The Clean and Green Club

• Design whole systems for multiple benefits, rather than components for single benefits
• Redesign production to close all the loops in a system and eliminate both waste and toxicity
• Reward service providers and customers who do more and better, with less, for longer
• Reinvest the resulting profits in scarce natural and human capital regenerativity model can have a huge impact not only in developed countries, but in areas of deep poverty, too.

1. Start with certainty
2. Anticipate
3. Transform
4. Skip your biggest problem
5. Go opposite (I might consider that a corollary to #4)
6. Redefine and redirect
7. Direct your future

Even without reading it, I’d come to embrace some of these, as well as the lens of abundance that he brings to all of it—through studying systems thinkers like Amory Lovins (see this month’s main article), Janine Benyus (she’ll be profiled in May) and John Todd (July). But I didn’t have the framework to see how all the pieces relate to each other. Now I’ve taken tons of notes and I see the whole picture a lot more clearly.

Perhaps Burrus’s biggest insight is that we have to look at two very different patterns of change: the inevitable (and highly predictable), and the uncertain. Calling these hard and soft trends, he looks at key drivers of change, such as technology and demographic patterns, and extends the lines from the present to the future.

It astounds him that more people don’t do this, because the hard trends at least are in plain sight. Watching the baby boom—a hard trend— begin in the 1940s, why didn’t municipal planners and educators understand that they’d better start building new schools before those vast numbers of new students started banging on the door? And watching that same bulge work its way through its lifespan, why are we not planning effectively for the coming wave of elders and the services they’ll (we’ll) need? They’ll be quite different from those serving prior generations, from boomer video games reliving the generation’s great moments to “unretirement homes” that facilitate volunteerism while providing services (pp. 29-32).

Planning for hard trends is about anticipating and capitalizing on them. We know that Boomers will move their demographic bubble up the age ladder. We know that technology makes many things smaller and more powerful. But planning for soft trends is thinking about how to change behavior—how to affect the outcome. We can anticipate that Boomers will want active lifestyle choices in retirement. We can be ready for Millennials who demand greener business practices. We can create educational models that feel relevant even to ghetto kids who don’t expect to see their 20s (pp. 223-224).

And business success is easy if you consider both types of trends when planning new products, services, and corporate capabilities. You can predict the future if you leave out the uncertain parts, he jokes—and he backs up this joke with a multi-page chart outlining some of his successful predictions from 1983 through 2008 (pp. 24-26; the book was published in 2011, so he probably wrote it in 2009). We need anticipation; agility is no longer enough. (p. 42) And you can leapfrog the stuck places by measuring tomorrow’s benchmarks (p. 46) instead of adopting today’s best practices (which will be obsolete soon enough).

Sometimes it takes a bit of mental jiu-jitsu: instead of trying to beat your competitor at its greatest strength, find a different frame, where your strengths and their weaknesses position you for success (p.188). Often, this means turning a commodity item that people typically only purchase based on price into a unique experience. And Burrus says anything can be decommoditized (pp. 192-193), citing examples like underwear (Victoria’s Secret), coffee (Starbucks), and even junk removal (800-GOTJUNK).

Much of the book walks us through examples of how various industries could anticipate the need for change, but usually don’t. He spends five pages showing how the US auto industry could take what they know for certain about the future (e.g., fossil fuels will be less and less important, shipping cost will drive more manufacturing close to the end user, and cars will need to fit the narrow streets of places like India’s cities) and reshape itself to effectively compete—and dominate (pp.32-37). This means thinking globally. Much of the world’s new and powerful thinking will come from developing nations, as adequate food, energy, and water begin to free people in those culture from focusing only on basic survival (p. 139). And much will come from thinking differently about resources—something I’ve advocated for years. For example, the Internet and the sharing economy allowed pharma giant Eli Lilly to crowdsource the wisdom of scientists, paying only for results (p. 113)—while other companies harness children’s creativity or rent computer power at night from schools that only needed it in the daytime.

And Burrus walks his talk. As an epilogue (pp. 250-263), he describes his own experience starting a software company using the Flash Foresight principles. Determining that smartphone apps met all the demographic criteria but the existing revenue models were not profitable, Burrus set up a company to not just write some apps but reinvent how creators can monetize their work—and created an app suite in real estate that could be repurposed in many other industries, using the same software engine. Using a virtual workplace model, generating revenues by selling recurring subscription charges to vendors who wanted to be in front of his customers, and garnering a tone of Tier-1 media coverage and blogger attention, Burrus’s Visionary Apps succeeded quickly and with hardly any head-banging.

Go read this book and think about how your company can leapfrog its stumbling places and not just catch the next wave but maybe even create it.

Note: Burrus has a new book out: The Anticipatory Organization. Visit that link to get a copy at no charge.