From sustaining to thriving
Recorded at Climate Con 2021 on November 9, 2021
From sustaining to thriving
Let's shake up how we think about our role in shaping change and the potential world we can create. For starters, there's sustainability—and then there’s regeneration. Discover the difference from one of the field’s thought leaders. Then, explore how playing your role starts by looking within to reconsider how we can be, not what we can do.
A workshop guided by: Carol Sanford (The Regenerative Business Summit)
Resources:
Regenerative Business Book by Carol Sanford
Full transcript.
Kristen Winzent: This workshop is an introduction to the principles of regeneration by one of the thought leaders who has been at the fore of this movement for over four decades. If you've been in the climate conversation for even just a minute, you've probably heard the term regeneration and it's become quite buzzy. And even though the awareness of regeneration as an idea has reached the mainstream, the actual understanding of it and exploration of it in practice is not yet quite as common. That's why we invited Carol today. So she's going to introduce us all to the principles of regeneration and how the practice of regeneration might reshape the way we approach our roles for climate action.
So quick intro. Carol has worked with Fortune 500 and new economy leaders, designing and leading systemic change and human development programs. She's an award winning author, educator and recognized global speaker whose work helps us see the possibility to change by developing people and thinking about systems in a matter that can ignite motivation.
So during the workshop, follow along in your workbook drop your all aha's in to the aha board. And then after the workshop, over the course of the event, Carol has been so gracious to record a number of videos for us that we'll deep dive into each of these roles. And so in these videos which will happen over the course of the few days the idea will be to pause and reflect on the role as a consider how you might play with them in your day to day. So with that, I will hand things over to Carol.
Carol Sanford: Hi, I took a drink of water. I need to put up my screen. There we go. Thank you very much, Kristen. And I want to say that beautiful spoken word performance started to give me tears. And so I had to take a deep breath, stand up and turn around. Was totally moving. And I'm so grateful for you having, given that as way to build a feel to start.
Why am I here today? I have work I'm seeking to do in the world that has to do was shifting away from action and more, or let's say we're not going to stop doing action, but create more reflective action, more mindful, more moving away from becoming activists which are passionate. And engaging with things in a way that may not serve and be alive for the system itself.
I am going to ask you off and on here to put some reflection specifically at a certain time in the chat and Kristen is going to help track all of that and come and give us some reflections. So today I'm asking you to not make lists of things you want to do when you leave here, but rather to learn, to be able to see and discern how, what you're thinking about, what others are saying, what they're doing is going to lead to.
Can we really actually. Do a better job of guiding our work. So first I'm hoping to help you recognize regeneration when you see it. I didn't title this from surviving to thriving. Those are terms I'm not very excited about either one of them. And the reason is because we equate restoration all and resilience. All of those is one big bucket. Now the sadness of that is we can't see that regeneration gives us something we can't get elsewhere. And I'm going to show you in a moment it's really a paradigm and a world view of how the world works. I'm going to give you some guidance that I think will be a mixture of fun and distressing, which is as you work today, as you work back in your world, as you listen to people, speak to be able to catch yourself when you're doing what I just said. Which is, I often hear people say to me we're working on sustainability or should I say regeneration now is though changing the word, gave us what we need. it doesn't.
We need to catch ourselves and be respectful of the names living systems have or otherwise we're doing what over the decades. We've hated other people doing they're doing work. They heard the term sustainability. After a while they got enough, they said, yeah, we're doing all that. They weren't. And that's what greenwashing is when we adopt the current language and we're able to use it enough that we can fool ourselves and sometimes fool others.
So I want you to be able to recognize regeneration as a distinct living process and to be able to catch yourself and others. Kristen, does your picture need to be on the screen? I'm watching your move and it's distracting. Sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah. Thank you. All so speaking of catching ourselves I want us to all be watching ourselves for the time you're going to be with NIMBY.
Now. You're not going to be judging other people. You're not going to be making Gliss. You're going to be doing what we might call introspective work. And then I want you to be able to know what a difference the idea of regeneration makes from any of the things we'd all been doing up until now, the best we knew.
