Gil Friend with Peter Kaminski, 2023-12-05
Author: Peter Kaminski Issue: 2023-12-20
Gil Friend with Peter Kaminski, 2023-12-05
Encourage Curiosity
What would you want to tell your grandkids how to cope until they get to be our age?
What I would say to the grandchildren that I don’t have?
I would encourage curiosity.
Just be curious, inquisitive, live in wonder, wander in wonder, which is kind of what I’ve done.
I grew up watching, watch Mr. Wizard in the 1950s and watching a TV series called Industry on Parade, which was a kind of weekly half hour black and white documentary of a particular industry manufacturing process, supply chain thing, whatever.
I was just a fascinated little kid, wondering, “How does this stuff work?”
And so for me, when I would go into a plant, looking at how to make it work better, I’d be full of questions about, well, how does that work?
And why do you do that that way? How’d you decide to do it this way?
Look under the rock, ask the next question.
Toyota got to it with the Five Whys process, which revolutionized their industrial process.
“Why is this that way? Well, what’s the why behind that? What’s the why behind that?”
Where that shows up for me today is the question that I learned from Robert Dunham, who’s always asking, “For the sake of what?”
In other words, if you’re doing this, or if you’re committed to that, or if you want the other thing – for the sake of what?
Why is it that you care about that?
And in the going to that, something starts to unfold, including pathways to getting people who are at each other’s throats to find common ground and find ways of inventing pathways together.
And so that fascinates me, is getting beyond the surface positions and the polarization and all the stuff that we’re surrounded by today to the common concerns that most people have.
I mean, they’re called common concerns because they’re actually common.
So “Five Whys” and “For the sake of what?” are very similar questions.
When did you learn about the Five Whys?
Somewhere along the way I learned about the Toyota Production System, which, as you know, was a breakthrough in quality in industrial manufacturing.
When I was a kid, there were Chevys, and there were Mercedes.
The quality was really, really different. And the notion was that you had to spend a lot of money to get to quality.
Toyota broke that open and said, no, you don’t have to spend a lot of money. You just have to do certain things in certain ways.
You have to ask certain questions, then you can get a Corolla that has the quality of Mercedes.
And now that has become the standard in the world because these guys asked some different questions.
We did some work at the Fremont NUMMI plant (New United Motor Manufacturing, a joint venture between General Motors and Toyota).
NUMMI brought American executives to their plants to show them the Toyota Production System.
They did not keep it secret – they were excited about it. They wanted to share it.
The American executives couldn’t see what they were looking at. They couldn’t understand what they were seeing.
They couldn’t understand that there was respect. They were looking for mechanisms.
We did a sustainability training at the plant in Fremont. I remember this striking moment.
We had done a bunch of briefing stuff, setting context and parameters and expectations.
Then we kind of posed a problem.
And this room full of like, I don’t know, 20 engineers sitting at tables, they instantly wheeled their chairs around, organized themselves into twos and threes, pulled out one of their Kaizen forms, started filling things out.
In a matter of minutes, they were just engaged with a process that was, let’s say, a formalized curiosity process.
It was a way of drilling into something, finding root causes, finding stucknesses, developing hypotheses of paths of action, designating responsibility for who would pursue and test.
And then they turned around back and they were back in the class.
It was stunning.
And these were Japanese engineers, American engineers?
American engineers trained in the Japanese process in a plant in California.
And it was a real eye opener for me in terms of what’s possible if you give people a little bit of training and a little bit of running room and a lot of respect.
For me, that was one of the lessons that I got out of doing, a couple of hundred of these eco audits in all sorts of sectors, was that the folks on the line knew a whole lot of shit about their business that the guys in the executive suites did not know.
And the communication between them was rare. The respect between them was broken in both directions.
And so that was one of the reasons I learned to be curious. I would stop a machine operator and say, why are you doing that that way?
And I would talk to somebody on the loading dock and ask them like, what’s going on here?
How do you know this rather than that?
And it was a real lesson for me as kind of an, East Coast0educated, not working class kind of guy, just really opened up my respect for what folks know and what they care about.
Common Concerns, Mutual Respect
Back to what we were talking about before about common concerns.
Listening deeply to each other, understanding what each other cares about, finding commonality there, is one of the places that respect can emerge.
If we disagree, do I think that you’re an idiot or worse?
Or do I think you’re a guy who has a different interpretation about things and maybe for some reason may have something to do with the life that you lived or the perspectives that you have?
And maybe there’s something to learn from each other there. Those are really different stances.
What I’m describing is kind of old-fashioned. It’s not mostly what we do these days. Look at the recent conversations about most any issue.
But that’s why I chose “Living Between Worlds” as the name for this webinar series because we’re in this in-between, we’re in this liminal space where what we used to know doesn’t seem to hold.
And we don’t know where the hell we’re going.
And how do we live as people who are committed and have passions and aspirations and the ground is liquid under our feet? What do we do?
Economism, Externalities
Will that change? How did we get to a place where we’re living between worlds?
Is that just the way it happens over time? Do we need to get out of it?
Well, the name of the first year of the series was The Only Way Out Is Through.
So, no, we don’t get to get out of it.
We get to live here and do whatever we do.
How did we get here, man?
