Applying permaculture principles to the corporation

During the building sustainable communities course we were asked to apply permaculture design principles to our lives and so I decided to apply them to corporation as a way of generating ideas about how to re-design human organisation within corporations to help them move towards sustainable business practices. I duly made (yet another) powerpoint and tried to set up a meeting with the CSR team (corporate social responsibility) who try and convince everyone how ethical and 'green' corporations are. I managed to show it to one person who was more open than I thought about this very radical (for them) way of thinking but knew it was going nowhere fast and anyway I was so done with trying to change the corporation but I thought I'd share some of the ideas I came up with:


Maximise beneficial relationships
The problem: Corporate silos often lead to internal duplication in effort and products. The culture of competition mean beneficial relationships through collaboration are not encouraged and leads to a lack of strategic systems thinking. 


Organisational idea: Encourage beneficial connections by including collaboration and co-operation in performance assessments rather than having incentives focused purely on individual performance. Working in silo’s mean people don’t understand the role of different teams in relation to their business function and so can’t see how they could combine knowledge to create collaborative solutions for sustainable business practice.

Encourage collaboration and co-operation by including team work in performance assessments

Use or mimic natural succession
The problem: Within a corporation succession happens as individuals ascend the hierarchy and gain greater influence within the organisation. Greater responsibility for day-to-day business operations means less opportunity for keeping up to date with wider societal changes. This top down individualistic control means there is little opportunity for new approaches and ideas coming from new graduates or alternative thinkers to upwardly influence the organisation, leading to a stagnant business that is slow to change.

Organisational idea:
One way to speed up ‘succession’ to a sustainable business culture would be to ‘seed’ different levels of the organisation with sustainability experts who have the necessary training to understand current BAU (business as usual) operations at the level of hierarchy they are working, this would grow ‘eco-literacy’ throughout all levels simultaneously, leading to a high ‘yield’ of eco-literate employees.

'Seed' the hierarchy with experts to speed up 'succession' to a sustainable business culture

Cycling and recycling our resources and energies

The problem: Corporations like other large human systems use a large number of resources (people, materials, energy and money) and creates large amounts of waste in the process where as in natural ecosystems everything is cycled and recycled so there is no waste. If we think of the corporation as an eco-system we can map the flow of resources and waste through the system to discover ways of recycling resources to make the system more sustainable. 

Organisational idea:

Use input/output analysis to map resources and energy to deliver maximum yield from the resources input to the system with the minimum waste for the business. 

Mapping the flow of resources and waste to make the system more sustainable

The problem is in their solution

But this exercise of applying permaculture principles to the corporation really highlighted the root cause of the problem we face, our obsession with consuming products. Anyone born during or after the second world war has been very carefully conditioned to see themselves as consumers, this was done to boost the economy after the first and second world wars. Edward Bernays, one of the pioneers of public relations and propaganda was Freud's nephew who used his uncles psychoanalytical ideas to persuade the masses that consumption was good. 

"If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits" 

Edward Bernays 

As we know this method has been very successful although more recently there has been a growing awareness that connecting your identity, status and feelings of self worth to material ownership is not the way to happiness. 


Green consumer task force
So when I joined the first meeting of the 'green consumer task force' a team put together to help the corporation be more sustainable, the obvious 'elephant in the room' was the continuing definition of people as 'consumers'. It's just now they would be green consumers and we would carry on making lots of 'green products' and so continue consuming because let's face it that's the foundation the corporation is built on and anything outside that model of business would seriously challenge the core beliefs of everyone involved, which of course is exactly what needs to happen....

The breakdown

Sea of emotions

Falling apart 
I have to be honest, I didn't just leave the corporation I had a breakdown. It had been a long time coming and I can’t even remember what day it was but I was feeling really terrible and was sat on the beach with my friend J who is one of the most intuitive, emotionally intelligent people I know. I believe you meet everyone for a reason and I met her to help me make my escape plan a reality and start the journey of reconnecting with my heart. There is a celtic spiritual tradition of anam cara or soul friend that believes when you deeply connect with another person your souls can flow together and I feel my friendship with J is based on this kind of connection. It feels very special to me.  