But with ancient wisdom, be able to understand how powerful the the idea of regeneration is and how much difference it would make for planetary vitality and viability. You're going to see some work that I gained from my grandfather. I grew up with a grandfather who was part Mohawk, and it had been for some period of time in Oklahoma and a reservation, which is unusual for marks, but that's another story for another day.
He constantly took me into the fields where he planted into the farm yard, where he had the animals, particularly he raised pigs. And I learned walking along those creeks, feeding those pigs with my grandfather, constantly telling me stories and asking questions from his indigenous worldview particularly air quiet and Mohawk.
What it is to see something is alive. See the life, because then we sometimes make it dead with our mind. And I wanted to tell you stories about that and have you apply them to your own work? So today what I'm wanting us to do is invite ourselves to do our reset. On how we think it takes what it takes for a planet, mother earth to be vital and healthy.
And so we have to go back to a beginner's mind because people who are attending here, all what I call well-intended. Including me. We want to do the right thing, but we have to learn to engage from heating different reference points. Not saying I'm going to learn regeneration. I'll add that on top of circular, sustainability, biomimicry.
It's not any of those things. And if you add it into the others, you're not doing. I want to help us learn to examine the danger of our good intentions. I was listening to Kristen, talk about when to do more be of service, and I'm going to show you how without an, a capability to be more discerning, those are incredibly dangerous for our mother. I want us also to learn the idea that a well-intended people often get in the way, if you are. And I'm sure all of you have been in one or more relationships in this life and you can see something's going on with the person you love and respect, and you quite sure they need help. You may even know they know it.
And so you keep trying to help try this, do that. And one day they'll turn to you and say, that's not helping. And they're saying it with love in their heart. I want to say you can't learn today to see yourself and see when what you're doing is not helping. Or the love of your life may have said, no you're misinterpreting. You got it wrong. That's not how it works. Slowly, if you're hearing these things, maybe it's coming to you that your own ideas about what that person needs may not be whole. You may be projecting your own thoughts. You may be imposing on them. And sometimes, especially if you're worried it's going to fit you and your relationship you get anxious about helping that movement happen, but you're getting it wrong because it's not how things are working or sometimes that person will even say to you, I know you're trying to help, but you're making it worse. And I hope all of you are laughing at yourselves right now because you've all heard this unless you're not no longer in the human body, because we all want to be of service.
We want to help. We want the people that we love to do well. And in this case we want mother earth. So mother earth is going to be saying to you today, if you'll listen, many of the activities and endeavors you're doing are not helping you got it wrong. That's not how living systems work. And in fact, some of what you're doing is making it worse.
I would love for you to get in that mind. Not because everything you're doing needs to be questioned, but I believe the problem we have now is not the bad guys, it's the well-intended. And let me tell you why. I see the world moving. I worked in the corporate world a lot and with organizations, various kinds and education, I'm a senior fellow of social innovation at Babson.
I see more and more people coming. When do you be a part of the solution and they're coming to the well-intended for the blueprint. The problem is I now see so many of the well-intended the people who you would say are the leaders in a climate improvement and the health and vitality. I see so many of them that I want to say to you, this is not helping you got it wrong. That's not how living systems work and some cases you're making it worse. So I think we, as well-intended people need to be able to lift up our own discernment.
I want to draw a Lineage Teachings for Calibration. Am I making a difference? Am I doing what's right. You probably have all heard Einstein's caveat. I bet every one of you have said some words of this, or 27 times Einstein said we cannot design our way into evolution, or he would say the next solution or wherever it was with fire too. And it's even demanded, if we use the same mind, the same thinking, the same paradigm that got us into the mess. So it's not our bad intentions.
It's our way we're going about it is using the same thinking that got us into the mess. And I understand what am I asking you today to learn, to look for what Einstein gave us is a great model. He said our biggest problem with not being able to get a different mind. We're working on getting things to work better is that we're using a billiard ball model. Of how change happens, how work change happens, and we need to learn to use a quantum paradigm. So I want to give you quickly a few keynotes ideas here about how it is. You can get that kind of movement in your mind. First. I assigned pointed out that in new Newtonian physics, which is about the physical world, not the thinking and a appreciated discerning world.
