Envision the world you would like to see

Back in the 1990s, visioning was all the rage and it seemed that every organization needed to have a vision statement.  Being a fashionable guy, I participated in that.  As a facilitator, I conducted workshops aimed at helping organizations to develop their vision.  I still believe that this is important.  Whether it is as an individual, an organization, or a community, we sometimes get wrapped up in our strategy without being clear on our vision.  Vision sets the direction for strategy, and helps bring current actions into focus.

As an individual, think through what you would like your career to look like fifteen or twenty years down the road; as an NGO, spend time dialoguing not only about what you are going to do, but also about what the world will look like after you do it; even as a for-profit corporation, develop a vision that is more specific than simply “growing to make more profit”.  Even if, after a few years, you realize that you want or need to go a different direction, going through the process of envisioning the future that you want, articulating it, and strategizing about how to get there will help focus your actions.

However, this kind of visioning typically has a time horizon of about one or two decades; here, I want to advocate envisioning the world we want over much longer time frames. The kinds of challenges that I wrote about in my last post will take generations to address.  In that post, I shared thoughts on why it is important to adopt a long-term perspective, a generational perspective; in this post, I want to explore ideas about how to do so.

Imagination and purpose

A recent analysis of “deep-time organizations” had some interesting findings on what characteristics allow organizations to survive and fulfill a mission over very long time[i].  The study examined organizations that have survived for centuries, such as Cambridge University Press (est. 1534 C.E.) and the University of Al Quaraouiyine (est. 859 C.E.).  Among the common characteristics of hyper-long-lived organized are having a timeless purpose, having stable and sustained outreach practices that align with the purpose, and having information feedback mechanisms helps the organization respond to changes in the environment.

Finding a purpose—a purpose that has enough detail to provide some inspiration and direction, but that is still universal enough to be timeless—finding a purpose like this requires some imagination.  This is one of the reasons I believe it is important to actively work at imagining and crafting a collective, long-term vision.  In the ongoing work of sustainability professionals to create a better world, I suspect that our collective failure to bring about transformative change is in part a failure of imagination.  We fail to imagine a different way.

On the economic front, we fail to imagine any future economic systems other than capitalism, Soviet style state socialism, or some kind of post-apocalypse regression to a scavenger economy surviving off the carcass of a dead civilization, as if those are the only three alternatives.  Certainly, there have been efforts to imagine alternative economics—concepts such as donut economics, circular economy, and degrowth for instance—but it seems that for the most part, elaboration of these kinds of ideas have focused on alternative objectives and indicators rather than on constructing a comprehensive vision of how a whole economic system would work.  My point is not to criticize donut economics, degrowth, or any of these attempts to rethink economics; rather, my point is that a lot more work is needed.

In the realm of governance and politics, on the other hand, our collective imagination seems to be hardly functioning at all.  There is a failure to imagine any version of democracy other than the divisive, adversarial version of it we have now.  Our vision extends as far as imagining the same kind of political system we have now except that it would be a version of it in which unfair procedures have been corrected, our side has won, the most moderate factions on the enemy side have come around to our way of thinking, and the most extreme factions have been vanquished.

We sorely need a transformative vision—a vision that includes new forms of governance.  Our current form of adversarial, representative democracy is better than dictatorship and better than feudalism, but as a benchmark, “better than dictatorship or feudalism” is no longer enough.  Having a vision of an alternative is crucial because that can help direct our strategy—direct it toward planting the seeds for transformation.

Inevitably, any futures that we envision now of just and sustainable economics, governance, and culture will be incomplete and full of holes, mistakes, and naïve assumptions.  And even if at this stage what we imagine is mostly at the level of principles and lacks details, it will nevertheless help tune our antennae toward the kinds of actions that are needed here and now.

And that is happening.  My claim above that there is failure to imagine alternative forms of democratic governance may be slightly overstated.  There are numerous examples both in civil society and in governments—models that we can learn from: the “consensus government” of the Northwest Territories in Canada, the non-partisan democracies of several Pacific island states, the electoral system used in the Bahá’í Faith, and the Mondragón federation of worker cooperatives and multistakeholder cooperatives, to name a few.

This all implies that it is also important to engage with the needs of the world as it is now.  Deep time organizations are organizations that not only have a timeless purpose, but also that have information feedback mechanisms which help them to adapt to, and engage with, the present, and that can show to their constituencies that they deliver real world benefits.

Becoming a deep time person

These concepts can also apply to individuals endeavoring to adopt a generational perspective.  Envision how day-to-day life could be different.  When you do that, the small things you do like recycling, taking the bus instead of driving a car, buying some of your food from the local farmer’s market instead of from the supermarket, and growing a vegetable garden—and you remind yourself how these are little glimmers of what a better future might look like—these small individual acts become infused with a little more meaning.  These small, individual actions are not in and of themselves the solution, but they can be part of the solution.

There is a global community of people who are working toward a better world.  Deciding to be part of it, and believing that the better future is possible, while also recognizing that some aspects of it will take generations to achieve, can help you to have the energy to keep going without getting disillusioned or running out of steam.

[i] Hanusch, F., & Biermann, F. (2020). Deep-time organizations: Learning institutional longevity from history. The Anthropocene Review, 7(1), 19-41. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019619886670.