation that brought you “Communist” witch-hunts, extraordinary rendering, and Guantanamo.

LIVING BETTER

Co-op on Tap: The Black Star Co-op Pub and Brewery is an interesting experiment in self-management, essentially a multi-stakeholder co-operative enterprise where the workers, suppliers, customers and investors are indistinguishable. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link.

A Currency Measured in Hours: A time bank in NYC allows people with no money access to essential services by contributing their time doing something they are good at in return.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

cartoon by RJ Matson in Roll Call

(A lot of people send me links to articles showing the corruption and incompetence of governments (notably the US government), regulators, and military and security agencies. The feeds I read regularly are likewise full of such reports. I appreciate receiving these articles, but after a while I start to get numb to them. So I will acknowledge that more-or-less the entire global corpocracy is rotten, bloated, and dysfunctional, and leave it at that. It is quickly falling apart, and running out of sources of money, so it won’t be able to do its terrible damage too much longer.)

The Boycott List: Responsible Shopper still publishes its social and ecological ratings of large business-to-consumer corporations, and its Green Pages of responsible (mostly local and small) businesses. Looking at the comparatives of large companies is discouraging — they are almost uniformly bad, irresponsible, destructive, unresponsive megaliths. Better to buy local, organic, and/or fair trade from small companies you know behave responsibly, and just boycott all the big companies, and the retailers, banks, lawyers and other parasites and media organizations that support them.

Stop the Tar Sands: The Dominion calls for direct action to stop the abominable Alberta Tar Sands and confront the right-wing federal and provincial governments that serve only as shills for Big Oil. As I predicted, the Washington DC demonstrations against the latest Tar Sands pipeline were a useless distraction and time-waste, a spectacle where has-been actors rehearsed and acted out getting arrested in front of the cameras, over-exposed ‘environmentalists’ plugged their latest books, and, behind the scenes, lobbyists got reassurances from Obama and his regulatory authorities that the pipeline and other Tar Sands support would be smoothly fast-tracked ahead, that the pipeline could be used for bulk water removal from Canada when the oil ran out, and that they could ignore the poseurs on the White House lawn. Meanwhile, Michael Cote reports that there are already 500,000 miles of pipelines in North America, most of them decrepit and overdue for tests and upgrades, just waiting to leak, burst etc.

Homeland Security: The Decade’s Biggest Scam: Glenn Greenwald reports that after spending billions, the US is much less safe than it was a decade ago, and is now saddled with a crushing and unaccountable run-amok domestic “security” bureaucracy that might be the final straw in bankrupting the country.

Seriously Damaged Rich People: I’m a believer that most people really do want the best for the world. It’s only the psychopaths, people seriously damaged some time in their past to the point that they lack all empathy and conscience and are utterly ruthless in their ideologically-driven activities, that we need to watch out for. The Cheney-Bush gang are the most notable examples, but on the corporate side the Koch brothers and this motley crew of wacko supporters are the standard-bearers.

UN Criminal Negligence Causes Thousand of Deaths in Haiti: A visiting UN delegation repeatedly dumped raw sewage into Haiti’s drinking water, causing a cholera outbreak that killed thousands and sickened half a million.

Red Ink: How the US got $14T in debt (mostly the Bushes), and who it’s owed to; another great infographic from the NYT. Thanks to Seb Paquet for the link.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

Garbage Art: Waste Land, a new and inspiring film pays homage to those who live by picking garbage and shows that great art can be made from anything. Thanks to Nancy White for the link.

Underground Missile Bases for Sale: Slightly used massive underground bunkers, some with airstrips and indoor pools. Suitable for theme parks, private security and income purposes. And great neighbours! Thanks to Morva Bowman for the link.

Writers Who Don’t Read: More and more young writers are choosing not to read, possibly because of the modern stigma, in this age of social networking, of spending lengthy periods of time alone. This seems to me a lot like being a chef who chooses never to eat prepared food.

THOUGHTS FOR THE MONTH

The most important advice ever written for poets, from TS Eliot (cited in this week’s New Yorker, not online, in a review by Louis Menand of his newly-published letters):

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. [Menand goes on, explaining how Eliot's small body of works utterly changed the writing of English language poetry: "I know that what I am looking at is a house because I am already familiar with things that look more or less like it and are houses. This is what enables me to say that the particular house I am looking at is a big house, an ugly house, a modern house, and so on. The same thing happens when I read a poem; I relate it to all the other poems I have read -- in the head of an ideal reader, to all the poems that have ever been written. Past poems condition my response to any new poem. And the really new poem conditions my response to all the poems that preceded it. After "Prufrock", the Inferno is, ever so slightly, a different poem. After I see a house by Marcel Breuer, my own house looks, ever so slightly, different."]

