Ten year-old kids in Copenhagen during COP15 explored a scenario where their family lived in a house with a big garden. Surrounding both was an invisible bubble that prevented everything but energy of the sun to come in and out. Would their families be able to live in such a place? What would happen?

It didn’t take long for them to realize that taking the garbage out would not simply make it disappear and tending to their garden would be very important if they wanted to have vegetables to eat. Today’s globalized world, the size of our population and how we have been dealing with natural resources bring us very close to the scenario those kids explored. We all live in that house and our society hold the same question: how can we live together in such a place?

If your organization is not yet talking about Sustainability, it certainly will. A recent Harvard Business Review points out that it stands as one of the megatrends that have been shaping and impacting the way we will do business during this millennium. Sustainability as a trend goes beyond the rearrangement of government’s powers and growing economies because it requires a more fundamental mind shift, a shift from our long relation to the environment as an externality. The industrial revolution helped to consolidate and speed up a mindset of make-use-waste and for years resources seemed abundant and waste was easily handled.

Society is receiving messages that this old mindset and current reality do not work well together anymore. Understand sustainability today is both a business opportunity and an alignment of doing good and doing well, of creating value for both shareholders and the society. This mind shift is also a transition in our practices and businesses. A company and a society cannot become sustainable in a leap, but the understanding of our natural and social system can give us the ability to define and strategically move towards a sustainable future.

For more than 25 years the civil society has been working to define a supportive framework that can both be scientifically robust and practically applicable. An exploration that started in the 80’s by a group of scientists in Sweden became that framework. A set of four sustainability principles that incorporates all the general aspects of sustainability and are clear and direct to inform decision-makers is known today as a Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD). Also known as the Natural Step Framework, the FSSD is continuously researched by the international NGO known by the same name.

The FSSD is supporting organizations and communities around the world to understand the core of sustainability, to support systematic planning and to make sense of the many tools and concepts on the field. Some companies are working to combine the short and medium term benefits with the long-term imperative of sustainability. Low-investment actions based on substituting materials, reducing consumption or rethinking design are saving costs and generating new products and services. Companies are saving up to 38% in one year, small businesses up to 66%.

Starting with this question I’ve just been through a reflection on a developed approach called Change Lab that aims to create social innovation by enhancing relationships, capacities and the emergence of initiatives in the system they are working with.

It was a fascinating exploration of the what makes a problem complex and the journey to enable social innovation to emerge. Although very connected with Theory U in both topics, the approach brings different and rich experiences in the perceived 3 phases of the journey: co-sensing, co-presencing and co-creating or co-crystallizing.

1. Collective sensing: how to convene collective experiences in a multi-stakeholder group, showing how the learning journeys have been an impact to groups talking about sustainability and child care;
2. Collective presencing: how a retreat invite the actors to step back from the immersion on the issue to immerse in themselves and allow newness to come;
3. Collective creating: by using rapid prototyping and artistic processes, how to engage in bringing the new into life.

The experiences from the presenters and the questions from participants made the day very interesting – first to connect to the approach, but even more to reflect on how some parts of this work are applied in the collective design of systems we have been exploring here and in the work to companies and communities.

In theory: from one side the collective design approach can learn a lot from the impact of the learning journeys (will share my perceptions and past experiences with the learning journeys in a future post) and the presence phase of the U. On the other hand the step to systematic decision-making could be consider a phase that is still unclear for the change lab approach. They could, and I’ll reflect into that later, use the Theory W (yes, I’ll join the mainstream :).

Insights that came back to me while being with the group:

• When talking about the artistic creation process, I interpreted the acknowledgement of constraints and of guiding principles for design when I saw the video of a Picasso painting being formed.

We all know that Art is not truth.
Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth,
at least the truth that is given to us to understand.
Pablo Picasso

In the art I’m currently playing with, Which are the constraints and the guiding principles that are behind Fred Astaire, a man known by his perfection in movement and endless reshootings, and a jam tap dancer, who just have one shooting?

• The power of context also struck me. I’ve just arrived back from a workshop presentation in Nepal and it was very clear that there were cultural needs in sharing their expertise to the whole group. This was mentioned as a challenge at a change lab that happened in India.

• The call is clear when it’s build in contrast with the mindset. If changing the name of a project in South Africa from “vulnerable children” to “children at difficult circumstances” generate the contrast needed to shake a mindset – call an event Survival Academy also generates contrast to a different mindset and bring different people to the room. This is still unclear and I’ll interview the artist in Barcelona who first used the word contrast to talk about fundamental change.