I started crying and she said you’re not well, let’s go to the doctors and get you signed off. I resisted at first as it’s not something that I would have ever thought of on my own but she was so right. I was in such a bad state I didn’t realise how ill I was. I walked up to the surgery and said I really need to see a doctor and got an appointment first thing the following day. It felt very awkward and embarrassing to have a meltdown in the doctor’s surgery but she was, as doctors go, pretty sympathetic and she gave me a sick note for a month. I felt a mixture of shock, guilt and shame surely I wasn’t the type of person to get signed off ? I was strong, hardworking and dependable…but I also felt relief as I realised I would finally be able to rest. I suddenly felt the extreme tiredness of someone who’s been running on adrenalin for a very long time.  

The first week after I got signed off I continued trying to keep ‘doing the right thing’, like a clockwork toy I was slowly winding down but still the tyrannical mind nagged me ‘you should be using your time effectively, you should be getting fit, you should be working out how to have a career change ectera. The end came after an ill-conceived trip to the power plate studio, after the session which left my muscles in spasm, I felt about 99 years old and practically had to crawl home. I remember lying spread eagled on the bed feeling utter exhaustion, I had used every last drop of energy and this is the way it had to be for me to finally STOP by reaching the point where I no longer even had the energy to think and that was it, the start of the big sleep...

The big sleep
I spent most of the next month asleep in bed and don’t really remember much about it other than every few days walking down the road to the co-op to buy food. You know you have broken yourself when a five minute walk uphill feels like you’re climbing a mountain.  During my short periods of consciousness I was crying a lot, a seemingly bottomless well of tears that had been building up for a very long time, feelings of sadness and despair that had been bottled up for years were finally being released. Even though I felt extremely weak and vulnerable I didn’t want people around me as I knew the instinct to avoid pain through distraction was not going to help me and what I really needed to do was finally face myself and find a way to be free of the negative patterns of thought that had created a prison in my mind, I wanted to heal myself, I wanted to be free!

Gradually I felt more awake and found myself drawn towards the seafront, looking out at the vast expansiveness of sea and sky always gave me an instant feeling of well-being.  At first I couldn’t understand what this feeling was as I had become so disconnected from myself but slowly I realised it came from deep within and was a brief connection with my inner being shining through the darkness that enveloped me the rest of the time.  It was a relief to have this feeling of well being rising up through the blackness as I knew I wanted more and that it was only me who could bring it back into my life. I wanted my thoughts to be free, joyful, loving and peaceful. I wanted to escape the tyranny of my mind and the self-limiting beliefs that had held me back for so long.

The sea of emotions
The image at the top of this post is from a journal I started to reflect on my inner journey which has been a very healing way of re-connecting with my creative inner being after my breakdown or breakthrough as I choose to think of it now. It's called 'The sea of emotions' and my friend kate said I should write out the words beneath it because you would want to read them so here they are.

"My inner being in a boat of consciousness floating calmly through the sea of emotions, even in stormy weather I can keep my course steady using the lighthouse of my soul to navigate. Most of the time I feel like I exist in a sea of emotions and sometimes they are relatively calm but other times without warning they can well up from somewhere deep inside and overwhelm me. I used to be scared when this happened and feel out of control but now I understand it's part of me and how I sense the world. In addition to the physical world there's the emotional energy field that's invisible but very tangible to me. It's taken me sometime to learn to differentiate between my feelings and other people's emotional energy that my 'emotional radar' picks up" 

Wisdom of your inner child
When I was four years old someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I remember it being the first time an adult had treated me as an equal and not as a child. I answered quickly without any hesitation "an artist". The funny thing is I was clearer then than I have been as an adult about who I am and what I'm here to do. If you are willing to look inward it's actually not difficult to connect with the wisdom of your inner child because they have always been there, it's just they get lost in the world of socially conditioned adult. Try it for yourselves now, connect with that inner voice the 'oughts' and 'shoulds' of society tell us to ignore, have a listen and let me know what it's telling you? 

Building sustainable communities

...and so it came to pass that I discovered permaculture design, for the uninitiated the most basic and simple description of permaculture is understanding how natural ecosystems are working through careful observation and using this knowledge to design human settlements and agricultural systems that mimic the relationships found in natural ecologies, sorry that still sounds a bit of a mouthful...seeking to work in a co-operative way with nature, seeing it as a friend that provides for us rather than an enemy that's out to get us that we must try and shape and control with technology. This belief has permeated every aspect of society and has led to a loss of knowledge about nature we'd had for thousands of years in a few generations.

