Practical Primal Philosphy IV: Intrinsic Resilience

Resilience refers to the property or ability that is able to “bounce back” or recover quickly from difficulties.  It can be applied widely to substances such as rubber and natural phenomena such as ecosystems as well as to institutions, societies and people. It is for example a widely recognised capability in psychology in which it refers to an individual's tendency to cope well with stress and adversity without showing negative side effects.

In a sense resilience is always “intrinsic”, or built-in. It does not require assistance or intervention to function although some external conditions will favour resilience whilst others will not. So what more are we adding to the concept of resilience when we call it “intrinsic”? The answer to this question has to do with boundaries.

“Resilience Engineering” for example represents a new way of thinking about some aspects of management. It acknowledges the new world of Primal Reporter in which networks and emergent complex interactions replace relatively simple chains of cause and effect. But Resilience Engineering is bounded by the very organisations that it manages: within our business and other organisations, it looks for ways to create processes that are robust, flexible and able to maintain the efficient use of resources in the face of disruptions or ongoing production and economic pressures. In other words Resilience Engineering shares boundaries with traditional conceptions of businesses and other organisations.

In a similar way, those who are concerned with our societies may seek to build more resilient societies that are better prepared for, and able to recover from, emergencies. Since societies are far larger and more complex than any individual organisation, this responsibility is shared widely between central and local government, emergency services, the private sector, civil society and individual communities. Hence social resilience transcends the boundaries of any specific organisation or indeed legal jurisdiction.

But for the “intrinsic” in resilience we need to go beyond even these social boundaries. Intrinsic resilience is concerned with whole world complexities. Responding to Climate Change is one such challenge for intrinsic resilience and it involves whole world complexities. The Poptech Climate Lab reports that by 2050 some 250 million people may be displaced by climate change. To put that in perspective, it means a ten-fold increase over the documented number of displaced persons we are witnessing at the moment – and that is a huge amount of disruption, stress and pain.

But climate change is not the only external pressure that we, mankind, has to face. Water, food and energy shortages no longer loom but are facts in today’s world. The forthcoming “Global Sustainable Development Report” from the United Nations (UN)  argues that we need to sustain Earth, biodiversity, ecosystems, ecosystem services, resources, environment, peace, cultures, groups and places. This is such a broad list that sustainable development can be taken to be going beyond any boundaries that we have previously had to deal with in businesses, societies, nations and international organisations.

Sustainable Development is a matter of concern for all of us. It will not be sufficient to let others make the necessary changes or to think that in the long-term all will be well. Indeed some kinds of change are gradual and we will no doubt adapt in time to proceed with fairly smooth and continuous change. But some of the other kinds of change that will come with climate change and unsustainable forms of development will be sudden and chaotic with widely spread impacts:

“Evidence points to a situation where periods of such abrupt change are likely to increase in frequency and magnitude. This challenges the adaptive capacity of societies.”

-       Stockholm Resilience Centre

So what can we do? The Stockholm Resilience Centre argues quite rightly that increased knowledge is important when coping with the stresses caused by climate change and other environmental impacts. But the centre is dealing with increasing resilience as a response to abrupt change: this contrasts most clearly with intrinsic resilience that does the same but in addition gets down to dealing with root causes.

The book Intrinsic Sustainable Development: epistemes, science, business and sustainability (Birkin & Polesie, World Scientific Press, 2011) is an exploration, both personal and objective, of the root causes of unsustainable development. It is particularly concerned with how dominant social systems such as capitalism and free-markets have distant roots in a kind of scientific understanding that has now been displaced. In essence, this mismatch between significant social institutions and new scientific realities provides an excellent explanation of the root causes of unsustainable development and climate change. The book offers alternatives to capitalism and free markets that will increase our intrinsic resilience in businesses, societies, the world at large and in ourselves.

It is however the “in ourselves” part of resilience that we wish to highlight here in this post. After all, it is ourselves, we extraordinary people, that invented capitalism, free-markets and the whole gamut of neo-classical economics that in some almost unimaginable way permits major institutions to damage and destroy whole classes of people and nature to the extent that Earth’s basic life support systems are themselves damaged.