From Raphael Enthoven in the NYT, “On Reverie”:

It’s a sweet drug that plays with fire. A wasteland — forest of ruins or paved-over jungle depending on whether wakefulness or sleep tips the scales. An old city where the shadows still hold a trace of vanished occupants, where detailed buildings, patiently reconquered  by nature, suddenly still are there, sand castles. Through the dreamer’s kaleidoscope where the absence of desire is taken as reality, birds slash through the twilight, cypress trees dive into the pool, stars sparkle in the sea, clouds take on shapes, water lilies bloom in the sky, plans become flexible, the limit to how far things can go relaxes, thought dances, light is lit by shade, opposites are juxtaposed, merge and become linked in a prelude to beauty: reverie is contemplation’s prehistory, the education of the gaze by the eyes of the soul. The world before concepts.

From JC Miller on conformity (in a letter to the editors of Salon):

American “adults” desperately and anxiously seeking approval and sense of worth – from Mommy and Daddy, peers, the norms transmitted over their TVs, their economic masters, their congregations – are terrified of deviance, of difference, despite their healthy aversion and abhorrence of the infliction of pain and death on other living things. That is what they have butchers and soldiers for, and that is why they eat meat.

From Richard Shelton’s desert lament Requiem for Sonora:

men are coming inland to you
soon they will make you the last resort
for tourists who have
nowhere else to go
what will become of the coyote
with eyes of topaz
moving silently to his undoing
the ocotillo
flagellant of the wind
the deer climbing with dignity
further into the mountains
the huge delicate saguaro

what will become of those who cannot learn
the terrible knowledge of cities

______

* (1) understanding what is really going on, (2) acquiring essential knowledge and abilities, (3) reconnecting with the Earth, (4) living responsibly, (5) showing and telling others why and how to prepare for collapse, (6) fighting back against the destruction, and (7) living joyfully

Over the last month I have been reading two (overly-long) books about new political and economic strategies, in parallel: Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics and Derrick Jensen et al’s Deep Green Resistance. This is a short review of these two books.

Sacred Economics is a wonderful summary of the principles and ideals of a Gift Economy. If you want to really understand what’s wrong with our current economy, it’s essential reading, especially for those who find economics bewildering. Eisenstein explains that the current industrial growth economy has evolved like a cancer to sustain itself at any cost, built as it is on cultural disconnection of citizens (making us into consumers, disconnected as individuals from each other and as a species from the rest of life on Earth).

Money, he says, began as a token of appreciation and gratitude, a means to facilitate giving without obligation. But as our economy has scaled up, homogenized and globalized, money has become a necessary means of tracking transactions, its spirit and ‘sacred’ meaning have been lost, and the resultant system creates an asymmetry between givers (now ‘suppliers’) and receivers (now ‘customers’) that destroys the affordability and desirability of giving, and concentrates ever-more wealth in the hands of those who already have a lot of it.

As money fails utterly to connect gifts and needs, it creates a dysfunctional sense of scarcity (fear of never having enough, and the compulsion to amass and protect private ‘property’). Eisenstein cites John Zerzan as saying that just as clocks create a scarcity of time out of natural abundance, so money creates a scarcity of material things. He goes on to explain that the appropriation and accumulation of private property is always tantamount to theft, and its extension to intellectual and social ‘property’ is an abomination. Nearly every good and service available today, he asserts, meets needs that were once met perfectly well for free.

The final insult in this dysfunctional chain, he explains, is the usurious charging of interest on yet another form of immorally aggregated privatized property — financial capital. It creates a ceaseless imperative for accelerating growth and debt that is destroying our planet, and it is essential that we begin to repudiate these penurious debts on a massive scale to begin to stop this destruction.

