Sustainability Symposium 2022 Sandra Waddock

00:00:01:07 - 00:00:30:06
Mike Collignon: Our next presenter is going to explore the human centric ethic of today's workplace, which is chipping away at the single bottom line version of capitalism and outline a shifting power structure whereby profitability is no longer at odds with stewardship. Hey, I've just become a fan of Sandra Haddock. She is the Galligan chair of Strategy, Carroll School's scholar of corporate responsibility and professor of management at Boston College Carroll School of Management.

00:00:30:09 - 00:00:52:23
Mike Collignon: She has published over 180 papers and chapters, 15 books, and received multiple lifetime achievement awards. Sandra's current research interests include transformational system change, memes and narrative flourishing life, intellectual shamanism, management, education, and wisdom, among others. Sandra, welcome to the Sustainability Symposium.

00:00:52:29 - 00:01:11:13
Sandra Waddock: Thank you. Mike. Great. So I'm really thrilled to be here and all. My goodness, what a thrill to follow Paul Hawken, who's I've been whose work I have for so many years. So I'm going to talk today about a reset. And it's the kind of reset Paul was just talking about. And it's got to do with changing mindsets.

00:01:11:13 - 00:01:39:19
Sandra Waddock: So Paul used the word tainted when he talked about people's mindsets and particularly policymakers mindsets. And I'm going to talk about what they're tainted by, which is really the sort of the economic narrative that we have in the world today. But before we start, I want to ask participants to do something, maybe put into the chat an answer to this question, what matters most to you?

00:01:39:22 - 00:01:53:15
Sandra Waddock: Just I'm going to give you a lot of time to that. But what's what's the most important thing in in your life? And I.

00:01:53:18 - 00:01:55:07
Sandra Waddock: Just write that.

00:01:55:09 - 00:01:57:14
Mike Collignon: I can help you with some of the answers if you need it. Sandra.

00:01:57:15 - 00:02:01:23
Sandra Waddock: Yeah. Just give me a couple of the answers.

00:02:01:26 - 00:02:03:29
Mike Collignon: Family legacy.

00:02:04:02 - 00:02:04:21
Sandra Waddock: Yeah.

00:02:04:27 - 00:02:14:28
Mike Collignon: Sustainability, comfort a lot, a lot more. Family health. Justice.

00:02:15:00 - 00:02:39:14
Sandra Waddock: Great. That's fine. Perfect. And now I want to say ask another question. What do you want your legacy to be. So someone mentioned legacy. So what do you want your legacy to be. And put that into the chat as well, your particular personal legacy. Because this is really what Paul was just talking about.

00:02:39:16 - 00:02:42:23
Sandra Waddock: Mike, you could maybe give me some of the answers there too.

00:02:42:26 - 00:03:03:02
Mike Collignon: All right. Service and perseverance. Doing what's right for the planet. Making things better. Net positive. Adding more beauty. Right. The the legacy of I gave back or he gave back. Honoring the earth. Caring for the earth.

00:03:03:05 - 00:03:26:20
Sandra Waddock: Yeah. Thank you. So so I want to point out something here. None of you said I want to make a lot of money. None of you said I want to leave the world with all the goods and material stuff that I could gather. Your legacy is about something relational, something personal, something of. Of giving back. Something of doing something good for the world.

00:03:26:20 - 00:03:59:06
Sandra Waddock: And I don't think most people entered those ideas simply because of what we call bias. You know, unwillingness to share the reality of your world. Now, the other thing, and I know a lot of people here have started, businesses are part of businesses. So if you've built an enterprise in any way, why did you start it?

00:03:59:08 - 00:04:01:27
Sandra Waddock: So I don't know if there's any responses to that.

00:04:02:02 - 00:04:07:26
Mike Collignon: Yeah. I'm just giving them a second to come in. So flexibility and freedom.

00:04:07:28 - 00:04:09:06
Sandra Waddock: Freedom. Yeah.

00:04:09:09 - 00:04:20:12
Mike Collignon: Yep. Supporting my family while solving the climate crisis. Great leadership. They wanted to have control over their work or their profession.

00:04:20:14 - 00:04:21:14
Sandra Waddock: Yeah.

00:04:21:17 - 00:04:28:25
Mike Collignon: Always make a difference in ways that I know that I can. And to work on environmental justice.

00:04:28:27 - 00:04:51:10
Sandra Waddock: Great. Thank you. Mike. That's great. So so again, I want to point out that none of you talked about making a boatload of money. Yes. You want to leave something for your family? Yes. You want to serve the world? But the purpose of the enterprise that you started has got something to do with something more than just making money.

00:04:51:10 - 00:05:17:20
Sandra Waddock: And yet, when we think about the purpose of business in an economics, as it's framed in economics, and as we hear about it in, in the news all the, all the time, it that isn't what we hear. What we hear is this idea, that business, the purpose of business is to maximize shareholder wealth or to maximize profits if you don't happen to be a public company.

00:05:17:22 - 00:05:46:21
Sandra Waddock: So we're we're constantly hearing this message that everything is about profits and money and the cumulation of stuff. In fact, most of us today are considered not not citizens or not family, but consumers. Wow. Because we can go out and buy stuff. And so, it just go and listen to the nightly news and you hear about how the stock market did today and, you know, was it was the share prices up or down.

00:05:46:21 - 00:06:12:11
Sandra Waddock: And most of us really couldn't care less, most of us if we hold stock and most people probably don't. But if we do hold stock, it's likely in money market funds or some other consolidated thing. We basically have no idea of what stocks were holding. So, but the conventional wisdom is telling us that the purpose of business is just money.

