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(Formerly Leadership and the Environment)
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819: A Course in Sustainability Leadership: 6: Our Brighter Future
This last recording in the series brings together the opportunities. We can't fix all the world's problems or to go back in time and change history. We can't change that people are already dying by the tens of millions annually from environmental problems, a number projected to increase by factors of ten or more.
But we can do the best we can. The best we can is all we ever could do. Even if our culture weren't creating all these environmental problems, conflict would always exist. Restoring lost value to our culture that would restore stewardship would keep us from having to hurt innocent people, contributing to this suffering, just to live.
Doing the best we can replaces despair, helplessness, hopelessness, anxiety, and all the internal conflict resulting from giving up on our values with meaning, purpose, love, and passion. People say action is the antidote to those things, but not just any action. The action must be effective, as part of a plan that leads to meaningful results.
This series shows what action will work for you in the moment and for humanity in the long run, leading to global cultural change, restoring basic human values we've jettisoned in a fool's trade for what we think of as comfort and convenience but has become satisfying short-term, meaningless craving.
This summary shows what you can do, on a different scale than avoiding straws. It means taking leadership roles to bring others with us. It's hard work that will take years, but you will love it. You will grow and you will help others around you grow, as well as your whole nation and species to grow from timidity and hoping for the best to restoring values of love, stewardship, family, community, and more.
Show Notes
To follow up:
Look up "Greatest of All Time" on Wikipedia and you'll find Muhammad Ali. This lesson shares how he went from being just the heavyweight champion of the world to the greatest of all time, transcending sport to becoming a statesman.
Business people say "culture eats strategy for breakfast," and our culture, while paying lip service to sustainability, promotes and rewards polluting, depleting behavior. Celebrities play a major role in setting culture. When I tell people, "Taylor Swift is probably in an airplane right now," they know what I mean. No one disputes because even if she isn't flying literally that moment, she flies plenty.
Yet billions of people want leadership. They want to follow people living by their values.
This lesson shares the potential legacy available to any celebrity in an area of global demand that can last centuries to millennia. Those doing performative, ineffective things won't reach it, but that constraint doesn't mean celebrities have to act perfect.
They don't have to act perfect.
They only have to show they are doing their best.
But they have to act genuinely and authentically, allowing their vulnerabilities to show.
The Spodek Method enables them to automatically, which is why so many of my podcast guests return for multiple episodes.
Sustainability has become a polarized partisan political issue, despite everyone wanting clean air, land, water, and food. In the US, neither the Democrats nor Republicans have a vision of or plan to sustainability. Both rely on purported solutions that exacerbate and accelerate our current results. Since we reach the general through the specific, I focus on US political opportunities. I believe those outside the US will see clearly how to apply the spirit of this video to their homes.
They're like two tired boxers who get stuck toward the end of a fight in an embrace, holding each other up, acting like they're punching but not. On the contrary, they've evolved into a mutually supportive dance, pandering to their bases, pointing at each other, not taking responsibility.
Yet there are political paths toward sustainability, which is why I work in sustainability leadership, as opposed to sustainability itself. We need leadership, not performances designed to look like leadership but are the opposite.
This video shows conservative, libertarian, and liberal approaches to sustainability from each tradition's principles, including limited government, free market approaches and anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial approaches. All are based in the opposite of coercion, convincing, cajoling, or manipulation.
They lead to what appears the only solution that works, an APPLE PIE amendment. While it will work, it's as hard for people as dependent on pollution and depletion as we are to envision as the Thirteenth Amendment must have looked to plantation owners. Yet the Thirteenth passed, replacing the most divisive issue in America's history with a source of unity.
Passing the APPLE PIE amendment will unify us. Future generations will wonder why we took so long.
The solution in video 3---the Spodek Method---creates a new, more effective situation than anything I know of in sustainability.
People act on their own motivation that they felt before I met them. Instead of me motivating them, it was more like I unleashed and inspired them. That's the difference in acting on intrinsic motivation instead of extrinsic.
Every other sustainability effort I'd ever come across convinced, cajoled, coerced, lectured, manipulated. It might get compliance, but squashed motivation.
When someone wants to do something but doesn't know how to achieve it, and you know they'll thank you for helping them do it, that's a business opportunity.