We have come to think that Kimmons can control outcomes. I noticed in the opening slides that talk about what humans can create. That's all an illusion. Einstein would say, that's not how the world works. He liked can't control actions by their direct action, whether it's demonstrating or advocating or taking out a career, they have to learn that's not how it works. I hope you're a little afraid right now and saying. I went to school. I got a degree. I've worked very hard and I am very active. Newton would say you can't get mother earth there from that position. We also think that we know and his metaphor, what a billiard ball table is for healthy climate.
We know how climate works. We've got science. Although most of it is chopped up in pieces. We think we can define the pockets that will give us a score. And then we think that we can be acoustic and that we can define which players on the table, which actions needed to move. And we back up with our big use stick. We aim at as the people who need to move at the actions that need to move. We see the pocket, we think our go-to and we hit it with the intention, put in the pocket. The problem is that's not actually how human life works and doesn't even always work on acute tape, our billiard table, this metaphor of thinking we can take direct action is the real problem we have now, as we may have a chance to get more and more people involved and that's exciting, and that's helpful.
What I, instead we have sent, send, said we have to do is have a quantum, non mechanistic view. So what does that look like? And if we're all going to become activists and take action and go make things happen, we want to be working with mother earth and wave that's. How life works, not have her, if she had voice and we could hear her say. That's not helping. So we want to learn to see when we're being a billiard ball. Now this is a long sentence, but it describes a non mechanistic view of getting to a healthy climate, a healthy ecosystem, healthy society. If we can understand that the quantum view says humans are embedded in living dynamics.
We're not over here in charge, looking at mother earth and the work. Nope, we're embedded. We're not nature. No nature's embedded in there also. And that also gets us mixed up. Humans are embedded and all living dynamic that works with systemic processes. I made everything's happening at one time, which no one aspect of the system, including humans can predict and determined.
And in other words, we can't go off and grade a charter and say, we'll do all of these things that we'll have a health. That's hubris, that's arrogance and sometimes it is evil because it is as anthropocentric as the people who are raping mother earth, we have to get over the idea that we have some super human power.
Secondly, the quantum worldview says that each embedded hole, that means each individual human. But area that alive form is species. Each biota, each community all have a role to play in this larger system. We don't as humans, I believe have purpose, individual purpose. I believe we have roles to play a system's purpose. It's one of the ways of helping all of us overcome. The system began then become self-correcting. But if I think I know, and humans know the system working at a living wage, can't be self-correcting, we've got a mess right now. So it's true that humans get in the way, but it's not a matter of getting humans out of the way.
It's a matter of getting them to understand how living systems. Which is a whole system is self-organizing and it can be self-determining if we understand and bring our attention to our role in the system, any effort we create. It's a reaction and it creates a change, even if our attention and our intention is not directed toward it. That means I have thoughts or I have a way of working and I go watch something. I am actually changing it by watching it. Heisenberg's principle. And that intention, that hope that aspiration is not predictable in terms of what moves. If we don't understand the working of his living systems, we go in with our human hubris and we start engaging things and we can change something.
Billiard balls. Ball under the table in this pocket. And what we're doing is creating a simultaneous movement. So the more an actor seeks to control the results. So if all of us here today, all 200 of us said, we're going to agree on one thing, and then that's going to do it. We are not understanding how living systems work.
We can't control the results and the outcomes from our action. We are actually creating a great deal, more dispersion, and our own intentions need to understand the forces of the system at work. Now, here's what I think. I want everyone to learn to take action on not action of activism or advocacy or a change processes, but working with the living world and having capability. I want everyone here today. I learned so much in preparing this presentation for you because I have to grow me every time I want to help others. I have to start with what capability do I need to work on is not what your actions, it's what you're being.
I have to be able to decide. I need to have. I love this metaphor. I came up last night. I hope you enjoy it. It's turning all of us loose to operate, to do surgery with a whole team of people that we never sent to medical school. And I have problems with medical school, but you get the idea of what, we need to be able to work in a way.
They were mostly starting with our own capability. And then rather than projecting the answers, the solutions we are building capability of the whole system to do its work for every life shed. I think watershed is an anthropocentric idea. That's where our water comes from or maybe it's some food jet or an air shed. All of them are fragments. Our capability to be able to see a whole working and help everyone else have capability is the answer to being able to have a whole in healthier. Alright, let's take Einstein's and what I'm going to ask you to do right now, and by the way, we're gonna do this little dance I'm about to offer you.