So it is the attitudes and values of everyday, extraordinary people that we need to address at the heart of Intrinsic Resilience. To increase Intrinsic Resilience, we need to ask the question: “If we really want to make the transition to a world that is healthy, sustainable and just, what attitudes and values would we and our societies need to hold?”

This is no ephemeral question for attitudes and values determine who we are and what we do – and we need answers right now:

“For many of the world’s poorest communities, the adverse effects of climate change are no longer a future possibility; they are a present reality. The poverty, dislocation, health crises, resource conflicts, food insecurity and economic harm that climate change engenders threaten to undo many of the humanitarian and other global development gains of the past thirty years. Marginalized constituencies experience the effects of climate disruption worst and first. And among the most vulnerable are rural girls and women.” 

-       PopTech Climate Resilience Lab 

The World's poorest communities are the most vulnerable.

We do have answers. It is not lucky that answers are available; nor is it a coincidence that the answers involve “intrinsic” concepts. It is a sign of the times, a sign of new understandings based on new knowledge that are now emerging, the coming Primal Age or episteme that is the over-riding subject of this blog.

What are the answers? Well there is no easy answer in the sense of a quick solution that we input into the system and all is well. The changes required are far too big and complex for that to happen. The answers are ones that will changes us, we extraordinary people, and allow us to think, develop and act in ways that increase intrinsic resilience and create more robust, stable, equitable and healthier worlds in which all of life may flourish. The answers are ones that help us to overcome some of the restraints and narrowness of day-to-day life which can create a small and mean sense of who we are, what we need and what we do. The answers are ones that gives us greater riches even though we may own less! The answers are ones that increase our motivations and rewards by increasing our sense of who we are and what we can do. The answers change people.

Take a first step towards working out your own personal yet generic answers and read, think about and begin to apply the following:

Common Cause

The Case for Working with Values and Frames

Getting over Financial & Economic Crises

The Financial Crises of 2007/08 is judged by many economists to be the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. As a result of the 2008 crisis, significant financial institutions, notably banks and stock markets, lost trillions of $US. In turn housing markets lost value resulting in evictions, foreclosures and unemployment. People saw their savings, pensions and endowments loose overnight the kind of money that takes decades of hard work to save. We are still suffering from this crises as more key business suffer or fail, high street shops and house-hold names go out of business; and  the European sovereign-debt crisis has ruined countless lives  in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and now Cyprus.

The 2008 crisis took much of the Financial & Economic world by surprise in spite of global studies and close attention from all quarters. The causes of the crisis are difficult to identify and has given rise to extensive debate. It is a global crisis and all of us are involved. The search goes on for ways to stop it happening again.

A significant amount of blame for the crisis has to be the “financialization” of the economy:

Is Sustainability still Possible?

You could be forgiven if you thought that the world was moving towards sustainable development. There is so much going on to improve our relations with nature and society. But if you look closely this is not the case. We are still heading towards a future of disasters large and small.

The World Watch Institute in Washington DC looks closely at sustainable development. In their State of the World 2012 report they write: “Despite multiplying numbers of solemn declarations, plans, and goals, no nation is even close to evolving toward a sustainable economy.” (Renner 2012, p. 3).

There are many reasons for this inability to realise sustainable development. The first may be that the required changes are so significant and the problems so intractable that much time is needed for changes to take place. We do not have the luxury of time!!

The Philosophical Burger

Do you eat ready-made beef, chicken or pork burgers? If you do, then you are performing the impossible because these food items no longer exist.

“Burgers” are on the menu for millions of people each day and with a generic name this patty is real enough. But it is the named specific burger content, the beef, chicken, pork, rabbit etc., which raises the ontological questions: the precise concern is not about the existence of burgers but is about the existence or otherwise of beef, chicken, pork, rabbit or whatever burgers.

Is this trivial? Burgers provide nutrition in a world where people are starving. So what if your beef burger does contain horse meat, pork, chicken or other poultry, donkey, onion, wheat flour, water, beef fat, dehydrated meat powders, soya protein isolate, salt, onion powder, yeast, sugar, barley malt extract, garlic powder, white pepper extract, celery extract, onion extract, rusk, stabilisers (diphosphates and triphosphates) and beef fat? It tastes good!