00:06:12:14 - 00:06:31:27
Sandra Waddock: But I want to argue that it's not just money, and that when we dig down deep into our own psyches and into the purposes for which we start businesses, we know that there are a whole lot more meaningful things than just making money. And sometimes it's about service, and sometimes it's about fun, and sometimes it's about legacy.

00:06:32:00 - 00:06:56:00
Sandra Waddock: And that's true for us as individuals and that's true for our businesses. As my friend, stakeholder, theorist and Freeman always says, you know, I need red blood cells in order to live. But the purpose of my life is not to make red blood cells. So today's talk, I want to challenge the idea, these ideas that come from economics.

00:06:56:04 - 00:07:21:08
Sandra Waddock: And I'll lay them out a little more fully shortly. I want I want to take us on a little journey into the story or the narrative, because Paul talked about the stories of the narratives that we're living in. And that's really that's really what this economic narrative is. It's a story that we tell ourselves and that, at their core, are destructive of both human relationships and our relationships to the world around us.

00:07:21:10 - 00:07:50:11
Sandra Waddock: And to do that, I'll challenge a few of the assumptions of many of the assumptions of economics and provide. I'm going to try to provide an alternative framing of economics that draws on an extensive review of literature and and also the work of a group of folks who've been looking at alternative economics just to see what the core principles are and whether they might differ from the ones that are current and are dominant discourse today.

00:07:50:13 - 00:08:16:22
Sandra Waddock: I want to argue that it's way past time, given the climate and many other crises that Paul alluded to for a fundamental rethinking of economics and of how businesses operate under that sort of big idea of economics that we all live in. And in doing that, I want to provide a framework for what gives, what needs to shift and why in our broader business systems and in, in our broader economic systems.

00:08:16:22 - 00:08:40:07
Sandra Waddock: And I'll conclude by arguing that we are all in this world together, just like Paul just did, actually, and that we need to start acting like that actually matters in the ways we construct our economics and in the stories that we tell. Because stories matter. And I'll explain why as we go along. So stories matter and flawed stories really matter.

00:08:40:09 - 00:09:05:05
Sandra Waddock: Why is that? Humans are storytelling creatures. When our ancestors sat around the fire at night, they told stories. Stories that explained how the world work, where their place in that world was, and how they should relate to each other. So stories matter. Stories that are repeated a lot become cultural mythologies. And those cultural mythologies are important because they shape our worldviews.

00:09:05:05 - 00:09:33:02
Sandra Waddock: They shape our attitudes, their the the paradigms that we have. We hold about how the world works and what our place in that world is. And particularly important in the context of those stories are what I call memes, or what Susan Blackmore called memes, or Richard Dawkins called means originally. And memes are these core units of culture. The ideas, the phrases, the images, sometimes the brands.

00:09:33:02 - 00:10:06:28
Sandra Waddock: If you happen to be a company, the things that get repeated from mind to mind, relatively intact and cultural mythologies are part of that. That set of memes that get repeated because they really tell us how the world works. And that means that the same story can get repeated over and over and pretty much the same way, and shape understandings and worldviews and paradigms and paradigms matter because, as John Ella meadows told us, it's paradigms that are the most important lever for transformative change.

00:10:06:28 - 00:10:41:20
Sandra Waddock: And one of the reasons that we have not achieved the kind of transformative change that if you read regeneration or drawdown, you see that many people actually are doing something quite different. But most of us are still stuck in this, in this sort of ideology of economics. That is one of our basically flawed stories, and it's these flawed stories that really matter, particularly when they're resonant and have been we've been indoctrinated with them, as we have with much economic thinking.

00:10:41:21 - 00:11:05:01
Sandra Waddock: They shape all of our relationships, they shape our attitudes and our behaviors, as I said, and in business, as they shape how business is actually practiced and in particular, how business treats the natural environment. So when you think about the core ideas, when I asked you what it was really important to you, those were the stories that you tell yourself.

00:11:05:04 - 00:11:33:00
Sandra Waddock: And some people think when they go into their business, they should have a different attitude, particularly if their business happens to be a large corporation. But we know that there are many crises today, and these crises are not readily dealt with. Their what is known as wicked problems or and they take place in a context of, of complexity and from a scientific complexity theory perspective.

00:11:33:00 - 00:12:08:22
Sandra Waddock: So wicked problems and complexity are problems that are intertwined. There's no easy beginning, no ending, their dynamic. There they are. This combination of complexity and and the wickedness means that they're very difficult to solve. It's hard to figure out how to define the problem where it started, because it's all tangled. And, you know, there may be many different stakeholders in each one of them has a different idea about both the definition and the proposed solution and how to get to that solution.

00:12:08:22 - 00:12:47:28
Sandra Waddock: So and in in big problems like climate, there's no clear boundaries. That's that's a global problem as we know. So the climate emergency threatens human civilization and it's only growing worse. We heard last week, just last week, the latest IPCC report, the Intergovernmental Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, tells us that climate change is significantly problematic and it requires dealing with climate change, requires massive changes in how we do business and in dealing with the natural environment.

00:12:48:05 - 00:13:27:22
Sandra Waddock: We also facing multiple potentials for ecosystem collapses. And I know that regeneration draws on the positive side of this, but the reason we need the kinds of activities that are being done in the regenerative regeneration movement today is because of the ecological unsustainability of the current system, and because we humans are breaching many of what the Stockholm Resilience Institute tells us are our nine planetary boundaries, planetary boundaries that that create huge problems.