I'm going to ask you to think of your work. There's a moment in your mind, given an image of what your work is, why you do it, why it keeps you alive and hopeful and feeling meaningful. Even. I want you to put that work. I want you to feel it in your body, what it means to be involved in what you feel is good work. It's work that makes a difference. And some of that you may be paid for. Some of that was volunteer. Some of it may be raising children in a community or alone. Some of them may be working on reversing racism, which I also this whole thing I'm giving you will speak to why it is we keep making racism worse.
We keep working from the billiard ball model. I am going to do something on that on December eight. So if anybody's interested, we'll get talk, but back to climate change. What we want to understand, is there four different paradigms. And this bottom one is the one where much of our work, or maybe I should say the people who we think are the bad guys are working, but we're all here.
We think when we go to work, that what we're about is extracting that. And now we all need to make the living. We all need to be in some systemic reciprocity, but if what you want is to be able to get more and more value for yourself then you're at this level paradigm, which by the way, It's a billiard ball model.
What we know is this is not whole, we'd all say, oh, that's a terrible paradigm to view the world from. And so we know we want to do better. So I titled this overall slide. We want our attraction to looking for better. Against the bad guys, blinds us to what really how the world works. What else is there?
What we've been doing for about 50 years is prying to arrest, to disorder that, that lower paradigm creates that mining creates. Get a strip mining that forestry, that chemical extraction, all of those things have been so obviously distracting that we put all our energy and still our, this is what I say, driving 99% of the work I'm making a healthy plant, slow down the destruction. Slowed arrest the disorder, arrest the distraction. And we go after that toward people we think can do that. People who are in power of some sort, they have an ability to pass the legislation or arrest people and try them. They have the ability to create global agreements.
All of these are aimed towards people who we believe can arrest the disorder. I'm going to have you look for a moment. And how much of what you do is here. And that certainly helps us. And, I do too. We're, I do all the recycling, what managing waste trying to be we're using sustainable products, fair trade products. All of those things are very small impact on what it takes for mother earth to be healthy. Putting our energy toward arresting disorder is much better because we know that we're slowing down the March over the cliff. Zeno's paradox still is it won't get us there. It's just keep cutting in half a little better.
And I don't think mother earth has time. She would say, that's not helping. Not that you should stop doing it, but it's not enough reasonably I 20 years ago, coined a phrase that I hear everywhere now, which thrills me actually. But it doesn't go quite far enough. If what we want to do is make it help their family. We can't beat our children less. We can even do some things that like getting to school and telling ourselves we need to be doing more with our children. Beating our children less won't make us have a healthy family or a child grow up well, so we have to do something else. What is that?
That turns out to be what people are now saying? I don't want to do just less bad I wanted to do good. And the first time I heard someone say that I can't believe that's what people are thinking. You go from doing less bad to doing good. Not knowing that doing good is the most dangerous thing you can tell a human to do.
I bet that startles you. I don't want you doing good. Although you may have some hints. What I said earlier, which is healings are hubris, hubris thick. Is that a word animals? We think the world revolves around us. We think we know the answer. That's how we ended up colonizing planet countries. And Creating philanthropy in countries where you don't know how their culture works.
We go do good. And we save them from themselves. We take their language away from them and make them learn to speak English that now the people are doing this thing. They're doing good. They take their children and put them into schools. Where they no longer study their own patterns. All of this is from do good, is from projecting what it is we believe humans know more about.
And then, so if you are a part of a group that is doing good, you may be the one that earth is saying, Sometimes you make things worse because you splinter cultures, you splinter a whole systems that work really well. So here, what we do is we think we're even better than arresting disorder, but we very likely are not.
And this is part of the humanistic movement. So the bottom three I'm saying to you are all dangerous. They're very dangerous for our mother, because we think we know better and we don't have the capability we're in a billiard ball model. So what did we do instead? Regeneration is this top level.
Why regeneration is about, if you're in a quantum model is not doing something for something, not advocating, not being an activist, by the way, I've been arrested many times in my youth, I was at Berkeley in the middle of the free speech movement. The war in Vietnam. I laid my body down in front of police cars. I was arrested because I was convinced that if I could arrested and sorted, it was happening, the world would be better. What I now know and for all of you who are young .You will hopefully learn quickly that every time you do that, you create more restraining force, more people who are disturbed or fearful.
