Why Collaboration Is Key to Sustaining Our Future
Adapted from a talk by Dennis Meadows

from Leverage Points Issue 58

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The book The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III (Universe Books, 1972) was a key catalyst of the worldwide environmental movement. Its look at the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet became the cornerstone of a global debate on how to achieve a sustainable future. Twenty years later the authors followed the book up with Beyond the Limits, which showed that humanity was already overshooting Earth's limits. Now Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update makes a compelling case for the vital need for a Sustainability Revolution.

At the 2004 Pegasus Conference, during his keynote presentation, Peter Senge invited Dennis Meadows to share some insights into the forces that are shaping the state of the world today and the ways that people are actively collaborating to produce change. The following article was adapted from Dennis's talk. Peter's entire keynote presentation—including Dennis's comments—is now available through the Pegasus web site at www.pegasuscom.com/sta04av.html.

Changing our world. It's so easy, when you're sitting here in this little microcosm on the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States, to forget what's really going on with the rest of the world. You could start to have the illusion that everything's going okay. In fact, the rest of the world is in big trouble.

We have over 2 billion people on the planet living on less than $1 a day. The next 2 billion don't make much more than $2 a day, and the gap between the rich and the poor is getting bigger. There isn't a continent on the globe where resources are being managed sustainably. There are locations of course where it's happening, cities where the air is getting cleaner, rivers where the fish are coming back. But if you look across continents—forests, agricultural soils, groundwater, the air are deteriorating. We've caught most of the fish in the sea, we've used up a lot of water, and it goes on and on. I won't belabor the point. I think we all know that we have a big job ahead of us.

A Big Gap
I've been looking at these issues off and on for the last 30 years. The most recent results of my study have been published in the book Limits to Growth: A 30-Year Update (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004), which is the focus of a new Pegasus video (view clips from the video). It's been an interesting challenge to look forward to the next 100 years, to understand something about the issues this century presents, and then to try to articulate that understanding for people genuinely concerned about doing something constructive and concrete right now. A big gap exists between understanding and action. Today I will share a couple of points that help me bridge that gap.

Why do we have these enormous global problems? No one is trying to create them. There's nobody who wants the gap between the rich and the poor to get bigger. Nobody wants the environmental foundations of our society to erode out from under us. Nobody wants to use violence as a way of resolving conflict. So why is our global society proceeding the way it is?

Of course, the reasons are complex, but there are some relatively simple explanations. We have become incredibly skillful at creating vertical organizations, each taking on a piece of the overall picture—that is, by producing food, providing transportation, or giving healthcare. And those vertical organizations have become skillful at maximizing the productivity of their people and resources and achieving results, often with high quality. But their orientation is short term, and their focus is on a small piece of the puzzle. The nature of global issues, on the other hand, is long term and interconnected. We need a different way.

Revolution from the Outside
Another observation, from our studies of innovation in various industries, is that really revolutionary changes don't come from inside established enterprises; they typically come from outside. In my experience, collaboration is the mechanism that makes it possible for those changes to happen. Collaboration is a relationship among people committed to supporting each other in achieving a shared goal. We speak about it lightly, but collaboration is an intense discipline that doesn't happen accidentally; it requires intention, attention, and integrity. And it's hard to make it work among members of a new group.

I lived and frequently worked in Eastern Europe back in the seventies and eighties. It's significant to note that the profound revolutions in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and so forth, when the walls came down and traditional communism got thrown out, came not from the established enterprises but from collaborations among people. Often these collaborations focused on environmental issues and became opportunities for people to come together, get a sense of their strengths, and work outside the established organizations.

Many of the issues I confront come out of habitual behaviors. I'm not in any way demeaning the importance of some of our big problems such as climate change and nuclear proliferation, but I can tell you there's a lot of low-hanging fruit. We aren't suffering these enormous deteriorations in our planet because some external force is pushing them on us. They come out of our habits. They come out of the fact that every morning six billion plus people get up and go through their life in a habitual way, and, unfortunately, those people have created a set of habits that aren't working very well. They could have different habits that would work a lot better. Our challenge is to understand how to boost people over this attention barrier until they can settle into a new set of activities. When we do that, we'll see that collaboration plays an incredibly important role in helping us to find and implement solutions to the big problems.

The Role of Collaboration
That's one of the problems you'll face. At the Pegasus Conference, you learn interesting new ideas, maybe even acquire some different life goals or ethics. Then you go back home to the same old group of people who haven't been here, who don't share the vocabulary, who have the same expectations of you that they did before you came to this event. In that setting, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to sustain a different behavior. This is where collaboration can be important to you. Your collaborators, people who work within many different organizations, can be the ones who reaffirm and educate and help reinforce some of the new ideas or behaviors that you'd like to acquire. That's really the purpose of collaboration.

Many of you here today have attended numerous Pegasus conferences. I know from talking with you that you are attracted to this meeting each year, not by the formal topic alone, not by the hotel and good food. You are attracted by the chance to spend several days talking to and learning from members in a large group of people who share your concerns and your goals. In short, you come here to develop and strengthen your collaborative ties. That's an extremely important goal. You have come to the right meeting for it. And I wish you an extremely productive time here.