Reminder: Life on Earth is 3,8 billion years old
Permaculture is a design method that seeks to mimic Life, as it unfolds through natural ecosystems. It is based on the premise that life as we know it is the result of 3,8 billion years of R&D, of trial and error that consistently eliminated forms that could not adapt and self-sustain, retaining only those that could.
Hence female elephants have an 18-22 months gestation period, giraffes 13-15, mares 11-12, and women around 9 months. It is the time needed to develop our complex bone, nervous, muscular and cardio-vascular systems, and be fit to face the world that awaits us – humans having a shorter gestation time but a longer adaptation time amongst a safe and caring family cell, whereas animals in the wild have longer gestation times but are expected to ‘hit the ground running’ once out there. However ‘slow’ we might think that 9 months is, it is unconceivable to expect humans to deliver the same quality of babies in a shorter time – the term premature, and all the medical care often associated with it, serve to remind us of how pertinent it is to wait for 9 months. We should also remember that this 9-month period is not only for the baby to develop, but for the mother to adapt (physically and psychologically) to a baby growing inside of her, and for the family more broadly to adjust to the changes that are about to disrupt their life.
In a forest, plants and trees grow at a specific speed. As a rule of thumb, those who grow quicker die quicker, whilst those who appear later in the cycle of a growing forest, and grow at a slower speed will tend to have a much longer lifespan. This is partly due to the genotype of a tree, but also to the life of the ecosystem in which it is growing: a pioneer tree will have access to much more direct sunlight, and nutrients in the soil; a more mature tree will sprout in spaces where pioneer trees have died, where there is less direct sunlight and where it takes time for other components of the forest’s ecosystem to break down the dead pioneer tree and turn it into available nutrients. This apparent ‘slowness’ is what makes the whole ecosystem, and therefore the growing tree, more resilient, and increases its chances to last for several centuries.
Slow is very much connected to small in Nature. What we refer to as Evolution is perhaps the most pertinent example: bacteria that merge together to form a more complex cell (over a very long period of time); mutation in genes that creates variations and differentiation in species, and eventually new species; bacteria in our gut that breaks down food to make nutrients available to us as energy, etc.
The concern for energy flow in permacultural design
Permaculture reminds us that speed is a function of energy. Yes you might grow tomatoes earlier than their fruiting period in Nature, but you will need greenhouses, and you will need to heat up those greenhouses in one way or another, most likely using fossil fuel-based energy sources.
You can design a city for fast cars and speedy buses/trains, or you can apply the concept of a “15-minute city”, developed by Carlos Moreno, to enable inhabitants to access most places they need by walking or cycling – hence using mostly free, renewable energy (human calories) and very little matter (shoes and bicycles).
So talking about “slow” solutions, with this principle #9, is not so much about placing slowness on a pedestal, as a goal in itself, as it is about inviting us to avoid relying on energy that is not directly available within the system.
For permaculture designers, small too is connected to energy. In the Bec Hellouin permacultural farm, in Normandy, they’ve done a research that suggests that they have been able to grow more food on 1 000 sq. metres – with only hand-held, non-motorised tools – than some of the ‘best’ intensive farmers do on 1 hectare (10 000 sq. metres) with their big petrol-powered machinery. In other words, it is much more energy-efficient and productive in terms of yields, to tightly grow several crops on the same bed, than to rely on the luxury of a highly polluting machinery to make you feel you’re the king of a huge piece of land.
In urban permaculture, designers again favour small scale solutions: local producers, local shops, even local currency sometimes. This ensures that the wealth produced by a community will stay much longer within that community, and help it prosper and build its resilience – when hypermarkets relying on food coming from far away are built on 2 major flaws: 1) they only ever have a 3-day stock of food, and could therefore face huge shortage very quickly; and 2) the money that we pay at their checkouts is syphoned out of our community in order to be either invested in stock-markets or distributed as dividends to shareholders who live hundreds of miles away from here.
The glorification of speed in our human societies
How far from this principle #9 have our 21st societies drifted… time seems to be the new gold, with every new start-up company rushing to promote a faster solution to what previously existed. Amazon of course has been a lead player in that, with their same-day or next-day delivery pledge. You want it? You got it!
Even though we had plenty of time on our hands during lockdown, supermarket chains in Paris started promising that they would deliver you anything you want for dinner within the next ½ hour, or sometime even less.
