(be) Benevolution
Business
“Synthesis for step change. We’re consciously managing more abstract, longer term goals. We’re assimilating negative feedback. This wins capital in the new world” ― Festina LentÍvaldi*
Conscious collaborative business outcompetes
Today’s significant issues cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them. There’s a new, step change, coming. We’ve had the Industrial Revolution and the Exponential Organisation – iCentered and Information Revolution – is with us.
What’s the next step? Benevolution is already outcompeting the old systems.
Business posts
A Climate for Change
I have worked on environmental and sustainability issues for decades. It is quite confounding. So often I would encounter my own and society's assumptions about the way the world works e.g. we make decisions based on rational economics. These are strong cultural...
Matching words to action
This is the text from my keynote, yesterday, for The University of Adelaide's MBA opening dinner:I’m going to talk to you tonight about paradoxes - the sorts of crazy contradictions that we see all the time, and we are often unconscious to the importance of these...
It’s personal: why leaders don’t turn climate knowledge into action
There is an abundance of profitable business opportunity to be found in addressing sustainability issues. These stand out against the difficulties we face implementing effective change. Globally, the World Bank recently found that tackling climate change would help to...
End Ecocide – a transformational inflection point
At the Planet Talks, WOMADelaide, Polly Higgins introduced the need for a 5th international law - to eradicate Ecocide. A law ending Ecocide - no more mass damage and destruction - is far more likely than it may appear at first sight. Polly describes her 'light bulb...
Old people will save the world
The need for quick, sustainable, global transformations versus our relative inaction appears to be a complete paradox. It's so obviously in our own collective, as well as individual, self-interest to act on many pressing environmental issues. It's often in our own...
Two Pauls – Ehrlich and Gilding – on transformation v’s collapse
Is there a sea change in our attitudes? Just as many people may not understand exponential growth and its consequences are we also missing another fundamental change - the underpinnings for a transformed society? Paul Gilding has just made a case that climate change...
Heat
Australia is in the grip of "a once-in-20 or 30-year heatwave" with extremes over 40 degrees. Despite the heat, and the likelihood that there will be many more extreme events like this as climate change hits, the Australian media almost universally omits to mention...
2012 a perfect storm?
George Monbiot and Ross Gittins, an environmentalist and an economist, both have two related and compelling reveiws of 2012 trends.Ross writes about Jeffrey Sachs' evidence for "the four business gangs that run the US". Sachs's highlights how:''corporate wealth...
Content
Business, transforming ~ benefit
Benevolution’s business stories are about today’s step changes. This is like the shifts brought about by the industrial and information revolutions alongside the political/social reformations that co-created them.
It is really hard to see such step shifts while they are occuring. There’s evidence the next phase, call it meta-modern, is underway. Signs include:
- We are living in an era of exponential change. Things are getting exponentially better, other things exponentially worse – simultaneously. Current ways of organising are destabilising.
- Synergy: when we synthesize disparate viewpoints, demands and imperatives new solutions can emerge.
- Climate change is a good example. Addressing it requires new thinking. Businesses that reverse global warming and are more socially and financially profitable, synchronously as they grow, are emerging.
* Quote with thanks to Hanzi Freinacht: We’re moving from the industrial age. We’re enabled by the internet age. In a globalized, post-industrial, market together these mean significant change. That change is a new step – metamodern. See Hanzi’s Listening Society book for an eloquent and compelling read on benevolutionary change.
Catalysing, inspiring ~ benevolution
The stories for positive change on this site are across 3 broad categories:
- Beauty – posts on aesthetic and expansive experiences. Art, poetry, travel and emotions catalyzing evolution.
- Benevolutionaries – superstars, accidental heroes, inspiring intellects and everyone between. People breaking boundaries.
- Business – that’s this page! See above for details and stories.
Background ~ better be…
(be) Benevolution aims to assist our deep longing. We are responding to a pervasive sense of the tragedies of our time and, simultaneously, experiencing an ardent awareness of possibilities. The site, its stories and perspectives are to help our agency and engagement – with the painful and the promising – for practical, ethical flourishing.
Stories from before 2019 are drawn from Kings Catch Fire and Greenmode – some of our previous explorations and engagements in personal, family, species, socitey and global thriving.
Festina Lente
Make haste – slowly, powerfully, minimally
“Hasten slowly” said Augustus. Oh, this is hard. To imagine what can be created, to hold back, to act; to engage means delving into both despair and hope. That’s where we’re challenged to see the powerful in what we do which is always minimal and micro. Feeling adequate in the face of manifest inadequacy. Weaving together the pieces that hasten, slowly and steadily, benevolution.
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