00:13:27:22 - 00:13:56:25
Sandra Waddock: We also face a massive crisis of inequality. Let's just go back second, five of the nine planetary boundaries that can't be breached have now been breached, as the latest data suggest. And and we face an inequality crisis. And there's, there's evidence to suggest from Jared Diamond that inequality, the gap between the rich and the poor, is one of the drivers of civilizational collapse.

00:13:56:25 - 00:14:28:19
Sandra Waddock: So these things put us at great risk. And we are facing massive biodiversity loss. So the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services tells us that we could be losing the world, could be losing up to a million species over the next 50 years or so. And a million. You may not think that's important, but as as Paul, I was listening to another talk by Paul Hawken last night, and he he was at my institution actually virtually as well.

00:14:28:19 - 00:14:49:16
Sandra Waddock: But he was also at my institution. And, and he argued that the insects, we don't think about the insects, but if we don't have insects, they're the pollinators. And they and they, they, they chew up the garbage and they do all kinds of ecosystem services for us. Without those insects, we humans will last. I think he said two years, maybe three.

00:14:49:16 - 00:15:16:22
Sandra Waddock: So, now and of course, we face the pandemic and on and on. And the pandemic itself revealed many of the the losses that we're talking about here is the just an image of the five planetary boundaries breached from the Stockholm Resilience Center. And this is the latest data. So, you know, these are these are the breaching. And I'm not a I'm not a I'm a management scholar, not a physical scientist.

00:15:16:22 - 00:15:24:22
Sandra Waddock: But you know I can read a diagram like that too. So so sorry.

00:15:24:25 - 00:16:06:15
Sandra Waddock: So what's behind all of these crises. Well, one of the things that's behind it, in my view, is the is is flawed stories. So these flawed stories and have helped us to not cope effectively with these grossly wicked problems, these, these problems that are housed in wicked complexity, our cultural mythologies or the narratives that shape our worldviews, particularly in the industrialized northern Western world and possibly particularly in the United States, with its emphasis on individualism, have led to these crises.

00:16:06:15 - 00:16:29:14
Sandra Waddock: And this is a picture of a baobab tree in South Africa. And I was told that it is possibly the largest one in South Africa, and that when drought is too bad for these trees, they just simply collapse, like in one day. They just collapse. And that's the the state change that in a complex adaptive system can suddenly occur.

00:16:29:14 - 00:16:55:11
Sandra Waddock: And it's what it's partly what we're risking if we don't change our ways sooner rather than later. And the latest IPCC report basically tells us we need to do that, by within three years. And Paul just also said that, so there are numerous stories that are important, but I want to two in particular, one that shape Western culture in particular in particularly in the United States here.

00:16:55:12 - 00:17:26:14
Sandra Waddock: One is how we humans view ourselves in relation to nature, and possibly even more importantly, because it drives a lot of these crises, is the economic story, and both of which have significant implications for the world. So what's this flawed human story? Well, it's about human exceptionalism. It basically argues that we humans are separate from somehow separate from nature and should have, quote unquote, dominion over nature that comes right out of the Bible.

00:17:26:14 - 00:17:56:18
Sandra Waddock: I think it's a misinterpretation of what was actually said in the Bible. But, but I'm no biblical scholar either, but I've read that it's interpretation. What it does, though, is it separates us from the reality that we human beings, we are nature. We are integrally and inherently interconnected with and utterly dependent on nature for absolutely everything. Everything we eat, where, live in, farm, build and purchase, everything that's all from nature.

00:17:56:19 - 00:18:45:14
Sandra Waddock: So in fact, we are nature, and nature is us. Including all the bad stuff, probably. But, but let's let's think about what might be different if we viewed ourselves actually as part of nature, rather than as above, or somehow separated from nature. If we recognize nature's gifts and benefits to us, rather than allowing that, then taking our separation from our distinction from nature as allowing us to maintain an exploitative approach towards nature, and then that exploitative approach towards the natural environment also takes extends to other living beings, and ultimately to other other human beings that we somehow view as lesser than ourselves.

00:18:45:14 - 00:19:00:22
Sandra Waddock: So the reality, though, is one of, sorry, one of connectedness and, and.

00:19:00:24 - 00:19:25:20
Sandra Waddock: Sorry. The reality is one of connectedness and interdependence. And as global thought leader David Courtin often says, we are living beings born of a living earth, and we forget that at our peril. And that that that could be. It's a very ancient story, actually, because it's very consistent with indigenous wisdom. But it could be part of a new story that we are a part of nature.

00:19:25:20 - 00:19:56:04
Sandra Waddock: We are nature. And wow, would that not be different. So the second story has to do with conventional economics. It's closer to home for people in any kind of business. And it's the story of how economics shapes our businesses and the societies in which they operate in highly problematic ways. So what does this dominant economics that's still, despite many advances in economics and many alternatives to it, still exists in the world today.

00:19:56:07 - 00:20:25:23
Sandra Waddock: What does it tell us? Well, here we have Milton Friedman, and some of you know him, I'm sure, or know of him and his. He famously said in The New York Times in 1970 that the purpose of the firm is to maximize shareholder wealth and or profit, and he argues for endless economic growth, growth, by extension, the purpose of societies is to endlessly grow what we now know as GDP or GNP.

00:20:25:25 - 00:20:51:21
Sandra Waddock: And the further extension goes back to what I said earlier, that the purpose of people is to consume more, because after all, it's that gets us to economic growth. So the economy is all about growth and endless growth. And because while resources will always be efficiently allocated, another tenet of conventional economics is, is that of individualism, individual responsibility.

00:20:51:21 - 00:21:30:26
Sandra Waddock: And this is a particularly dominant strain in the United States, where individualism is part of our culture. And it's all about individual responsibility. And as Friedman articulated, the only social responsibility of business is to increase its profit. And that works because humans, after all, are rational, self-interested, profit maximizing in the notion of economics as as it's conventionally framed and well as Reagan, as Ronald Reagan told us, he's sitting here with Margaret Thatcher.

