Confusion of Means and Ends
Friends!
Happy Fathers Day to all Fathers AND Mothers. It does take two to have children! At least in some ways. And not to overdo my AND concept from last week, I am reminded this day of the most precious and favorite role I play in my life. The one as a Father. But I am equally reminded about the fact that without Jessica and our partnership this feeling of gratitude, love, and joy wouldn’t be present.
It also reminds me of the conceptual distinction between motherly and fatherly love. Motherly love is thought of as unconditional and primarily concerned with the growth of a child. From womb to eventually full separation. Fatherly love is more conditional and primarily concerned with living up to ideals expressed (and hopefully lived) by a father. I believe firmly all children need both kinds of love and both women and men frequently play both roles. I am mainly making yet another case for the importance of living in the world of AND and resisting the world of OR.
I continue to reflect and process what we are living through. Most days I am just hunkered down all day long on Zoom, Meet, or Teams trying my best to be the best I can given the circumstances. It’s the only thing to do. But like all humans, I also flirt with and occasionally visit other less productive places like cynicism, frustration, and other more or less harmful forms of escape.
Intermittently I also try hard to get some air. Get my heart working. Chicago is showing its best side and is gradually opening up. Ran on the waterfront first time and it made me feel fully alive. As a family, we are also trying to keep things as normal as we can. Jessica and I flew to Boston this week to meet our newest grandson for the first time. Felt incredible and our hearts were filled with pride, joy, and gratitude. On this Father’s day, it feels very special to celebrate your son’s first experience as a father himself.
But I also continue to be in a state of shock over how this little virus has gotten most of the world on its knees. How it has revealed and then amplified most of what we knew were unacceptable imperfections before. How our political system and the media reporting on it are much more divided and meanspirited than the people they proclaim to represent. I keep thinking a lot about root causes and how we can move beyond the cheap political scoring, the endless blame game to the systemic corrections we need to re-design and ultimately implement.
I was introduced to systems thinking back in the early 1990s by my good friend Dr Karl Henrik Robert who then had just started The Natural Step. That beautiful encounter changed my life in 3 ways. First, it helped me see what I previously couldn’t see. That our planetary boundaries are real and our economic system is linear while our ecological system is circular. And ultimately the ends badly. Second, it showed me how to use “backcasting” effectively (meaning you start with where you want to be and then you build a strategy for how to get there step by step). Third, it finally taught me invaluable lessons in leadership using tools such as consensus documents (focus on all the things you CAN do instead of getting stuck on the few things you can’t do). It was a sensationally rewarding journey and I am forever grateful to Karl Henrik, Rigmor, and all the friends in the broader community that taught me so much. I will for sure return in future newsletters to some of those learnings.
If I take a page from Systems thinking and I try to look at our current crisis and why our societal institutions feel so irrelevant and incapable of rising to the challenge of our times I arrive quickly on the following insight from John Gardner:
”But means tend to triumph over ends. Form triumph over spirit. People become prisoners of their procedures. The means and methods were originally designed to achieve some specific end, but when circumstances change and new means are called for, it turns out that the old ones have become sacrosanct; the means have become ends in themselves - no longer effective perhaps, but enshrined”
- John Gardner in On Leadership 1990
To me, what this means is that the world has a giant Business Model Problem. We are paying for means and not ends. Let’s take a few examples:
Health care - we reward fixes and activities (means) instead of long term health outcomes (ends)
Education - we reward testing (means) instead of valuable and sustainable job skills (ends)
Capitalism - we reward transactions and short term profits (means) instead of long term value creation (ends)
Politics - we reward winning elections (means) instead of policies and services that benefit our citizens (ends)
Media - we reward immediate attention (means) instead of educating and elevating our civil dialogue (ends)
These are perhaps imperfectly expressed but you get the point. We get what we pay for.
What are the answers here? Well, there are many. But the key point is that we need to attack our problems at the level of the system. Not at the level of tactics or individuals. And we, for sure, have to push our time horizons further out. We have to penalize short term behaviors. Or at least not reward them. They are generally bad. Not all of them but most of them. We do live in a short term world with long term problems and therefore we MUST align the time horizon of our systems with the time horizon of our problems. Otherwise, we’ll always shortchange ourselves. No leader elected in politics, government, or business will launch 20-year agendas but that is exactly what we have to do if we are to solve the many challenges we face. Paradoxically, in politics, it might be more about shorter time horizons. Or at least term limits so that they have incentives to make decisions for the longer term and not worry about the next election.
I think we all need to take more of a page from nature. The wonders of industrialization, technology, and globalization brought us so much progress. It truly did. But it also created distance from the sources of production. Anyone growing their own food knows what love, care, respect, and appreciation you feel when you eat that food. It is VERY different from a frozen TV dinner. Or as Larry Summers once said: “In the story of the world, no one ever washed a rented car”.
When we grow our plants, when we garden, when we raise our children, when we enjoy nature, almost no one lacks patience with the process. We know it takes time for all things to grow. It’s “natural”. I wish we all could subscribe to more of this “farming” attitude when it comes to most other problems we are facing. On this Father’s day, let’s recommit to more nurturing. Less virtue-ing. More natural. Less processed. More integrated. Less divided.
Below I have, as I always do, posted some things that inspired AND provoked me this week.
To my Swedish friends, I say Happy Midsummer. To my father I say: I love you and happy fathers day. And to all of you, here’s to a safe return to the new normal. I miss you.
Mats
Here are some sources of inspiration (recent and old) for how and why Farming (regenerative and real) is a great metaphor for the kind of values we need to re-introduce to many of our institutions
Dan Barber’s 2010 TED Talk “How I fell in love with a fish”
Dr. Karl Henrik Robert explains The Natural Step Framework for Sustainable development (full picture book here)
Balancing Our Perspective
Given the reporting the past few weeks on racism, police brutality and inequity it’s difficult to find a balanced view. So I keep looking. I found these pieces particularly helpful in painting a more nuanced picture on what’s going on.
Here is a good article by David Brooks in the Atlantic that goes deeper on the complexities surround policing and culture
Here is a deep examination of the facts around police brutality by Sam Harris. It’s long and well worth your time.
If you look for bad news you will find it. If you look for good news you will find that too. My partner Brian Chu turned me on to this book by the Dutch Historian Rutger Bregman. You can read a short overview here from the Guardian (free if you sign up).
Also I am a big fan of Nicholas Christakis which is relevant here. First, because you are who you are with. Social Contagion. If you want to feel more positive, spend more time with positive people and positive news. Second, his newest book, Blueprint, is about what makes human beings good.
Tracy Palandjian is perhaps my favorite example of a leader driving social change through “reinvention” of business models. She is the CEO of Social Finance and she recently published this article which is the kind of thinking we need to see more broadly. Tracy also gave a TEDx talk at TEDxChicago in 2018 where she explains the pay for success model.