No argument from me. Most of us working to create a better world and mitigate the crises we face today have said all of these things, though perhaps not so eloquently. My problem with Eisenstein’s book is my problem with most of today’s magical thinking books on creating a better society — as Dmitri Orlov put it recently, describing the similarly well-intended Transition Movement, the problem is that you can’t get there from here. This is what Eisenstein proposes:

• Negative interest rates (“free money”) to discourage hoarding of wealth and redistribute wealth and income; this systematized and continuous devaluation would apply to all financial balances and also to cash.
• Allowing the issuance of money by governments based only on “unused” natural wealth (“commons”)
• Guaranteed annual income, negative sales taxes and payment for good, “uneconomic” work (“social dividend”), funded by taxes on “bads” instead of “goods” that would effectively internalize pollution, resource depletion and other costs that are currently externalized (passed on to the environment and future generations)
• Local currencies and mutual credit commons to complement the above government currencies

Once these things were introduced to replace our current money, currency, economic and tax systems, Eisenstein claims, a Gift Economy would begin to emerge naturally, spurred on by these incentives and disincentives. And perhaps it would if it were somehow possible to gently dismantle the existing economy to put all of these things in place. Unfortunately, it is not, and no amount of wishful thinking and consciousness-raising is going to change that. Our current economy has evolved over centuries as a self-reinforcing system, and its fearful and well-propagandized supporters (the politicians, bankers, police, right-wing, wealthy, wealthy-wannabees and other members of the unwitting group that Keith Farnish calls the perpetrators of the Tools of Disconnection) will violently oppose any attempt to demolish it. It is not in our nature (or even our collective capacity) to simply take an existing human system and replace it wholesale with a better one. It has never been done and never will.

If we are hugely fortunate, when the industrial growth system starts to fly apart and collapse through its own unsustainable failings (a process that’s well underway for all the attempts to cover it up), some collective of smart, generous, articulate people might start to put some of Eisenstein’s ideas to a real-life test. But I wouldn’t count on it. When things start to collapse, panic, denial, blame-seeking and reactionary thinking are more likely human responses.

While we’re waiting, Derrick Jensen’s new book (mostly written by collaborators Aric McBay and Lierre Keith) suggests a different tack. Deep Green Resistance is Jensen’s response to calls for advice on specific and systematic steps to take to confront the destruction of our world and, essentially, begin as humanely as possible to dismantle industrial civilization before its destructiveness escalates further. Lierre Keith writes:

A serious strategy to save this planet has to consider every possible course of action. To state it clearly once more: Our planet is dying. There could not be a greater call to responsibility than stopping the destruction of all life. A heartfelt belief in human goodness is not a political strategy. Neither is our spiritual growth or our moral purity. We all need to decide for ourselves what actions we can and cannot take, and as in all things that matter, “No” is absolute. That should be a given. There is room — indeed there is a necessity — for every level of engagement in this project. But it is long past time to stop playing make believe about the threats to our planet, solutions to those threats, and about the courage and sacrifice that will be required to bring the system down…

Most of the population is never going to join an actual resistance. We’re social creatures, and it’s hard to stand against the herd… Conformity brings rewards and privileges; fighting back brings punishment and alienation. Most people are not psychologically suited to the requirements of resistance. The sooner we accept that the better… The collective decision [of the environmental movement to date] has been to reject the possibility of a serious resistance movement. That conclusion has been fostered by many cultural forces [including those at work in our religious beliefs, individualism, salvationism, classical liberalism, idealism, the alternative culture movements, permaculture, simple living, and the Transition movements]… These people obstruct any attempt to conceptualize how resistance to industrial civilization could be organized… What’s missing is the recognition that political resistance is necessary… [Relying on individual efforts, hoped-for large-scale "paradigm shifts", education, and personal and community preparation for major change] is not enough.

Much of the second half of the book consists of Aric McBay’s analysis of how resistance movements have (and have not) succeeded in the past, and Derrick Jensen’s “Q&A” answers to the most common questions about the risks of getting involved in active resistance to an established culture (they’ll be familiar to you if you read his column in Orion magazine). The most useful tool, at least for those still in the early stages of girding ourselves up for resistance, is McBay’s chart of forms of resistance that he calls a ‘taxonomy of action’. I’ve captured what I think are the major elements of it in the chart above.

The key message of the book is that what is needed now are more people to work, either above-ground or underground (they make the important point that members of the resistance need to be one or the other, with a clear wall between them), on the three forms of Direct Action: block it, break it, or take it. I’ve written before about some ways we could apply this to stopping the Tar Sands.

I’d encourage you to buy or borrow both books, Eisenstein’s to understand why our current economy is broken and how it got that way, and Jensen’s to start to think about what you might be willing to do to help bring it down.