And they're not bad people. I'm scary that, but Jesus out of them, but what I'm doing, you demonstrating and that whole fear makes the opposition stronger. We are now dealing with some of what I did in the sixties to try and slow things down. Instead I learned maybe 30, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, really that my work had to be evolving capacity for things to do for themselves.
For a forest to grow itself. I had to not go plant and be the person making the forest working. I've worked with tons of forest now in my life, I did evolve the capacity for the forest to do its work. I have to evolve the capacity for the child to be its own, being for a neighborhood to create its own self-organizing process.
For our planet to be able to do that. So it can be self-determining. And here's the second thing that if you don't have this involved, you're not doing regeneration, which is working from essence. Every living entity has its own essence. E-juice sit there and ask yourself for the moment. It's not your behavior. It's not your personality. It's probably been there since you were born. And people would say when he, or she grows up cause they didn't know there weren't only two genders. If when he, and she grows up, this is what they're going to be because that's like what they do with everything. I do this with a business.
When I start what's the essence of the business based on the founding. I do it in communities when I'm doing economic development. What's the story of this place, and I bring my friends at Regenesis are brilliant at leading that conversation. If what you're doing is evolving capacity for every entity to be expressing its own essence.
Now, my projected idea about what it should be. Now. We have a chance of having a living system, socialcism, planetary system, all working as living system of self organizing self-determining way. So we want to get to a systemic understanding that capability is not built. Drives me crazy. We don't do that at school, we teach the billiard ball way, working with humans and with psychology. I know I did my doctoral work into billiard balls, psychology, and therefore we all get stuck. We well-intended people know not to be down there on the bottom. We know that, but we get stuck at trying to arrest the disorder and doing good. Now, your job for the next five minutes. It's going to be to reflect on you.
The, as Kristen said, this work is working on ourselves. I want you to in your workbook these questions are not in the workbook, by the way. I figured them out just before we started, but you can put them in chat room because I'd love for you to fill up the chat room with self-reflection.
What you're seeing about what are the levels of paradigms in your own endeavors? How much of your energy actually, they end up even extract value. And there needs to be some because you need to be making a living, but you need to be doing responses are all things. There's nothing you do. And sometimes that's a story for another day.
What is it that you're doing it each of those levels. And are you really moving into the level of saying I'm not an action driver, I am a capability builder. I am not a projector of best practices. I am building capability of easily entities to see itself and therefore have a whole system work. Can you see where you are on there and then acknowledge yourself, where's the gap in your understanding any of your capability and don't lie to yourself. We want to look good. We're all well-intended people. We want to be in the group of people who are doing what's right. I do too. And I won't tell you, I'm not, I know all of this. I've known it for decades now and I can't every day live it, but the more I can not lie to myself and Ryan make me look good, honor yourself.
I can see the gaps and it gives me a place to work on me because that's the work. What changes in your own will, as we have this conversation, what's happening to you inside? Are you moving it all in what you want to work on, where you think the notable shift is from trying to drive change, like the billiard ball into the pocket with you as acute.
Or are you building capability, which is the quantum way for the system work for itself. All right. I'm going to be quiet. We never do this online. But we're in a workshop. And so please take five minutes right now, make those put much of it in the chat room. And then Kristen's going to pull out some pieces and reading them aloud and I may respond to them.
You can also if there's some questions Kristen, you can start now you can be judicious because in fact, go off into too many directions we may get lost. So why don't you get us started?
Kristen Winzent: Great. I will intermix some reflections and questions here. Okay. So there's one being shared saying that they're at their best when they're facilitating the reflections of others individually and both in groups.
But noticing that they fall short when they're, when they think that they're right and they tend to start giving advice and that provokes resistance or compliance.
Carol Sanford: I understand the world of forces and we live in mostly we'd live in a two force world where people pick sides and we haven't built the capability to see how a system works.
Kristen Winzent: Another one I'm saying as a parent, I often think about how to make sure my kids learn X or do Y that I think that they're supposed to learn. And I want to start shifting my thinking to be about making sure, to focus on where they want to shine.
