Want to change the world? Start with your mindset: from Economy to Ecology

We all know that we are in the midst of economic and ecologic crises. More and more articles, opinions and research are pointing to economic theory as one of the major inhibitors for a truly sustainable, ecological world. That is because economy theory is based on pure rational but most people aren’t pure rational. Neither is the climate. So we better change that economical ‘scarcity’ thinking model now for good.

The good thing is that a mindset shift doesn’t ‘cost’ anything other than the willingness to accept it. And maybe it needs a simple guideline to explain the desired transformation. What about this one: from Economy to Ecology needs only two letters of these two words to be interchanged: change the n from economy to l from ecology and the m from economy to the g of ecology and we’re ready. And it can even be simply reminded: we change n to l  because we want the ‘now I need my ROI’ mindset become a ‘long-term ROI is better’ mindset. And we want to change the m to a g because we want the ‘mine is more important than yours’ mindset to change to ‘globally shared’ mindset.

Simple, right? Let’s grow the ecology, not the economy. Good luck sharing this mindset!

The World is My Other Team

I love philosophing about world-improving subjects. Our world is becoming more and more ‘flat’ not in the least part because of Internet and social networks that bring people together who otherwise would never have found eachother. It’s part of a global consciousness transition which could take on astronomical effects. Based on the universal law of free-will and driven by many (most?) humans wanting to handle as autonomously as possible, our world might evolve into a new kind of networking ecosystem.  An ecosystem where we learn how to organize things that need to be organized in a totally different way than via our more traditional autority-based techniques like e.g. hierarchies. So, while I am a proud member of several “local” teams close to me, operating mostly in a well defined context, I am also more and more proud to be member of what I like to call “The World as my other team”. This “other” team as I envision it, is a virtual team where you and I share ideas, thoughts etc. and inspire each other towards world-scale improvement. That is holistically thinking and I am a believer that we need that more and more if we really want to solve todays many world-scale problems. The best way to do that, we all have yet to find out, but there are clear signs everywhere that we are willing to let go more and more of old ‘systems’ that helped us get to where we are now, but fail to get us really further. Perhaps by experimenting and using “the World is my other team” paradigm we find the breakthroughs we so desperately need. Happy team finding!

The Beauty of Ethics

In this article from HBR a nice figure was embedded that caught my attention. It said literally in the figure “People behave less ETHICALLY when they are part of a larger group”. I don’t know if this is just a theory or knowledge gathered from analysis or science. But I have the gut feeling this statement is correct. It can be noticed whenever people gather in larger groups, regardless the context, their ethic ‘ceiling’ tends to lower, take f.e. with football (hooligans). It seems also true in ways many (large) businesses conduct their (greedy) growth with total disregard of the bigger (humanitarian) picture. If these businesses would reoganize themselves so they break up in many smaller highly autonomous groups (in fact a heavily networked, decentralized organization with a loth of local, decentral autonomy), this could demonstrate that these business still can work together optimally for society but in a much more ethic way. Especially those businesses that highly value integrity could lead the example.