We can all make our lists – 500 years of capitalism and reductionism and mechanistic approach to universe and, what are we, 70 some odd years of post-war American hegemony. And the technology revolutions.
I keep pointing back to the Powell Memorandum of the early 1970s, which set the course of the political neoliberal trajectory in the United States.
All of this in the midst of a culture of economism that reduces everything to money and assumes that we can measure things through that.
Hazel Henderson just passed away last year. There was a memorial for her last year. And Hazel was a brilliant kind of anti-economist.
She was one of the one of the assailants of the GDP and one of the people who said said that economics is a form of brain damage, in its very limited view of physical and human reality.
So that’s part of it.
We’ve wound up in a game where making as much money as fast as possible seems to be the organizing principle for everything. But we only count certain things inside the game board.
And clean air, water, health, biodiversity, climate balance, human survival – outside the economic equation.
We’ve built this machine that lies to us all the time, and we bribe it to do what we think we want it to do.
One perspective on the climate story is that we subsidize the fossil fuel industry to the tune of about seven trillion dollars a year, which is more than the profits of the 10 largest oil companies.
So we tax ourselves, to pay these folks, to put money in their pockets, to destroy the living world on which everything that we care about depends.
This is not a good plan, you know.
So I think those are some of the things that contribute to it. There are others.
The question of busting those subsidies, and what I call getting the prices right, trying to remove the distortions in the market so that you pay the real costs of things, has always seemed to me to be one of the critical levers inside the capitalist game.
If I think a gallon of gas cost two bucks or in California five bucks, and it really cost 20 or 30 bucks, I’m going to make different decisions.
If I had to pay $20 at the pump, I would not be driving the car I’m driving today.
And probably no one would be making it.
But if I can pay $5 or $2, it’s a free ride until it breaks, right?
Whole Systems, Buckminster Fuller
So that’s how I got here, Pete.
When I was a kid fresh out of college, I ran away from home and instead of going to the first Rainbow Family Gathering, which was kind of a proto-Burning Man in the early 1970s...
My friends from the natural foods restaurant where I was working were headed to the Rockies to smoke dope and run naked through the mountains all summer.
And I went to Southern Illinois University where Buckminster Fuller was scholar in residence and spent a month in the World Game Workshop, which was a 80 person, 16 hour a day design charrette for the planet.
Looking in detail at what would it take to have a world that works for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.
That was Bucky’s quote, his personal philosophy.
And so we got a week’s worth of whole systems brainwashing.
Three weeks, dividing up into 10 teams, one focused on food, one focused on energy, one on water, one on education, one on transportation, one on recreation, and a few others that slip my mind at the moment.
And in each team, we did what Bucky called the design science process. We looked at what is the current state of humanity around each of those concerns. Detailed, quantitative, grounded.
And then we asked the question of what would success look like.
So in the case of food and agro, I was working for a future population of whatever estimated billions and a caloric and protein need of human beings of so much per capita.
How much food would you need? And what would it take to produce that?
And there’s a gap between where we are now and where we need to be.
And then in contrast to the usual plan of saying how do we get from here to there, the game was we stood in the future as though we were successful, and then looked backwards, and said, what are we doing the last five years that enabled the success?
What are we doing the five years before those that enabled the last five years to happen?
And worked the system backwards, reverse engineering the pathway to planetary success, which it turns out is what NASA did in the Apollo mission. They reverse engineered the moon mission.
It’s a powerful technique when you’re dealing with a huge gap where all you can see from here is the limited possibility of incremental what I can do today.
It’s hard to see the big leap.
There were for me, two stunning takeaways from that process, one was that in every one of these 10 domains of focus, there was no necessary physical barrier to human success.
People weren’t hungry because there’s not enough food. There’s other reasons why people are hungry, etc.
That was number one.
So that completely shifted my sense of possibility in the world.
And the other was that, and these groups were mostly working independently, but pretty much all of us came up with relatively small scale, localized, adapted to place solutions as opposed to big global mega engineering projects.
So those two perceptions have informed my life and career ever since.
I came back from Illinois, co-founded a thing called the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which was a think-and-do tank based in Washington DC, still operating to this day.
That was focused on urban ecological economic development, saying that if you look at cities like ecosystems, with flows of energy and materials, flows of energy and cycles of materials, hopefully.
If you look at them like developing countries, which have favorable or unfavorable balances of trade, you can drive a very different kind of economic development process in cities.
And then on from there.
The Tale of Two Cities
I feel like in a lot of ways maybe we’ve progressed since Bucky was thinking about Planet Earth, Spaceship Earth. And in a lot of ways, maybe kind of gone backwards.
It’s the mix, it’s the tale of two cities. We are further along than I ever imagined we would be in terms of general awareness, in terms of technology. I mean renewables are cheaper than fossils everywhere on the planet right now.
Stunning. Twenty years ago, I don’t think we could have predicted that.
We’re also in deeper shit than we ever imagined we would be.
The pace of climate degradation – and everybody talks about climate, but there’s also biodiversity and the health of the oceans and disappearance of insect species and like the whole pyramid of life is in real trouble here. And oh by the way, fascism. It's all in the mix.
I don’t think we saw all that coming to the degree that we’re facing it now.
Related:
- Peter Kaminski (author)
- 2023 (year)
- Topics: Climate and Environment, Events and Gatherings