This knowledge was completely missing from my education as I was being educated or conditioned depending on how you look at it, to enter the industrial workforce. For me the sustainable communities course presented a whole new way of thinking about humans relationship with the natural world, as someone who spent the previous 10 years designing humans interactions with the virtual world, it was great to find a design philosophy that reflected the value of people care I had tried so hard to instil within the technology industry with little success. Earth care and fair shares complete the trio of simple but powerful ethics of permaculture.

In the world I had come from the majority prescribed to the techno-utopian vision that designing more and more tech, quicker, smaller, faster was taking us to a 'better place' with no thought for the ethical and environmental effects of this focus on improving the already high standard of material comfort for western consumers. I found myself on the edge of two very different worlds and as the permaculturists reading this will know the edge of two ecosystems is a very productive place which sparked a lot of new ideas about how permaculture principles could be used to help the corporation think about sustainability in new ways.

I really enjoyed the course, especially the feeling of being part of a like-minded community as it's always inspiring to be working with other people who share your values and the 'pot luck' lunch was always a highlight of the weekend. I even managed to organise my team at the corporation to do a pot luck lunch which they all really enjoyed. It was quite sad when the course was over but I knew I would find ways of continuing on this path...

corporate 'pot luck' lunch

The post corporate world

Escaping corporate mind control

Going against the herd
After my wake up call on the sustainable design course at Schumacher college I started buying books like ‘capitalism at the cross roads’ and ‘The post-corporate world’.  I found reading them very comforting as it was a relief to realise there were lots of people out there who thought the same as me, I was not alone. It helped clarify my thoughts and gave me confidence, it’s hard being the different thinker in a group as you are going against the crowd and we have an instinctive need to fit in with the herd so it is uncomfortable when you’re basic survival instincts are in conflict with your need to live your values and beliefs.

I had often wondered why the seemingly intelligent people I worked with were unwilling to question the bigger picture when the role corporations were playing in damaging our ecosystems was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore but I knew they didn’t want the uncomfortable feeling that questioning would cause, they wanted to fit in with the herd and they had bills to pay which I completely understood. The command and control hierarchy works by institutionalising people over many years, the longer their ‘service’ the more ‘rewarded’ they are with higher status and greater responsibility but in reality the longer they stay the more disconnected and out of touch they become from the world outside and the greater their fear of leaving the institution.

Climbing the ladder
The corporate structure and purpose is aligned with the survivalist view of the world, ascending the hierarchy (having power over others) and beating your competitors to ensure the biggest profit for yourself (survival of the fittest) but this very limited life purpose and way of relating to others was deeply unsatisfying to me.

I do not see the value in the personal goals of ‘climbing the ladder’ and the reward of earning more money that those who buy into the business hierarchy appear to accept as a life purpose. I have no desire to ‘achieve these successes’ as ascending a thought construct based on the egoic need to feel superior to others feels like an empty and pointless goal to me.

These thought constructs are clever control mechanisms disguised as something that will fulfil your ‘needs’ as part of consumer society. There is no recognition of you as a human being, so it’s important to be able to differentiate between the genuine needs of your heart and the ‘needs’ you have been conditioned to believe you have by people who want to control you.

Energy of fear and greed pours into the universe 

When I was inside the building the feelings of fear and greed were very strong and being in there for too long would make me feel ill, a kind of negative sensory overload. There was definately an absence of love but most people could not allow themselves to fully connect with this reality because otherwise they would not be able to stay. 

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

My single step actually happened a couple of years ago when, finding myself increasingly disillusioned with the world of technology which I had been inhabiting for a long time, I decided to sign up for a weeks course in sustainable design at the Schumacher College.  It was a great experience, delicious homemade food eaten in a naturally lit dining area instead of a windowless canteen in the tech corp, daily meditation instead of daily 'medication' in the form of caffeine and vending machine snacks, interesting conversations instead of tech acronym spattered monologues and most importantly lots of very inspiring ideas about sustainable design.

After 10 years of trying to get the tech industry to focus on people as a starting point for the design process rather than products I was now seeing this goal in the wider context of consumer culture, the role design had played in creating it and the lack of ethical and environmental awareness involved in the industrial product design process. It was one of those moments in life when you realise you need to re-think everything. It wasn't just people-centred design we needed but planet-centred design! I knew this was the direction I now wanted to head in, I just needed to work out how...