Spaghetti and Marshmallows

If you are reading this post you probably have two questions on your mind:

1) What is happening with the Natural Step transition?

and

2) What is the interim CEO really doing with his time?

In an effort to answer both of these questions in one go, take last Thursday: -  I was in a Parisian boudoir trying to lift a marshmallow as far off the floor as possible with 20 pieces of spaghetti, some tape and some string. Despite the combined brilliance of Caroline (Head of The Natural Step in France), Berend (setting up The Natural Step in the Netherlands), Cyrille (independent Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development or FSSD practitioner) and myself, we lifted the marshmallow a shorter distance than a group of school children probably could. Why? Because children spend most of their time learning by doing, whereas adults often spend a great deal of time planning. Having spent rather too long doing the latter, The Natural Step International are now focusing on the former.

This has included:

• Setting up a charity in the UK to enable The Natural Step International to demerge from Det Naturliga Steget.
• Piloting the process to become a new The Natural Step office with the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain.
• Testing out an enterprise social network for The Natural Step.
• Sharing our plans for a strategic sustainability network with leaders in their respective fields, from the MSLS grads, to the Cambridge Programme for Sustainable Leadership, to www.ergo-id.com
• Developing the Research Alliance for Strategic Sustainable Development to succeed Real Change.
• Asking prospective pathfinders what their needs are for the new network and then meeting programmers to see whether that is possible.

To name but a few.

I’ll be sharing what we’ve been doing weekly to keep you up to date. We’d also love to hear from you. Not least if you can solve the marshmallow and spaghetti conundrum.....