Individual Action, Organizational Clout: An Interview with Peter Senge
by Vicky Schubert

from Leverage Points Issue 100

Copyright © 2008 Pegasus Communications, Inc. (www.pegasuscom.com). All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, without written permission from Pegasus Communications, Inc. If you wish to distribute copies of this article, please contact our Permissions Department at 781-398-9700 or permissions@pegasuscom.com.

PETER SENGE is a senior lecturer at MIT and the founding chair of SoL, the Society for Organizational Learning. His latest book, The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World, co-authored with Bryan Smith, Nina Kruschwitz, Joe Laur, and Sara Schley, draws from their work over the past decade with the SoL Sustainability Consortium and related collaborative efforts to offer stories and tools for practitioners seeking to transform the way their organizations do business. Peter recently spoke with Leverage Points about the relationship between organizational change and individual action.


With the publication of his latest book, The Necessary Revolution, Peter Senge and his coauthors have taken another step in galvanizing a movement of individuals who understand that their greatest leverage for transforming society lies through organizations. As many of us are already taking action in our personal lives to reduce waste through our consumer choices and new behaviors, it becomes increasingly apparent that it’s our organizations—particularly interconnected webs of organizations, business partnerships, supply chains, even whole industries—that have the greatest clout.

Senge believes that organizations represent a blind spot in the sustainability field, which has focused more on individual and government action, when neither has the broad-reaching influence that organizational action has. “For the most part,” he explains, “it isn’t government policy that’s destroying species, and certainly you or I couldn’t destroy a species if we tried. But we succeed in doing just that by the way our individual decisions are mediated through the webs of institutions that define the global economy.” The key, then, lies in transforming the Industrial Age economic system by adopting more sustainable ways of doing business, individually and collectively.

A daunting task, to be sure. But Peter is convinced that this shift is already starting to happen and that each of us has a role to play. He suggests that we start by asking, “What are some of the things my organization could be doing? What are ways in which I could become a more effective instigator and leader of these changes?” Peter points out that there is often an obvious business case to be made—particularly as energy costs rise—for redesigning a process or making an operational change that saves enough money to matter. It could be as mundane as installing light switches that automatically go off if nobody is in a room, or agreeing to adopt the practice of turning off the light in the bathroom when you leave it, or striving to move toward a “zero waste” office environment where everything is reused or recycled. A funny thing happens when you start talking with each other about making these kinds of simple changes in your workplace: You build a sense of shared vision.

Senge points out, “Building a shared vision in an organization is not about everybody saluting the wall where the vision statement is posted. It’s about people doing things together that they care about. It doesn’t matter if it’s mundane. All of a sudden you realize, ‘Hey, we’re doing this together.’” Beyond the economic benefits, these moves can become a source of fun and constitute one of the more effective ways to unite people around a common goal. He continues, “In many parts of Vermont, you pay to have your trash picked up, but recycling is free—think about what that does to get people working together to reduce waste.” These preliminary steps also start to build a common awareness for the major changes coming: new products, new processes, new business models, and wholly new networks of collaboration.

The Courage to Step Outside the Bubble
Senge believes that most of the industrialized world is living in a bubble of denial about the precariousness of our wasteful “take-make-waste” culture where rich countries increasingly impose the side effects of their lifestyles on poorer ones through global food, energy, and material goods systems. “For virtually all other species,” he says, “food is local, energy comes from the sun (in many forms), and ‘waste equals food;’ that is, by-products of one living system are nutrients for another.” The Industrial Age has fostered a kind of collective hypnosis that our food can be shipped thousands of miles, energy comes from digging up and burning former living systems, and waste is someone else’s problem. The stresses created by this way of living, manifesting in problems such as soaring gas prices, climate change, and social instability, are finally getting everyone’s attention. The question is whether we can move beyond just reacting to these crises to thinking and acting in ways that will create new systems that are regenerative rather than exploitative.

The problems with changing the status quo can seem so daunting that it is hard to see what anyone can do, yet The Necessary Revolution is full of stories of people whose passion and courage to pursue a more systemic perspective have enabled them to build networks and foster innovations that have snowballed. For example, ten years ago, Darcy Winslow headed a small advanced materials group at Nike that worked with Cradle to Cradle authors Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart to do a toxicological study of Nike’s entire footwear line. The results were shocking; the company had no idea of the number of toxins in the shoes. Case in point: the “air” in the Nike Air shoe—a bestseller that was considered one of their biggest design successes—was a substance called SF6, which was a much longer-lived greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Likewise, glues and solvents used in the manufacturing process posed serious health problems for workers and potentially for communities when shoes were eventually discarded. The company, which prides itself on health and fitness, faced a huge predicament.

