THE ENLIGHTENED ENTERPRISE ACADEMY SIGNS THE JENA DECLARATION
Yesterday Benno Werlen, the UNESCO Chair on Global Understanding for Sustainability, invited me to connect with him, and to sign the Jena Declaration. He correctly suggested that the 10 elements of the declaration are “very much in line with your Enlightened Enterprise Academy.” Here they are:
1. Accelerating the progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and implementing the UN “Decade of Action” successfully, requires a move from talking about sustainability to living sustainably. Such a shift implies the need to focus especially on peoples’ everyday practices. This includes developing policies that enable, promote and support radical change in peoples’ everyday actions.
2. Many sustainability policies stem from a human-nature dichotomy, understanding nature as humanity’s surrounding environment. Yet with our body we are ourselves an integral part of nature, and we also incorporate it into our practices in specific ways, depending on what we are doing. This premise inverts the perspective on sustainability from a nature-society opposition to a society-nature interdependent relation.
3. Most of the present crises find their roots in unintended, often foreseeable, problematic consequences of human actions that are, ultimately, of global significance. This implies the need to frame the crisis as primarily a societal rather than purely an environmental issue, and to expand what is understood to be its knowledge base.
4. Establishing long-term sustainable ways of living requires recognizing everyday practices as key drivers of the transformation. This calls for respecting those practices’ cultural, social, and regional diversity, as well as past experiences of adaptation. In this context, the social sciences and the humanities must play a central role in shaping sustainability policies.
5. Transformations towards living sustainably will be broadly accepted if they are co-developed by everyday people, specific stakeholders, and policy-makers at all levels working together with academic experts and scientists. This implies a radical paradigm-shift away from imposing “one size fits all” top-down strategies and towards specifically tailored approaches.
6. Cultural, social and natural dimensions of everyday practices are all inherently connected, locally embedded, and globally interrelated in specific ways. This insight requires scholarship that transcends disciplinary silos while benefiting from each discipline’s findings, and is supported by new forms of research organization.
7. Genuine transdisciplinary research should provide information and insights in an accessible form, and facilitate participatory knowledge production. This requires supporting bottom-up movements among relevant communities, allowing them to offer effective contributions and to take action.
8. A deep societal transformation across generations requires that young people are especially strongly involved in this shift from the start. This demands that they have access to robust information and education, civic involvement, as well as political participation.
9. To establish culturally and regionally diverse ways of living sustainably, creativity and a new aesthetic are necessary. How we do things depends very much on what they signify to us, how we see the world and our place in it. The arts in all their forms, together with the humanities and social sciences are crucial for expanding mindsets, providing new perspectives on ways of living. This shall allow humankind to move from the age of extraction towards cultures of regeneration, to reach the SDGs with increased speed and depth, and to ensure measurable success.
10. To that end, we call upon all relevant political and scientific institutions, including funding agencies, to use the UN “Decade of Action” as a time to ensure that the cultural dimension is at the core of sustainability programs. This includes the need to:
· Reframe the basic perspective from an environmental issue to a societal challenge
· Complement solution orientated top-down strategies with more inclusive, regionally differentiated problem-avoiding bottom-up approaches
· Promote participation of younger generations in decision-making processes
· Reform sustainability research, its funding and organization
· Strengthen transdisciplinary cooperation in all domains of research
· Revamp the curricula of all educational institutions, focusing on global social emergencies and their mastering
· Establish universities, research and educational institutions as authentic examples for societal transformation
· Integrate the arts, as well as findings from the humanities and social sciences into the co-design of future, culturally and regionally diverse “ways of living sustainably.”
Sections 5,6 and 7 in particular relate directly to the approach the Enlightened Enterprise Academy is taking and is advocating. We recently updated our website home page to state the following:
We should also emphasise that change requires all of us to recognise that our thinking, which drives our behaviours and is reinforced by the language we use, has been very deeply embedded over the course of three millennia. To the extent that we are rarely conscious of what is driving our thinking as we continue to operate on ‘autopilot’ most of the time. Reflection will make us conscious of the fact that the way we see the world is largely rooted in Enlightenment thinking, not all of which is helpful in a 21st century context. And some of which can be seen as the root cause of many of today’s problems. It is essential that we transcend the failings and the limitations of the Enlightenment thinking we argue in making the case for a New Enlightenment.
