7. DEMONSTRATION PROJECTS
WHAT IS LACKING IS ANY WAY FOR ALL OF THESE GROUPS TO THINK TOGETHER ON BEHALF OF THE LONG TERM AND THEIR COMMON INTERESTS.
– Hal Hamilton
At the conclusion of the solo and the following awareness training, I met with John and Brian to share my insight. We talked for several hours and then agreed to meet the following August at John’s place in Crestone, Colorado.
That August, John, Brian, and several of our colleagues from Generon and MIT crystallized the vision to undertake a global and regional effort dedicated to the testing and developing of the U-process as an advanced method for multi-stakeholder problem-solving and leadership development. We all felt a high sense of urgency. And the destruction of the twin towers at the World Trade Center just ten days later served to deepen our commitment. The formal organizing meeting for the initiative took place in New York City, less than a half mile from Ground Zero, exactly thirty days after the towers went down.
Through our network of associates, we began with a round of deep dialogue interviews in seven regions worldwide – our way of “observing” globally to gain insights about which projects to target. We spoke with leaders from multinational business, national governments, multilateral institutions, and civil society as well as from activist organizations from across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
I devoted most of my effort during the start-up to raising capital and enrolling key sponsors. While in Europe, I received an invitation to a small gathering in Putten, a tiny village near Amsterdam. That invitation proved to be pivotal to the launch of our two largest demonstration projects because of a man I met there – Antony Burgmans, the chairman of the Anglo-Dutch food giant, Unilever, who later introduced me to a senior Unilever manager, Andre van Heemstra. Andre eventually became a key sponsor of one of the projects, and Antony’s company ended up supporting both.
The initiative was formally inaugurated at a meeting at the Trapp Family Lodge in Northern Vermont. For three days, under a tent in a beautiful meadow, seventy people from eleven countries began planning. And six months later, Unilever and Oxfam launched the Sustainable Food Lab (SFL), our first experiment. They were joined by over thirty multinational food companies and nongovernment organizations, major foundations, and government representatives from the United States, the Netherlands, the European Commission, and Brazil. The objective of the undertaking was to “foster collaborative learning across the food supply chain” between Europe, Brazil, and the United States.
At the first organizational meeting of the SFL, the founding participants described the global food system – growing, harvesting, buying, and distributing food – as a classic case of a system largely out of control. They acknowledged that the leaders of those in the system were trying to make the best decisions possible, but they were doing so in a system that is critically fragmented. In their words, they were trapped in a “race to the bottom,” going faster and faster toward a destination no one wanted to reach. The codirector of the SFL, Hal Hamilton, described the situation to us this way:
Most companies think the answer is to use technology to increase productivity. On the other side of the street, many activists are dedicated to fighting big corporations that they see as destroying local farming communities and ecologies. Governments get caught in the middle between corporate pressures to boost production and the political instability of farmers displaced from their lands by falling prices. Rich country governments respond by spending $500 billion a year for farm subsidies, but poor governments don’t have this option. What is lacking is any way for all of these groups to think together on behalf of the long term and their common interests.
The founding participants dedicated their efforts to learning how to shift the forces driving these global supply chains in order to ensure a more sustainable future for society worldwide.
Within four years of that organizing meeting, over seventy businesses, governments, farm groups, and nongovernmental organizations joined the Lab. Opportunities were created to incubate innovations at every stage along the entire supply chain. The SFL is now an independent venture, housed at the Sustainability Institute in southern Vermont. Among its achievements is the establishment of a Global Business Coalition for Sustainable Food, which is developing sustainability standards for members worldwide.
In early 2003, we began organizing the second demonstration project, the Partnership for Child Nutrition (PCN). The PCN was initiated by the head of the Unilever foods business in Asia, Tex Gunning. Tex was known throughout Unilever for his leading initiatives that connected his units deeply to one another and to their collective purpose. His work has been chronicled in a book, To the Desert and Back: The Story of the Most Dramatic Business Transformation on Record.
Tex and I had first met in Helsinki, where we had made a joint presentation at the first Global Forum for SoL. After our presentation, Tex told me he had been deeply moved over the prior two years by the suffering of malnourished children in India, where one of Unilever’s largest operating companies, Hindustan-Lever Limited, was located. The story he told me was stunning. Over 46 percent of children in India suffer from malnutrition, a rate higher than sub-Saharan Africa. An estimated 75 million of India’s children from birth to three years old are undernourished, the root cause of a high level of many preventable diseases and of impaired development. Despite the country’s many advances, Tex explained that the scope and persistence of malnutrition in India has remained a major obstacle to the country’s economic growth and development.