Carol Sanford: And I am beginning a new rigidity parenting community, which is about really regenerative families and how you have to design families and extended families and non traditional families.
And I have a bit about that in my book to regenerative life about rigidity parenting, because I think we are so determined to get our kids to be socialized in the right way. We don't give them the ability to discern and think, and then wonder why they're affected by peer pressure. Gee, wonder where they learned that.
Kristen Winzent: Someone here. Calling out that quiet reflection seems like a really necessary ingredient to becoming aware of the paradigms and acknowledging that they might not be doing so much of that in their day-to-day life. And that has been helpful.
Carol Sanford: Here is a little trick for learning to do that. And it will not surprise any of you who already do some of this. You want to start with every evening journaling. Where was I and what paradigm for the day? And I've written. So much about paradigms and I would got on medium. I have many articles. I have a new book out in January. That's even more about how paradigms work at the end of the day, journaling about where we are.
We eventually can catch ourselves and we can get better. Then we want to begin to think about it while we're in action while you and I are talking. Can I watch when we're facilitating others and ultimately. We want to briefly think before we speak about which paradigm am I speaking from? Because there you can be in any kind of interaction on any subject and move up and down. These and people do so load practice. One more.
Hopefully we're going to print all these. I want all of these and maybe we can share them with anyone who was here. And you're going to have another one or two more reflection moments. One more.
Kristen Winzent: Okay. This one, just because I think this is pretty reflective of how a lot of people are seeing that I'm seeing share Someone just admitting I'm raising my hand to saying that I thought I was doing good and I would have been really at the top, but realizing that I'm still working up to it.
Carol Sanford: Yeah. And that acknowledgement is the greatest act we can take. We can learn to listen to mother nature saying, I know dear child. That your intention is Fort may. I see you demonstrating, I see you riding. I see you podcasting and all over this to tell people to stop doing that terrible stuff. I wanted to tell you that's not helping.
And in fact, it may be making things worse, us being able to see ourselves as core to the problem, which is what Einstein was trying to tell us is the most important work we can do. And then building our capability. I am going to move us through the seven first principles. Cause we, they would help us at the top.
No one were there. So I have a little matrix here. Oh, it was a lot of misfiling on Quando. I'm terrible at spelling. Just say she's terrible. There's spelling. She's good at other things. I forgive her and then you'll be fine if you worry that I'm terrible. I don't get corrective. You'll drive yourself nuts.
On the left-hand side, everybody to give you a way to catch yourself. I use these to catch me where I'm at a billiard ball, mine compared to when I am in a quantum mind, which is what that's supposed to say where I'm really helping entities be self-determining and to really learn, to see things as systems view.
By the way, there's a little in the middle where we try and do good. What is really a billiard ball model is a fragmenting model. The way we got to the mess we're in is businesses, primarily organizations, governments started with the idea of you don't understand it, break it down into smaller parts.
The minute we did that, we no longer were able to see anything working. We are, instead of learning to watch a frog, to understand frog newness and the movement of frog, we dissect them and pin them on boards and name their parts. Ah, that hurts me every time I use that story because it's a reductionist model.
But if you have in your work, Guinea lists, It's a fragment. If you have anything that you have talked about, all the parts of it, we have to work on if you have 17 principles, like the United Nations, they are principles. That's the most fragmented lives in. People just love it. And yet it gives us nothing about how things are.
We have to do to be able to be regenerative and to be in a quantum model, a living systems way of seeing is see holes, the person who talked about their child. If you see a child as a whole being, not one that has problems in school or math is not their strong point or I can't get them involved in sports.
All of that is your projection. The way to see a hole is to see it aspiring, seek it, see it seeking to make a difference. Children's start early one day, contribute to the family and by book the rigidity of life, which we're also going to be using a bit here today. What you can see is. That there are ways to involve children from a young age that have nothing to do with assigning them tasks.
That whole idea of we want to be in a value adding process is quarter work. So you're going to stop here in just a moment. I'll be some questions to know what is, how much of your work is fragmenting, because it was fragmented. Your fragment. Mother earth. You're fragmenting society. You're putting things we'll see next and categories and boxes.
