everlastingNow

Having been battered daily with the news of our doomed world economy, I’ve been forced to think through the concept of an ‘economy’ in general. What is one, really? And, if you’re not an economist and have no real desire to go much deeper than two serious NPR reports defining terms and conditions, how do you get the answer? Intuition, I say.

An economy is an ecology of trust. Period. The more you listen to these stories, the more this truth rises to the top. Money has no value except the trust it implies. Nor does a derivative financial tool… or any other instrument in an ‘economy’ for that matter (stock price, market cap, etc. etc.).

Once you begin draining trust from the pond, the ecology begins to falter. Pull too much and dead fish start showing up at the surface. Over-heat growth with fertilizers and an unsustainable pace becomes the norm, only to fall off and become a scary change… because what was the norm is no longer ‘normal.’

Regardless, I’m not here to talk economics. Rather, it’s a metaphor that is as real as your hand in front of you. An economy is an ecology of trust and clearly it can be broken, if not ruined, by abusing the inputs and outputs of the ecology. Which reveals that any community is an ecology of trust. Communities are ecologies where the currency is trust. This applies to project teams, division, or whole companies.

An effective company–especially one that needs to innovate regularly–needs to establish ground rules for a healthy ecology of trust. To be effective, you have to know one another. You have to know what each of you is capable of. And you have to believe that when you ask someone for something, they’ll deliver it.

Ground Rules emerge. They ensure that you don’t break down the ecology of trust that makes whatever you’re running hum (what the employees normally see as this hard-to-define ‘culture’ that they live in). It’s actually quite easy once you look through the lens of trust-as-currency and people-as-an-economy.

• You can’t grow too fast or too big, otherwise you’ll fall in on yourself. False accelerators make for false norms.
• You can’t stand for misinformation or abuse, otherwise the currency drops and energy slows.
• The strength of your currency (trust) is an exchange commodity with other companies.
• Depending on the work you do, there are limits to the size you can grow in order to sustain a vibrant ecology.
• The work you sell is the nutrition upon which your ecology sustains. Sell the wrong stuff or too much of the same and your ecology stagnates.

The ground rules you find in reflection such as this become the pillars of a sustainable company, culture, and life style for the people you lead.It’s easy to find companies struggling in today’s economy. The media are shoving them at us in order to make a story we’ll watch. Fear is unfortunately engaging. What you’re not seeing is the under-reported bevy of those who are doing all right… and why. Because they knew who they were all along and set up ecologies that were sustainable in their own right. This isn’t to say that we aren’t all affected by the macroeconomic ecology around us. But it is to say that the stronger yours is at a local level, the more insulated you’ll be from ‘head winds’, ’slow downs’, and the like.

What’s the ecology of your team, organization, or company all about?