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....