This video explores the potential to revolutionize leading people and cultures, even global, toward acting more sustainable. It covers just leading yourself to live more by your values, to working with our team, to starting a project or venture yourself, up to creating a culture-changing project creating a legacy to last centuries and beyond.
I'm not saying you can just start these projects tomorrow. Our culture has poisoned the market so much that nearly everyone associates living more sustainably with making their lives and cultures worse. The Workshop will lead you to know otherwise from hands-on practical experience, but it will take time to build the market.
Then we'll see demand from billions of people.
Now that we understand our environmental problems as cultural, proposals based in technology, market incentives, and legislation don't address the problem. They generally won't achieve the desired outcome and will often achieve the opposite.
I share my path toward discovering a solution that works, now called the Spodek Method. Changing culture requires many things, and leadership is one. The Spodek Method is an experiential leadership technique that prompts people to share and act on their values---that is, based on intrinsic motivations. I describe how it works and what it achieves, in yourself and others.
So you don't have to take my word for it, I share the experiences of people who have learned the technique, some renowned. Some took my Workshop, others were guests on the podcast. Once you get the Spodek Method and a sense of how it prompts you to transform, I share the vision, mission, and strategies it enables in my mission of changing global culture through a path that is intrinsically rewarding for everyone who tries it.
Do you think our environmental problems are rooted in greenhouse gas levels or emissions? Or biodiversity loss? Or any of what makes the headlines?
They are symptoms. They all result from our behavior, which results from our beliefs, stories, role models, images, and what makes up our culture.
If we magically fixed all of the environmental conditions making the headlines, but didn't change our culture, we would recreate them.
Every time you say, "individual action doesn't matter," blame someone else or BP, or anything that keeps you polluting, depleting, living unsustainably, you contribute to that culture, even if you really wish you weren't. You fund the lobbyists creating the political forces accelerating more polluting and depleting.
Only by understanding the actual problem can we avoid distractions and solve it.
The video goes into more depth and detail. It sets up all the later videos.
You'll never see the world the same again.
Many people see whatever part of what I do, think that's everything, and conclude I'm just doing some personal action or other form of spitting into the wind.
I don't like wasting my time any more than anyone else does, nor do I want to see people continuing to
I'm partly insulted that they think I'm wasting my time or that I haven't developed a comprehensive plan that stops all those things that works at every stage, mainly by working on people's existing motivations. It's based on the Spodek Method and other effective leadership techniques.
I posted a series of videos I call A Short Course in Sustainability Leadership that outlines the plan. I designed it for people who want to act and lead, not abdicate and capitulate like nearly everyone else. I recommend watching the videos, which are on this page, but I'm posting the audio here.
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Our third conversation matches the first two in intrigue and quality. We talk about the things that came up for Dr. Bob that got in the way of his commitment. These issues come up for nearly everyone (implying they aren't personal, but cultural beliefs): politics (including reacting to Trump), family, and race.
This conversation was one of my first engaging on race unscripted. It's tempting to see some issues as immediate and conclude we have to address them first. This view misses that unsustainability causes them, including racism, tyranny, and corruption. I'm not saying sustainability alone will solve them, but as long as we live unsustainably, we keep causing them.
You'll hear a lot more in the conversation. This conversation exemplifies what our culture needs more of.
Tina is one of the central characters in that group that everyone knows (another is Kevin Fucillo, also a podcast guest). We go back a few years. She was born in the south in 1933, so you can do the math, but you'd never guess. She's at times a firecracker, full of life, ready to handle anyone. She's friendly to all, but ready to police anyone overstepping bounds. She's always caring about the community as a whole and each person in it. She goes out of her way to help people beyond just delivering food. The community wouldn't be the same without her.
We talk about volunteering, homelessness, slavery, Africa, the South, and more. She worked at the Lone Star Cafe, which was a famous club in the 1970s and 80s, so shared some big names of people she hung out with, like Willie Nelson, James Brown, Courtney Cox (we couldn't remember her name), Bruce Springsteen, and more.
We recorded in the lobby of her building, so you can hear people coming through and some sound issues. She spoke more softly than her usual self when I turned the microphone on, so I urge you to watch this video to see her energy outdoors. It was taken by a TV crew doing a story on me but they didn't use it.
She asked me not to share her picture, so I'm only showing her side picture here, during a winter delivery, but she's okay with my sharing the video that still came from.