After many years
of organic gardening experimentation, I discovered my own fast process
for producing compost this past summer. So I was curious when, during
a conversation about design and sustainability issues and what the
future might hold, Lyn Falk of Retailworks handed me a book and it
flipped open to a chapter entitled “Composting Waste.” The
book she had given me was the recently published The Natural Advantage:
An Organic Way to Grow Your Business by Alan Heeks. In it the author
presents what promises to be the most important issue corporations
will face in the decade ahead: employee satisfaction, retention and
productivity.
At the very beginning of the book, Heeks asks, “Does your work
renew you or wear you out?” The book’s main focus is about
work and the individual worker and creating inherent sustainability
via a path of self development based on natural cycles. He is quick
to point out that natural does not mean easy. As he states, “The
move toward sustainability is not one frightening giant leap; it’s
more a matter of progressing cyclically. With each repetition of the
cycle you move closer to true sustainability.”
Heeks is a consultant and entrepreneur who made a bit of money when
he helped successfully launch Caradon, a building materials supplier,
in the late 1980s. As a result, he founded an educational charity,
the Wessex Foundation. Heeks envisioned an organic farm where people
could learn the natural principles of sustainability. In 1990 Heeks
and the foundation bought the 130-acre Magdalen Farm in southwest
England. Since then it has been transformed from a depleted conventional
farm into a productive organic farm and residential education center.
Heeks suggests that since business is very adept at using models as
guides for all sorts of activities, it’s time to look behind
the scenes in order to find the basic operating principles developed
and refined over billions of years that govern all life. The principles
of sustainability that control a farm, an ecosystem or the whole Earth
are universal, whether they are applied to individuals, work teams
or entire organizations. To date, most efforts to apply these natural
principles have been focused on the design of buildings, spaces and,
more recently, preliminary efforts have been initiated toward product
design. Only a few of the most enlightened companies have attempted
to alter their core structure to accommodate sustainability.
The uniqueness of Heeks’ approach is his concentration on the
individual’s work habits and utilizing these principles to lessen
stress, to improve productivity and to deal with change creatively,
all while renewing the individual in the process. He comments on the
fact that more and more companies are talking about sustainability,
but how elusive it is to implement or attain. In 1997, seven years
after he had begun to transform Magdalen Farm, Heeks learned of The
Natural Step (Dr. Karl-Henrik Robert’s approach to achieving
sustainability based on a set of science based principles and cycles).
He realized how the process of organic growing on the farm embodied
a powerful example for human sustainability at work and developed
seven principles based on the natural cycles that govern the structure
and procedures of natural organic farming.
The first three principles examine the process of establishing the
best conditions to promote natural growth. This, of course, includes
the composting chapter I alluded to earlier. Just as composting uses
the output of a previous growth cycle as the input for the next stage,
Heeks shows how to turn the discarded energy, conflicted feelings
and negativity that sometimes plague workers into constructive energy
when the individual is at the center of the process. The next two
principles instruct how to use sustainable inputs to achieve sustainable
outputs. Finally, the last two principles explore how the fruits of
sustainability flow out of the organic process.
I would recommend this book whether you are trying to make your own
work flower or your business flourish. The Natural Advantage was written
as a workbook, but the author suggests you read through it once before
attempting the numerous exercises, assessments and reviews that appear
throughout the text. It is written with conviction and belief in a
clean, clear style that make Heek’s working principles very accessible.
It is also filled with examples from Heek’s consulting work that
adds another level of validity when the principles are demonstrated
with real-life situations. The groundwork that Heeks bases his process
on is quite sound and capable of supporting a diverse set of applications;
rarely do the analogies break down.
The author writes, “Most organizations are still very far from
acknowledging or developing human sustainability; their prevailing
culture and practices do not sit easily with natural cycles. Typically,
the word cycle would only be used to describe the planning or budgeting
procedure.” Improving the quality of our working lives and making
both the conditions and productivity of work more sustainable will
be key to achieving success as well as attaining true sustainability
in the next decade.
Just as viewpoints about sustainability that were once considered
eccentric a decade ago are now reaching the mainstream, the issue
of worker sustainability will be on the action agenda of any forward-thinking
company in the years ahead. The green cell is considered the basic
building block of life because it can turn sunlight into food, and
the self-sustaining individual will be seen as the basic building
block of sustainability within corporations. Heeks asks why we, as
a culture, continue to treat ourselves like machines when we should
be using natural methods for self-rejuvenation. It is apparent that
this will change in the near future now that The Natural Advantage
has opened the debate about this important topic.
Richard Walthers (rwalthers@prairiefish.com) is
founder of PRAIRIE fish; a Chicago IL-based consulting firm dedicated
to design and sustainability issues. |
