Recently I gave up and hired an organizational expert to help me clean up my disorderly home-office space. In working for an entire day with Annette D’Agastini of Manhattan Organizing I realized something – it struck me like a thunder bolt. What I thought I needed was a cleaned-up office space, but what I really needed was a system.
Hiring Annette was not like hiring a cleaning service for my office. If the aim is a clean office, any cleaning service will do. Yet within days the same unmanageable mess is back again. Annette’s aim however is not to clean your office. She uses the phrase “Give a man a fish and feed him for a day, but teach him to fish and he can feed himself for life.” Developing a system by which one can manage one’s books, magazines, mail, paperwork – the information flow of an office – is what Annette teaches, and in doing that she helps her clients create a framework the consequence of which is an orderly and neat office environment - and one that is sustainable.
This idea of being mindful that results are always the consequences of system or process has very wide application. We often talk about means vs. ends, but as someone rightly pointed out "Means are ends in the making." It’s as true in the arts (you get to Carnegie Hall through a system - practice, practice, practice), as it is in mental health (in Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl said that happiness can not be pursued, it must ensue from a life built of meaningful activity), as it is in business (profit is the consequence rather than the aim of a well manage enterprise.)
One of the most pressing global problems of the 21st century is the threat of human-induced climate change. Like the messy office, the earth’s atmosphere with way too much greenhouse gas is not just a problem but a consequence. The earth’s natural systems work one way, but the global economy is often not aligned with those workings - climate change being the most urgent symptom of that lack of alignment. So the sustainable solution to climate change is not so much about sequestering carbon underground or putting heat shields in the atmosphere (this is like shoving the excess office papers under the rug.) The sustainable long-term solution to climate change is to have a global economic system that runs as if it is an interdependent part of the Earth’s natural systems. We need to think about aligning the economy with how the earth works rather than aligning the earth to how the economy works. The more we plan and execute economic development from a systems perspective, the more likely the consequence will be a sustainable economy.
To paraphrase Viktor Frankl, a sustainable economy can not be pursued, it must ensue.
By the way, here’s how my sustainably neat home-office turned out:
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