00:21:30:27 - 00:22:04:21
Sandra Waddock: The idea of government is that we want to have less regulations always. Government doesn't serve. It's only there to hinder things. So the popular idea in conventional economics is to keep government off our backs. And in Reagan's phrase, or let's say, fair government. So the less government, the better. Reduce regulations, privatize anything. The that that that we privatize anything that can be privatized.

00:22:04:21 - 00:22:31:11
Sandra Waddock: And that goes along with Margaret Thatcher's notion that there's no such thing as society. And also in economics, there's no such thing as nature. So because after all, markets are primary and they will solve according to ideas that people, I think again misinterpret from Adam Smith, market primacy will solve all of society's problems. And so you don't need government.

00:22:31:11 - 00:22:59:16
Sandra Waddock: And there's no such thing as society, which means that there's no such thing as the common good. And therefore we can ignore externalities because like society, nature also doesn't exist in this context of economics. And anything that negative that happens in doing business can just be pushed out into the environment, the external environment, where it's outside of the realm of the business and therefore it's quote unquote an externality, and therefore it doesn't matter.

00:22:59:18 - 00:23:27:03
Sandra Waddock: Oh, and by the way, as Satcher always also said, there is no alternative. This this acronym became known as Tina. There is no alternative. This way of thinking about the alternative, the economics. So not only do we have this economics with its, I would argue, flawed assumptions, but there's no alternative to it. And this story, and that's what it is, has created many of today's complexly wicked problems.

00:23:27:05 - 00:23:58:18
Sandra Waddock: If we look at these economic premises, we can just begin to see where they might go wrong. Are humans really self-interested? Only? It's it's a mechanistic perspective. It's a dominance perspective. Perspective. Masculine perspective. I think Paul Horgan called it. And I would agree, it's a linear perspective that argues that what we often think of as a take make waste economy is the right way to do it.

00:23:58:18 - 00:24:23:18
Sandra Waddock: And it's not a living approach. It's really about just about stuff and about money. It's not about living versus and that's it's time for a reset. And the reset is towards what? What? I would fully agree with Paul that we need an orientation towards life and we need to orient economics towards life. We need a new story that is about the fostering of life and flourishing.

00:24:23:18 - 00:24:52:12
Sandra Waddock: So I like to use like Paul, I'm hesitant to use the word sustainability because I think it well, first of all, it implies sustaining what is. And we all know that business as usual is problematic. That's why we're here at this conference. So flourishing argues for regenerative types of practices of the sort that Paul is talking about. It orientation towards life argues for harmony and relationality.

00:24:52:14 - 00:25:24:07
Sandra Waddock: And I'll explain these ideas and a little bit more depth in a minute. It's about complex, connected beings, integration of humans with the world. And it's about living, not not things that are dead. So is there are there alternatives? Is there a way to think about this? Well, I would argue for this reset around what we call life centered economics that integrates humanity with natures, recognizing much of the indigenous wisdom that has been passed down through the ages here, and largely ignored in the rest of the Western world.

00:25:24:13 - 00:26:02:29
Sandra Waddock: That acknowledges our ability and at the same time allows for dynamic economic and social innovation to provide an inclusive and equitable framework for building that new economics based on the diversity of next economies, local economies. So Paul highlighted the notion of community and it's communities where that build businesses. And to the extent that those businesses are housed and localized and in the community and not necessarily trying to dominate the whole world, then they are likely to be much more ecologically friendly.

00:26:02:29 - 00:26:30:23
Sandra Waddock: They are likely to be much more human friendly just by the nature of their size. So we could build this new economics from the ground up rather than from the top down, to leave the world that we'd want to leave for our grandchildren. So the shifts that are needed here, this reset moves us from me individualism to we to we all, to all of us together, working together in what some are calling a wellbeing economy.

00:26:30:25 - 00:27:09:24
Sandra Waddock: It means reintegrating and rebalancing humans relationships with nature and redefining success to mean not wealth, while the original meaning of wealth but to well-being. The original meaning of wealth is well-being. They come from the same root word. And if we and actually the original meaning of economy has to do with household management, and today our household that we need to manage is at the local level, but it's also at the planetary level, and it's a rebalancing, if you will, of the feminine with the masculine, which Paul also argued for.

00:27:09:24 - 00:27:49:03
Sandra Waddock: And it has at its core, equity and inclusion, not just money making more money for the already rich and the elite. So what are some values and memes? If I talked about the importance of memes a little while ago for economies that support life, well, I'm going to argue that from a long a lot of literature that I reviewed and published in a paper, that there are six values that create a set of memes that we could conceive of as being, being part of the idea of a new economics.

00:27:49:06 - 00:28:15:06
Sandra Waddock: These you see them listed here, stewardship of the whole co-creating collective value, cosmopolitan, localist governance, regenerative reciprocity and circularity, relationality and connectedness, and equitable and fair markets and trade. And I'm going to unpack these just a little bit. So stewardship of the whole here we have the picture of the blue marble, the earth as viewed from space. And this picture stunned people.

00:28:15:06 - 00:28:46:01
Sandra Waddock: Look at it. There is no boundaries there. There's no nationalities, there's no countries. It's one whole world. So we think about the responsibility. And conventional economics tells us that we're responsible only to ourselves into an extended to the organization level for our companies or other enterprises. But really, that responsibility only extends as far as maximizing self-interest, which is too often interpreted as financial wealth and material goods.

