Business as an Agent of World Benefit

America needs a purpose. And it needs to call on the best from our past.  Something that can unite us in a new grand narrative of shared meaning, and at the same time wake our economy out of this contained depression we are in.  

The strategic landscape of the 21st century has finally come into focus. The great global project is no longer to stop communism, counter terrorists, or promote a superficial notion of freedom. Rather, the world must accommodate 3 billion additional middle-class aspirants in two short decades -- without provoking resource wars, insurgencies, and the devastation of our planet's ecosystem. For this we need a strategy. So say my great friends, Patrick Doherty and Col. "Puck" Mykleby, former marine who worked for the Joint Chief of Staff Admiral Mullens.

As they put it: 

"In the face of the present danger and in the best tradition of the republic, America's response must be to lead. The country must put its own house in order and, with willing partners, author a prosperous, secure, and sustainable future. The task is clear: The United States must lead the global transition to sustainability."

For example in the arena of Resource productivity: To bring 3 billion new middle-class aspirants into the global economy requires a revolution in resource productivity. Energy and resource intensity per person will have to drop dramatically -- while simultaneously delivering on the improved income and lifestyle expectations that come with global connectivity.

That revolution will drive the logic behind a new engine of innovation in material sciences, engineering, advanced manufacturing, and energy production, distribution, and consumption. In the United States, the high-wage, high-skill jobs emerging from this revolution will restore and strengthen America's middle class for decades.

America has never confronted a global challenge of the type or magnitude it faces today. If it does not change course, the United States will be racked by violent storms -- both figurative and literal -- as the global order breaks down. The country cannot delay. For a few short years, it has a window in which it can choose an incredibly prosperous 21st century, but that window will close. It is time once more to lead the world through difficult change."

Read this whole article. Not once but twice. Its an amazing call to action. But lets ask all the great strategy thinkers out there, from Henry Mintzberg to Michael Porter to Peter Senge and many others: How might we design a process where this notion of grand strategy can become not a wonderful report on the shelf, but an activating "live" process of engaging a whole country--regions, cities, corporations, communities-- in developing a shared thesis, a critical consensus, and a larger strategic capability to transform vision into reality--together?

Optimistic. Bold. Transformational. These are the words people have used to describe the Global Forum for Business as an Agent of World Benefit. Patrick Cesceau the former CEO of Unilever and Honorary Chair of the first Global Forum along with C.K Prahalad described it as "an epicenter for sustainable innovation."

The Global Forum is an "Unconference" because it is more like a massive design studio—engaging, creative and action–oriented–than a typical convention. The Forum taps into the "whole system of strengths" and uses design tools from the world–renowned Appreciative Inquiry Summit method to enable and inspire individual, team and collective action. To be sure, the Forum offers groundbreaking workshops and amazing speakers, but what makes the Global Forum such a landmark event for many people is its mantra: "up with design."

Upcoming 2014 Global Forum for Business as an Agent of World Benefit

The 2014 Global Forum series will bring together leading business executives, management scholars, civil society leaders and government policy makers from around the world to identify and to leverage new solutions that have the potential to change the nature of 21st century society. The format and content will encircle the globe, with delegates coming from around the world to attend the Forum with additional participants attending virtually. We will connect insights across disciplines, sectors, cultures and geographic regions.

When and where: 
October 15–17, 2014 at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA

Early List of Confirmed Speakers:

Naveen Jain, Founder and CEO of inome and the founder of InfoSpace, Moon Express, and other companies

Michel Giannuzzi, CEO of TarkettDr.

Stu Hart, Professor Emeritus of Management and Organizations, Johnson School of Management at CornellDr.

Raj Sisodia, FW Olin Distinguished Professor of Global Business and Whole Foods Market Research Scholar in Conscious Capitalism at Babson College. He is also co-founder and co-Chairman of Conscious Capitalism Inc.

And other globally recognized thought leaders such as Dr. Peter Senge, Dr. Ron Fry, Dr. David Cooperrider and Dr. Chris Laszlo.

Presentation and panel themes:

Going beyond the business case for sustainability to engage hearts and minds in the pursuit of flourishing;

Launch of the Prizing for Business as an Agent of World Benefit; and

Sector specific action plans including rapid prototyping of possible solutions that are good for business and society.

The Forum is designed to galvanize change. And we invite you to be apart of it. The 2014 Global Forum series website is now in development and will soon provide more information about the speakers, presentations, panels and registration.

Join our mailing list to stay up with the 2014 Global Forum's progress, just click here:

http://weatherhead.case.edu/centers/fowler/newsletter

We are entering the collaborative age. In eras past, the focus was on preparing for organizations to be change frontrunners capable of capturing strategic advantage through disruptive innovation and by creating their own organizational cultures capable of embracing relentless change.