We always think we're a little better when we say no, I don't fragment. I looked at relationships. I look at connection. What fragments? So we feel better every time we say it's all about relationships and all about connecting, where they just see something as a whole. When I work with a company I don't work with or a business, I don't work with functions.
I don't let them work with functions. I don't let the team to the long lines of. Manufacturing or coding? No, they are working with the whole, and you do that by connecting with the external world of customers, earth communities, something were holes are once we've fragmented, we got a mess on our hands. So we have to categorize.
We have to figure out well, which thing is going, which box high, medium, and low performance is the words. Example. That's probably not the worst. Knowing where it is that we have categorized, because that makes us put everything in a category and makes it generic. Now we have a real problem because everything has to fit in that box.
Some of us felt better because there are. Types. They're not all types is just a flat land view of categories. What we want to learn to do. If we're working rigidity, we will always be looking at the essence of the living, into the living process. What's the essence of eating. Just sit and think about that sometime.
What's the essence recreating. What's the essence of parenting. And I give you a few clues to that in the book. Absence is a living system way of understanding something at work more, then dissecting it. It's under say the frog. Jumping with its family, maybe toads in a a pool of water, for us and understanding that is what regeneration is.
And our third one here right now is looking at how often you start from problems. We were taught that about 200 years ago from scientific method, define the problem named the problem. I get many interviews podcasts interviews where I'm against people say define the problem you're trying to solve.
And I say, I don't work on problems. Everything is a problem. If you're wearing no, it's not. That's a worldview. And we have to learn to see that's minute we have categories. I won't tell you how we get to problems and issues. The minute we have categories. And somebody doesn't fit in the box some way a board game doesn't fit in the box.
It's an issue. And if it's not fitting the way we think in our work, it's a problem. And then we go work from the problem and try and fix it so it can fit the category, what you want to do. We're from potential of each essence. So when I go down the right hand side, you're building something, the idea of potential is not generic from like when your teacher said to school too, you have so much more potential when he, or she really meant was before you meet my ideal of what you ought to look like.
You're a problem, but you have so much potential now potential doesn't come from the left-hand side. It comes from essence, your child, you as a person, your business, your community, each has an essence. And the potential arises from that essence of it. Uniquely and distinctly. All right. So here, I gave you more questions here that you can answer in the next five minutes, but I want you to get started with some of these, and we're probably not even going to make it through even remotely all, but look at where you do fragmentation.
Can you even think about what the whole would be? How would you work on look at it, often you categorize and type things and make them generic. And then as a result, make it an issue or problem when it doesn't. Can you start to ask yourself, what is the essence of this at work? And the look at what the value of these three first principles are. And Kristen, this time, we'll just pick a few ideas immediately. As people start writing.
Kristen Winzent: We have one quick question here. If there is a nonessentialist approach to regeneration.
Carol Sanford: I'm not trying until I get an abstract question. I can't even answer it. I don't know what it means. I don't think, I think what the question might be is if you're not working with essence, can you still were working regeneration?
And the answer is no, but the reason is because. You are not working with the specific, unique distinction with life. So you're not working with life. You're working with an abstraction. So unless you can do essence now, you're not working with junior regeneration, you're greenwashing and lying to herself. That's by a judge. All right, next.
Kristen Winzent: There's just a reflection here that the focus on potential and not problems is really awesome. It's reminding me of the appreciative inquiry methods. Which an example question, being asking what's going on? Here that we can build on.
Carol Sanford: And the only problem I have with appreciative inquiry is going all the way to one I'm talking about it is it doesn't have whole system frameworks, which I don't have time to talk about today.
You can still be using mental models, which are categories and so forth. Yes. The intention that is, and if you use appreciative inquiry, we'd some we'd my newest book, indirect work, which will be out in January. And it talks about how to avoid that trap. One more. Got it.
Kristen Winzent: Cool. And we have a few people just asking if you can explain essence a little bit more.
Carol Sanford: Let me tell you what my essence is, and you'll get a flavor for it. And you immediately will say, oh my goodness, she's done that every minute, all the way through here. And if you followed me around through life, you would know it is at the heart of me. It is very, I don't teach it. I have people who work in my community groups by change agent, particularly learn over time because we are so conditioned to see parts and pieces. It takes a long time. My essence, or at least the only way I can articulate right now is I disrupt certain. I don't want you to get caught in anything you're certain about because you quit examining and discerning.