00:28:46:03 - 00:29:14:26
Sandra Waddock: But there is an alternative, and it's found in virtually every single one of the world's religions. And that is the idea of stewardship. Stewardship is caretaking. It's it it's also this idea is also found in many indigenous and feminist wisdom traditions. And stewardship is defined as care over the long term, and that care broadly is broadly shared by anyone who's in a position to bring change about or to do something new.

00:29:15:02 - 00:29:47:24
Sandra Waddock: Stewardship for the whole means not just caring for me and my individual gain, but being aware of and caring about everyone in my orbit family, community, company, country, and ultimately the planet. So stewardship of the whole is yeah, it's more complex than I'm going to just take care of my company. But given the reality of the world, of the interconnectedness of the world, and that's one of the other tenets here, it really requires a whole different way of thinking.

00:29:47:25 - 00:30:28:18
Sandra Waddock: Well, what do we know about care? Well, here's the reality. Human cultural evolution to this point is not competition red and tooth and claw, as Hobbes would have had it. But and but rather it's all about symbiosis. So biologists will tell us that symbiosis is the basis, not just competition, but it's both competition and symbiosis, of course, but it's symbiosis that has enabled many organisms to survive in its symbiosis and integration and collaboration that have enabled human cultural evolution to evolve, not just competition.

00:30:28:20 - 00:30:58:01
Sandra Waddock: Stewardship means then thinking about shared responsibility for the common good. Yes, we need to bring that term back. And in other words, creating a life centered economics. It's not just about me, it's about we or about us, and it's also about those non-human, more than human beings that exist on the planet with us. So it's long term. It's about symbiosis and it's about care.

00:30:58:04 - 00:31:27:26
Sandra Waddock: The second value is that of creating, co-creating collective value. And now we talk about the bottom line. The bottom line is easy to measure. And that's one reason it's so, so popular. And we can talk about also about, the idea of, shareholder wealth that's easily measured and profits are easily measured. So collective value isn't quite, so easily measured.

00:31:27:26 - 00:31:55:07
Sandra Waddock: On the other hand, it it is what we need to see from coming from our companies and from our nations to. It's the idea that co-creating draws directly from the stewardship of the whole, and suggests that we all have a role to play in defining what's important. Conventional economics focuses entirely on financial wealth, and not the broad and definition of wealth that's embedded in the idea of collective value.

00:31:55:07 - 00:32:35:02
Sandra Waddock: It means collective value means generating well-being and dignity for all beings, for human beings, for all human beings, and for all its inclusive. And it's got to do not with just shareholder value, but with stakeholder value. The idea of collective value comes from the writing of Tom Donaldson and Jim Walsh, who talked about this as the this value as the core of business purpose, not maximizing shareholder wealth and sorry and dignity is is also important here.

00:32:35:04 - 00:33:12:02
Sandra Waddock: So that obviously requires new metrics and frameworks. My favorite tends to be the genuine progress indicator, which takes both ecological benefits and negatives into account in order to come to it, and human well-being into account, versus GDP, which measures only economic activity, whether that economic activity is positive or negative. So clear coat of forest great for the economy because you've got all those logs, but you've devastated that location of the natural environment and all other beings that live in it.

00:33:12:02 - 00:33:41:01
Sandra Waddock: And it's not a healthy way to have thought about getting your timber. There may be a better ways. There's also the Gross National Happiness Index, which comes from Bhutan, and the OECD has developed something called the Better Life Index, which is measure well-being, human well-being. So there are alternatives, and they are beginning to emerge, and they're beginning to gain some popularity as GDP begins to get question more and more.

00:33:41:04 - 00:34:10:14
Sandra Waddock: And some of you may have heard of Kate Raworth, Donut Economics. And here she takes the The Planetary Boundaries framework, which now has five planetary boundaries breached not just for and and she puts on the inside of it a whole social foundation. And she says basically which includes people having sufficient water and health and education and the like, peace of justice, political voice, social equity.

00:34:10:14 - 00:34:31:25
Sandra Waddock: And you can see that most of those are also breached in in the diagram here. But she says that for people to live well, we need to live within the context of that donut in the middle of it. Not, not, not outside of it, because living outside of it is like drawing from your bank account. You can live on your bank.

00:34:31:25 - 00:35:03:25
Sandra Waddock: What's in your bank account for a while. But after a while, as you begin to draw it down, to use Paul's phrase, you're going to be starting to run out of money. We can and must do better. As as Paul Hawken tells us, and these, these kinds of metrics can help us. Cosmopolitan localism, is arguing for the idea that economics needs to be about all of us and planet planetary well-being.

00:35:03:28 - 00:35:47:20
Sandra Waddock: Some put it as shared well-being. On a flourishing planet where decision making is devolved to the lowest level possible, rather than centralized in because people locally know what's best for them and can make the best decisions, and because the ecological resources will be better. Husband if people are there seeing what's actually happening, happening with them. The idea of cosmopolitan localist was really developed by Gideon Kossoff, and it's well known in management circles as participative management, giving people say in the work that they do, and we know that's a better way to manage, even though it's not always how things are done.

00:35:47:23 - 00:36:08:17
Sandra Waddock: Cosmo Local perspective also provides for local community, regional, national self-sufficiency, sharing of ideals, DIA's regional resources. Rather than pushing the idea that trade and decision centrally will be made by powerful corporations in the.

00:36:08:19 - 00:36:39:22
Sandra Waddock: IT the global context, it localizes decision making and self-sufficiency, and it provides shared ideas, skills and knowledge as part of our culture and resources. And then we have the idea of regenerative reciprocity and circularity. So we've heard a lot about regenerative from Paul, and I don't think I need to spend a lot of time on that because we all, I think, agree that it is a way to think about not just sustainability, but creating flourishing.