Tex had looked into the matter and concluded that the cause was a systemic breakdown operating across all sectors. He wanted to find breakthrough solutions to the problem and believed that to do so would require engaging all sectors – government, nongovernmental organizations, hospitals, research institutions, academia, villages, and mothers. He felt the Lab process could provide a path to a solution. He understood, based on what I had told him of our experience in the Food Lab, that enacting a new system is not about getting “the answer,” but about developing deeply connected networks of engaged and trusting people who are guided by a common understanding of the current systems and a deep commitment to create new systems.
A month later, I was in Rotterdam meeting with Antony and his Unilever executive team as well as many of Unilever’s senior managers. Over the next ten days, we gained the full support of Unilever’s senior management to undertake the project. Antony and Tex told me of Unilever’s strong ties to the Indian government through its well-regarded subsidiary. The company also had a good emerging relationship with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), who they thought could be an important local supporter of the initiative through its country’s program and its national committee in India. The missing partner was an NGO with a strong reputation in India and access to civil society organizations committed to reducing child malnutrition. That partner turned out to be the Synergos Institute, a well-regarded NGO in New York with strong ties to India.
The PCN created the Bhavishya Alliance (“Bhavishya” is Sanskrit for “future”), an unprecedented coalition of Indian corporations, government agencies, and civil society organizations with a commitment to halve the rate of child malnutrition in India – especially for children zero-to-three years old – by 2015. The partnership focused first on the state of Maharashtra, where an integrated set of initiatives was implemented. Phase I, which ran through 2008, covered five rural districts and one ward in Mumbai. The total population in that project area is an estimated 2.2 million people, with 40,000 undernourished children.
Phase II, started in 2009, covers a project area of five rural districts with an estimated population of 19 million, and seven additional vulnerable wards in Mumbai. The partnership is now exploring options for child nutrition projects in countries beyond India, particularly in Africa, where the rate of child malnutrition remains intractably high.
A third demonstration project was created in the Northern Great Plains region (North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Indiana, and Minnesota) by a half dozen business and community leaders led by Jerry Nagel of North Dakota. These people gathered together over the course of several months and identified core issues facing the region, believing that some way must be found to address deep systemic issues, including accelerated migration of rural youth to urban centers outside the region; severe racial divisions preventing the region’s Native American and Latino populations from contributing their full potential to the region; hidden and insidious poverty trapping families in a paycheck-to-paycheck existence and a dependence on federal or state programs for survival; and growing drug and violence problems, particularly in rural communities, caused by isolation and despair. They concluded:
If the region is to reach its fullest economic, social, environmental, and spiritual potential, it can no longer seek solutions to these societal concerns through the old paradigm of technical solutions. Restructuring or re-engineering strategies and reframing or rethinking our mental models is no longer sufficient. The solutions to these systemic problems lie at a much deeper level. We must also develop the collective will and spirit to change our beliefs and habits. To do this requires shared conversations, an open mind and heart, and thinking and creativity at a much deeper level than we have been willing to undertake in the past.
In 2004, the coalition of leaders decided to initiate a U-Process Innovation Lab with the declared purpose of “creating a team of committed current and emerging leaders who care deeply about the economic, social and environmental future of the Northern Great Plains to work together to cause long-term systemic change in the region.” A team of twenty-nine participants was chosen, “representing a microcosm of the regions’ social system, including representatives from agriculture, youth, education, manufacturing, government, finance, the arts, urban and suburban areas, conventional and alternative energy, community activists, immigrant populations, the faith community, philanthropists, and transportation.” Every team member committed a full thirty days to the Lab over two years. The design of the Lab mirrored that used in the Alliance and the other two demonstrations projects.
The Lab ended in late 2007, resulting in the establishment of The Meadowlark Institute as an incubator to provide “living examples of systemic change and through these demonstrated examples create a vision of the Northern Great Plains as a place of opportunity for all people.” The Institute’s mission statement declares:
A core belief of the Institute is that the necessary resources to solve our problems and create our futures are already present within us and the challenge is for us to work together to bring our individual and collective knowledge, intelligence, wisdom, creativity, and inner courage into play.
The Meadowlark Institute was named after the Western meadowlark, a bird whose “cheerful song is often described as inspiring and is seen as an announcement of the arrival of spring. The bird is often associated with hope and renewal.”
The Institute is active in the region, providing strategic planning, leadership training and development, team building, and civic engagement services to businesses, civic organizations, and local communities throughout the Great Plains region.