A powerful principle: simple in its workings, so difficult to fully engage with!

The truth is, I have found this principle the toughest one to reflect on so far!

Why might that be? Well, partly I think because I have been witnessing how growing positive feedbacks of climate change and biodiversity erosion seem to be gaining the upper hand over negative feedbacks, and how little we seem to do to bring back negative feedbacks that would keep those positive ones in check.

So we have been seeing, for example, how climate change has triggered massive forest fires in Canada, Australia, Greece, thus both emitting CO² that had hitherto be stored in forests, and damaging those very forests’ capacity to capture CO². We’ve had IPCC reports confirming how serious the situation is – probably worse than previously estimated. And still no country or business is putting this at the centre of their concerns.

The outer world often being the other side of the coin of our inner world, I would also say, though, that exploring this principle has put me in touch with how the accuracy of positive and negative feedback loops, the sharp revelations they bring about who I am and what I am actually engaged in doing, can be so overwhelming that, through time, my (so-called) “intelligent” mind had learnt to develop highly sophisticated ways to avoid this unmediated contact with reality.

Exploring this Permaculture principle has laid these defence mechanisms bare, and left me feeling rather inadequate: both in terms of realising how I had been the orchestrator of my own self-delusion; but also in terms of connecting to a more primary reality without knowing how to navigate it. One small example: I have probably been working too much over the last 18 months: evenings, week-ends, a lot of travelling… My body has been trying to alert me to that fact, through kicking in a negative feedback loop called “backache”; but I have so far mainly attempted to develop strategies to deal with the backache (the symptom), rather than working at the root-cause (work-life imbalance), probably in order to avoid addressing all the ego-pleasing rewards I get from those positive feedback loops (recognition, money, a growing business, etc.)

So is it really worth pealing off one’s own – and our collective – layers of self-delusion, and engage with the intensity, the potency of our interconnected living?

The truth is, do we have a choice? Building walls to cushion ourselves from the almighty force of the self-evident, self-affirming Living can only be doomed to fail: not only will the walls collapse eventually, but we will have grown soft in the process… So better perhaps to accept that we are part of Nature, and that, as such, we can thrive along the same principles of self-regulatory feedback loops; better, perhaps, to (re)discover how we can be, through surrendering to Nature’s principles, effortlessly powerful or, as Nelson Mandela put it – and Marianne Williamson before him – powerful beyond measure…

What do we mean by self-regulatory feedback loops?

Self-regulation involves a set of positive and negative feedbacks. These terms hold no value-judgement. Positive here means that the effect of the feedback is to increase the trend the system is already following; it is therefore an accelerator for the system. Negative here means that the effect of the feedback is to decrease the trend the system is following; it is therefore a brake for the system.

As Holmgren puts it for Permaculture farms or productive land-based communities, a self-regulatory organisation, or organisational ecosystem, is really the Holy Grail for managers and consultants. Yet we have to be mindful here of what self-regulation truly means in Nature.

In simple terms, we’re talking here of a system’s capacity to regulate its own functioning in order to continue thriving in a surrounding environment prone to perturbations and changes. Adaptability to changes in one’s environment is therefore the core principle here, and what underlies it, is a capacity to modulate, through a complex web of positive and negative feedbacks, one’s response to this environment.

This is, in fact, what was described by Darwin himself in his expression: “survival of the fittest”: the survival of those fit enough to adapt to perturbations in their environment. Unfortunately, it has since been wrongly interpreted, through a predator mindset, into the notion of survival of the strongest, and led to the misconception that the biggest and the strongest are the ones that survive – an assertion that any ant, worm, mouse or even ecoli would happily challenge…

But this misconception has led, with far reaching consequences, to a series of problematic behaviours in the (late) 20^th century: the development of large-scale, intensive farming; the development, in the business world, of huge corporations through mergers and acquisitions; and the development of the globalised financial markets.

Without going into much detail here, the key problem with these behaviours has been the increase energy spent to either compensate or even deny what the (usually negative, i.e. braking) feedbacks were “telling” the systems, until system breakdown is reached: the subprime crisis is a typical illustration of that kind of behaviour.