Anyway who is naïve enough to expect a beef burger to contain just beef?

Sumatran Tigers - hope for mankind!

The fate of the Sumatran Tiger is by no means secure – but we have reasons to be hopeful that this exquisite animal will survive.

Around170 Sumatran Tigers live in Kerinci Seblat National Park on the island of Sumatra in Indonesian. This is their largest known population. The smallest of all tigers, the Sumatran also has narrower stripes and a more bearded and maned appearance.

Sumatran Tiger Cubs by courtesy of WWF.

Get Real! –John Gray on Capitalism’s Delusions

John Nicholas Gray (1948 -) is a former London School of Economics and Political Science Professor. He is a well-published author of books and he contributes regularly to the UK national press including the Guardian newspaper.

John Gray promotes realistic thinking: “The meltdown of financial markets has done more than wipe out wealth on an unprecedented scale. It has also destroyed the neo-liberal belief in progress through ever expanding production and consumption, and an anxious search is under way for a replacement creed. Religious fundamentalism is one result of this quest, Green utopianism another. Intelligent improvisation – using technical fixes to reduce the human impact on the Earth, for example – is more likely to yield results that the search for solutions. But realistic thinking goes against the grain. It is easier to inhabit an imaginary future than deal with the intractable present.” (Gray 2009, p. xxv).

The above quotation was written in 2009 in a new preface to his book “False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism” which was first published in 1998. Gray’s 1998 prophetic vision on the delusions of global capitalism was proved to be correct one decade after publication.

In “False Dawn” Gray had argued that the effect of unrestricted international free enterprise will be socially and culturally destructive. It is also unsustainable. But Gray cannot be classified as a Green, as anti-growth, or as a return-to-nature thinker. Indeed Gray argues that a Green agenda, an anti-growth recognition of physical limits and a natural utopia are not tenable. He also argues not for sustainable development but for a “sustainable retreat”. (ibid.).

If Gray is against free enterprise, greens and sustainable development, what is it precisely that he does want?

Professor John Gray

John Gray wants realism; a knowledge and action undistorted by utopian ideals and beliefs. In particular he wants to rid the world of the propaganda that free markets are a natural state of human affairs. This is also a core argument of Primal Reporter.

 In “Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals”, John Gray (2002) challenges what it means to be human. He thereby touches upon another key PR idea – that the world is changing, and a new world, or episteme (Foucault 1970), is emerging. The book “Intrinsic Sustainable Development: epistemes, science, business and sustainability” (Birkin and Polesie 2011) is about the emerging episteme.

By referring to a new world, we have not of course found a new geographical expanse to enter. However, it is arguable that PR’s new world is an even more momentous event than that. What makes our knowledge possible is changing; and this changes what we know of the world and of ourselves. In this way a whole new world is made available to explore and with that all the thrills and opportunities of pioneering and discovery. Professor John Gray is yet another a harbinger of this change.

References

Birkin, F.K., and Polesie, T.  Intrinsic Sustainable Development: Epistemes, Science, Business and Sustainability. Singapore, World Scientific Press.

Foucault, M. (1989[1970]). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London, Routledge.

Gray, J. (2002). Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. London, Granta.

Gray, J. (2009[1998]). False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. London, Granta.

Green China?

Is corporate China ready for the green economy? A report from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) asked that question in October 2012 (ACCA and WWF 2012). In PR’s opinion, no! But corporate China is beginning to say the rights things, think about what is needed for a truly better world and seek sustainability credentials.

China has a massive sustainability hill to climb: very high levels of pollution; an avid shopping culture among those Chinese who can afford it; widespread poverty; a huge population; overcrowded cities; and an economy that can seem more dedicatedly capitalist, growth-minded and money conscious than the worst excesses on Wall Street. So PR does not think that China is ready for the Green Economy.

