Mount Everest isn’t the tallest mountain on earth. At 29,000 feet and change, Everest is just under 5,000 feet shorter from base to summit as Hawaii’s Mauna Kea – the difference is that more than half of Mauna Kea is under water.
People are like this. We see the visible and often forget what’s under the surface. When reflecting on sustainability and regeneration leadership, we need to go below the surface of accomplishments and plumb the depths of motives, values, and behaviors most of which are running quietly out of site unnoticed and underappreciated like the base of Mauna Kea.
Typically, leaders are understood to be people who work with other people and teams to achieve outstanding results consistently and reliably. Phil Jackson, the former coach of the Bulls and Lakers, is this kind of a leader – he’s the most winning basketball coach in history. In business, Mary Barra of GM and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella are current exemplars having profitably navigated great transformations of their companies over the last 10 years.
But regeneration leadership, particularly in business and politics, means something different than simply rallying the troops to win a game like basketball or business. Because regeneration is about a new way of human beings living in the world that improves the richness and diversity of Life, regeneration leadership is about more than conserving land, installing renewable energy, reducing food waste, building soil health – its about enrolling our fellow humans in seeing the world anew so that they naturally make choices consistent with the principles of regeneration without thinking about it too much.
Regeneration leaders consistently motivate top talent to perform, keep learning, and win.
Said another way, regeneration leadership is about dreaming, designing, and coaching others to play a modified game of business, politics, and community building, built around slightly different rules the outcomes of which are regenerative. It’s about the uniquely human project of ‘history making [1]’ focused on changing our collective background cultural conversation of what is normal and expected. Regeneration leaders see a beautiful future that others don’t see yet, and work diligently to bring that future to life, such that over time regeneration becomes ‘just the way it is.’
Regeneration leaders willingly explore and align their personal assumptions, motives, and behaviors with regeneration.
I wrote a blog post called “Seatbelts and Sustainability” that described this type of change. When I was a child no one wore seatbelts (even though they were standard equipment in cars); today no one even thinks about buckling up. When you get in a car, you just do it. Similarly, smart phones didn’t exist 20 years ago. Today we can’t imagine a world without them, and we mindlessly fuss with them all day long. Mobile technology has become ubiquitous and has now faded into the background – we don’t much think about it until something doesn’t work – our interaction with the world through our phones is just the way it is.
Leadership, in this sense, is about catalyzing transformation of what’s believed to be impossible to possible. In the mid 1980’s I led the first group of westerners to the Soviet Union to raft the Katun River, 200-miles of whitewater cutting through Siberia’s Altai Mountains. A new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had initiated reforms to open the Soviet Union from its isolation. Over the next five years leading youth, professional, and sports cultural exchanges I got to play a very small part in one of the greatest political transformations in history where the Berlin wall came down and, without a shot being fired, the Soviet Union transformed into Russia. The change was completely unexpected. If you had asked all the smartest experts in 1985 whether this political transformation would be possible, all would have said, ‘impossible!’ (with great emphasis no doubt). A more recent example in the USA is Donald Trump’s 2016 election as President of the USA. No matter your opinion of him, had you asked the smartest experts in the world in 2014 whether it was remotely possible for him to be elected two years later, they would have said ‘impossible!’ (again with emphasis). We know how this turned out. This proves that the possibility for our future is beyond the predictions of all experts, pundits, and zealots.
So, the good news: human possibility is almost unlimited – the smartest experts don’t know what we can and will create. The bad news: human probability is a whole lot more limited and predictable. And as someone once said, ‘if we don’t change direction, we might end up where we’re heading.’ This is why we need regeneration in the first place, and why we need exceptional leaders bringing an inspiring new future to reality.
Which brings me back to Mauna Kea and the importance of understanding what’s below the surface of regenerative leaders and their mindsets.
To lead regeneration, it is not enough to be skilled at reliably motivating people to ‘win the game’ as it’s understood today. You also get to enroll people in the ‘history making’ aspect of regeneration: That it is physically possible for humanity to thrive, behave peacefully, and act beautifully in relationship to Life. Improbable, but possible. Finally, because the improbability of the regenerative vision is built on beliefs, assumptions, and bias – often hidden to us – not on physics, we plumb the depths of our own psychology and examine what’s under the surface driving our individual and collective perspectives, desires, and behaviors. These leaders model regeneration in their own lives.
Regeneration leaders understand that rules and norms are malleable and subject to change – that most barriers to regeneration in the world are human-constructs, not physical impossibilities.
Regeneration leadership is about standing in the face of experts inside and outside of our tribes who argue why renewables won’t scale, zero waste to landfill is impossible, and the customer just won’t pay the true cost of sustainable products, and saying, ‘thank you for sharing’ and then continuing to lead us all through demonstrations in personal behavior, and results in the world, towards a beautiful impossible future.
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[1] See Spinosa, C. et al (1997), Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity. MIT Press
National Geographic Magazine cover image: Blu Skye Advisor Rick Ridgeway on his way to the top of K2