What then constitutes a self-regulatory system in Nature?

At its core, the main thing that a natural ecosystem always grows is fertility. As Janine Benyus puts it, Life always produces the conditions conducive to Life. There is no central control unit in the system, that orchestrates every part’s behaviour; by being fully themselves, fully alert and fully responsive to changes in their environment, the system’s components become interconnected to actually form that system, in an emergent process. When one element grows too big (through positive feedbacks), a predator, a disease, shade, reduced access to water, or any other negative feedback sets into motion to reduce that growth and restore system stability. Alternatively, when a toxic phenomenon develops within a system, both negative and positive feedbacks can set in to prevent toxicity from harming the overall system; this could include negative feedback loops to reduce toxicity at its source, or positive feedbacks that enable new, or hitherto underdeveloped, system elements to grow through using the toxic elements as nutrients, thus neutralising them for its neighbours.

Self-regulation in Permaculture

For Permaculture designers, creating self-regulatory ecosystems involves using tough, indigenous, semi-wild crop varieties and livestock breeds instead of highly bred ones; the reason being that local, semi-wild varieties are intrinsically self-adaptive to their environment, and therefore will need vastly less energy (sometimes none) from the gardener compared to the highly bred ones, whose breeding means that the gap between what they were and what they have become needs to be (literally) fuelled by human intervention for them to survive. In other words, Permaculture tries to rely, as much as possible, on natural self-regulation, where intensive agriculture spends huge amounts of energy trying to override it, by bringing in its own positive feedback loops (e.g. artificial fertiliser) or negative ones (e.g. pesticides).

Tough, indigenous, semi-wild breeds in organisations

How do we choose staff to make up our teams then, if we want to apply this principle to organisational life? Or, equally, what team/organisation do I choose, for which my “semi-wildness” can match the existing human eco-system?

We’ll have gathered from the Permaculture analogies that the kind of staff needed to enact a self-regulatory organisation need to have the following qualities:

• Self-reliant: in other words, have the capacity to acquire and exercise the authority needed for them to decide and act in role
• Energy efficient: produce the maximum output with the minimum input of energy
• System-aware: in the words of the poet David Whyte, all elements in the natural world are constantly paying attention and participating in their eco-system; all their senses are tuned in to the larger movement of life, of which they are a part. System awareness in humans is a bit more tricky, because of the damage that our Cartesian mind has operated over the last four centuries. Whilst we can not return to a pre-conscious experience of being a part of a whole, we now need to mindfully connect to the whole, and experience what the whole may require from the parts. We need to operate a 180° paradigm shift, and now move from the whole to the parts, rather than from the parts to the whole.
• Self-aware: who am I, and what is my work? Self-awareness here – whilst including it – goes beyond a more traditional meaning of self-awareness that is about connecting to your feelings, and how they’re impacted by your interactions with the outer world. We are talking here about an awareness of what I am here – on this earth – to do; about the source of what animates me. It connects, in some way, to Spinoza’s concept of cognatus, the essence of our existence, the living force that makes our existence necessary.
• Clarity of intention: building on self-awareness, intention becomes the materialisation, into the living world, of what I am here to do. Intention is very different from will; whilst intention is an open container offering itself to be filled with opportunities, will is an ego-based manifestation of a desire to shape, and ultimately control, one’s inner and outer worlds.
• Self–updating: I propose this word here, borrowing from our digital age where our computers and apps offer us several (automatic) updates a day! Self-updating is the capacity to deeply learn, i.e. to update/modulate one’s behaviour, thinking and emotional experience in response to new sense-making of the context and one’s place in it – and not waiting for someone else to do it for us.
• Libidinal: in the true, noble sense of the word: life creates the conditions conducive to life; a semi-wild organisational breed must also engage in fully encountering its wider human eco-system in a deeply authentic way, so that something new can unfold from this encounter.

Are self-regulating human systems possible?

