Connection, Cooperation, Change

As difficult as talking to a bird

I’ve always been interested in change. From a very young age, it seemed to me the world needed a lot of it. I watched as my parents’ relationship crumbled, my brother and I fought until blood flowed most days and school was a procession of bullying and fighting for survival. Perhaps it was just what rural Australia was like in the 60s and 70s but I don’t think so. It was universal then and universal now, even more so, that people struggle to get on.

Bad things happen when people fight. They get hurt and there’s a lot of collateral damage, most often to those around them but also to Nature. The chance for things to change for the better is made so much harder because we fight, fight and fight.

As I grew and started working, I witnessed first hand the fighting between green groups and the forest industry in Australia. In 1990, I went to Oxford University and studied cooperation. In 1995, I co-authored a paper, “Cooperation and conflict in forest management: Applying a theoretical model to the Australian problem.” In 1999, after early forays into helping people cooperate in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, India’s Terai region, and in Russia and Romania, I founded the Tropical Forest Trust to help build cooperation in the teeth of a European-wide NGO campaign against retailers and the garden furniture industry because of their use of illegally harvested wood from Cambodia. It was the only way I could see that things could improve, that our collective performance could be such that we helped ourselves and Nature.

I found then, and in so many fascinating projects since, that we can only move beyond conflict to change if we can find a path to and then across the bridge beyond to cooperation. That path involves getting connected to who you are, to your own values.

But how do we do that?

Inspired by Australian “National Living Treasure” Michael Leunig’s 1990 publication, “A Common Prayer”, I’ve learned that getting connected, living a different way is a lifetime’s work, a deep struggle and that there are many storms and other troubles to knock us from our path. Michael’s inspiration was to draw a beautiful yet profoundly simple picture of a man praying to a Duck to represent a person searching for their soul. This resonates very deeply with me.

I’ve learned that if I can connect to my true self, my soul, if I can get close to that Duck, my inner voice, then I can help others do the same. Time and time again, by being true to myself, my deeply held values, I’ve been able to “whisper” forth the Duck in others and help them be true to themselves, to live from their own values.

Armed with this connection, they’ve made profound decisions for themselves and for their companies that have transformed entire industry sectors, saving millions of hectares and forest and affecting millions of people’s, plants’ and animals’ lives. When people get there, really big things happen - for them, for the organisations they lead or work for and for society and the planet as a whole.

My work then, to support individual, organisational, industry sector and planetary change, is very simply inner work. It’s about making sure I’m connected to myself so that I can then inspire others to connect to themselves and then away they go to bring change at scale.

It’s as simple and as difficult as that.

The essence of my experience is that change happens deep in the hidden recesses of the human heart. It can take root and ultimately flourish there but only when people find ways to connect to that place, when they can put down their guns and swords and navigate the difficult terrain of life together, to that field, if only for a while. Getting there and helping this cooperation unfold in the face of often deep conflict can be really difficult.

Cooperation can grow when we’re connected to who we are because that’s when we’re most calm, when we’re listening, especially to our own emotions, and most essentially when we’re open. That’s not easy when we’re under pressure. Who we are can get thrown out the window as we struggle with narratives that tell us we’re evil, that the “other” are idiots, that we’re right and they’re wrong, that their concerns are baseless. It can get thrown under a bus when we’re triggered to anger, or when we’re judged or shamed; cooperation struggles to get a toehold in such barren wastelands and then change becomes impossible until the wastelands can be healed, until the garden can be watered.

We can heal those wastelands, water that garden and whisper forth the precursors to cooperation - openness and calm - for others but only if we’re calm and open ourselves. Then, slowly at first, cooperation between adversaries can emerge. When that happens, and if it can be maintained, we can achieve big, unprecedented change such as on those major projects I list under “Transition Whispering”.

But cooperation is the precursor to that change and it’s creating the conditions for cooperation to emerge that has been my life’s work.