00:36:39:24 - 00:37:12:11
Sandra Waddock: Regenerative practices in agriculture and animal husbandry are actually beneficial to the earth, to the topsoil, to the lakes and streams, rather than the kinds of practices we used we use today. Circularity means simply replacing today's planned obsolescence and cheaply produced goods, fast fashion and the like with durable, high quality, built to last goods, services and services designed in a ecologically friendly way so that they can be reused, recirculated and and regenerated.

00:37:12:13 - 00:37:44:22
Sandra Waddock: And and the idea of mutual benefit was is built right into the notion of of of indigenous wisdom. Drawing draws directly from indigenous wisdom and argues against self-interest as a core maximum, and puts the idea of the common good or the public good right back into the center of things. The idea of relationality and connectedness. So physics, biology, ecology and cultural evolution, I'll tell us that we're we're connected to each other.

00:37:44:22 - 00:38:24:28
Sandra Waddock: We are complex, connected. And this idea also is reflected in much indigenous wisdom. So in Africa we have the idea of ubuntu, which means I am because we are or I am because you are. I can't exist without you. And we know that human babies are born helpless and can't exist and and people can't. We learned in the pandemic, it's really hard to try to be isolated or the Lakota saying or the scene, which I'm probably mispronounced, which means all my relations, which identifies human beings with the beans in the natural environment.

00:38:25:00 - 00:38:34:19
Sandra Waddock: So relationality is actually core to who we are as people. And.

00:38:34:22 - 00:39:07:26
Sandra Waddock: Do I just go back? Dude, I'm sorry. And finally, we need global, responsive, equitable, fair markets and trade which which internalize full costs and ensure that things are fairly produced. And this is very different from the idea of free trade in free markets, which are allowed to do whatever they want, charge whatever they want. There's a lot of implications of the type of shift that we're talking about here in our economics.

00:39:07:26 - 00:39:49:14
Sandra Waddock: And the reason that we understand economics and economies are important is that under that understanding drives our paradigms, our understandings, the mindsets that we have. And we've already seen that the relation, this relationship to our earth is troubled. So what we need is massive system transformation. It and I'm going to argue that there are five elements of systems that need to change paradigms, which we've already just talked about the purposes of businesses and our economies, which we've talked about the performance metrics, which which by which we measure things.

00:39:49:14 - 00:40:22:13
Sandra Waddock: And they performance metrics are really important because you get what you measure, as accountants will certainly tell us. And these three elements drive the practices of business is how businesses actually enable enact their business models, how what they do and how they do it and how they treat their customers, how they treat their employees, how they produce their products and services, and the power relationships, the relationships that exist within the context of the business and between the business and its external stakeholders.

00:40:22:13 - 00:40:56:06
Sandra Waddock: So paradigm and mindset really matters because that tells us what's important. The purpose, which we know is the fundamental reason for being, is it profits versus meeting real needs for specific stakeholders? Most of you or most of you identified that in the performance metrics which tell us what's really important about our business, how we reward our people in our in our enterprises, and how we measure our success as an enterprise.

00:40:56:09 - 00:41:45:19
Sandra Waddock: Maybe it's got to be something more than just money. It's that notion of collective value. So these three things performance metrics, purposes and paradigms over arch. The other two which are practices in power. But they're in a system. They're all they're all related to each other. So I so what what are the lessons or the takeaway? Let me argue for three key, three key takeaways, to get to this, to get to these and other changes speaks to the core need for narrative shifts towards a shared sense of urgency and a new language, as Paul said, that allows us to overcome what Paul, in his 2007 book called Blessed Unrest, called Blessed Unrest, blessed unrest

00:41:45:19 - 00:42:15:11
Sandra Waddock: is the fragmentation of initiatives and efforts in particularly language, in a space that is broadly defined as social justice and ecological flourishing. These. These Paul identified million to 2 million of these entities and said that they they're all doing great work on their own, but they're too fragmented. And so we need to be.

00:42:15:13 - 00:42:38:12
Sandra Waddock: To figure out ways to bring them together, to create the kind of impact that's needed to overcome efficacy. It is said in some research that only about 3.5% of the population is needed to make a transformative change. If we pulled all these initiatives together in some way into what and some other work I'm doing we call transformation systems, then we can begin to make that that shift.

00:42:38:13 - 00:42:57:16
Sandra Waddock: We need to overcome our sense of human exceptionalism and separation from nature, and we need to over overthrow, in a sense, the economic, conventional, neoliberal economic narrative that I that I spoke about. I'm going to remind us that as David Court and frequently says, we are living beings born of a living planet. We forget that at our peril.

00:42:57:17 - 00:43:27:00
Sandra Waddock: We need to operate our businesses, governments and other institutions with that insight and may make a major shift away from these these economics towards these life affirming, life centered, wellbeing oriented ways of thinking about businesses and economies in a flourishing natural environment. And.

00:43:27:03 - 00:43:31:23
Sandra Waddock: Thank you.

00:43:31:25 - 00:44:01:05
Mike Collignon: Thank you. 1 or 2 couple questions from our audience. We've got one from John. You hit a lot on his question, but there was one part. And one thing I like about doing these for green building media is we don't really shy away from any topics. So he brings up one that that you didn't hit on when you were talking about the combination of the economics and the planet's resources, growth and that sort of thing.

00:44:01:08 - 00:44:26:04
Mike Collignon: How can how can permanent growth be sustainable on a closed system planet? And his question was kind of long. I'm going to summarize it as saying this. He talks a little bit about population control. You know, how do we do this if we continue to grow as a population and continue to continue to consume more resources? So can you touch a little bit on that?

