INTRODUCTION TO gJ’s
Conceptual frameworks
It is paramount that the profound innovation and change we invest in focus not on further proving how much damage has been done, nor how much more is to come, but in generating breakthrough possibilities for actualizing transcendent change that will encourage our highest future potential on a global level.
The necessary investment for transforming business, society, and ourselves towards more meaningful, sustainable futures must address systems of learning, evolving how and why we prioritize financial investments globally while also adapting the infrastructure of resource extraction, transport, and manufacture.
Contributions from participants across corporate, civil society, government and academia, both within organizations as well as wider societal systems, have addressed many systemic issues while developing innovative methods for adapting our institutionalized understanding (one high-level example being UNFCCC) of what lies ahead of us. Yet the adoption rate of such advancements remains lackluster, and large-scale embrace on a consumer level continues to fall short due to prioritization of cost or an unwillingness to adapt behaviors to align more earnestly with value systems.
We can only enable transformation by innovating new and inspiring ways of communicating the potential to change as necessity. Designing systems that solve the problem of “selling in” how sustainable, regenerative systems are not only worth investing in, both individually and collectively, but can ensure the creation of better return on investment is critical.
Facing head-on the biases attached to out of date models/modes of operating is vital now more than ever.
Moving sustainability towards designing and developing viable frameworks that prove such modes of operating will enhance global economic competitiveness, while also creating a pathway forward that will help to galvanize everyone towards fully expressed implementation and more holistically sustainable futures for all is the challenge of our lifetime.
In the following 3 frameworks, I present a summary of research and conceptual development already undertaken, and explore in more detail some of the areas I hope to expand upon in the future.
ALTRUISM BY DESIGN
Exploratory qualitative research rooted in Grounded Theory methodology
Is it possible to shift the view of people worldwide towards stewardship and personal accountability in a manner that reconnects us to the planet and the health of our personal states of being, including how we operate professionally and as consumers? In essence, what is necessary to ensure that we are able to reconnect with the most rudimentary, but profound nature of “sacred relationships” and regenerative systems in modern everyday life?
This analysis is centered on identifying both internal and external factors that affect our values-based alignment through determining access to, and implementation of, valuable resources.
Resources can be broken into three distinct categories: tangible, intangible, and organizational.
How we then prioritize physical and emotional health, access to social and personal resources, and protecting and retaining physical capabilities is of the utmost importance throughout to the philosophical nature of the framework.
Authenticity and authentic, organic relationships create an undeniable synergy, and synergy in itself is the most effective short and long term advantage for any business—most specifically those willing to engage more intimately and organically with their consumer base.
Organizations are poised to not only implement, but gain market share through loyal, dedicated consumers eager to invest in businesses that are most likely to return the favor and invest in them, creating product and content better suited to their wants and needs, while also encouraging a deeper level of accountability in terms of value-based alignment.
The future of design lies in a business model focused on reciprocity, honesty, eagerness to engage and a willingness to learn from their most important stakeholder: the consumers they serve.
WHAT I’M WORKING THROUGH
Opportunities for fundamental change at every level of society are needed. Addressing the issues at hand within each industry through ecologies of intervention, I’m uniting practitioners and researchers from design and beyond.
Identifying the direct and indirect conflicts between our value systems. Both personally and professionally, through awareness of the incongruencies in how we FEEL versus how we operate, I’m seeking to understand how to align our work with ourselves.
Methods for unveiling and embracing what really matters. Beyond profitability and growth as motivational factors, I’m searching to understand value creation and what hurts/hinders us from moving more fully into sustainable organizations, products, and services.
HOLISTIC SUSTAINABILITY
Exploration areas for future justification, understanding and integration
A priority now is validating my “holistic sustainability” framework advancement through quantifying net benefits of the ephemeral.
Creating and substantiating the architecture for a holistic social, economic, and environmental practice will have to include re-evaluating and redesigning the structural systems of our institutions and organizations through identifying the combined opacities that have excoriated our ability to prioritize not only the health of our environment, but that of our own mental and physical health, as well our sociocultural and spiritual way of relating to the world.
Integrating sociocultural health, as well as the mental, physical, and spiritual health into the framework will be a means for developing a mission-driven value proposition canvas that must then be taken from conceptual to operational through studying and researching its viability beyond philosophy.
Western sustainability science most often considers human individual and community wellbeing as a function of the supply of resources and services that underpin health, where wellbeing is gauged as an individual having physical and emotional health, access to social and personal resources, and retaining physical capabilities.
What I’m working through
Reimagining how our understanding of the system design for sustainability can—and should—operate, through widening the lens with which which we view sustainability from.
In creating a more well-rounded framework and view of what holistic sustainability might look like, can we then recalibrate how we evaluate and establish KPI’s within business operating systems to ensure more than just profitability is prioritized and integrated throughout our organizational structures.
How might holistic sustainability help us to identify new opportunity territories that can expand our capacity in terms of innovation and redefine success through expanding our capabilities so that (when fully expressed) a more intersectional and sacred relationship can be fostered, both internally and externally?
Synergistic Return on Investment
Transition to maximizing full experience, beyond exclusively economic benefit, through igniting societal motivation for change—i.e., realigning capitalistic commodity ethics
If we can identify opportunities to develop new key performance indicators (KPIs) that organically engage the 360° view of holistic sustainability, in turn enabling new systems to be designed that include human and environmental externalities that become incorporated into fiscal operations. In turn, my aim is to design a new framework that can be adopted on an organizational and governmental level that benefits the circular nature of our designed economies so that there is motivation to emphasize “synergistic return on investment” (SROI) as much or more than stakeholder value or profitability metrics exclusively.
Applying my alternative model suggests two possible ways forward:
Prove SROI and “altruism by design”-positioned organizations/institutions can be more profitable and productive than conventional organizations/institutions operating within traditional capitalistic/neoclassical economics. This outcome seems less and less unlikely in light of the climate and social crises currently impacting the world at large.
Drive consumer demand for SROI and “altruism by design” by redesigning and reducing dependency on systems that exploit and exacerbate maladaptive behaviors currently coded into our modes of living—chiefly, hyper-consumption as defining social capital.
Identifying/developing methods that can help move a culture away from socially-prescribed perfectionism that expresses itself through conspicuous consumption–i.e., “keeping up with the Joneses” and wealth signaling—towards new aspirational targets such as conspicuous frugality or other more altruistic forms of socioeconomic engagement and posturing.
2. Addressing backgrounds of poverty and scarcity that plants seeds of defining safety through overabundance, while also exploring how human cognition and social interaction can generate both adaptive cultural evolution, including more sustainable and regenerative processes (i.e., creating a relevant and modern “virtuous cycle” of consumption) while simultaneously mitigating maladaptive losses driven by culturally- and ecologically-oriented lifestyles, earnestly encompassing both our personal and professional selves or projected identities.
Identifying/developing methods that can help move a culture away from socially-prescribed perfectionism that expresses itself through conspicuous consumption–i.e., keeping up with the Joneses and wealth signaling—towards new aspirational targets such as conspicuous frugality or other more altruistic forms of socioeconomic engagement and posturing.
Addressing backgrounds of poverty and scarcity that plants seeds of defining safety through overabundance, while also exploring how human cognition and social interaction can generate both adaptive cultural evolution, including more sustainable and regenerative processes (i.e., creating a relevant and modern “virtuous cycle” of consumption) while simultaneously mitigating maladaptive losses driven by culturally- and ecologically-oriented lifestyles, earnestly encompassing both our personal and professional selves or projected identities.