Our fixation on 1 or 2 criteria (rapid fulfilment of a given need/want, for an acceptable price) means we’re losing sight of others, such as the energy and matter required, and therefore the waste and the CO² produced – as well of course as the impact of all the low-wage workers whose pay needs to remain low and whose working conditions need to remain basic for us to be able to enjoy the rapid fulfilment of our want at an acceptable price.
In organisations, ‘slow’ is fast and ‘fast’ is slow
As an organisational consultant, I, too, early in my career, was fascinated by speed, efficiency, large-scale transformation projects swiftly executed. What I began to learn, however, is that the time you feel you earn upstream by working with a small team of ‘enlightened’ executives, you lose it several times over when that same team of “enlightened” executives try to ‘sell’ their new idea to the rest of the organisation. People who have not been involved in co-creating the proposed future see it as something foreign – and just like our immune system does with foreign bodies, they start to reject it, to build defence mechanisms in order to resist the implementation of the new ideas. And it then takes a huge amount of time, and energy, for the authors of these ideas to try to convince their colleagues of the well-founded nature of what they are proposing.
For the past 12-15 years, by contrast, I have been developing an organisational development approach based on Otto Scharmer’s U-Theory, that instead seeks to involve, from the outset, as many people who make up the organisation as possible. To invite them to contribute not only to the initial diagnosis of the situation (what Scharmer calls co-Sensing), but also to the ideation phase, i.e. the process of imagining together solutions that will solve the problems that we have identified together, and embody our collective intention for the future.
Of course, this takes time – at the beginning. Plenty of meetings/workshops/conversations in-depth about the nature of what is going on in our organisation, and in the world around it that we are trying to connect with. Plus the time for creative ideation. But what happens then, is that once the group has co-produced the road-map to the future they want to live together, they’re ready to go! No need to spend months or years trying to ‘sell’ it to internal stakeholders, because the authors are the stakeholders! In fact sometimes you need to hold them back from going too fast!
Speed is a relative concept, though, as the U process can be used in much shorter periods of time. I remember leading a team of 10 consultants, facilitating a high-stake team-building event for a group of just over 100 people. The morning had gone really well, but had taken us somewhere else than where we’d expected, so we knew we had ½ hour after lunch to redesign the afternoon session. Faithful to the U process, I asked my colleagues to share their sense of the morning and how the group was by lunchtime. Overwhelmed by anxieties, they didn’t follow my invitation and went straight into proposing solutions. I knew this would get us nowhere, because everyone was speaking from a place of anxiety – not from a diagnosis of the ‘state of the system’. Despite their cries of “Matthieu, we don’t have time to do this Sensing!”, I insisted and, sure enough, after 15 minutes of sharing and deep listening, we were able to paint a shared picture of the system. On that basis, it became very easy to imagine what we could do in the afternoon to meet the group’s needs, and after 5 minutes the whole team agreed on a way forward. Within the remaining 10 minutes, we planned who did what, and went to get all the material needed, and so were ready to go within the ½ hour!
Small solutions too – but with a good leverage potential – are important in bringing about organisational change. A few years ago, I consulted to a very large, international organisation seeking help to transform their organisational model. I designed a fairly extensive process, involving all the different units across the 5 continents, with activities within those units, and some across units. The project span over 3 years, designed along a U process with key milestones. At the end of it, during a feedback session with my client, she shared with me how pleased she was with the transformation that her organisation had undergone, naming what for her was the highlight of the intervention: “Your 7 principles for Generative Listening, that’s what really made the difference for us! For the first time we were able to really listen to one another, without jumping to defend positions or fighting for ideas. And once we really listened, everything simply changed…”. Talk about a small solution!
Another client, another extensive organisational transformation project; this time to enable this 8 000-staff organisation to break its own glass ceiling and enable more women to reach top executive positions. Another U process, another set of far reaching solutions, including a “Women business tour”, an event going round 10 big cities in France, and engaging the business community there around the issue. What made the most difference though for this organisation was an HR tool that we designed with them, called “Maternity dialogue”, ensuring that every woman going on maternity leave could have a meeting with her manager before her leave, to see how her current clients would be distributed around the rest of the team; and a meeting on her return, to see how she could return to her previous client portfolio and continue to grow it. One process, whose description fitted on ½ an A4; 2 1-hour meetings. Small solution, big impact.
To conclude with this principle, let me quote Rev. Jennifer Bailey: “Relationships are built at the speed of trust, and social change happens at the speed of relationships.” So whilst moving fast might be important, if your aim is social transformation, you can’t do without investing the time on building a mycelium of relationships.