Darcy couldn’t solve the problem overnight, so she started talking to people. Having just read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, she figured if she could get 3 to 5 percent of Nike employees to align with her, something could really start to change. But when she calculated that, given the size of the company, she’d need to enlist something like 1,000 supporters, she had to admit that probably wasn’t going to happen.

Then she realized that she didn’t have to reach everyone. Instead, she concentrated on Nike’s few hundred lead designers, some of the most influential people shaping Nike’s products. Now, reaching 5 percent seemed a lot less daunting. Once she started knocking on doors, she found many who were interested in the problems but had been turned off by how the problems had been presented. Senge recounts, “Creative people don’t get excited by being told, ‘We’ve got to get all of this bad stuff out of our shoes.’ What excites them is the challenge, ‘What would it take to create a shoe with zero toxins?’” Nobody had ever done anything like that before. Gradually, Darcy succeeded in connecting to what the authors of the book call, “the generative DNA of a company,” and things started to change.

In the ensuing years, Nike introduced a whole line of organic cotton products (creating the Organic Cotton Exchange to bring more organic cotton to market worldwide), created the “Reuse-a-Shoe” program to recycle old sneakers into running tracks, and introduced many products with greatly reduced waste and toxicity. Today, they have a new system for rating all products on the basis of waste, toxicity, water, and energy used in their production. Not just shoes, but every product receives a sustainability rating: Gold Medal, Silver Medal, Bronze Medal, or no Medal. For example, Michael Jordan’s new Air Jordan shoe will be one of Nike’s first Gold Medal basketball shoes, with a woven upper that creates almost no waste in production and a sole that is stitched to avoid all glues and solvents. Plus, after many years of research to find polymers that could keep air from leaking out of the shoe, the “air” is now actual air and not SF6. The company is sufficiently convinced that these ideas will shape future markets that they are now striving to achieve zero waste and zero toxicity across their entire product line by 2020.

Peter shares the story of Per Carstedt, a Swedish entrepreneur who has led the so-called “bio-region movement” in northern Sweden, in which communities are working together to become the world’s first advanced industrial society with zero reliance on fossil fuels. Fifteen years ago, Carstedt and a few other people started introducing modified Ford Tauruses that could run on ethanol. Today, 25 percent of all vehicles sold in Sweden are capable of running completely on ethanol.

Along the way, Carstedt, himself a car dealer, began to focus beyond the transportation system—which produces only about 25 percent of greenhouse gases—to the built environment, where heating, air conditioning, and electrical equipment account for about 50 percent. Around 2001, he and colleagues created the “Green Zone”—a trio of interdependent businesses that includes a McDonalds, a service station, and a car dealership. The service station sells ethanol made from the waste oil in the McDonalds. The car dealership has no heating system of its own, but is heated by waste heat that comes from McDonalds. And, of course, the car dealership sells ethanol-fueled vehicles and promotes sustainable production of ethanol (the region is building state-of-the art facilities that convert forest waste products, not food crops, into abundant supply).

As Senge recounts, Carstedt is amazed by the attention the experiment has gotten. He had felt it was almost trivial, being on such a small scale. But by the time he conducted his 500th tour of the Green Zone, this time with a group from Japan that was filming it for a television show, he had come to realize the power in creating something tangible that everybody can relate to. Peter notes, “Everybody knows McDonalds, everybody knows a gas station, and everybody knows a car dealership. These were just regular people with regular small businesses—not IBM or Microsoft—just small businesspeople who said, ‘Hey, let’s find a way to dramatically reduce our total waste and switch to sustainable energy.’”

According to Senge, this combination of pragmatism, humility, and vision is key. Like the Industrial Revolution, the revolution needed today will not “come from any grand plan or government agency, because the issues are too deep and the changes too sweeping.” It will take all of us—business, education, civil society organizations, and government and public sector leadership—to tackle the immense challenges we face.

Suggestions for further reading:

The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World, by Peter Senge, Bryan Smith, Nina Kruschwitz, Joe Laur, and Sara Schley
(Doubleday Currency, 2008)