“This moment, the moment we are all in together, is our greatest opportunity to forge a new path forward.”
The authors of The Sustainable Enterprise Fieldbook, 2019
Welcome to The Sustainable Enterprise Fieldbook’s Building New Bridges to the New Future. We are all experiencing the global COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The “normal” routines and rhythms of daily life have been upended. Our streets are empty and our schools are closed. Some in our community are working from home, essential workers (heroes) are showing up to keep us healthy and allow communities to function. Many, tragically, are out of work. People are experiencing stress, loneliness and anxiety that their lives will never return to the way it was before the pandemic and be “normal” again. They are afraid of the future they believe is going to happen. They believe with conviction that they know how the world works and have little hope that the negative future they are imagining can be changed. They now are seeing the danger of this crisis. We published The Sustainable Enterprise Fieldbook 2ndEdition in 2019 with the purpose to help forge a path to a better world and a more sustainable, flourishing and thriving future. At that time, we stated that our journey to a new future starts with a commitment to work together to accelerate the journey from awareness to understanding and, most importantly, to action. As we strive to live our values and be our best selves, we decided to provide easy access to selected events, webinars, articles, and practical examples of what communities, businesses, and experts in various fields are proposing as steps that will move us to a new and better future.
Our Call to Action
As Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” What is needed more than anything else is not just talk but concerted and intentional action, translating all the wonderful ideas and learning over the last 50 years into meaningful on the ground change. We need to close the ‘knowing-doing’ gap! This process of transitioning from the current unsustainable economy to a new sustainable economy is not an intellectual exercise but one we must learn by doing, by building the bridges as we walk on them. As we learn we will almost certainly change some of our ideas about what we want and can do. Real learning always changes people. We have also learned we can be most effective when we create the space, structure and conversations that will energize ourselves and our readers to take action. As happens with the turn of a kaleidoscope, our accumulated skills and experiences reorder and recombine to make new original patterns time after time; we’re always a work-in-progress. It is the rich breadth and depth of our humanness, simultaneously simple and complex in its unfolding.
Building New Bridges to a New Future
In our book, we use the metaphor of building new bridges that allow us to travel from the present to the future. The figure depicts many of the stepping stones, accelerators, and pillars that we had identified to make these bridges sturdy and passable.
The bridge has a three lane highway to get us across the chasm from the unsustainable, wasteful grey economy on the left, to the sustainable green economy on the right side. To get us started through the toll booth and onto the bridge, we need to have hope (see Box 9.1). Once on the bridge, we need innovation. As we accelerate, we must behave collaboratively. And most important, we have to be adaptable to discern and continually respond to the feedback signals for resiliency.
Our Call to Action
As Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” What is needed more than anything else is not just talk but concerted and intentional action, translating all the wonderful ideas and learning over the last 50 years into meaningful on the ground change. We need to close the ‘knowing-doing’ gap! This process of transitioning from the current unsustainable economy to a new sustainable economy is not an intellectual exercise but one we must learn by doing, by building the bridges as we walk on them. As we learn we will almost certainly change some of our ideas about what we want and can do. Real learning always changes people. We have also learned we can be most effective when we create the space, structure and conversations that will energize ourselves and our readers to take action. As happens with the turn of a kaleidoscope, our accumulated skills and experiences reorder and recombine to make new original patterns time after time; we’re always a work-in-progress. It is the rich breadth and depth of our humanness, simultaneously simple and complex in its unfolding.
Building New Bridges to a New Future
In our book, we use the metaphor of building new bridges that allow us to travel from the present to the future. The figure depicts many of the stepping stones, accelerators, and pillars that we had identified to make these bridges sturdy and passable.
The bridge has a three lane highway to get us across the chasm from the unsustainable, wasteful grey economy on the left, to the sustainable green economy on the right side. To get us started through the toll booth and onto the bridge, we need to have hope (see Box 9.1). Once on the bridge, we need innovation. As we accelerate, we must behave collaboratively. And most important, we have to be adaptable to discern and continually respond to the feedback signals for resiliency.