By way of example, section 5 of the declaration states “policy-makers at all levels working together with academic experts and scientists” is needed. That does not happen. Even within academia not all experts and scientists work together. They operate in faculty based academic silos, and rarely in multi-disciplinary ways. Then graduated tend to work in professional silos. This issue is a direct consequence of Enlightenment thinking and is one the Enlightened Enterprise Academy is addressing directly. And specialists are rarely able to see the relevance and impact of their work in a more holistic context. We have now been trying to address this with our work on Critical Systems Thinking and Practice approaches for five years. The benefits are explained in section 6 of the declaration.
Our insistence on taking a global perspective, rather than a national perspective, on issues is also reflected in section 6 which states issues are “inherently connected, locally embedded, and globally interrelated in specific ways.”
The points mentioned in sections 5 & 6 are closely related to point 7. We agree with the notion that the transdisciplinary work needs to be made accessible to communities to facilitate change from the bottom up. For this reason we are developing the Civic Intelligence Academy in collaboration with Cordial World.
We go further by stating that in all we do going forward the Enlightened Enterprise Academy will encourage engagement, cooperation, and collaboration between the private, public and plural sectors of society. As stated in the Evolution of the Objectives of the Enlightened Enterprise Academy, we think this is essential if we are to bring about the rebalancing of society.
In conclusion, I am now in conversation with Benno Werlen to see how we might collaborate in support of the Jena Declaration and it’s efforts in calling for “a global bottom-up mobilization to achieve sustainability through culturally and regionally adapted and locally embedded pathways and social inclusion.” Plus, “A real transdisciplinary bottom-up movement, helping to overcome those current political turbulences endangering sustainable futures.”
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The need for transdisciplinary reciprocities of influence gained prominence, in healthcare for example, twenty years ago. Transdisciplinary initiatives are different from multidisciplinary porfolios that merely aggregate or interdisciplinary innovation that creates different kinds of stovepipes albeit across established disciplines. Transdisciplinary initiatives involve collective intelligence that juxtaposes disciplinary perspectives and crystallizes them for a more holistic understanding of something. But therein lies the rub. Understanding of what?
Most well-intentioned transdisciplinary efforts are effective in stimulating innovation and establishing collaborative relationships that generate novelty. Many even have the intent of transltioning research to practice, typically by expecting or hoping for some translational magic as innovation becomes increasingly more mature and within reach of operational systems. Transdisciplinary translational initiatives are most effective when one starts with a commitment to specific needs of specific people. Such demand is unaware of boundaries between disciplines or offerings on the supply side, and it doesn't respect such boundaries.
Transdisciplinary innovation can occur on the demand side, as it were, with no need for translational magic at some future stage of development. This is one interpretation of how "bottom up" systems thinking is different from top-down abstractions. It requires a diversity of stakeholders to throw themselves, together, into some real-world problem at a community level where individuals are recognizable while also having to deal with a diversity of others. It's somewhat like the famed "skunk works" in Lockheed Martin of a bygone era.
But an enlightenment cannot be closed to the outside world as the concept of skunk works implies. It must be open to a small-world network of communities in which such collective intelligence is manifesting and collaborative innovation is occurring (islands of innovation). And it is different from the mere outsourcing of "open innovation." It is more like an archipelago in a "blue ocean" of continual reconfiguration and exploration of value delivery.
The new enlightenment has the capacity for discovery analogous to science if not the scientific revolution, but is decidedly is not limited to science let alone to hegemony of a scientific method. It has the character of dialectic in scientific community, but it is not limited to scientists. It is theoretical, empirical, open to a multiplicity of perspective, most notably a diversity of stakeholders.
While this may begin to sound as abstract as the analytical philosophy of the 20th century, to the contrary, it could not be more relevant to everyday experience. In a sense, it is a natural philosophy of life in community that has become confused and frustrated by the fragmented bounty of modernity. It is engaged, accretive, and selective. It is mindful and interpersonal. It accepts both passion and reason. It is both deeply personal and indefatigably responsible.