Today, however, executives are saying that organizational change is not enough. The overriding question is no longer about change per se, but is about change at the scale of the whole.  “How do we move a 67,000 person telephone company together?” “How do we move a whole Northeast Ohio economic region in momentum building alignment and shared consensus?” “How do we move a whole dairy industry toward sustainable dairy, not in fragile isolated pockets that disadvantage some and advantage others, but across an industry-wide strengthening effort together?” Or, how do we, as a world system, unite the strengths of markets with the millennium development promises of eradicating extreme, grinding poverty via collective action?” 

Meanwhile, the list of grand challenges calling out for “change at the scale of the whole” grows in complexity and urgency: the call to systemic climate action; massive energy and infrastructure transition; establishing economic conditions for peace; creating sustainable water, regenerative agriculture, sustainable forestry and fisheries and walkable cities; or designing effective polices for moving from an economic era of contained depression to one of sustainability + flourishing.

Nowhere is this call for change at the scale of the whole more decisive for designing and capturing business and society value than in the sustainability domain. We are entering the next phase of the sustainability age in which systemic action is the primary leverage point for successful change (Chouinard, Ellison, and Ridgeway, 2011.)

New convening capacities and leadership tools for aligning strengths, interests, priorities at all levels of a supply system, or across public-private sectors including government, academia, and NGOs, and even across entire industries, regions, and countries—this is the new strategic capacity for game-changing innovation.  An additional consideration, equally important, is speed. Big change is often so slow that no matter how good the visionary impulse, the program, or the strategic imperative, it is often dead on arrival because the momentum stalls, politics drag on, priorities drift apart or, more mundanely, it takes months between small group meetings. Consider the maddening attempts to coordinate calendars across slow bureaucracies and more agile entrepreneurial technology upstarts, or to simply synchronize the collective diaries of hyper-booked executives.  Jeffery Sachs, the economist, puts the case persuasively. The single “most important variable affecting our fate is global cooperation” and, as he writes, “it’s a fundamental point of blinding simplicity” (Sachs, 2008). 

In the realm of sustainable business, it is indeed increasingly clear that we’re no longer lacking in isolated sustainability solutions. Everyone is going green or socially responsible. Our greater challenge lies in system-wide designing—for creating mutual advantages, for scaling up for what could be trillion dollar solutions, and for discovering the ways of overcoming the challenges of collaborative creativity across multi-stakeholder supply chains, entire industries, and larger whole systems.

In this article (you can download a pdf at http://www.davidcooperrider.com) we seek to take the call for systemic collaboration to a new octave by exploring advances in what one CEO in a key report of the UN Global Compact, singled out as “the best large group method in the world today.” [i] While research in this article focuses on the performance and results involved in the Appreciative Inquiry Summit approach, it also seeks to advance our understanding of  “the positive psychology of sustainability”—that is, why and how the best in people comes out so spontaneously and consistently when they, and their institutions and cultures, are working across silos and separations to build a world where businesses can excel, people can thrive, and nature can flourish. 

The use of large group methods such as Appreciative Inquiry (“AI”) for doing the work of management, once a rare practice is soaring in business and society efforts around the world. While at first it seems incomprehensible that large groups of hundreds and sometimes thousands in the room can be effective in unleashing coherent system-wide strategies, designing rapid prototypes, and taking action, this is exactly what is happening, especially in the sustainability domain.  Part of the reason is that the AI process is profoundly strengths-based in its assumptions. It is founded on the premise that we excel only by amplifying strengths, never by simply fixing weaknesses. But the other half of the equation is the underestimated power of wholeness: the best in human systems comes about most naturally, even easily, when people collectively experience the wholeness of their system, when strength ignites strength, across complete configurations of relevant and engaged stakeholders, internal and external, and top to bottom.

Sounds complicated? Surprisingly, it is exactly the opposite. Recent research on multiplier effects demonstrate that it is much easier to convene a whole system of stakeholders under the right conditions for joint design thinking—let’s say 700 people for three days, using the design and strategy tools of AI—and address a big-league opportunity collaboratively, strategically, and at higher velocity, than it would be to struggle with hundreds of committee or small group meetings that drag on across silos, specializations, sectors, and sub-systems. The key: knowing when and how to create what theorists’ call “positive contagion” and what large group research is calling “the concentration effect of strengths.” There is an unmistakable power in leading through strengths—like an electrical arc sparking across a gap—only today it is not the micro strengths of small silos, it is the macromanagement of systemic strengths.

[i] The Global Compact Leaders Summit Report (UN 2004) documents the impact ofAppreciative Inquiry at the United Nations world summit between Kofi Annan and CEOs from 500 corporations including Hewlett-Packard, Starbucks, Tata, Royal Dutch Shell, Novartis, Microsoft, IBM, and Coca Cola. For the full report go to: http://www.unglobalcompact.org/docs/news_events/8.1/summit_rep_fin.pdf. In the report Rodrigo Loures concludes “Appreciative Inquiry is the best large group method in the world today.”