00:44:26:06 - 00:44:29:21
Sandra Waddock: Yeah, that's the undiscovered bill, isn't it. Population control.

00:44:29:24 - 00:44:30:13
Mike Collignon: Well, right.

00:44:30:14 - 00:44:55:07
Sandra Waddock: Yeah. Basically basically we can't continue to grow indefinitely on a finite planet. That's that's just a physical, you know, a physics. That's a physics thing. You know, it's not possible. And at some point human human population will collapse because we will hit some sort of wall unless we take measures to deal with it. And I do think it's it's kind of one of the undiscovered.

00:44:55:10 - 00:45:24:07
Sandra Waddock: I mean, Paul mentioned a couple of the others, but, but it's one of the undiscovered. But, you know, ind it's interesting because there's a difference between the global North and the global South, and many countries in the global North population is either stabilizing or sometimes decreasing. Whereas in many countries in the, in the global South, which are less resourced, people have less, they consume less and they have their ecological footprint is less because they because of all those factors.

00:45:24:09 - 00:45:59:08
Sandra Waddock: But they are growing more because there's instability in their lives and they don't have the, the, the assurance they need. They want to have children so that they can ensure that they continue. So we need to equity. That's what equity becomes so important. Because if we can balance these things out and we can educate more women, one of the best factors for reducing population is women will choose to have fewer children if they have a more stable lifetime, and they can choose to feed their the the children that they do have and house them and educate them.

00:45:59:08 - 00:46:23:20
Sandra Waddock: So so it really is about creating more equity rather than less equity, and recognizing the need to stop this mantra of constant growth. I mean, you hear it on the news every single night, don't you? Oh, the stock market grew or the GDP grew. And, you know, that's a problem. You know, that's where the narrative that Paul was talking about becomes so and I was talking about becomes so important.

00:46:23:22 - 00:46:26:04
Sandra Waddock: Right. Got to change that narrative.

00:46:26:06 - 00:46:58:06
Mike Collignon: Right. Well, so narrative ties into a question that George said in, and I was kind of wondering the same thing a little bit. So he says, you know, not using the word sustainability. Okay. Paul talked about a little bit. You've talked about it too. And so George's question is, since this space is already confusing enough for people who don't specialize in this area, you know, we bring up different terms that sometimes refer to the same thing or similar things.

00:46:58:10 - 00:47:16:28
Mike Collignon: Is it George? Is it honestly helpful to say, well, let's not use sustainability because it finally seems to him like these efforts are seeing some real traction and real investment in changing up this term. Could it be counterintuitive at this point?

00:47:17:01 - 00:47:42:04
Sandra Waddock: Yeah, that's a really great point, George. Yeah, it could, because narrative really does matter. On the other hand, if you think about what sustainability means. My objection to it is a little different from what Paul gave. I think it means to sustain what we have business as usual. And what we really want is for, I think, all life to be able to flourish.

00:47:42:04 - 00:48:07:14
Sandra Waddock: So, yeah, the fact that it's so embedded, that's really, that's great in some ways because people understand sustainability as flourishing, I think. But I just, I personally prefer to use the word flourishing because it really speaks to the world that I envision and the world that I think we can have if we we have to do something with population, we have to do something with consumption levels.

00:48:07:14 - 00:48:16:22
Sandra Waddock: We have to do something with equity. Those are the issues that we're that we're those are the big issues that we're facing.

00:48:16:24 - 00:48:46:11
Mike Collignon: We've got a couple other questions for you, Sandra, if you don't mind. Fernando has got a question about equality. He's wanting to know, are there any strategies to try and bring equality to diverse groups without the pain upon grants or gifts or sympathy for those with resources that you know? I've got more resources than you. So can there really be a level playing field for all?

00:48:46:14 - 00:49:14:00
Sandra Waddock: Well, probably. Probably not. Realistically. On the other hand, there I'm working with a number of initiatives that are trying to to to first of all, take not a deficit approach to people and nations that have less or places where there's there's less resources. But but a what they call positive deviance approach. It's the idea that people have resources, they know what's good for them.

00:49:14:00 - 00:49:48:26
Sandra Waddock: So if you allow people to if you find ways to decentralize things and allow people to gain access to decision making, they will make the best decisions for themselves. I think that that's one of my beliefs. Anyway, and then you can begin to equalize resources, but you have to do something, you know, in this country, I don't remember the latest statistics, but, you know, back, I don't know, 50 or 60 years ago, the CEO pay ratio to the average worker was something like 20 times.

00:49:48:26 - 00:50:18:22
Sandra Waddock: And now it's like 350 times or more. And you know, that that level of and it could be even more now that the pandemic has really increased some people's some billionaires wealth by a magnitude, by matters of magnitude. You know, that that level of wealth concentration is just not healthy. It's not equitable. And so, you know, Paul talked about the fragmented and divisive politics that we have now.

00:50:18:22 - 00:50:42:10
Sandra Waddock: And I, you know, it's very scary for me to look at the way people talk with each other and the fact that policymakers can't seem to agree on anything, especially when we face these major crises. So, so it's I think it's a problem of education and open people's minds up so that they begin to see the world as not.

00:50:42:11 - 00:51:09:19
Sandra Waddock: It's not a, you know, even though we can't have endless growth, it's not it's still not a pie that we're going to divide up. There is some opportunity for all to flourish together, but we have to have it's a different mindset. It's a different way of approaching things. It's a different understanding of who we are as human beings and how we as human beings need to relate to each other and to the natural environment.