BUT, China and Chinese people are nothing if not adaptable and pragmatic. Chinese history is a record of how China adapts, accommodates change and survives - for over a very sustainable 3,000 years. Chinese people possess strong pragmatic elements, deep-seated ethical awareness and an ancient culture grounded on principles of harmony between heaven, earth and mankind. So PR thinks it quite possible that China could become Green and sustainable before the West.

Sustainable Business Models: Getting Over Growth

Existing business models have to grow. It is a compulsion and it has a well known technical driver.

The technical compulsion for growth is embedded in the way we measure business success in terms of the return created for the investment made. This is well known: if you are lucky enough to have surplus cash and you put some of this money into a savings account then you expect to get more money out after a period of time. You expect your investment to grow.

For accountants in business, this growth is measured as the return or profit gained for the capital employed or invested. It is represented by the equation

                                          Profit before Tax
                                         Capital Employed.

It is the fundamental driver of business and economic growth. It is known as the Return On Capital Employed (ROCE). To get no return is not an option in business.

This kind of growth is a problem for its disciples appear to recognises no limits to growth; this is true even when society, nature and the planet suffers because of too much business growth. Because growth causes so many problems, degrowth is now being seriously proposed.

The Club for Degrowth as featured on The Worldwatch Website

The Club for Degrowth argues that degrowth is essential for over-developed countries such as the USA and the UK. But does this mean that businesses in such over-developed countries will stagnate or wither? No - not at all…. but we do need to reconceive what is actually happening.

For example, if we first reconsider the above ROCE equation, the “Profit before Tax” and put it into the context of the world that science now reveals. The world that science now reveals is complex with many inter-dependencies,  interactions and uncertainties. To encourage businesses to focus upon “Profit before Tax” in this complex world is like asking a tourist to navigate a rain-forest using a map of London.

The “Capital Employed” for any business is not just money invested. All businesses use functioning societies and environmental inputs and necessarily create their space in the planet’s eco-systems. This has always been the case, but for too long the formal information systems of businesses focused far too much upon money transactions alone and simply did not see the social and ecological relations upon which they depend.

In the complex, interactive, interdependent and uncertain world that we now know and experience, our businesses need to generate benefits according to more than one metric: they need to deliver a Triple Top Line (TTL) (McDonough and Braungart 2002) of social, environmental/ecological and economic gains. To achieve this goal, the ROCE equation needs to be recognised for what it really is, just one of the many tools now available to assess business performance in a Sustainability Balanced Scorecard (SBC).

The Sustainability Balanced Scorecard prepared from the ISIS (Cloverleaf) Concept
(ISD Book 2011, p. 297).

References
ISD Book. (2011). "Intrinsic Sustainable Development: epistemes, science  business and sustainability. Singapore: World Scientific Press.

McDonough, W. and Braungart, M. (2002). "Design for the Triple Top Line". Charlottesville, Virgnia: McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry. Available at <http://www.mcdonough.com/writings/design_for_triple.htm>. [Accessed December 2012].

China and the Primal Episteme

Chinese accounting students who wanted to learn how accountants in the West  deal with accounting for social, environmental and sustainable development aspects of company performance had a shock when they attended Frank Birkin's lecture at Jinan University, Guangzhou, on Saturday 27th. October 2012. Instead of showing them how to do it, Frank showed them how scientific knowledge of the world now indicates that ancient Chinese ways of thinking provide a better foundation for social, environmental and sustainable development accounting than does neo-classical economics and free market idealism.

It is strange that educated Chinese people are not aware just how important their cultural and philosophical inheritance is to the world as a whole. Prof Rob Gray had set the scene by challenging Western notions of what accounting ought to be and this opened minds to the possibility that accounting could be very different - not just a servant to capitalism and financial markets. With the possibility of different forms of accounting established in their minds, these young Chinese accounting students were only too pleased to learn from Frank that they - the Chinese people - could develop their own, more harmonious and sustainable forms of accounting for China ... and for the world.

A slide from Frank's presentation in Jinan University, Guangzhou.

Please email Frank if you would like to learn more about how ancient Chinese culture and Philosophy can help to make the world a better place. You may also enquire about his itineraries in the near future to see if he could make a presentation at your university or college.