And I am very another aspect. There are three windows on it has to do with that I really want to disrupt excuse me, I want to engage discernment. Get people to have more distinctions in whole system frameworks. Now, each was nobody else has that. That's me and my version. And it's not only people who have essences like a city or a life shift.
Ain't things. It's a whole, all right, I'm going to keep moving here. We've got the first three we've done. Now, we're going to do one that says we have to learn to see the world is nested. And if you're working on regeneration, you're always working on nested holes. The holes are nested worlds. Mostly what we do is do everything linearly and all of you learned early where we, you studied that linear was the old pair.
And that the problem is that we still make lists, which are the ultimate linearity, or we create steps. And therefore we can't see nested as the next thing we try and do when we're in a non rigidity view, a billiard ball move is scalable. How many of you said I want to be able to scale. Our scale, what I do, we've got a scale, a resilience scale, not even noticing.
Wait, where does that paradigm come from? I think it's like what got us in trouble in it. We scaled things. Yeah. So we don't want to be scalable. We want to learn to be no rule, like acupuncture. Where is it? I worked, so my. If some capability building of the mind, critical thinking skills, personal development.
I think if I work on nodes and nodal capability, everything booze, that's what node means. We also get stuck a little in leverage. Then to what we do is a lot of transactional. It we're down my air. Somebody say, I'm going to take action. We're going to go demonstrate Jeffrey Holland or seventh generation.
We used to have that conversation, a lot of glasses of wine. If I get out there and I blame my body, I get arrested. I can have an impact. That's the billiard ball model. It. I think if I pick what I'm going to work on, I directly go after it I'll have an impact. Now it turns out it doesn't work that way.
It scatters has some Burton told us every time and many other visits to long delivers here. There were time where direct and we try and move something. It will move. Or a way, or it was scattered or you will in some way, not help you go where you want to go. What you want to do is learn to build fields.
If you want an example of a brilliant field, the opening events this morning was a piece of that. I remember I got the lovely woman's name. It was magnificent. That is a field building. When I do field building, I start with getting people to reflect. I opened with something that will disrupt them. So they can't be in the old mind.
And I asked them to do their own work. Not me tell them I don't. I have corporate clients who say you do an assessment of us. No. Why would I do that? But I'm going to teach you how to do it. That builds a field. It shifts the field. So we're back to your reflection work. What are the nested holes in your work or where do you end up flat land?
Linear. Can you draw those nested ones? Can you see when you are catching yourself thinking about scaling and can you even think what the note onus of your work might be alert versus everyday you get up and do something don't create movements, don't join movements. I know it was introduced that way.
And I think I tried to do that. Yeah. Movements are billiard ball ideas of just a bunch of us driving the people to the table, to the pod. Cause we think they ought to be in. Can you catch yourself where you do that? So again, I'm going to have you write in the chat room and Kristen's going to give us a couple of reflections. Cause we are just about out of time.
Kristen Winzent: Two minutes left.
Carol Sanford: Rig one, cause I have one last thing. So read one out of this one. Okay.
Kristen Winzent: If you're open to this, someone is just asking if you have any examples of how you've helped your clients in the business world, because it does seem that their energy probably is not directly correlated with that.
Carol Sanford: So first I want to tell you, that's not true. I work with DuPont corporation bibs on why would you work those evil people? I said, I've never met an evil person in there. They're all in a paradigm that they can't see. So all I ever do is educate. Ever, and I work with what you would consider the worst in the world and they change it and they want to do things.
And by the way, the world is moving in. I wrote a book called the Regerenative Business, which tells about 15 stories about I've done it all on my books. All right, I'm going to do my last little piece here. The middle one you will not be surprised to hear is to overcome. And thank you for what you just did.
Overcome our fixed ideas about the bad actors. We look at those people and we decide they are the problem. The work is all about development, and that is what I leave with you today is the idea that it's all about capability building. It's all about. Wow, you do the other work and you'll see that in my books.
So Kristen, thank you very much for inviting me today and I hope you all can use this the whole three days in your life at going forward.