00:51:09:26 - 00:51:33:29
Sandra Waddock: And that part of that is building into our economics, not the idea of constant GDP growth, but the idea of equity, which would argue for different tax policies, different different ways of relating to each other, different pay policies and companies that are, you know, that bring these ratios down in some way. So I know that's not a great answer.

00:51:33:29 - 00:51:42:16
Sandra Waddock: I feel a little bit inadequate to address it, but, well, anybody would. So.

00:51:42:18 - 00:51:47:24
Mike Collignon: We've got we've got one more question here from Michael. Let me.

00:51:47:26 - 00:52:17:22
Mike Collignon: So his question was really about the mechanisms. What what mechanisms are in place that the bounds that puts bounds on conventional economic or corporate behavior. Because in his opinion, from a systems thinking perspective, he's assuming this involves feedback loops of information and recognizable value so they can make decisions based on the value that we all know exists in nature and also communal well-being.

00:52:17:22 - 00:52:45:03
Mike Collignon: But some things, you know, it seems like you got to have them enacted by government like regulations or taxes, which can be challenging. We talked about politics at the end of Paul's talk. So what are the best mechanisms for strengthening information and value feedback loops that both individuals and corporations can use to help recognize and guide their self-interested decisions?

00:52:45:05 - 00:53:10:26
Sandra Waddock: Well, you know, Paul, Mike, Michael may have better answers than I do on this one, but, you know, if we're going to change the narrative you need you need things like happening. Like what? What is beginning to happen in some many businesses, Paul talked about some of the businesses that are already shifting. You need those leaders to come out and talk about what they're doing and why they're doing it, and to create the conversation among their peers.

00:53:10:26 - 00:53:36:11
Sandra Waddock: You need you need a bottoms up narrative shift. There are a number of initiatives that are actually working explicitly on the idea of narrative shift, one called the Narrative Initiative, one called imperative 21, another one called We All the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. And so getting ideas not exactly my ideas necessarily, but ideas like my ideas out into the world.

00:53:36:12 - 00:54:15:25
Sandra Waddock: As an alternative to Tina to there is no alternative, getting people to recognize that, yes. In fact, there are all challenges and alternatives. And there may be better for people because they're more equitable, because they're more relational in their orientation, because they recognize the importance of a healthy natural environment. Those become really important. And so you've got to get those if you will start out in a whole variety of ways, it seems to me, and through art, through through storytelling, through imaging, through a whole bunch of, you know, it's not just one mechanism.

00:54:15:25 - 00:54:37:13
Sandra Waddock: There's not one. There is no magic bullet here. It's a process. It's a process of system transformation. And system transformation starts with mindset change, I think, according to Meadows, anyway. And that's what some of the groups that I'm working with believe I'm working with another group that is actually reviewed, the.

00:54:37:15 - 00:55:16:26
Sandra Waddock: Economics literature, the heterodox economics literature. So ecological economics and feminist economics and the like, there's a lot of them and drawn out ten principles that from that literature that that are quite different from the conventional economics. They're not the ones I presented. Those are values, but these principles, they're very much aligned with each other. And, you know, if you could get those principles out into a public forum and I'm hopefully that paper will someday be published, then you begin to change the conversation.

00:55:16:26 - 00:55:42:08
Sandra Waddock: And as you change the conversation, you begin to change mindsets and you think about things like the Great Reset the World Economic Forum is proffering. You know, I my doubts about whether big companies are truly going to transform. But but that's a start. You think about the Business Roundtable statement that they that companies need to pay attention to all their stakeholders, not just to stockholders.

00:55:42:11 - 00:56:11:11
Sandra Waddock: Stockholders. These are these are starts. These are important initiatives. And you need to continue to hammer these things. You need to you need to get get the Green New Deal going in this country and passed by Congress. In Europe has already they've got a Green Recovery Act that they have 70 ministers of you of European countries have accepted.

00:56:11:11 - 00:56:22:16
Sandra Waddock: So, you know, the the US is way behind on some of these issues because of the divisiveness of our political discourse. I think in part.

00:56:22:18 - 00:56:43:08
Mike Collignon: I want to sneak in one question real quick. I got about 30s left here. Sandra, the question is businesses and institutions, if we can get them to shift from profits to people in nature. The question is, can we how can we ensure this through governance? Is there any pathway there?

00:56:43:10 - 00:57:03:17
Sandra Waddock: Yeah. You have to bring in representatives of the system into the governance. It seems to me it's not just the elite governing the elite, because, you know, we all have our little circles in our, you know, our mindset biases and stuff. And we we do live in echo chambers. I live in an echo chamber as much as anybody else.

00:57:03:19 - 00:57:24:05
Sandra Waddock: And you know, so we need what, what a broad array of stakeholders can do is bring in very different perspectives that open people's minds to different ways of thinking about things. Plus, you need to change how companies are measured. You know, if you're just measuring them on profits or share price, that's all they're going to pay attention to.

00:57:24:10 - 00:57:47:01
Sandra Waddock: If you measure them on something defined as collective value, did they contribute jobs? How stable are those jobs? Did they contribute to the local community in positive ways? Are they polluting the environment or not? Those kinds of things. Then, then, then they pay attention to those things too. So, you know, and it's not that money isn't important. It is.

00:57:47:02 - 00:57:49:27
Sandra Waddock: It's just that it's not the only thing.

00:57:50:00 - 00:58:01:21
Mike Collignon: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your time, Sandra. We do need to wrap it up, but thank you very much for your presentation. And I'm passing along. Thank you from the audience as well. So thank you very much.

00:58:01:22 - 00:58:04:03
Sandra Waddock: Thank you for inviting me. Thank you Sarah.