The above qualities suggest that the task is already pretty hard to ensure that our societies can provide semi-wild, indigenous breeds – especially given the current emphasis, in most educational systems, towards information download as opposed to inner capacity building. But a Permaculture mindset might help design training and capacity-building programmes in organisations who want to develop as a self-regulating system.

But training and developing individuals will not be enough. What types of self-regulating structures and processes might be needed then to elicit our own self-regulating capacities, and enable us to connect to each other in order to enact self-regulating, sustainable, regenerative organisations?

I guess Frédéric Laloux’s “Teal” approach – as does Itzaac Getz’ “Liberating leadership” book – offer several examples of how self-management thrives in a self-regulated system: whether feedback comes directly from the client, from the context, or even from our own colleagues.

As I am writing this chapter, it becomes more and more obvious to me that the key to self-regulation is to ensure proper, fluent functioning of both positive and negative feedback loops. I am amazed to see how often, in our society, we actually try to soften, distort, ignore, or compensate the clear messages that are coming our way:

1. GDP: the Gross Domestic Product does not take into account our eating into natural resources, nor the damaging impact our activity has on living eco-systems (both of which we actually do plenty of). These damaging positive feedbacks (more resource-hungry industrial activity feeding even more polluting industrial activity) can therefore not be countered by negative feedbacks (inputing used resources in the “Loss” sheet in the accounts, duty to replace/regenerate, imperative to clean up outputs…). We’re operating in a market economy where nobody is paying the main provider of vital services (i.e. the Earth). Are we waiting for Nature to come and claim its due, in a massive negative feedback, to our grandchildren?

1. The EU Common Agricultural Policy: many people would like to consume organic products, but are often put off by price. Organic food production tends to be a self-regulating system, with a price reflecting production costs plus a living wage for the farmer. What we tend to forget though, is that the price we pay for non-organic product (which, being lower than organic products, makes the latter look more expensive), is the price of production plus a living wage for the farmer minus the allowance paid to the farmer through the common agricultural policy. On top of that, the hidden costs of non-organic farming (to the environment, to our health, etc.) is not factored into the price. A costly, potentially health hazardous system is therefore artificially maintained through tampering with the feedback loops that could otherwise allow it to self-regulate.

1. The production of waste in western societies: in an economic system where the primary engine is growth, therefore ever more selling with ever quicker home delivery, we end up producing more and more waste. Recycling processes barely work at reducing the harming impact we inflict on our ecosystems, partly because it is not a negative feedback per se, i.e. it does nothing to address the positive feedback loop around more growth, nor to make the true cost to Nature tangible for the user. A simple example used to exist in the UK, where you’d leave your ‘empties’ for the milkman, who would wash them and reuse them; a similar system of “consigne” used to exist in France where glass bottles (of sodas, wine, etc.) would be sold with an added cost for the bottle, which you could reclaim when you brought those bottles back.

Concluding thoughts

All these reflexions on the possibility of self-regulating human systems leave me with three thoughts:

1. Just as with Permaculture, the design and enacting of self-regulating human systems will need to start on a small scale (local economies, local business eco-systems…) and build up slowly in scale. They’ll need to be inviting the best out of people, i.e. be a place where their highest possible self can be expressed. They will need to be structured by key living principles, that enable one to relate clearly to the whole and find one’s place as a contributor to the whole’s wellbeing.

1. Sustainable development as such may now be an outdated concept for working towards an economy that ensures we leave a planet to our grandchildren in at least an as good as, if not a better state than we’ve found it. What do natural ecosystems do when they’ve been damaged? They regenerate; inherent, self-regulating healing processes kick in to regenerate the land and its animal and floral population. What we therefore need now is a regenerative economy.

1. Today, our systems are saturated with debts; positive feedback loops left unchecked (with probable voluntary inhibitions of negative feedback loops) have allowed it to grow to non-human levels unseen before. But does debt exist in Nature, and if so, what does it look like? And, more importantly, as Janine Benyus would say: “how would Nature deal with it?”